Just kidding, it’s from SL-9. Because he hates me, Phoenix goes for the double whammy insults to my intelligence, both asking Gumshoe to repeat what he said about evidence list size, and flashing back to Edgeworth’s parallel comments regarding his own list. Get it? DO YOU GET IT YET?! The gang agrees to pocket this list because Gant must be hiding something about the case. Nobody thinks to actually read the fucking list and see what might be on it that would help them. Why the fuck would they? What matters is the evidence list is a robust 11.5 inches, not a puny five! And its paper weight is very girthy. It is now firmly in the NICE percentile.

At last, Phoenix turns his attention to the conspicuous metal safe sitting atop Gant’s tasteful curio cabinet. Gumshoe is like, “This has GOTTA be where the dirt is,” and indeed it would be disappointing it if weren’t. The safe unlocks with a digitally entered seven-digit code. “I think I just might know what it is…” Phoenix thinks. Yes, Phoenix thinks it is “7777777,” because Damon Gant, Chief of Police and confirmed crafty bastard, is obviously a complete moron who would use the same repeating, single-number PIN for fucking everything. I’m sure this is because Phoenix himself does this, and his email password is “password.” So, even though Gumshoe wants Phoenix to use his birthdate (which is just so sad), Phoenix enters “7777777,” and sure the fuck enough, Damon Gant is that stupid. Phoenix tells the somehow shocked Gumshoe and Ema that this is proof that Gant was the one in the evidence room the day of the murder. Which this is definitively not proof of, but it may as well be. It’s mostly proof that the chief of police is as technologically savvy as Wendy Oldbag.

‘I want to take Mr. Edgeworth to the Melting Pot for his birthday!’

Eventually, it occurs to Ema that they can also look inside the safe for evidence and not just take its combination as a smoking gun unto itself. Gumshoe is mostly interested in any money inside, so he can set up a last-minute severance package for himself. Sadly for him, there is no cash–only a “shard from a broken cup,” per Gumshoe, that is clearly the final piece of THE JAR, and an oddly shaped scrap of leather with a handprint on it. I have no idea how one could leave a handprint on leather, but it’s there so I’d better just get used to it. Gumshoe takes a look at their loot and tells Phoenix, “They look like pieces of evidence, but unless you can prove they have something to do with this case, I’m afraid I can’t just let you take them.” But if they are related, stealing them from the boss’s safe is totally fine. Obviously.

First, Phoenix presents THE JAR, minus its obvious one missing piece. God, the piece from the safe even has the same stupid brown handle thing sticking out of it that’s on its other two sides. This is asinine. It takes way too many screens of text for everyone to be on the same page about this, but I also have to go the extra mile and drop this last piece into its rightful place. It literally just occurred to me that THE COMPLETED JAR, viewed two-dimensionally, anyway, looks like a uterus. Given that it used to be in this office, it was probably a relic symbolizing the Virgin Mary’s holy, undefiled womb. But one night, the possibility occurred to Gant that there was a reason everyone believed that Joseph didn’t knock up Mary, and in a fit of gay panic he smashed it against a wall.

It was Mary’s time of the month, apparently.

Well, that was a fucked-up tangent. Back to THE JAR: Phoenix tells the again somehow shocked Ema and Gumshoe, “That of course means…Chief Gant willingly and knowingly hid a piece of this jar in his safe. In other words, he concealed a piece of evidence from the SL-9 Incident.” We already know he concealed the fucking evidence list, but whatever. I am just writing from the future, where Future Sam will be extremely unhappy THE JAR exists. Adding to Future Sam’s misery is Gumshoe, who exclaims, “Hey guys! Get a load of this!” They see that this piece has “a reddish line” on it, where the adjacent pieces only have red dots. The bright red markings are blood, even though this is evidence from two freaking years ago. God, I wish that was the least explicable thing about THE JAR. I want to live in that world.

To demonstrate the value of the piece of leather, Phoenix has to show Gumshoe the fingerprinting set, and has to keep from mentioning that it was a very special gift from HIS BOYFRIEND, MILES EDGEWORTH. They’re still too near Gant’s windows to risk Gumshoe hearing this. After a truly facepalm-worthy misunderstanding in which Gumshoe thinks Phoenix wants to dust his hand to look at his fingerprints, they get to work on the fucking leather scrap. Jesus Christ. I can just feel the hours of my life draining away.

If only this were true.

From the middle finger on the handprint, Phoenix manages to pull a perfect fingerprint, one that matches…Ema Skye. Oooooops. Well, that’s awkward. Phoenix blue-fonts about this, and it’s proof that Phoenix’s blue text is supposed to be his inner thoughts, because Ema does not cotton on just yet. Phoenix lies to her, “Oh, uh…it seems the prints are too old. They aren’t clear enough to get a match.” This is a ridiculous lie and Ema should see right through it, but she goes, “Oh… That’s too bad. I thought they’d be Darke’s prints.” Why the hell would Gant hide a piece of evidence that implicated Joe Darke? It would have been in the fucking trial if they were his prints, dummy. Meanwhile, Gumshoe calls Phoenix to the other side of the room for a little tête-à-tête. “What’s going on here?” he asks. “What are that kid’s prints doing inside the Chief’s safe?” How did Gumshoe immediately see the fingerprinting match, and Ema didn’t? Is she too short to look over Phoenix’s shoulder? Phoenix is like, “Beats the fuck out of me,” and they agree to keep the truth from Ema for now. I’m sure she won’t find out at a really dramatic time, like in court. That never happens! But this, at least, is enough to convince Gumshoe to slide the scrap into the court record.

After all of this, the thought crosses Gumshoe’s mind that Phoenix might–gasp–suspect Chief Gant of more wrongdoing than just evidence tampering. But it’s so unthinkable that he can’t even say it out loud, so he goes, “You don’t think… Nah! You wouldn’t be… No. …No, there’s no way. Never mind. Don’t worry about it.” Phoenix is all, “Okay,” and Gumshoe blows up at him. “When someone tells you ‘don’t worry about it,’ it’s supposed to start bothering you, pal! You don’t just let it go at that!” From across town at the prosecutors’ office, they can hear Edgeworth shouting, “Right? Why doesn’t he get that?!” So Gumshoe finally comes out and asks if Gant is a suspect. “Yeah, Mr. Wright!” Ema chimes in. “What do we think of him?” Phoenix treats this like a big moment of truth, even though he spent the entire investigation today more or less suspecting Gant. But rather than give Ema an answer, for no reason, he blue-fonts, “Perhaps it’s best I don’t divulge my feelings…yet.” I have no idea why Phoenix is being so guarded about this in front of the two people who conspired with him to break into the dude’s fucking office. If he can’t tell them he suspects Gant, who can he tell?

“Well?” Gumshoe asks, with his usual Labrador enthusiasm. “Was I any help? Was I a good boy? Am I a good boy? I AM?!” Phoenix tells him he was a good boy. “Thanks to your ID card, we were able to get some hard evidence,” he says, over-explaining what they’ve been up to just so someone labeled “???” can walk in at that exact moment and say, “Now that’s not very kind, is it? In other words, if it wasn’t for his ID card, he would have been useless…” Of course, the mystery person is Gant. Though his music was playing this whole time, so he didn’t have that to usher him in. “Isn’t that right, you in the coat?” he asks Gumshoe. Wow, “you in the coat”? That’s ice cold. Ema screams again, but this time she doesn’t think the intruder is a ghost in need of a good smack to the face. Phoenix says, “We didn’t think you’d be back so soon.” I’d hope not, Phoenix! That would have been some shoddy planning!

“Fortunately I’m a man who believes in signs,” Gant tells them. “As I was walking to my meeting, I happened to look out a window and saw a stray dog run right into a pole. Just then I thought of a certain detective.” That is the most brutally accurate metaphor for Gumshoe ever. Even Gumshoe can recognize himself in that enough to go, “Do you mean…m-me, sir?” Poor guy. Gant tells them all to get the fuck out, and adds to Gumshoe, “Oh, you in the coat. Drop off your ID on the way out. You won’t be needing it anymore.” I still think comparing him to a dog walking into a pole is more devastating than firing him, but needless to say Gumshoe is not thrilled about the latter. Of course, they’re lucky Gant isn’t arresting them and confiscating their evidence. Fuck, Redd White managed to arrest Phoenix for doing less than this, and he wasn’t the goddamn chief of police.

Gant scoots Gumshoe and Phoenix out the door, but he asks Ema, or “You, the one without the spiky hair,” to stay and have a chat with him. Oh God, is Ema a lesbian? Is he going to “fix” her too? But that’s illegal in California now! Ema panics, but Phoenix can’t do anything to help her and walks out as Ema’s yelling, “Mr. Wright!!!” He should feel like such a heel right now. Outside the police station, Gumshoe lectures Phoenix about how foolhardy it was to go in there, because yelling is better than crying, and yelling while crying is Gumshoe’s favorite thing of all. Phoenix points out that Gumshoe was fine with being fired, but Gumshoe retorts, “Yeah, but if I knew it’d be like this, I never would have said it!” Fair enough. Gumshoe takes off to beg Gant for his job back, maybe with several thousand more pay cuts. Over a black screen, Phoenix narrates that Ema called him to let him know she was being questioned by the police for the rest of the day. So I guess one of them was arrested for burglarizing the chief of police’s office. Nice, letting a teenager take the fall for two grown-ass men. Classy as fuck, Phoenix.

The game shunts Phoenix over to the detention center. Talking to Lana is really the last thing he needs given that she’ll blame him for Ema getting in trouble, and when he could either be canoodling with Edgeworth on the fuchsia sofa or at home working through all those Storage Wars episodes on his DVR. Lana appears with her “What the fuck did you do, idiot” face on, so needless to say she’s been brought up to speed on the whole Ema situation. “It’s no use thinking about it,” Phoenix tells her, while she tries to punch him through the glass partition. “Tomorrow’s the final day in court.” Yeah, no use thinking about how he could have not taken the high school student in his custody along on an illegal burglary mission. What’s done is done! Jesus.

Yeah, she was not doing that with Phoenix, don’t you worry.

Anyway, Phoenix says he’s here to get more useful information out of her to aid in her defense, and when Lana says she’s already told him what she can, he presumably rolls his eyes at her and replies, “What you’ve told me over these past couple of days…is absolutely nothing. Not a single, useful thing.” I get what he means about Lana since she’s been alternately lying to him and stonewalling him from the jump, but he could really say that to every person he’s ever interrogated for a case. Lana is unfazed by Phoenix’s sass and replies, “Really? I believe I did mention something quite important. Something I told you right at the beginning. I said that I was the one who stabbed Detective [Niceguy].” But Phoenix has been working that lonely brain cell overtime today, and has figured something out: “Who it is you’re hiding behind those words.” This finally surprises Lana, who praises him for absorbing even a tiny amount of Mia’s mentorship. “It seems Edgeworth was right,” she also tells him. “Once you’re convinced you know something, no one can persuade you otherwise. ‘Thick headed’ is the term he used, I believe.” I think Lana may have misunderstood the context of that statement. Not that the non-penis interpretation is wrong at all.

This is Phoenix’s chance, per his inner monologue, to get Lana to finally spill, and the game won’t let me screw it up for him by trying to get in a quickie with Edgeworth or to even presenting evidence. All he can do is talk to her, and so he does. “I have to admit I was more than a little perplexed at first,” Phoenix says. “You insisted you ‘did it,’ yet there was no incriminating evidence.” Yeah, there wasn’t a witness who saw her do it or anything. But Phoenix needs his evidence to be hard. Rock hard. “That’s when it hit me,” he goes on. “It’s not that you’re unwilling to tell the truth, it’s that you’re incapable of doing so, because of a certain individual.” Phoenix makes it sound like Lana is wearing a shock collar under her red scarf, which would admittedly fit with our view of Damon Gant. Lana looks all sad at this, but still feigns ignorance of this person she’s supposedly protecting. “Protecting? No,” Phoenix says. “I think ‘afraid of’ is more like it. If I’m not mistaken, the person in question may have persuaded you to silence.” Lana finally asks Phoenix to put up or shut up and name this person she’s so scared of, so he thrusts out a photo of…Mike Meekins. Just kidding–he presents Damon Gant. I think Jeanne is the one who’s scared of Meekins. Those emotional scars will take years to heal.