LITMIR.BIZ

      I hustled back to the hotel. The stacks of files and information supplied by the NYPD had grown daily. Pads of paper covered the bed. I had sticky notes on one entire wall and had forbidden the housekeeping staff from entering lest some crumb of note-taking be disturbed.

      I arm-shoveled pads to the floor, turned on a muted news channel and stared at the ceiling. Vangie’s reason for bringing Jeremy to New York was to avert a disaster. But had she encountered the threat during a visit to New York? Or in her daily work?

      How did this connect to Jeremy’s assertion he and Vangie were … what? He’d never used the word lovers, choosing innuendo and bombast, which he often used to disguise a lie.

      Was there any connection to the invisible patient? The confidentiality problem to which Traynor had alluded? The break-in at Vangie’s house?

      My mind felt like a myopic eye trying to track a thousand comets through the night sky. Facts swirled across suppositions, names danced around places, theories disappeared down black holes. I’d absorbed too much information and it had jumbled. How to make sense of an onslaught of the senseless? I mulled the thought for two minutes, then called the concierge.

      “How fast can you get me a roll of butcher’s paper?”

      I was intrigued by Cluff’s methodology. Pour your mind on to a white expanse and study the facts in a spatial setting, adding underscores, arrows, impromptu timelines. Decide what’s wheat and chaff and keep unrolling paper. If an idea goes nowhere, you still have a quarter-mile of thinking ahead.

      I sat and poured both fact and supposition on to the paper, crossing out, adding, tearing away paper and starting anew.

      I transcribed the duality of voices at Jeremy’s murder scenes. I saw my notes on Harry’s conversations with Dr Traynor at the Institute, how my brother’s underlying motive – primal judgment? Was that what they called it? – had never been ascertained by Vangie. She must have ceaselessly attempted to uncover Jeremy’s “Fire that lights all fires” as Traynor also called the seminal moment of transition to murderer.

      My pen paused. Was it irrelevant? Of all the cases presented to Vangie over her career, my brother’s would have been one of the most enigmatic. Apparently, however, he had never confessed his original pinion point: What drove him to kill the first woman?

      I heard Vangie pick away at the lock as Jeremy jittered and danced, bobbed and weaved, letting Vangie close, but never in the final door. He would have been irritating, frustrating and angering. A total challenge from the day he entered the Institute.

       Challenge.

      The word echoed in my mind. Why?

      I studied trails of words and arrows on my eight-foot-long mural of death. Where had I seen the word? There, in my longhand notes of Harry’s discoveries. Traynor had told Harry that if Vangie had a private client, he or she would have to pose a tremendous challenge. Saturdays, one to three p.m., Vangie had – according to her neighbor – kept hours with a client. But the neighbor had never seen anyone enter or exit.

      Maybe there wasn’t a client. Perhaps it was Vangie’s way of grabbing some quiet time to write or take a nap.

      Or …

      Could it be because the challenging client couldn’t be there? Except perhaps, as an avatar, a symbolic representation.

      A photograph on the door.

      Had Vangie been searching for Jeremy’s primal judgment? Had she uncovered a transforming moment in his past that had kindled today’s crimes?

      I re-read all police reports, moving backward in time, ending with Officer Jim Day’s notes on my father’s murder scene: clear, precise, insightful, with a concluding judgment that stepped outside objective reportage:

       “… the entire scene was drenched in anger and release. It seems some pivotal mental barrier was broached, a threshold crossed, a major decision acted upon.”

      Pivotal mental barrier? Day seemed to have discerned a subtext in my brother’s murderous actions. Had Day noticed anything else? And if he had, would he remember?

      Was he even alive?

      There was nothing I could do from here. Not with any efficiency. I pulled my phone and called Harry. As I dialed, my eyes drifted to the far-left end of the butcher paper, where I had started by encapsulating the details of my father’s death. The details had been supplied by Officer Jim Day, his name in a wide swathe of black ink.

      Day. Where my brother’s records started. Where everything started.

      “Nautilus,” my partner answered.

      “I need to talk to a guy, Harry. He may be hard to find.”