“You know,” added the smoother Bill, “unlike, say, ’sixty-three, we have the Internet, we have bloggers, we have anybody with or without a thought in his head having instant worldwide contact with billions of others of questionable competence. The result, I’m sure you’re aware, is a kind of festival of the bizarre, of the mendacious and the frankly exploitative. Good God, some are saying that Tom killed Joan because she was going to tell the world Tom dresses up in women’s clothes! Or he never forgave her for not having his child. Or she cheated on him with a key grip on the set of Justine’s Revenge. Others are saying Mitch Greene was a Russian agent and was about to turn himself in and reveal Tom as a spymaster. I mean, can you imagine? I can’t even repeat some of the viler stuff.”

“Well, there’s a kind of systemic guard against that,” said Nick. He was smart enough to lean a little forward, as if he were divulging some real inside dope, when what he was about to say was clearly known by everyone above the precinct level. “See, once law enforcement closes the case, it goes into the records as ‘case closed.’ That’s a percentage, and every department, especially big-city departments or state police agencies and the political bureaucracies behind them, want their percentage as high as possible every year. I don’t think the director will fire me if I tell you we do too. So the reality is that nobody wants to reopen a closed case that’s on the good side of the ledger. Practically speaking, that means when the guy with the psycho best seller idea comes to us, we just say case closed and refer him to our document. Which, of course, he’s already seen on the Internet. When that final doc comes out, it really does, in our experience, pull down a curtain that never comes up.”

“Nick, may I call you Nick?” asked Bill.

“Sure, everybody does.”

“Nick, is there a time frame here you could share?”

“Well, this one is unique, given the celebrity of the victims and the killer, the media attention and so forth, so of course we don’t want to rush anything or make any mistakes that can later be attacked or reinterpreted. So I’m thinking another week at the least.”

“Ah.” If Bill was disappointed, no hint of it showed on his pampered, sleek, confident face, but in time he did make a further comment.

“I’m wondering,” he said, “if we can’t hasten it just a bit. Tom is extremely disturbed by Joan’s death, and it’s unnerving the way it’s just hanging there in the open right now. This is painful for everyone, and Tom is also speaking for the heirs and families of the other survivors as well, and that poor, crazed sergeant. So I’m wondering if we can’t speed the process somewhat. Get it out, get it done with, get it put to bed and closed, and we can return to our lives and begin the healing.”

“I understand that,” said Nick, “and we are working extremely hard. But, sir, it is a complex investigation, given the disparity of the four victims and the geographical spread, and my fear is that if we do somehow misstate or miss something, that’ll just be fodder for these goblins. Look at the Kennedy thing, how that went on for years and ultimately compromised a generation’s belief in the United States government.”

“I see, I see,” said Bill. “Then possibly here’s a way we could go. Could we leak something to, say, NBC News or the Times? I happen to know a young guy at the Times who could be very helpful. And that paper almost speaks with the authority of the state, and an early peek at the findings of the investigation would do a lot to calm this grotesque speculation.”

“Well,” said Nick, knowing it to be a bad idea. You couldn’t trust those guys anymore, and some hotshot egoist reporter with a desperate need to advance his own career could completely mess things up.

“I appreciate Tom’s interest,” said the director, “but I don’t think we’ve got anything comprehensive to leak yet. I’d be very happy to keep you gentleman, and Mr. Constable, in the loop, and when we have something near an end product, we’ll get back in touch and then maybe we can work something out. In the meantime, Nick, consider yourself officially interfered with by the Seventh Floor and pressurized to bring it to a boil faster, because there are so many interested parties. It’s wrong, it’s unfair, it sucks, but it’s Washington.”

Everybody laughed at the director’s skillful jest, which nevertheless carried the weight of authority behind the humor.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to walk Nick back to the task force real estate; it was good of you to drop by and express your concerns.”

Everybody rose, shook, palavered inconsequentially for a bit, and then the director herded Nick back to the hallway and shoved him down it toward the elevators.

“Sorry, but Constable has juice with the administration, and when he leans, I have to pretend to give a little.”

“Yes sir,” said Nick.

“For some reason, they want this thing moved ahead. I know you’re working your ass off, but it’s so much better for all of us if you can release sooner rather than later and if you can slip something to the Times.”

“As soon as I can, sir, believe me, I’ll-”

“Just let me ask you, what’s the hang-up? Do you need more people? Is it a manpower issue or a technology thing? Whatever support you need, I’ll give it to you one hundred fifty percent. I want this thing over too.”

“Yes sir. No, it’s not really manpower, it’s-”

He paused.

“ ‘Memo to Special Agents: Never pause thoughtfully in the presence of the director. Thoughtful doesn’t get you to the Seventh Floor, only results do.’ ”

“Yes sir. It’s this, then. I’ll lay it out. Not a major issue, I think, but it is something I’ve-we’ve-never encountered before. It’s weird; it’s got us somewhat baffled.”

“An anomaly?”

“A huge anomaly. I’ve never seen an anomaly this big.”

“What is it?”

“Here’s the anomaly: there are no anomalies.”

The director grunted.

“This is real life,” Nick said, “there’s always an anomaly, some little random fact that doesn’t make sense or seems stuck in there and is connected to nothing. Someone gets somewhere too fast or not out of breath; someone’s looking out a window and sees something and misinterprets it; a fingerprint from seven years ago turns up on a scene and screws up everybody. That’s the universe we work in: squalid, messy, human, full of the unexplained or the untidy. The unusual is to be expected; it’s even banal. But in this case, nothing. It all fits. There’s nothing left over, nothing unexplained. Everything is perfect, from the ballistics to the forensics to the arterial spray patterns to the fiber samples to the fingerprints to the paper trail to the witness accounts to the time line to the coroner’s report to the DNA testing. It’s not messy enough. It’s too neat and it makes me very nervous.”

“But you can’t put your finger on any one thing, is that it?”

“Exactly. We go over it and over it and we’re stymied. Every day we get something new and it always fits just right, like a puzzle.”

“Well, let me just caution you that you don’t want to get too overwhelmed by what is, after all, well and truly nothing. I mean the prime craziness of the conspiracy gooney birds is the notion that the less the evidence, the more proof the authorities saw of conspiracy. Less was never less, it was always more. The absence of evidence was seen as more significant than evidence itself.”

“Good point,” Nick conceded. “Still, there’s a thing I want to do. Let me run it by you.”

“Go ahead.”

“A wild card.”

“Hmm,” said the director.

“Meaning somebody from outside our culture, not in our boxes, with our prejudices, who would look at it with a fresh eye.”

“A neutral observer.”

“Actually, someone inclined to disbelieve our explanation. Someone who’d fight us. Someone with an instinct for our weaknesses. Someone who’s very good on guns, particularly the dynamics of shooting, because he’s won a batch of fights with big iron. Someone whose life experience inclines him to revere the marine sniper and who would never make an axiomatic assumption about a marine sniper’s guilt. His mind doesn’t work that way. Then, he was himself a marine sni-”