for motive, it appears that he did it for the money.”
“Yes, but the money from whom?”
“We don’t know.”
“And regardless, that’s not what the abductors wanted from him in the end.”
“Apparently not.”
“Obviously, you’ll need to follow up with your elusive Dr.O.'
“He’s still out of town. It’s on my list for later today.”
“Yes, of course. And Shade, what do you know of this Shade character?”
“Not much. He might be the man we took into custody, but I doubt it. Shade told me on the phone that he was at the rendezvous point and it seems unlikely that would have been the warehouse.
Whoever Shade is, he knows how to mask his GPS location and he knows me. He positively identified me during our brief phone conversation so I’m afraid he might be someone from a previous case, or maybe even a personal acquaintance.”
“Quite so.” Calvin walked in silent repose beside me for a few minutes and then said, “It’s an intricate case to be sure, but I’m confident you’ll be able to unravel it, my boy. I’ll certainly consider all that you’ve told me, and if I have any additional investigative recommendations, I’ll contact you promptly. One word of advice…” Then he began speaking to me as if I was still a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University, and he was still my professor. “Patrick, remember, the devil is not in the details, but in how the details relate to each other. Sometimes you need to stop looking at the facts and start looking at the spaces between them. One cannot adequately understand the movement of the planets through a solar system until one has identified what they all orbit around.”
I was reflecting on his comments when he added, “And now for the personal matter you were reticent to mention on the phone.”
I knew he would be able to tell if I were hiding anything from him, so I didn’t even try. “Calvin, at times my job really eats away at me. The human potential for evil is, well… it’s staggering.”
He read between the lines. “But it’s your personal potential for evil that troubles you most.”
“Yes.”
“We’re all capable of the unthinkable, Patrick.”
“I know. Maybe I know that too well.”
We paused in the shadow of a thick palm tree, and Calvin said,
“I believe the more acutely aware we are of our human frailty, the less vulnerable we are to our base instincts.”
“It’s those base instincts that frighten me the most-not just the inclination we have toward evil, but-”
“The subtle enjoyment of it.”
“Yes.”
He contemplated my words for a few moments. “So, to put it in mountaineer’s terms, how do we know we’re not going to slip off the escarpment when we’re all living on the edge of the cliff?”
“Yes,” I said. “And how do we know we’re not going to push someone else off the arete?” We stepped back into the bright day and continued along the trail.
“The simple answer, Patrick, as you’ve already deduced, is that we don’t. We can never be sure we won’t jump or push someone else.
But that’s not a satisfactory answer because we all want to think that we’re different, that we would never do those things-and yet the edge is within reach of all of us. Nietzsche wrote, ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’ You have looked long into the abyss, my boy. And you’ve seen how alluring it is.”
I thought for a moment. “You’re right, Calvin, except I don’t fight monsters and neither do you. We track offenders who are just as human as we are. Killers, rapists, pedophiles-they do monstrous things and their actions make them more guilty than others, but not less human. The more you search for what makes ‘them’ different from ‘us,’ the more you find that, at the core, we’re all the same.
Offenders aren’t monsters any more than we are.”
“Then, perhaps,” Calvin said with disturbing resignation, “we are all monsters.”
Just what I needed to hear. “It’s such an encouragement talking to you, Calvin. If Dr. Phil ever retires, you ought to apply for his job.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Tessa was waiting for us across the parking lot from the Museum of the Living Artist, in the Casa del Rey Moro Garden. “What took you two so long?”
“I’m afraid we’re still a bit befuddled by this case,” Calvin said.
“I thought it was almost solved?”
“A few remaining conundrums, as it were,” he replied. “Well, I think your problem is, you two need to start thinking more like Dupin.”
“Dupin?” I said.
And then Tessa taught Dr. Werjonic and me how to investigate a crime that, by all appearances, could not possibly have occurred.
67
“Dupin,” Tessa repeated. “Haven’t you ever read The Murders in the Rue Morgue?”
“Probably… A long time ago,” I said. “Maybe when I was your age.”
“That would be a long time ago,” she muttered.
The truth was, I did remember reading some of Poe’s writings when I was younger, but I’d never been that interested in him. Now, I suspected I would regret that. “Tessa,” I said, “who is Dupin?”
“Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. Poe created him. Wrote three stories about him. In the first one, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, there’s these two people who get killed-a woman and her daughter. But they’re not in a morgue, though. It’s the name of a street.
Anyway, the detective is this guy named Dupin, but he’s not really a detective exactly, more like a profiler or something.”
“Hmm, a profiler,” Calvin muttered.
“Yeah,” she said. “And he ends up solving the crime.”
“Well, there you go,” I said. “You can already tell it’s fiction.”
Tessa gave me a headshake. “If Lien-hua were here, she’d drop-kick you for saying that.”
“Quite so,” remarked Calvin, who had chosen to lead us north along the path that led past the Botanical Building. “But I’m sad to say, my dear, this Dupin fellow, he seems to be a pale apograph of the inimitable Sherlock Holmes.”
“Holmes?” Tessa recoiled. “Do not even go there with me. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if I can even call him ‘sir,’ totally cripped Poe. The Rue Morgue was written in 1841, Doyle wasn’t even born until 1859. And then, in 1885 when Doyle decides to start writing detective stories, he makes Holmes a complete carbon copy of Dupin.
Holmes thinks like Dupin. Acts like him. Talks like him. Relates to the local police in the exact same way. And Watson is totally based on the guy who narrates Dupin’s cases.” She was getting really riled up. Passion looked good on her. “And then, despite all that, in the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Doyle has the effrontery to have his pseudo-creation Sherlock Holmes dis Dupin by calling him ‘a very inferior fellow.’ Doyle is lame. Poe rocks.”
Calvin, a connoisseur of detective stories from the other side of the Atlantic, cleared his throat slightly. “Did you just say ‘effrontery,’ my dear?”
“You’ll get used to it,” I told him. Then I faced Tessa. “Not that I don’t find all this very interesting, but how does this relate to us solving this case?”
“Hold on. I’m getting to that. So, here’s what Dupin does in The Rue Morgue…” She counted on her fingers all of Dupin’s investigative techniques, one at a time. “He looks over the facts, collects physical evidence, studies the wound patterns, analyzes hair samples, does a preliminary autopsy, evaluates the statements from witnesses,
