12 hours left…
9:29 a.m.
It took Tessa less time than I expected to get ready.
She foraged in the kitchen for some food and ended up with a plate of some of the leftover Chinese from the meal Lien-hua had brought last night, and a slice of apple pie from Cheyenne.
Two distinctively different flavors.
Okay, Pat. Do not even go there.
“You can eat in the car,” I told her. “I won’t bug you about it. Let’s get going.”
She grabbed her collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and before I could ask her about it, she said, “Yeah, I know, but I promised Dora I’d finish it. I’m almost done.”
We climbed into the car and started down the driveway. “So are you a fan yet?” I asked her.
“Of what?” She was eating dessert first, and her mouth was full of apple pie. “Holmes?”
“Yeah.”
“Um.” She swallowed. “That would be a no. Doyle cheated.”
She’d contrasted Doyle and Poe to me before, and I drew from our previous discussions: “You mean by shamelessly basing Holmes on Poe’s Dupin character?”
“Well, that and the solutions to his mysteries.” Balancing the plate of food on her lap, she flipped open the book. “Okay, so this one, The Silver Blaze, the one I was reading last night. Holmes solves it when he notices…” She took a moment to page through the story. “Yeah. Here: ‘The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime
… the dog did nothing in the nighttime… that was the curious incident.’”
I recognized it as one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous lines. “Sure, the dog didn’t bark-Holmes realized that it should have, and that was the clue-not what did happen but what didn’t happen that should have; the thing you would’ve expected.”
“Right,” she said, “well, it would have been curious if the dog didn’t bark, but up till that point in the story, Doyle doesn’t tell you the dog didn’t bark. It’s cheating to let your detective suddenly know something your readers don’t. How convenient is that? I mean, if you’re gonna write a mystery, you have to at least play fair and include enough clues for astute readers to solve the case.”
We turned onto the county road in front of the house. Six minutes to the interstate.
“That makes sense,” I said. “But at least Holmes’s reasoning was sound, I mean, the investigative principle is true.”
“And which Holmes would you be referring to?” She was working on the Chinese food now, and her mouth was full. In lieu of chopsticks she was using a fork.
“You’re just prejudiced against him,” I said, “because you don’t like his author.”
“No, seriously, his entire approach to solving crimes is based on a logical fallacy.”
“A logical fallacy? Sherlock Holmes? I don’t buy it.”
She swallowed her food. “Doyle has Holmes say-I don’t know, I think it’s in The Hound of the Baskervilles or maybe The Sign of Fouranyway, he says: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ I’m not sure if that’s word-for-word, but you get it, right?”
“Sure, Spock even quoted it in the 2009 Star Trek movie.”
“Well, if he did, he was being illogical too.”
“Now you’re saying Spock was illogical.”
“Yeah.”
“Heresy.”
“Whatever.”
She took another bite.
I evaluated the investigative principle. “Tessa, I have to say, this time I think you’re wrong. That reasoning is perfectly logical.”
She polished off the rest of her food, set the plate aside. “Let’s say you’re trying to eliminate the impossible-how do you know you have?”
“Eliminated the impossible?”
“Yeah.”
I looked at her curiously, and she explained, “Just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If you told Holmes that you could restart someone’s heart after she was dead
…” She held up her cell. “Or that he could use this thing to talk to anyone else in the world any time he wanted to, he would’ve said it was impossible.”
“It was. Then.”
She gave me a withering, annoyed look. “Obviously.”
“So what are you saying? That in theory it’s true, but in practice-”
“Yeah. Consider this: how could you ever be certain that you’ve eliminated all possibilities? That somehow you’ve considered every eventuality, every combination of the facts, that you’ve foreseen every unforeseeable contingency?”
“Well.” I was reluctant to admit it. “Unless you had infinite knowledge, you couldn’t.”
“Exactly, so that’s the thing: there’s no way to ever be certain you’ve eliminated the impossible. And absolute certainty that you’ve eliminated every possibility-”
“Is the prerequisite for applying Holmes’s axiom.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s illogical,” I said, anticipating her conclusion, “to base your investigative strategy on a methodology that cannot in essence be practiced in the real world.”
A pause. “That’s a good way to put it.”
So both Mr. Spock and Sherlock Holmes were wrong because they weren’t being logical enough.
I didn’t see that one coming.
For the rest of the drive to the Library of Congress while Tessa read and mumbled invectives about Holmes’s “specious deductive abilities,” I tried to consider the impossible possibilities related to this case.
What was I assuming to be impossible that might not be? How was that affecting my perspective? And where in this tangled mess of clues and killings was the dog failing to bark?
We arrived.
I dropped off Tessa at the library’s Independence Avenue entrance, waited until she was inside, and then parked in police headquarters’ underground garage, and, taking latex gloves and my computer bag with me, headed to the street to have a look at the car that the killers had left right under our noses.
Brad had hacked into the girl’s gmail account the day before he killed the Styles woman and the two police officers in Maryland last month.
And that was one of the reasons he’d proposed the plan for this week to Astrid.
Because of what he’d read in the young lady’s emails.
Tonight held so many possibilities, but to make them happen, he needed a little more information.
Hacking into secure sites was quickly becoming one of Brad’s favorite hobbies, so now he clicked to his computer’s Internet browser and surfed to the website of the Law Offices of Wilby, Chase amp; Lombrowski.
And he began his work.