“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.