Chapter 41 - Chapter 41 The Task ForceThe press

conference is at eleven AM, in the conference room on the second floor of the Roundhouse — the Philadelphia Police Department's headquarters on Race Street, a building shaped, famously and unfortunately, like two concrete circles pressed together, which makes it look from the air like something designed by someone who was asked to think of a building and thought of something else.Donahue does not do press conferences. He is, by temperament and preference, a back-room person — the man who builds the case, not the man who announces it. But Director Halley has decided that the public response to the podcast episode and the Inquirer piece requires a face, and the face has to be credible, and the most credible face available is the one that has been hunting the Surgeon of Sin since November.He stands at the podium. He speaks for six minutes. He says: there is an active investigation. He says: the Bureau is coordinating with the Philadelphia Police Department. He says: they are pursuing multiple leads. He says nothing that is true and nothing that is false and nothing that helps anyone, including himself.A reporter in the third row — young, aggressive, leaning forward with her recorder aimed at him like a small weapon — asks: "Is it true the killer is only targeting criminals? Does the Bureau consider that morally significant?"The room shifts. A very slight shift, the kind that happens when a question lands with more weight than anyone expected.Donahue looks at her steadily. "The Bureau considers it a homicide investigation," he says. "The victims' prior records are not relevant to the legal determination.""Are they relevant to your profile?""Everything is relevant to the profile."She writes something. The room is still slightly shifted.He takes two more questions. He thanks the assembled press. He walks back to his seat and sits with his hands flat on the table and his face set in the expression he uses when he wants to look like he is thinking about nothing, which is when he is thinking most carefully.The moral significance question is the one that worries him. Not because the reporter is wrong to ask it. Because the fact that a reporter is asking it in a public forum means the public is already asking it in private, and public sympathy for a killer — even a theoretical, unnamed, unproven killer — is the kind of environmental condition that makes cases harder. Not impossible. Just harder.He thinks about Gideon walking into his hospital that morning. The way the nurses had nodded. The way the resident had fallen into step beside him with something close to reverence.He thinks about that, and he thinks about what the moral significance question actually means, and he folds both thoughts away.He has a meeting in forty minutes.He goes to the meeting.