The board is not enough.
This is what he knows as he stands in front of it at eleven PM on a Thursday — a man alone in a rented studio apartment, doing the thing he has done in forty-two different cities over twenty-six years, standing in front of the accumulated evidence of a mind he has been living inside for four months.
The board is not enough because the board holds everything he can see and nothing he can prove. He has the partial print at sixty-two percent, which is professional opinion and not admissible. He has the geographic overlaps, which a defense attorney would dismiss as coincidence. He has the timeline correlations between Gideon's documented schedule and the pattern of kills, which are suggestive and not conclusive. He has his own professional assessment of the Surgeon's psychology, which maps to Gideon's documented history with the precision that keeps him awake at two in the morning.
He has a lot of red string and one name.
What he does not have is anything that puts Gideon in the same room as a dead body.
He sits down. He gets his notebook. He draws a line down the center of the page.
On the left side, he writes: What I know.
On the right side, he writes: What I can prove.
He fills the left side in twelve minutes. It takes four dense pages of his cramped, careful handwriting.
The right side takes thirty seconds. He writes two things.
The first: medical training confirmed by profile.
The second: Partial print, 62%, Kelley scene.
He puts the pen down. He looks at the two columns.
This is the fundamental problem of the case. He is not a man who doubts his own conclusions — he has been doing this too long for that. He knows who the Surgeon is. He is as certain as he can be without a confession or a caught act. But certainty is not a legal instrument. Certainty gets you as far as the boardroom and no further.
He needs to watch. He needs to wait. He needs to be patient in a way that most people cannot sustain, but that he has built his entire professional life around.
He closes the notebook.
He goes to bed.
In the dark, he thinks about what Briggs said. What the wrong answer costs.
He thinks: the wrong answer costs everything. The whole structure. Everything we built on the idea that some things are not permitted regardless of circumstances.
He thinks: the right answer costs something too.
He is honest enough to hold both things.
Then he goes to sleep.