Jerry closes his eyes. He thinks about his office. He can remember the smell of the room, can feel the desk beneath his fingers, the jade plant on his desk he bought ten years ago that was still on that desk when he was there yesterday. He can remember the way the sun fell into the room, the angle fractionally different every day, the way it would hit and fade the framed King Kong Escapes poster on the wall. Only he wouldn’t see it fade, it faded the same way you don’t notice a child growing every day, but you know it’s happening. In King Kong Escapes, King Kong was pitted against his exact robot duplicate, a battle of the titans, and boy how he loved those B movie posters from half a century ago and how much Sandra hated them, how she wouldn’t let him hang them anywhere else in the house. He would sit in his office and he would use Henry Cutter as an alias, but he didn’t think he was Henry Cutter. He was Jerry Grey, the author, whose exact author duplicate built a life on creating fiction. He wrote during the day, and at night he watched stories other people created for TV. He would read books by other writers, go to movies. Fiction was his life. Henry Cutter was only a name and, like earlier today, he needs Henry’s help.

I’m here, Jerry. All you had to do was ask.

“Are you thinking of this as a novel?” Hans asks.

They think about it as a novel, Jerry and Henry together again, the dream team, and that’s always been how they’ve done their best work. “Yes.”

“Everything I just told you, if it were a book, what would be happening?”

“It’s easy,” they tell him, and it is easy. Henry and Jerry—they’ve always been the master of solving a mystery. How many times has Sandra told them to shut up when they’ve been at the movies, or watching something on TV, because they were unable to stop sharing their predictions? And this is the mystery to top all of them, and they’ve always enjoyed a good puzzle.

Jerry pictures it. He puts into words what he and Henry can see. Just how he used to do it, but instead of typing, he’s talking. “The crime writer with dementia couldn’t find a way to sneak out of a nursing home. Sure, maybe once, perhaps twice, but not more than that. Not when people are trying to keep an eye on him, which means he had help, but then the needle marks suggest he’s not being helped but being drugged. He’s being sedated and snuck out, then driven into town.”

“Why would somebody do that?” Hans asks.

Jerry pictures it. He bounces some ideas back and forth with Henry, and then they settle on one. “He’s being snuck into town on the days of the murders. Snuck into town and dumped somewhere. That way there’s a pattern. He’s not dumped at the first crime scene, because then whoever is doing this can’t kill any more women without the perfect scapegoat, because he knows the writer will be caught. He also knows he can’t keep doing it forever. He figures he can kill four women. The first three, he dumps the writer at random locations, but on the fourth he leaves him inside the house to wake up and get his prints and DNA all over the place, which is what happens, and the writer thinks he’s done it.”

There is silence in the car, and he looks over at Hans expecting him to laugh, but Hans doesn’t laugh. Instead Hans asks, “So who’s the killer?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“Indulge me.”

“Somebody who has access to the nursing home and to the drugs to sedate the patients. Somebody who knows the writer is confessing to crimes. Somebody who hides jewelry in the writer’s pockets so the writer will think he took them.”

“Somebody from the home,” Hans says.

Jerry nods. “Sometimes people say my books are implausible. I remember that.”

Hans shrugs. “Most crime novels are. If they weren’t, then they’d be no different from real life. People don’t want to read about real life.”

“This is real life.”

“True,” Hans says. “But keep thinking of it as a story. Do you remember what Eva told me earlier on the phone?”

“She said one of the orderlies said I’d confessed to him last night that I’d killed somebody.”

“Fiona Clark,” Hans says. “If somebody is sneaking you out, don’t you think it’s the same person who says you confessed?”

“Unless I did confess,” Jerry says. “I could have confessed because I did it, or I confessed because I saw it in the news and thought I did it.”

“In these books of yours,” Hans says, “what would be the next step? What would a person in your situation do?”

“Go to the police.”

“No he wouldn’t,” Hans says.

He wouldn’t, Henry says. Come on, be honest here.

“People never go to the police,” Hans says. “They should, but they never do, because if they did then that would be the end of the story, right? It would be wrapped up by chapter three. And anyway, the police would never believe this story. Somebody has been drugging you, Jerry, and I just don’t see you walking twenty miles, and I don’t see the police worrying about the fact that there are no witnesses who saw you walking all that way. Think about it.”

Jerry thinks about it. Both him and Henry. Then they carry on. “In a book the next step would be for the writer to go and see the orderly he confessed to. The same orderly who has access to injections, and who had injected the writer in the past.” Jerry remembers something else then. “The same orderly who wants to be a writer.”

“Write what you know,” Hans says. “How about we reverse that? How about we do what you write and go and pay this guy a visit.”

“His name is Eric,” Jerry says, “and he might be innocent.”

“That’s what we’ll figure out.”

Before they can start to figure it out, a car pulls into the driveway on the other side of the garage door. A moment later two doors are opened and closed. There are footsteps, and then knocking on the door. If this were a book, Jerry thinks, then this would be the police arriving ahead of schedule.

THE FINAL DAY

Before the gun does its dirty work, there is one more thing to report. This isn’t being written down because you think things are going to work out okay, or that Captain A has found a different white whale to chase and doesn’t need this vessel anymore, but because when your family looks back at everything, they can understand what it was like. Maybe it can help others. Hard to call it a silver lining, but maybe researchers in the near future might learn something here that can help them map the streets of Batshit County.

You are trying to keep the suicide notes short. One is written and the other is still pending. The written one is full of I’m sorry and I love you. The person you need to apologize to the most is Belinda Murray.

Sandra came down to the office earlier. She actually knocked before coming in, which is something she always used to do before opening the door, which always made your job feel so formal for lack of a better word. She knocked and she came in and sat on the couch. You sat in the office chair with the suicide note hidden beneath the pad you’re about to write the second one on. She glanced at the pad then at you.

Have you killed other people? she asked, and she sounded so resigned to the fact there would be more bad news.

No.

But how can you be so sure?

It was a question you’ve been asking yourself, and you gave her the answer you’d come up with. Because I’d know.

So you knew you killed Belinda?

It was a flaw, one you had seen, one you couldn’t get around. No.

Then how can you sit there and say you’ve never hurt anybody?

You had no answer, and didn’t offer one. Instead you asked a question of your own. Have you called the police?