That’s when he went old school. He took out a fresh Circa notepad, found a fountain pen that had some ink in it, and started to freestyle. What do I want? To find the ending for my article. No, you don’t. Then what? You know. Do I? Yes, you know, you just haven’t defined it properly yet. . . .
Every time Rook did this, he thought that if someone found these ramblings in his trash, they would think he was a madman. It was actually a technique he had picked up from a fictional character in one of the Stephen King novels, a writer who, when he needed to sort out a plot, interrogated himself on paper. What seemed like a cool device in a novel got put to use by Rook once, and it worked so well connecting him to his subconscious that he employed it whenever he needed to think through dense terrain. It was like having a writing partner who didn’t take a percentage.
. . . You are defining the wrong goal. I know my goal, to name her killer in the damned article. And Esteban Padilla’s. And Derek Snow’s. You know the killer, it’s the Texan. That’s a technicality. That’s right, you want whoever hired him. Soleil Gray? Maybe. But now that she’s dead, too, it’s a guess. Unless . . . Unless? Unless I—Unless I can find that last chapter. Congratulations, you just defined your goal. I did? Pay attention. Don’t read your notes looking for clues to the killer. Or even the one who hired him. Read them looking for clues to what Cassidy did with the last chapter. What if she hadn’t written it yet? Then you’re screwed. Thanks. No prob.
As it usually did, his little exercise in dual personality disorder brought him around to something basic and obvious he had overlooked because it had become so familiar. He had been looking for a who, and he needed to shift to a what—and the what was the AWOL chapter. Back at his laptop, Rook opened the Word document of notes he had transcribed from his Moleskine. He scrolled at skim-reading speed looking for something to grab him by the shirt. While he reviewed the notes, he could almost hear Nikki’s voice asking him over and over again since they’d reunited, “What is it you have observed about this woman?”
The qualitative things, like her need to control and her compulsion to exercise power, were character traits not to be ignored, but that didn’t lead him anywhere specific. So what else did he know about her?
Cassidy slept with a lot of men. He paused to think if he could envision one she seemed to trust enough to hold the critical chapter, and none came to mind. Her neighbors were sources of complaints and feuding, not trust. Her building super was an entertaining character who did good work but was graced with just enough charming larceny that Rook couldn’t see her entrusting the chapter to JJ. Rule out Holly, too. Her daughter’s kinder feelings after her mother’s death didn’t seem to have been reciprocated in the last weeks of her life. So that is what he knew about Cassidy Towne and her relationships. They didn’t work except transactionally.
On his computer, Rook stopped the scroll on one of the notes, one of the small details of her character he had meant to include but forgotten. The porcelain plaque near the French doors in her office that pretty much summed up her view of relationships. “When life disappoints, there’s always the garden.”
Rook slowed down his scrolling to read more carefully. He had entered a section of notes of some length because it was about her passion for gardening. If not redeeming, it was at least illuminating. He came across a topic sentence he’d tried out and rejected as too flip after he and Nikki visited Cassidy’s belated autopsy and Lauren showed the dirt under the gossip columnist’s nails. He had written, “Cassidy Towne died the way she lived, with dirt on her hands.” Much as he liked the line, its glibness broke his rule of authorial intrusion.