His therapist — if he has one — would describe him as an ideal patient.

I put the cap back on the marker.

"Questions?"

There were questions. Technical ones about ballistics and geographic clustering and whether the secondary regulation source theory could help with a geographic profile. I answered them on autopilot. The part of my brain that ran briefings was a separate machine — reliable, efficient, requiring approximately fifteen percent of my actual cognitive capacity.

The other eighty-five percent was doing something I wouldn't name.

The drive home took thirty-two minutes. I took Wisconsin Avenue instead of the highway because highway driving is automatic and I didn't trust automatic right now. Surface streets require decisions. Left turn, red light, pedestrian in the crosswalk, decision, decision, decision. Decisions keep the other thing quiet.

I parked. Sat in the car for a moment with the engine off. My neighbor's sprinkler was running on a timer, hitting the same arc of sidewalk over and over, a dark stripe that dried and darkened and dried.

Inside, I poured water. Not wine. Water. I needed clarity, not comfort.

I sat at the kitchen table and opened my personal notebook — the leather one, not the FBI-issued case file. This was where I kept my unstructured thinking. Observations too soft for an official profile. Hunches. The stuff that would get me laughed out of a courtroom but had been right more often than the evidence-based conclusions.

I flipped to the page where I'd been building the Gentleman profile in my own shorthand. Not the clean, presentable version I put on the whiteboard. The real one. The one with arrows and question marks and crossed-out wrong guesses.

I read it.

M, 30-40. Military background, likely special operations. Two or more deployments. Recruited post-service by private entity or handler. Psychologically contained. Presents as warm, functional, socially fluent. Lives alone. Space is controlled — minimal possessions, utilitarian aesthetic. No visible personal history (photos, memorabilia). Relationship to violence is professional, not pathological. Kills are assignments, not compulsions. Slowing interval suggests new emotional anchor — relationship or therapeutic engagement.

Physiological markers: low resting HR (est. 48-55), minimal startle response, fine motor control suggesting trained precision. No substance dependency. Moderate alcohol consumption — social, not self-medicating.

Domestic tells: high-quality tools, minimal decorative objects. First aid supplies that exceed normal civilian needs. Knife set that reflects actual culinary skill or blade familiarity. Bookshelf skews nonfiction — geopolitics, history, tactical subjects reframed as intellectual interests.

If encountered socially: would be described as attentive, present, careful. Would make sustained eye contact. Would notice details others miss. Would make you feel seen.

Would make you feel like the only person in the room.

I read it twice.

Then I closed the notebook.

I didn't do the next thing. The thing that any competent analyst would do, which was to pull out her phone and open the contact saved without a name, and look at the text thread, and place the texts against the timeline, and do the math.

I didn't do that because I wasn't an analyst right now. I was a woman sitting at her kitchen table with a glass of water, and the sprinkler outside had finally cycled off, and the silence was the kind that doesn't ring — it just sits.

My phone buzzed.

No name. Just the number I knew by heart now, the way you learn a number when you dial it at 11 PM and 1 AM and once at 4:30 in the morning when you couldn't sleep and he answered on the first ring, already awake, voice not groggy at all, and you didn't ask why because you were grateful.

Dinner tomorrow? I'll cook.

I typed back: What are you making?

Whatever you want. I'm flexible.

You're never flexible. You always have a plan.

Three dots. Then: You caught me. Salmon. Lemon. That rice you liked.

I smiled at my phone. A real smile, not the one I used in briefing rooms. The kind that happens before you can decide whether to allow it.

Sounds perfect.

I put the phone down. Picked up the glass of water. Drank.

The notebook sat on the table, closed. I could see the edge of my handwriting through the cover — the last line I'd written, pressed hard enough to leave an impression.

Would make you feel like the only person in the room.

I put the glass in the sink, rinsed it, set it on the drying rack. Turned off the kitchen light. Went to bed.

I did not open the notebook again.