.5

What had she been reading?

He walked back into the bedroom. He hadn’t spent any real time there. He had swept right by the porter being interrogated, and headed for the left wrist hanging from the radiator—genteel. In the bedroom, there was a stack of seven New Yorker magazines on the dresser next to a print of an animation—a curvaceous highschool girl astride a panda. The girl was peering over her left shoulder. The panda’s eyes were slit open. The New Yorkers had not been touched. They were perfectly aligned and parallel to the top of the dresser. They were several weeks old. She’d put them there and not moved them. The picture had also not been touched. It had several days’ layer of fine dust.

On her nightstand: The Neural Control of Sleep and Waking. Jerome Siegel.

She had a white bookmark on page 63: EEG Synchrony and Behavioral Inhibition. She had put an asterisk by Figure 7.1 B and underlined in the footnote: “The line at the bottom of the figure marks the onset and offset of thalamic stimulation. The symbol S with an arrow through it signifies electrical stimulation.”

He photographed the page.

She wasn't an expert. The pages were too crisp and the binding was hardly creased. She was a dabbler. Read chapter four, “The Discovery of the Ascending Reticular Activating System” and forgot all about it. Catalogued it next to an article on the probable life-span of the cloud forest in the Cordillera de Tilaran, and thought herself well travelled. Like potholes in a field—a groundhog coming back up to tell the length of winter and forgetting. She wasn’t inhibited. She was obsessive.

The forensics were still flitting about the bruise trying to get it from another angle. Carefully trying not to touch her. She was still warm.