CHAPTER 15 — THE WEIGHT OF SEEING
[Three Days Later — Alistair's Office, 02:33 AM]
Alistair had not slept more than two consecutive hours since the Neumann case.
His office looked like the den of a conspiracy theorist: walls covered in photographs, colored threads connecting elements, geometric diagrams, overlapping timelines.
But it wasn't madness.
It was the only method he knew to visualize a system that existed primarily inside another person's mind.
At the center of everything, written in large letters, was a single sentence:
12 LAWS = 12 TYPES OF HUMAN NOISE
The killer does not hate people.
He hates the dissonance they produce.
Below that, he had tried to predict the next Laws:
Law 5: Rigidity? Resistance to change?
Law 6: Dependence? Need for validation?
Law 7: ???
He couldn't see beyond that. He needed more data.
His phone vibrated. A text message from Inspector Vargas:
"You need to sleep. Your team is worried. I'm worried."
Alistair stared at the message for five seconds and didn't reply.
How could he explain to Vargas that every lost hour of sleep might be a life saved? That the killer was building his masterpiece and he was the only one who could decode it in time?
He turned back to the diagram.
The angles: 45°, 60°, 30°, 15°.
They did not form a simple arithmetic progression. But they weren't random either.
He wrote out every possible operation:
60 – 45 = 15
60 – 30 = 30
45 – 30 = 15
15 was the key number. The minimum quantum of the system.
Everything moved in increments or decrements of 15°.
But why?
What was special about fifteen degrees?
He thought of basic geometry. A full circle: 360°.
360 ÷ 15 = 24.
Twenty-four steps? No. The killer had been clear: the system possessed an inherent completion in twelve.
360 ÷ 12 = 30°.
Each Law occupied a 30° sector in a complete conceptual circle.
But the specific angles of the objects did not follow that exact division.
They were internal variations within each sector.
Alistair stood up abruptly, nearly knocking over his cold coffee.
"They're not absolute angles. They're deviations from a center."
He rushed to the board and drew a large circle. He divided it into twelve equal sectors of 30° each.
He marked the first four:
Sector 1 (0–30°): Warren → object at 45° (+15° deviation from sector center)
Sector 2 (30–60°): Leland → object at 60° (exact upper boundary)
Sector 3 (60–90°): Mikkelsen → object at 30° (exact lower boundary)
Sector 4 (90–120°): Neumann → object at 15° (–15° deviation from sector center)
Each angle was a precise position within its corresponding sector.
No positions repeated.
He was systematically mapping the angular space.
"Son of a bitch," Alistair whispered with something dangerously close to admiration. "You don't just have twelve Laws. Each one has its own geometric sub-theme."
He wasn't just mapping philosophical concepts.
He was mapping spatial variations of each concept.
The complexity was almost… beautiful.
Alistair took a photo of the board and sent it to his personal computer. Then he erased it quickly.
This level of understanding could not be shared with the department yet. They would consider him obsessed. Compromised.
Maybe they would be right.
He sat back down, feeling the full weight of intellectual solitude.
He was the only one who saw the complete system. The only one who understood that each death was a word in a language spoken by only two people in the world.
And one of those two was committing murder to write his doctoral thesis in blood and geometry.
He looked at Clara Neumann's photograph on the wall.
Forty-one years old. Respected psychologist. She had probably helped dozens of people.
And she had died because her own inner life was a contradiction the killer could not tolerate.
Did she deserve to die for that?
The question struck him with unexpected force.
Of course not. No one deserved to die for having inner conflicts. That was what being human meant.
But…
A small, dark part of his mind completed the thought:
…but the killer is right that the contradiction existed. That it was real. That Clara lived fragmented between the perfect therapist and the broken person who couldn't help herself.
Alistair clenched his fists until his knuckles turned white.
"No," he said aloud to the empty office. "Seeing the contradiction does not justify erasing it. Understanding the system does not mean agreeing with it."
But the thought had already entered.
And it couldn't be fully removed.
Because he, too, saw human contradictions all the time. He, too, felt that friction when people said one thing and did another. He, too, experienced that impulse to correct disorder.
The difference was that he channeled it into solving crimes.
And what if he hadn't had that channel?
What if he had been born into different circumstances?
"Stop," he ordered himself. "This is exactly what he wants. For you to start thinking like him."
He stood and walked to the window.
The city was still awake even at 3:00 AM. Lights in windows. The occasional car. Lives continuing in their usual chaos.
And somewhere out there, Aurelian was designing the Fifth Law.
Preparing the next lesson.
Alistair rested his forehead against the cold glass.
"Eight more," he whispered. "I have to stop him before the remaining eight."
But another voice—more honest—added:
Or I have to understand him completely before he finishes. Because something tells me that the end of this system is going to change everything.
He didn't know whether that thought made him a good detective…
…or the perfect student of the most brilliant killer he had ever known.