every case I cited included those tiny details, that strange patina of circumstance and motivation, that allows good investigators to separate the genuine from the fake.

watching—like he had probably spent half his

He looked at me for a moment. “It’s a Zen story, of course,” he said, smiling again. “The point is—if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.”

But there was nothing, just a gale of fear blowing down the lonely corridors of his mind.

It is fair to say a lot of my work has been a row through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat, but even by those low standards Markus Bucher was memorable.

everybody knows this—or cares probably—but the first law of forensic science is called Locard’s Exchange Principle and it says “every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.”

But as people say—are you gonna curse the darkness or light a candle? So let me ask you again—what are you going to do about it?”

information didn’t exist until it had been safely transmitted.

Evidence was the name we gave to what we had, but what about the things we hadn’t found? Sometimes, the things that were missing were of far greater importance.