Schemers

24

I dreamed the answer to the locked-room trick.

Feed your subconscious enough data and set it to work on a problem before you go to sleep, and sometimes you’ll wake up with the solution. That had happened to me before, but this was the first time my subconscious had kicked one up in a jumble of sleep images and metaphor.

In my dream I was in Gregory Pollexfen’s brightly lit library. Others were there, too, Pollexfen and his wife and Jeremy Cullrane, and I seemed to be watching them from an elevated position, as if from the top of one of the bookshelf ladders. At first I couldn’t tell what was going on, but the longer I stared down the clearer the scene became. Then there was a sudden flash and a burst of silent noise, like you sometimes get in a dream, and all at once I was out of it and sitting up in bed wide awake, the images still clear and sharp.

I must have done some thrashing around or made an involuntary sound because Kerry woke up and rolled over and said with groggy alarm, “What? What is it, what’s the matter?”

“Got it,” I said. “I know how it was done.”

“How what was done?”

“The murder. How Pollexfen worked it-the only way it could’ve been done. Drugging the two of them, that’s the key. Ingenious, simple-and as nasty as it gets. A sick new way of killing somebody. He can even pretend there’s no blood on his hands because technically it’s not a homicide at all.”

“What’re you talking about? How can a homicide not be a homicide?”

“When it’s murder by suicide.”