The PowWow

The consultant badge was a laminated rectangle on a lanyard and it suited Curtis.

He was at a workstation Rachel had apparently arranged for him — not a spare desk pushed into a corner, but a proper setup, dual monitors, his own keyboard which he had, I noticed, replaced with one from a bag he had brought himself, because Curtis and standard-issue keyboards had philosophical differences that he did not consider negotiable. He was already deep in it when we came through.

He looked up. Looked at me. Then at Rachel. Then back at me with the expression of a man who had processed several things simultaneously and elected to address only the professional one.

"You're late," he said.

"We had a busy morning," I said. I looked at the badge. "That looks good on you."

Curtis straightened slightly. The badge caught the fluorescent light of the precinct in a way that was objectively unremarkable and which he appeared to find genuinely satisfying. "It is an appropriate credential for the work being performed," he said, with the measured dignity of a man trying not to be pleased about something and not fully succeeding.

"Very official," I said.

"Thank you," he said. Without irony. Which was either Curtis being sincere or Curtis being so far past irony that sincerity had looped back around. With Curtis it was genuinely difficult to tell and I had stopped trying.

Rachel set her notepad on the desk beside him and pulled up a chair. I stood behind them both with my arms folded and watched two people who communicated in different professional dialects — Rachel's the language of incident reports and documented patterns, Curtis's the language of data architecture and geometric inference — and their conversation was a nominal representation of a Venn diagram.

Curtis had been running the location data since the previous evening.

Not because anyone had asked him to — because Curtis, once given a problem with geographic and temporal components, applied himself to it with the focused inevitability of a natural law. He had taken the documented healings from Jeremiah's pastoral network, the social media posts from bystanders — a surprising volume of these, people photographing or posting about the man with the Bible without identifying him, the posts geotagged and timestamped with the accidental precision of people who had no idea they were generating useful data — and the timing of every confirmed sighting across the past six weeks. God bless the Internet, Smart Phones, and vain people taking pictures of everything.

He had mapped the movement.

The pattern was not random. That was the first thing, and it was not a small thing. Itinerant ministry that moved the way the man moved — no fixed location, no announced schedule, no institutional anchor — could have been genuinely unpredictable, the movement of someone going where they felt led without internal geography. It wasn't. There was a shape to it, visible only across enough data points and enough time, but present: a loose circuit, irregular in its timing but consistent in its geography, the particular pattern of a man who covered ground systematically without appearing to.

"He's working a territory," I said.

"He's working a territory," Curtis confirmed, with the satisfaction of a man who had arrived at a conclusion and was glad to have company in it. He pointed at the central monitor. "Not a grid — not that mechanical. But there are areas he returns to. The north park district, the river corridor, the Clement Street neighborhood. He rotates. The intervals aren't fixed but the locations recur."

Rachel had her notepad open. "Cross-reference the incident geography," she said. "Not complaints about him. Adjacent incidents. The ones that cluster around where he's been."

Curtis typed. The screen populated.

The overlap was immediate and visible.

The areas where the man had been working overlapped, with the patient consistency of a geological feature, with the areas where Rachel's incident reports had been quietly accumulating. Not immediately after his visits — the timeline was longer than that, the tap-turned-off-slowly timeline that she had documented in the color-coded file. But over the months. The gradual accumulation of small signals in the geography of his circuit.

Rachel looked at the screen without expression. The detective composure doing its work. Underneath it, the recalculation running. She was adorable when calculating.

"The north park district," she said. "His last confirmed sighting there was eight days ago. If the rotation holds—"

"He's due back," Curtis said. He had already pulled the interval data. "The north park sightings cluster at eight to twelve day intervals. Today is day eight."

He pulled up the map. A park two miles north of the precinct — mid-sized, the kind that had benches along the main path and a small open area near the east entrance where the morning light came in at an angle that made it the kind of place people sat.

"If the pattern holds," Curtis said, "he'll be there tomorrow morning."

He said it with the careful qualifier of a man who understood that patterns were probabilities rather than certainties and documented them accordingly. Then he sat back and looked at the screen with the expression of someone who had done the work correctly and was satisfied with the correctness of it.

Rachel was already writing. The address, the timing window, the confidence interval Curtis had attached to the projection. Her pen moved with the focused efficiency of someone building the next step in real time.

"Good work," she said to Curtis, without looking up. Direct, specific, the compliment of a professional who meant it.

Curtis received this with composure, "Thank you, Detective," he said. The badge caught the light again.

I pulled out my phone.

Jacob picked up on the second ring. I guess he’d decided the first ring was desperate like Rachel and I had.

"North side park," I said. "Curtis ran the location pattern — Rachel cross-referenced the incident geography. Between the two of them they've got a high confidence projection." I looked at the map on Curtis's screen. "If the pattern holds, he'll be there tomorrow morning."

"Then tomorrow," Jacob said, "we can talk with him."

Not we'll go, not we should be there. We can talk with him. The phrasing of a man who had been waiting for the conversation since the previous encounter, since the walk along the east path, since the scripture that was almost right and the question of how he talked about himself that Jacob had been holding with the patient thoroughness of someone who knew the right moment had not yet arrived.

Tomorrow it would arrive.

"Yeah," I said. "That's what I was thinking."

I hung up and looked at the map on Curtis's screen, memorizing details.

Curtis was already archiving the work. Methodical, complete, with the satisfaction of a man for whom the documentation was as important as the finding and who considered both finished only when they were both correct. I figured he had mental color-coded tabs that meshed well with Rachel’s physical ones.

Rachel capped her pen. She looked at the map. Then at me.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Tomorrow," I said.

She held my gaze for a moment with something in her expression that was both professional and not, the two registers she had been learning to inhabit simultaneously with increasing ease.

I watched her write the address and admired the deliberate movements of her writing. So many little things about her and how she did the things she does. Learning about her was an unending data dump of mostly adorable things into the swelling file in my brain about all things Rachel.

I switched gears again. Tomorrow, we could hopefully find out more.