“Are you alright?” Williams asks. His question releases Kierk, who spins on him. At first, perhaps due to a trick of the mind, or perhaps because he was confused by Kierk’s pause, Williams’ face is a truly unreadable canvas, disconcerting in its blank untranslatability, but then this flits away, replaced by an expression of benign concern as he meets Kierk’s eyes. Kierk examines that face, that expression, with all the detailed intensity of a portraiture artist, attempting to match it to his brief opaque memories of the man he had glimpsed in the subway.

“I actually have a few more questions, professor. Have you ever heard of the Following Brothers of Christ?”

“No. Should I have?”

“Do you ever get down to Bleecker Street Station?”

Williams is an enigmatic sphinx, paws on the arms of his chair.

“I don’t know what you mean. The subway stop?”

“Yes. Were you there Saturday before last?”

A brief flicker of anger. “Today is my first day back from the conference. As we discussed numerous times over email.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, professor. Forgive my absentmindedness.”

Kierk continues slyly watching Williams, as if about to say something, but then, with nothing forthcoming, he just nods and nearly bows out of the room, closing the door and retreating to the stairwell where he paces about on one of the landings.

Questions in his mind: did Williams mean for him to see it? Was it a sign, and if so, what did it signify? Threat? Complicity? Informing Kierk that he knew that Kierk knew?

Rushing back to his computer he pulls up information about the conference Williams had been attending. Online Kierk thumbs through the photos of the conference, looking at the timestamps, looking up flights from Chicago (the conference location) to New York, and finally concludes that Williams really had attended the conference, and in fact had given a talk the day before Atif’s body had been found. The immediate closure is disappointing to him—surely it was unlikely for someone in Chicago to appear in a photograph one day, and then to have traveled to New York the next night to commit a murder with no motive? And then pretend to be away the rest of the time? And should he tell Carmen all this? After all, this would only inflame her in a quest that Kierk did not fully believe in. It could also prove merely a distraction, more noise injected into the search for signal. Eventually he decides not to tell her, for now. Like a proper scientist he would wait for more evidence.