After some yoga and then taking a shower, Carmen begins to do what she has done for the last two Saturdays: investigate the case, as she thinks of it. First she cuts up a banana and sets it in a bowl with cream and sprinkles brown sugar over it, and then she sits by her open window looking out at the street with her Moleskine notebook, occasionally taking banana-slice bites, listening to the city sounds. Opening to a series of pages with names, times, and locations on them, Carmen flips past those to one titled “LEADS.” Alone with her thoughts this notebook has felt both funny and dark and necessary all at once, but when Kierk was here it suddenly seemed paranoid, ill-humored, and vaguely pathetic, like she was a bored suburbanite concocting a fantasy about a neighbor. The organization helps her consider the main points of the case: Atif, herself, Kierk, Alex, Jessica, Mike, Leon, Greg, SAAR, the Following Brothers of Christ, the kallu, Bleecker Street Station, the taxi, Mike taking Jessica home, Kierk and her kissing in the lobby then leaving, the aftereffects, all forming a set of conceptual points that she arranges and rearranges into different constellations trying to make the outline into a shape she recognizes. She enjoys doing this—after all, isn’t the fundamental plot of a mystery identical to the fundamental plot of science: distinguishing the true causal structure of a series of events? Untangling correlation and causation? Coming up with the simplest theory that explains as much as possible? Was the fact that none of them had clear memories a mere stochastic event with no ties to Atif’s death, or was it central? What about Greg leaving early? What about what the leader of the local SAAR meetings, Allen, had said about there being an insider in the CNS? All accompanied by the remembrance of a bit of trivia she recalls: that the English word “mystery” comes from the Greek word muein—to close one’s mouth.