CHAPTER 4 — THE MAN WHO SEES TOO MUCH
Inspector Alistair Draeven arrived at the crime scene twelve minutes after receiving the call—not because he rushed desperately, but because he calculated traffic flow and alternative routes better than any GPS.
The building was an old duplex in a neighborhood that had seen better days. A forty-two-year-old painter named Marcus Holt had been found dead in his studio. The kind of case that wasted weeks of average detectives: too many contextual elements, no clear motive, only informational noise without structure.
Alistair crossed the yellow tape without asking permission. It wasn't deliberate arrogance. He genuinely forgot that others required small social rituals of protocol.
"Inspector, please wait for authorization from—" a young officer began.
"I am waiting," Alistair replied without stopping—because technically, he was waiting for his brain to finish processing the scene, which was the only authorization he required.
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The body lay on the floor among scattered brushes and open paint cans. Uniformed officers took notes without apparent order, photographed from obvious angles, filled out forms with redundant information.
Alistair did not look at the corpse first. He looked at the room as a whole. A slow, methodical, circular scan. A single visual sweep.
And he already had a mental list of fifteen fragments of chaos that did not fit the apparent narrative of "death by cardiac arrest during work."
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The Smell: Strong, persistent humidity—but no scent of fresh paint or solvents. Yet three paint cans stood open, with clean rims. A clumsy staging meant to suggest a workplace accident during a painting session.
The Cup: A half-full coffee cup sat on the table, completely cold. No lip marks on the ceramic rim. The coffee showed at least three hours of visible oxidation. A poorly constructed temporal alibi.
The Phone: Found in the victim's pocket, locked. But there were fingerprint smudges on the sides of the device—pressure from incorrect angles, as if someone had tried to unlock it without knowing the pattern. Signs of a failed attempt to erase communications.
The Brushes: Four were clean, neatly arranged on the stand. One had blue paint stains. But the painting in progress on the easel used only greens and ochres. A blue brush in a scene with no blue. A detail without logical sense—unless it belonged to someone else.
The Fall: The corpse's left hand extended farther than was anatomically natural for a collapse due to cardiac arrest. The angle of the arm suggested not a fall, but post-mortem placement. Someone had positioned the body.
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A more experienced officer approached with a digital tablet.
"Inspector, the preliminary medical report suggests cardiac arrest. No clear signs of struggle. Probably stress, age, maybe recreational drugs. Case closed by Monday."
Alistair knelt beside the body without responding immediately.
"No," he finally said with the calm certainty of someone reading a mathematical equation. "The noise in this scene is false. Deliberately constructed. The killer was here between eight and twelve minutes. No more."
The officer stood frozen, processing.
"How can you—?"
"If Marcus had died naturally while working, the cup would have lip marks. Painters drink coffee constantly—it's routine. Someone else brought that coffee, probably as a pretext to enter. Then they tried to make it look like paint spilled during a sudden collapse. An impulsive idea, poorly executed by someone with no forensic experience."
He walked toward the bathroom window.
"But the door was locked from the inside—"
"The bathroom window," Alistair interrupted. "Look at the lower frame. There's a rectangular patch where accumulated dust was recently wiped away. The killer exited through here after locking the front door from the inside using a cord or strong thread. A simple trick found in any basic locksmith manual."
He knelt again beside the body, pointing to the neck.
"Marcus was supported by someone before dying. Look at this faint mark here, on the right side of the neck. Thumb pressure. Someone with a strong arm held him—probably in a gesture that Marcus initially interpreted as concern—just before the collapse."
"They held him while he died?" the officer asked, horror creeping into his voice.
"Yes. Not out of mercy or sadism. Out of technical necessity. To control exactly how and where the body would fall. To give the scene the specific appearance the killer needed."
He stood and walked toward the wall where several finished paintings hung.
"The culprit is Leo Hartmann—the painter's student. Approximately twenty-six years old. He comes here three times a week."
"How—?"
Alistair pointed at the cup.
"Oat-milk coffee with a hint of cinnamon. I can smell it from here. An unusual combination. Leo is lactose-intolerant—documented on social media—and constantly posts about his 'special' coffee from a café two blocks south. He bought one at 4:10 p.m., according to today's Instagram story. He arrived here, they argued about something—probably artistic criticism or money—Marcus suffered the cardiac arrest during the argument. Leo panicked, believed he had caused it, and staged this clumsy scene."
He lifted the blue brush with tweezers.
"This brush belongs to Leo. Different brand, different wear. And the cord for the door trick is right there." He pointed to a nearly invisible nylon thread caught in the doorframe. "Fishing line. Leo is an amateur fisherman, according to his profile photos."
Everyone in the room stared in absolute silence.
"This wasn't a planned murder. It was impulsive—pure panic, full of emotional noise and execution errors. Arrest him before he tries to flee—or worse, harms himself out of guilt."
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Only when he was alone in the room, after the team rushed out to locate Leo Hartmann, did Alistair rest a hand on the paint-stained table.
The silence of the empty scene gave him room to recalibrate his mental processes, to let the variables settle into their correct positions.
He did not enjoy solving crimes in the emotional sense others described—"justice," "the satisfaction of a job well done."
He enjoyed imposing logic on chaos. Turning noise into signal. Transforming fragmented data into coherent narrative.
That was his true work—his only real function in a world that insisted on being disordered.
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Twenty minutes later, when the officers returned with the news that Leo Hartmann had been detained while attempting to take a taxi to the airport with a half-packed backpack, Alistair simply said:
"Predictable."
Then he put on his coat, buttoned it methodically from bottom to top (never the other way around—disorder physically disturbed him), and exited the duplex into the cold evening air.
His mind had already filed the case under "Resolved / Simple Pattern" and moved on to the next fragment of disorder that would require silencing.
He walked toward his car without looking back.
The world remained chaotic, noisy, full of unnecessary friction.
But for today, in this small fragment of reality, Alistair had restored order.
And that was the only reason he kept getting up every morning.