Lily was eager to get home. She hurried out the door, and wasted no time crossing town to head down onto the peninsula where she lived. It was a long twenty minute drive, and she was feeling very impatient. It felt ironic to her that she had been so exhausted and spent half an hour ago, but now was brimming with energy.
She was also pretty sure that nothing more she could do tonight would have any bearing on the thoughts racing through her mind right now. It was too late to call an elderly gentleman to interrogate about his motives, it was too late to bother Grace with more inquiries, and it was too late to contact any more of Cassie's fellow booksellers for further information. All of that would need to wait for the morning, and be better attended to with a full night's sleep.
So, despite the explosion of energy washing through her at the moment, she was actually in a hurry to get home and call it a day. She stopped short of deciding it was time to go to bed, though. There were several things she could still see to on her computer, and it was essential that she take some time to type up everything she could remember from the day, and make notes of all the crazy thoughts racing through her mind.
She was particularly interested in the last observation made by Cassie before she had left for the night. Cassie was absolutely right that Carter Denning exhibited completely different behavior on three separate occasions. There could be something behind it. One thing she desperately wanted to do was go through her psychology and drug reaction references to be certain that the behavior they had witnessed was not connected to anything in them.
Lily had tried to assure Cassie that it was all inconsistent with the activity they were watching, but her training was kicking into high gear with her adrenaline level at the moment, and she knew that kind of thinking was lazy, and deserved no status in a court of law. Was she expecting anything to actually end up in court? No, she hoped, but that attention to detail was the key to success in any investigative endeavor, so she followed that insight keenly whenever she felt it.
So, she would hunker down and spend a couple of hours reviewing dry reference material in order to feel confident in her understanding. She also wanted to take another crack at researching information on Carter Denning. It nagged at her that Cassie had better information and had been able to conjure more when Lily had been unable to locate anything.
She reminded herself that using the library computer may have played a role, but that too was something she wanted to test. Once home, she made sure to lock her car and doors before doing anything else. She chuckled at herself as she did it, thinking there was nothing to be worried about. She didn't even have an actual case anymore...
That thought broke through. She didn't have a case now that Denning had shown up at the bookseller's conference in Boston the Saturday after he had stood Grace up at the train station. It was very easy for Lily to see conspiracies everywhere and connect them into ordinary events, but without a case, she was without a client, and without a client, she was operating at her own expense.
That reminded her to update all of her notes on the case Grace has given her this morning. She opened her computer files and added entries explaining the day and her thought process. She added reference for expenses, which fortunately didn't amount to even ten dollars. She noted it all, but added a comment that there was no need to collect, considering the case had dried up.
That started her on a new line of thought. If there was no case, what was she busying herself doing? Surely all the actions and directions she was pursuing were those connected to investigating and resolving a case. She was behaving as though it was, and that made her ask - what am I actually trying to find out.
Now she had a starting point. She sat down and began filling out a new case file. She stopped, pulled up the files related to Grace's request of this morning, then she proceeded to meticulously wrap them up, label them as partially initiated, and file everything away as closed.
