It takes thirty-six hours.
He knows this because he is the one who calculated it. He ran the modeling three times with different variables — body weight, existing conditions, activity level — and each time the window was thirty-two to forty hours. He split the difference.
Victor Sands dies on a Saturday morning. The call goes to the neighbor first because the dog has been barking since Friday night. The neighbor calls the non-emergency line. An officer is dispatched. The officer finds Sands on the kitchen floor. The officer notes, in his report, that there are no signs of trauma and no signs of forced entry and the man appeared to have been in some distress before losing consciousness.
Gideon reads the preliminary report — it ends up on a police scanner blog he monitors — on Saturday afternoon while eating lunch at the hospital cafeteria.
He thinks: clean. Not perfect, but close enough.
He puts his phone in his pocket. He eats the rest of his lunch.
The part he does not tell himself, the part he permits only as a background awareness, is what happens when he watches the ambulance from his car across the street Friday night. He parks on the cross street with a clear line of sight to Sands's driveway, which he has used twice before for reconnaissance, and he watches the lights come — the cold blue of the paramedics, then the white-red of the police cruiser. He watches them go inside. He watches the posture of the two officers who come out first, and he reads it: not violent crime, not urgent, contained.
He sits in the car for a while after.
The dog is still barking. He can hear it through the window glass, distant and insistent. He thinks about the dog and whether it has been fed and whether someone will take it, and he thinks: the man who fed that dog also trafficked human beings for eleven years, and both of those things are true, and the space between them is precisely the kind of moral terrain he has chosen to stop examining.
He starts the car.
He does not know, as he drives home, whether what he feels is resolve or distance or something that used to be one thing and has become the other without telling him. He turns it over once, the way a surgeon turns an instrument before placing it, and then he puts it away.
The work is done.
There are three names left on the list.
He drives home through the rain.