The podcast transcript is three pages. He finds it Thursday morning on his phone, sitting in his car in the hospital parking garage, before his shift.
The podcast is called Philly After Dark. It has, according to the metadata, a hundred and forty thousand subscribers. The episode is called "The Doctor of Death?" — with, again, a question mark that does the work of plausible deniability while carrying none of its meaning.
He reads it.
The host has done what Gideon would call a competent job — not brilliant, not sloppy, but solid enough to be credible. He has cross-referenced the twelve deaths now in the public record. He has spoken to a forensic pathologist who will not be named and who has, apparently, reviewed the available reports and confirmed the likelihood of deliberate causation. He has traced the criminal records of the victims with a thoroughness that Gideon finds, involuntarily, almost admirable.
And he has given the killer a name.
Not a real name. A media name. The kind that sticks.
The Surgeon of Sin.
Gideon reads it twice. He puts the phone face-down on the passenger seat. He looks at the concrete ceiling of the parking garage.
The name is not wrong, exactly. It is the kind of name that captures a shape without understanding the interior — which is, he supposes, exactly as much as a podcaster with a hundred and forty thousand subscribers needs to do.
* * *
Three miles away, in a conference room on the eighth floor of the FBI field office on Arch Street, Ray Donahue is presenting his formal profile to a room of eight people, including the field office director and a deputy from the Philadelphia Police Commissioner's office.
He presents it without flourish. Data, pattern, assessment, recommendation. He has done this twenty-two times in eighteen years. He knows exactly how to give a room what it needs without giving it what it does not need, which is uncertainty.
He does not mention the red string. He does not mention the index card in his drawer. He does not say the name he has been carrying in his chest for three weeks.
Not yet. You do not show a hand like this until the hand is complete.
The director approves the task force at ten forty-seven AM. Donahue is named lead.
He accepts it the way he accepts everything — with the quiet, patient gravity of someone who has already been doing the job without the official designation.
He walks back to his office. He sits at his desk. He looks at the board. He looks at the red string.
He thinks about the man in the parking garage that morning — the tall, lean, controlled man walking into a hospital where he is beloved and trusted, carrying, inside his excellent coat, a weight that Donahue understands and does not excuse and cannot stop respecting, even now.
He opens a new file.
He types a name.
The task force, officially, begins.
* * *
In the parking garage, Gideon picks up his phone. He looks at the transcript one more time. He closes it. He puts the phone in his pocket and picks up his bag and gets out of the car.
He is scrubbing in at seven-thirty. He has two surgeries and a departmental meeting and a resident evaluation that he has been putting off for a week.
The Surgeon of Sin.
He takes the elevator up. He does not look at his reflection when the doors open.
He goes to work.