Of course, there were ways to get clues, he reflected. He thought of his father. His father would have gone to the scene of the crime, or questioned some of the witnesses. But the scene of the crime was anywhere and everywhere, and most of the witnesses didn't know they were witnessing anything. Except for Her Majesty, of course—but he'd already questioned her, and there hadn't been any clues he could recall in that conversation.
Malone stubbed out his cigar, lit another one absent-mindedly, and rescued his tie, which was working its slow way around to the side of his collar. There were, he remembered, three classic divisions of any crime: method, motive and opportunity. Maybe thinking about those would lead somewhere.
As an afterthought, he got up, found a pencil and paper with the hotel's name stamped on them in gold and came back to the chair. Clearing the ashtray aside, he put the paper on the table and divided the paper into three vertical columns with the pencil. He headed the first one Method, the second Motive and the third Opportunity.
He stared at the paper for a while, and decided with some trepidation to take the columns one by one. Under Method, he put down: "Little bursts. Who knows cause?" Some more thought gave him another item, and he set it down under the first one: "Psionic. Look for psionic people?"
That apparently was all there was to the first column. After a while he moved to number two, Motive. "Confuse things," he wrote with scarcely a second's reflection. But that didn't seem like enough. A few minutes more gave him several other items, written down one under the other. "Disrupt entire US. Set US up for invasion? Martians? Russians? CK: Is Russia having trble?" That seemed to exhaust the subject and with some relief he went on. But the title of the next column nearly stopped him completely.
Opportunity. There wasn't anything he could put down under that one, Malone told himself, until he knew a great deal more about method. As things stood at present, the best entry under Opportunity was a large, tastefully done question mark. He made one, and then sat back to look at the entire list and see what help it gave him:
Method
Little bursts. Who knows cause?
Psionic. Look for psionic people?
Motive
Confuse things.
Disrupt entire US.
Set US up for invasion?
Martians?
Russians?
CK: Is Russia having trble?
Opportunity
?
Somehow, it didn't seem to be much help, when he thought about it. It had a lot of information on it, but none of the information seemed to lead anywhere. It did seem to be established that the purpose was to confuse or disrupt the United States, but this didn't seem to point to anybody except a Russian, an alien or a cosmic practical joker. Malone could see no immediate way of deciding among the trio. However, he told himself, there are other ways to start investigating a crime. There must be.
Psychological methods, for instance. People had little gray cells, he remembered from his childhood reading. Some of the more brainy fictional detectives never stooped to anything so low as an actual physical clue. They concentrated solely on finding a pattern in the crimes that indicated, infallibly, the psychology of the individual. Once his psychology had been identified, it was only a short step to actually catching him and putting him in jail until his psychology changed for the better. Or, of course, until it disappeared entirely and was buried, along with the rest of him, in a small wood box.