Free The Good Father by Noah Hawley

.22-caliber pistol. Was he carrying it the night of the assassination? Did he draw this pistol after Sirhan started shooting and shoot Kennedy from below three times? If this is the case, then who was Cesar really working for?
    The case against Cesar is pure speculation, and he, of course, denies having any involvement in Kennedy’s death. But the coincidences are provocative, and start the gears of an analytical mind spinning.
    A patient presents with a seizure disorder. His blood pressure is low. He has been having headaches recently, and his right foot is swollen. As a doctor you must decide: Are these all symptoms of the condition causing the seizure? What if you learn the patient has gout? This explains the swelling but not the seizures. Discount the swelling, reexamine the remaining symptoms. The key to a successful diagnosis is to find the pattern in a sea of camouflaging factors.
    A girl in a polka-dot dress. A security guard hired at the last minute. An eight-shot pistol. An audiotape that seems to have recorded at least ten shots. What is relevant? What is irrelevant? To make the properdiagnosis you must put aside your own prejudices. You do not, after all, fit the symptoms to the condition. You fit the condition to the symptoms. Your own beliefs are not an issue. Your ego. It is a question of science. Of fact.
    This is how I was trained to think. To diagnose an illness, a doctor creates a clinical decision tree. Arrows branch from the patient’s major symptom to his other symptoms, his lab results, and family history. Is there a fever or not? Have other family members suffered similar symptoms? Ultimately following the branches to the end should result in the correct diagnosis and the proper therapy. In reality flesh-and-blood decision making relies on pattern recognition. With enough experience a doctor learns to recognize diseases. He relies on instincts. From the moment a patient walks in, the doctor is already considering a diagnosis, and then as questions are answered and test results received, that diagnosis is refined. These types of doctoring shortcuts are called “heuristics.”
    But shortcuts can be dangerous. This is why diagnostics is such a tricky game. If you are too literal, you might not make the imaginative leap needed to find the underlying disease. But if you are too intuitive, you might discount important criteria.
    A patient presents with a deadly illness. It is a determined and canny hider. Undiagnosed, the patient will die. He has already been hospitalized. His health is failing. As a specialist, I must review the data—blood tests, X-rays, MRIs. There will be dead ends, scientific misdirects. New symptoms will appear making old diagnoses instantly impossible. As his doctor I cannot give up. The harder the disease is to diagnose, the harder I must work, the more creative I must become.
    This is how a good doctor becomes great.
    This is how I will discover the truth of what happened.

 
    Danny was handcuffed to the bed. This was the first thing I noticed. The cuffs slid along the metal rails of the bed with the sound of a shower curtain being drawn. Open, closed. Open, closed. He was sitting up, his eyes raised to the ceiling-mounted television. His face was bruised. There were scratches on his cheek, and the skin around his left eye was starting to darken. The white button-down shirt he wore was torn and speckled with blood. He was watching the Weather Channel, as if it possibly mattered what the weather was anywhere in the world. As if he was a regular Joe who wanted to check his morning commute. But Danny’s outdoor days were over. Soon he would be a creature of small rooms, of cold, unforgiving surfaces—metal and concrete—spaces that were easy to clean, to squeegee free of blood and shit and piss. The only weather he experienced would be internal—great storms of remorse or anger moving across his central plains.
    There was a Secret Service agent sitting by the bed. When David