[PPTH Conference Room B — September 21, 2005, 9:00 AM]
Tritter had rearranged the furniture.
The conference table — the same table where Vogler had presented his audit findings nine months ago — had been pushed against the wall. Two chairs faced each other in the center of the room, six feet apart, no table between them. The setup was deliberate: no barrier, no surface to grip, no desk to hide hands behind. Two people in an empty room, and the emptiness was the point.
Isaac entered at 8:58. Two minutes early — punctual enough to demonstrate respect, not so early as to suggest anxiety. Tritter was already seated, a legal pad on his knee, a pen in his right hand, and the same flat-planed expression Isaac had catalogued during the clinic incident twelve days ago.
"Dr. Burke." Tritter's voice was level, unhurried, the cadence of a man who measured time in confession increments rather than clock hours. "Thank you for coming."
"Detective." Isaac sat. The chair was the hard plastic kind — no cushion, no armrests, the seating equivalent of a bare interrogation room. His back was straight, his hands resting on his thighs, his posture projecting cooperative without projecting compliant.
Social Deduction activated at full resolution. Tritter's physiological markers were controlled — heart rate steady, breathing even, no stress indicators. The man was comfortable in this environment. The interview room was his territory the way the diagnostic conference room was House's, and the territorial advantage was designed to produce exactly the discomfort Isaac was working to suppress.
"I'll be straightforward," Tritter said. "I'm investigating prescribing irregularities in the Department of Diagnostic Medicine. My questions will focus on your observations of Dr. House's professional conduct. You're not under investigation. You're being interviewed as a colleague."
The preamble was standard — the verbal framing that established the interview as voluntary and collaborative while carrying the implicit weight of compulsion. Isaac had heard it before, in the Memory Palace's stored records of police procedurals and legal dramas. The framing was designed to lower resistance by reducing perceived threat. It worked on most people. Isaac wasn't most people.
"Understood."
"How often do you observe Dr. House taking medication during work hours?"
"Regularly. He takes Vicodin for chronic pain related to a leg infarction. The usage is consistent with his documented condition."
"Do you consider his usage excessive?"
"I'm not his physician. I don't monitor his dosage."
"But you're observant." Tritter's pen moved on the legal pad. Not writing — tapping, the rhythmic percussion of a man maintaining focus through tactile engagement. "Your colleagues describe you as exceptionally observant. Dr. House himself has noted your... perceptiveness."
The word perceptiveness carried weight that had nothing to do with the Vicodin investigation. Tritter had done his homework. He'd spoken to the team — Cameron's honest testimony, Foreman's guarded answers, Chase's diplomatic performance — and somewhere in those conversations, Isaac's reputation as the diagnostic savant had surfaced. The man who saw too much. The fellow with impossible accuracy. The doctor whose colleagues described him in terms that belonged in a science fiction novel rather than a medical chart.
"I'm a diagnostician. Observation is part of the job."
"Observation is part of your job. You seem to have made it a personal specialty." Tritter set down the pen. Leaned back. The posture shift was calculated — creating space, projecting openness, the interrogator's technique of appearing relaxed to encourage the subject to match. "Have you observed Dr. House performing medical procedures while impaired?"
"No."
"Have you observed Dr. House making clinical decisions that appeared to be influenced by medication?"
"No."
"Have you observed Dr. House taking medication in quantities that exceeded what you would consider therapeutic?"
Isaac paused. The pause was one second — long enough to suggest consideration, short enough to avoid suggesting evasion. "I've observed him take Vicodin at frequencies that seem high. I don't have access to his prescription records to determine whether the frequency matches his prescribed dosage."
"But your impression is that it seems high."
"My impression is that chronic pain patients often require medication that appears excessive to outside observers. Context matters."
Tritter's expression didn't change. His eyes — dark, steady, the eyes of a man who'd spent a career reading liars across interview tables — held Isaac's gaze with the patient intensity of someone measuring not just the answers but the mechanism producing them.
"You're very composed, Dr. Burke."
The observation was a weapon. Not a compliment — a diagnostic statement, delivered with the same clinical precision Isaac used when naming a pathology. Tritter had noticed something, and the something was Isaac's calm. The specific, practiced, deliberate calm of a man who'd been navigating institutional interrogation for almost a year and had refined his performance to a degree that now registered as anomalous.
"I was told to be cooperative and honest. I'm being both."
"You were told. By whom?"
"Hospital legal counsel provided guidelines for interacting with investigators."
"Guidelines." Tritter picked up the pen again. This time he wrote — a note, compact, the handwriting too small for Isaac to read from six feet. "Your colleagues were nervous during their interviews. Dr. Cameron was emotional. Dr. Foreman was defensive. Dr. Chase was careful." He looked up. "You're none of those things. You're... prepared. Like you knew exactly what I was going to ask and had practiced your answers."
"I answer questions for a living, Detective. Patients, colleagues, administrators. Composure is a professional requirement."
"Composure under diagnostic pressure is professional. Composure under police investigation is interesting." Tritter closed the legal pad. The gesture was final — the end of the formal interview, the transition to whatever came next. "I have one more question. Not about Dr. House."
Isaac's hands stayed on his thighs. His posture stayed straight. Social Deduction registered the shift in Tritter's emotional profile — the investigation-focus narrowing, tightening, redirecting from House's prescribing to something else. Something about Isaac.
"Your medical license was issued in August 2004, three months before you started at PPTH. Your undergraduate transcript from Rutgers shows a GPA of three-point-seven with a biology major. Your medical school records from Robert Wood Johnson are complete but—" Tritter paused. The pause was theatrical, the interrogator's technique of creating silence that the subject would rush to fill. "—unremarkable. In my experience, remarkable people have remarkable records. Yours are... adequate. Just adequate."
"Not everyone's life makes for interesting reading."
"No. But everyone's life makes for consistent reading." Tritter stood. The interview was over — he was signaling it through body language, the detective's method of ending on his terms rather than the subject's. "Your records are consistent. They're also thin. Thin enough that a thorough investigation might want to verify the details."
"I'm happy to cooperate with any verification."
"I'm sure you are." Tritter extended his hand. Isaac shook it — firm, brief, the handshake of two men concluding a transaction that neither considered finished. "We'll talk again, Dr. Burke. I have more questions about you."
The door opened. Tritter collected his legal pad and left the conference room with the measured stride of a man who'd just acquired a new target and was already planning the approach.
Isaac sat in the plastic chair and counted his heartbeats. Sixty-two per minute. Steady. Controlled. The composure that Tritter had identified as anomalous was real — produced not by acting training but by ten months of performing under scrutiny from House, Vogler, Foreman, and the constant background pressure of a life built on impossible secrets.
His hands were trembling. Not during the interview — during the interview, they'd been still, anchored to his thighs by conscious control. But now, alone in the repurposed conference room with the two chairs facing each other like accusers across an empty floor, the trembling arrived with the delayed urgency of a body processing threat after the threat had passed.
Isaac pressed his palms together. Squeezed until the trembling stopped. Stood. Walked to the door.
In the hallway, the hospital continued its business — patients wheeled to imaging, staff moving between departments, the institutional machinery grinding through its schedule without reference to the investigation operating within its walls. Isaac merged with the flow, another white coat in the corridor, another face in the crowd.
His phone buzzed. House: How was the interview?
Isaac typed: Standard. He asked about your prescribing. I didn't volunteer anything.
House: And the non-standard part?
Isaac stared at the screen. House knew. Of course House knew — Tritter's pivot from the Vicodin investigation to Isaac's background had been predictable to anyone who understood how investigators worked, and House understood investigators better than most.
He asked about my records, Isaac typed. Called them thin.
House: They are thin. I noticed that on day one. A pause. Then: Be careful. Tritter isn't Vogler. Vogler wanted control. Tritter wants blood.
Isaac pocketed the phone and headed for the elevator, and the trembling had stopped by the time the doors opened on the fourth floor.
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