Trader Faulkner

Trader Faulkner, an associate professor of philosophy of science at CSU, is Jennifer Rockwell’s partner of roughly seven or eight years and a central figure in the investigation of her death. He enters the story as both an intimate companion of the woman Mike Hoolihan had known since childhood and a suspect whom Colonel Tom quickly names; later disclosures complicate that suspicion without conclusively settling what happened between the couple or what led to Jennifer’s death.

Identity and Background

Trader is presented as a fellow academic and intellectual match for Jennifer, an astrophysicist working at Mount Lee. Mike describes the two as brilliant and striking, and recalls that Jennifer had dated around at CSU before living with Trader for years. That contrast places their relationship after a period in which she had moved among other potential partners: Trader is not a brief encounter but the long-standing companion around whom the account of her adult personal life is organized.

The professional description also sharpens the initial suspicion. In the homicide unit’s familiar understanding of violence, a staged suicide might be imagined as the work of an impulsive or inexperienced killer. The possibility that Trader, an academic, could have killed Jennifer and disguised it as suicide strikes Mike as an implausible cliché. His disbelief is not proof of Trader’s innocence, but it reveals how quickly occupational identity becomes part of the investigators’ reasoning about what kind of person could commit a crime.

Relationship with Jennifer

Jennifer and Trader had been together for seven or eight years and were living together. Mike’s account characterizes Trader as an unusually kind lover, but immediately questions what such a description can establish about a relationship. The novel offers no sustained, independently verified account from Trader of their private life. Instead, their intimacy is reconstructed through brief statements, other people’s suspicions, and Mike’s later attempt to explain Jennifer’s state of mind to her father.

That limitation matters. Jennifer’s academic gifts and apparent success do not, in Mike’s view, explain her death; he reflects that her work may have widened the perceived distance between her and people with very different lives, while resisting any simple claim that this intellectual gap supplies a cause. Likewise, the label of a kind partner cannot settle whether a relationship was secure or troubled. The text holds those facts and uncertainties together rather than treating Jennifer’s accomplishments or Trader’s reported kindness as a complete account of her private experience.

Suspicion and the Investigation

When Mike discusses the scene with Colonel Tom, he allows that the death could have been an accident, referring to a rag and a .303 rifle as elements that might support that possibility. Colonel Tom reacts sharply and identifies Trader as the person responsible. His accusation arrives before the narrative supplies substantiation for it: it expresses a father’s certainty in the face of a disturbing death, not an established finding by the investigation.

Trader later appears at the homicide offices at 8:20, carrying a briefcase and the pink security card issued at the front desk. He comes up to the fourteenth floor, where Mike is waiting. Their exchange is brief: Trader recognizes Mike and greets him as an old acquaintance; Mike answers that he is late. The meeting places the long-term partner within the formal procedures of the inquiry, but this arrival itself establishes neither guilt nor innocence. The contrast between their familiarity and the institutional setting makes his position especially charged: he is someone known to Mike, yet also someone under scrutiny after Colonel Tom’s accusation.

The Letter and Jennifer’s Final Words

In a recorded conversation, Trader recounts that Jennifer sent him a note through the U.S. mail. He says he returned to his office a week later and found it in his tray. He then says he is going to take a walk around the block, as she had done on the Saturday morning when she posted it. The account gives the note a specific route and delay, but does not disclose its contents. It therefore establishes that Jennifer communicated with him by mail without allowing the reader to treat the note as a full explanation of her intentions or their relationship.

After the word lithium is raised, Mike reflects that the people around Jennifer accepted it, including Trader, because he believed her dying words carried a special weight as testimony. The episode shows how trust persists in the aftermath: Trader’s belief is tied not to an independently demonstrated account of the substance, but to the authority he gives Jennifer’s final statement. Mike includes himself among those who accepted it, while signaling that this belief was bound up with the need to make her death intelligible. Trader’s response is thus presented as an act of faith in her words, not as a settled medical or investigative conclusion.

Later Account and Narrative Limits

Near the end, Mike speaks to Colonel Tom by telephone because he knows he cannot deliver the explanation face to face without being recognized as untruthful. He tells Tom that Jennifer had spent a year doubting her own mind, had begun losing her grip at work, and had talked about death. He also says her relationship with Trader was coming apart because she was considering another man, whom she had met in a bar; he instructs Tom not to tell Trader. These claims offer Tom a pattern that could make Jennifer’s death seem explicable, but they are delivered within a conversation Mike himself frames as a lie. They cannot be used as straightforward confirmation of a real affair or as a verified account of the couple’s final months.

Mike’s closing impulse is to call Trader and say goodbye, but the phone rings again as Mike heads toward Battery and its bars. The text records the wish, not a completed farewell. Trader remains at the far end of an unresolved relationship: he trusted Jennifer’s last words, was suspected by her father, and received a mailed note whose contents remain unknown. The gaps are part of his narrative significance. He is neither cleared by the account of kindness nor convicted by Colonel Tom’s certainty; the novel preserves the distinction between love, suspicion, and proof.