Derek Simmons’s arrest

Derek Simmons’s arrest turns the investigation’s final confrontation into a public resolution, while also exposing how much of the story had been shaped by Richard Flynn’s imagination. Peter Katz leaves the encounter with a covert recording device; minutes later, police sirens sound. The arrest’s consequences extend beyond the case, making Simmons’s story a media event and changing the meaning of Flynn’s manuscript.

The Encounter and the Arrest

After speaking with Derek, Peter walks away and turns a corner to get out of his sight. He realizes Derek has not noticed the recording device concealed in a special pencil in Peter’s jacket pocket. A couple of minutes later, as Peter pulls away from Witherspoon Street, he hears police sirens. The sequence places the arrest in the immediate wake of the encounter, though the account does not specify where officers take Derek or what evidence leads to the arrest.

Questions Left in Its Wake

As he drives, Peter recalls a claim in a document about Derek: that Derek’s father had moved to another state years earlier and disappeared. He wonders whether anyone checked that story at the time. He also considers Derek’s claim that Joseph Wieder hypnotized him, and asks himself whether Wieder understood what his patient was capable of. Peter cannot settle whether Wieder gave Derek the keys to his house because he believed the amnesia would be permanent, leaving Derek like a bomb without a detonator. The sirens give the arrest a concrete sound, but do not answer Peter’s lingering questions about what Wieder knew or why he trusted Derek.

Public Fallout and the Case’s Reversal

The arrest’s impact reaches well beyond the investigation: Derek’s story makes enough of a splash for its ripples to reach a small town in Alabama. John Keller tells Peter that Roy Freeman, the retired detective, has become a media star after solving a twenty-eight-year-old murder mystery. With reporters pursuing him, Roy has temporarily moved to his ex-wife’s house in Seattle. Against this public resolution, Flynn’s manuscript can no longer function as the true-crime account Peter had expected. The latest events have overturned Flynn’s theory and shown that his authorial imagination embellished real events; the arrest closes one mystery while changing the status of the story that had tried to explain it.