How Did Red John Know Jane's Suspect List?

Red John made Lorelei read Jane's list of seven suspects back to him name for name off a list that existed nowhere except inside Jane's own head. And the show never really explained how. So today I'm going to do exactly that. This is one of the rarest mysteries that Jane never managed to solve and it kept all of us fans confused. Jane has been awake in that attic for weeks. He's burned every scrap of research he owns in a barrel outside and he's finally cut a list of over 2,000 names down to seven. Only he knows those names. When Teresa asks him in the car, he tells her flat out that he doesn't think it's a good idea for her to know. Then Miriam Gottlieb, who turns out to have been working for Red John the whole time, hands him an envelope with a DVD in it. He plays it and there's Lorelei already dead by the time he's watching reading out a letter from Red John. And she says all seven names, literally every one of them, off a list that existed nowhere in the world except inside Patrick Jane's head. Bruno Heller said in an interview around that finale that the move was meant to feel almost magical. And that's the right word for how it plays. Jane himself admits that he still has idea how it happened, which means we've been sitting with the exact same question he was. So let's actually solve it because there are only a handful of ways this could have worked and one of them is far more realistic than the rest. To understand how Red John pulled it off, you have to understand how Jane got there first because the two paths are more connected than people realize. It starts in Red Sails in the sunset in that motel where Lorelei has just found out Jane set her up. She's furious. She's beating him and in the middle of telling him how alike he and Red John really are, she says the line that changes the entire series. She wonders why the two of them didn't become lifelong friends the moment they shook hands. She didn't mean to hand him anything because she was insulting him. But Jane hears it and immediately understands that he has met Red John face to face and that he has almost certainly touched the man's hand. By the end of that episode, he's telling Teresa that Red John is someone he knows. From there, he does the most Patrick Jane thing imaginable, which is sit down and reconstruct a decade of handshakes from memory alone. By the red barn, he has 2,164 names on paper, and he grinds that down to 408 using alibis,