The Fractal Murders Part 2

"What's up?"

"Just wondered how you were doing."

"Pretty d.a.m.n good," I said. I've suffered from mild depression since the death of an old girlfriend in a car accident years ago, but little brother still calls nearly every day to make sure I haven't killed myself.

"I tried calling earlier."

"I was meeting a new client."

"Long meeting?"

"I treated myself to dinner and a movie."

"Good, you need to be kind to yourself."

"That's what the self-help books say."

"I never read 'em. I thought I was being original."

"I don't know why they call them the dollar movies," I said. "The ticket cost a buck seventy-five, and I spent another six on popcorn and a drink."

"They hose you on refreshments."

"Yeah, and they won't even let you bring in your own stuff. Probably an ant.i.trust suit in there somewhere." I took the hankie from my pocket and blew my nose.

"You got a cold?"

"Sinus infection."

"Gonna see a doctor?"

"They always say it's just allergies."

"That's what they're taught to say when they don't know what's wrong."

"I've never been allergic to anything in my life," I said.

"Me either," he said. "Real men don't get allergies." We laughed at our own caricatures of masculinity. "So," he said when the laughter had ceased, "tell me about your new client."

"She's a math professor with a preference for the Southwestern motif."

"Divorce case?"

"No, a fractal case."

"Is this where I'm supposed to ask what a fractal is?"

"Yup."

"What's a fractal?"

I explained fractals as best I could and outlined the facts my client had presented. "And," I added, "guess who one of the agents was?"

"You're s.h.i.+ttin' me?"

"Nope."

"Be nice to prove him wrong." Troy had never met Polk, but he knew the story.

"Be nice to kill him," I said, "but I may have to settle for a small moral victory."

He allowed a laugh but said, "One manslaughter trial is enough." A reference to a legal problem I'd had some years back.

"It was a joke," I said.

"Not funny," he said. I rolled my eyes. "So, you think there's anything to this fractal thing?"

"It's worth checking out."

"Yeah."

"Besides, she gave me enough money to live on for a month and it beats getting a real job."

"Amen."

"Amen," I repeated. There was a brief pause.

"You coming down here tomorrow?"

"How about three o'clock? I'll work out, then chow down with you and the gang." Troy and Trudi have two kids, Andrew, age thirteen, and Chelsea, age seven.

"It's a deal," he said.

"And bring my Glock with you." I own one firearm-a nine-millimeter Glock 17-and I rarely carry it. There had been a string of burglaries in Troy's neighborhood, so I'd loaned the pistol to him a few months back. The burglars, two ex-cons with a taste for heroin, had since been apprehended.

"You really think these deaths are related?"

"She thinks they are," I said. "If she's right, we're dealing with a highly motivated individual. No use taking chances."

"I'll bring it."

"War fractals," I said.

"Out," he said. It was a sign-off routine we'd picked up from Jim Rome's sports radio show.

I hung up, opened the back door, and yelled, "Ollie ollie oxenfree," whatever that means. Like two Cruise missiles, they flew straight to the door, then positioned themselves at my feet and competed for affection. Tails wagging, they followed me in.

"How are my two favorite boys in all the world?" I asked as I knelt to let them nuzzle me. "Daddy made two thousand bucks today, so he bought you fellas some treats." I handed a foot-long compressed rawhide bone to Buck and a smaller version to Wheat. Buck trotted across the room with his and staked a claim on the couch. Wheat took cover beneath the kitchen table, where it would be difficult for Buck to get at him.

I undressed and clicked on CNN. Wearing plaid boxers and a white T-s.h.i.+rt, I began my stretching routine as an auburn-haired beauty summarized the day's events. A terrorist bomb in the Middle East, Republicans and Democrats blaming each other for the nation's ills, and an a.s.sortment of murders, kidnappings, floods, and droughts. Who wouldn't have a little depression? I turned off the TV, leaned back in my recliner, and picked up Heidegger's Being and Time.

When I left the practice of law two years ago, I purchased a home in the mountain town of Nederland and began a new life. As part of that I promised myself I'd spend time each day studying philosophy or eastern religions. Those subjects had captivated me in college, and my hope was that immersing myself in them once more might give me some insight into how to deal with my existential pain. So far it hasn't, but at least I'm well read.

The problem is that I am one of those unlucky souls condemned to forever ponder life's unanswerable questions. I don't know whether this is the cause of my depression or the result of it. Either way, traditional religion never worked for me. I've always had a bit of an authority problem, so I have trouble with the concept of G.o.d. I go through life with the nagging suspicion that it's all meaningless, but I read philosophy hoping to prove myself wrong.

I began my self-study program by reading the pre-Socratics and had since worked my way well into the twentieth century. Consequently, I now found myself trying to understand one of the most incomprehensible philosophers of all time. Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, has been variously cla.s.sified as a phenomenologist, an existentialist, and a mystic. For Heidegger, the fundamental mystery of life was that something, rather than nothing, exists. He spent most of his adult life attempting to develop a philosophy based on this rather obvious fact. Of course, I had spent most of my adult life as a lawyer billing people for my services in six-minute increments, so who was I to judge?

As often happens when I read philosophy at night, I soon found myself half asleep and skimming the same paragraph again and again. Something about "Dasein"-Heidegger's term for man, or being. I put the book down. "C'mon, boys," I said to the dogs, "time to hit the hay."

They followed me to the bedroom and we began our nightly ritual. Buck jumped on the bed ahead of me, stood on his hind legs, placed his grapefruit-size paws on my shoulders, and gave me a hug. That done, I slipped under the covers so Wheat could begin my face licking. After a suitable interval I turned out the light, then pulled the sheet over my head to signal Wheat the cleaning process was complete. Buck flopped down on my left, Wheat turned around three times and burrowed in on my right. Some people think I'm nuts when it comes to my dogs, but they're all I've got.

"Mornin', Pepper," Wanda said.

"Mornin', Wanda." She took my Foghorn Leghorn mug from the rack on the back wall and handed it to me. Her blond-gray hair was in a bun, and her white ap.r.o.n was covered with a.s.sorted stains. She'd been baking for hours and she looked it. It was seven-thirty on a Tuesday morning and the place was crowded.

"Haven't seen you in a while," she said. "You get tired of gas station coffee?"

"Decided to treat myself today," I said. Ever the diplomat.

"Something to eat? I've got some cinnamon rolls just out of the oven." They smelled wonderful, but I'm insulin resistant and have to limit my carbohydrates or I gain weight.

"Tempting," I said, "but not today." I poured myself some coffee, mixed in a little cream, and placed a faded dollar bill on the gla.s.s counter by the register. I found a booth in the back, read the News, and listened to the morning gossip. The Post might be a better paper, but it's divided into folding sections so large only an octopus with bifocals could comfortably read it.

The gossip was more entertaining than the paper in any event. Wanda's Kitchen is a gathering place for the telecommuting yuppies, aging hippies, and transient bikers who populate this mountain town of fifteen hundred. This morning's conversation centered on a controversial proposal to eliminate the town marshal's office and contract with the county for law enforcement services. The consensus was that this was a bad idea that would ultimately lead to enforcement of such things as building codes, marijuana laws, and the three-dog limit. I agreed with the consensus.

I poured some more coffee and returned to my booth only to find Wanda's black Lab, Zeke, sitting beneath the table. The Boulder County Health Department doesn't make it up here very often. I took a moment to rub Zeke's belly, then began reviewing the news clippings and biographical blurbs Jayne Smyers had provided.

The first victim, Paul Fontaine, had been a fifty-five-year-old professor of mathematics at Whitman College, in Walla Walla, Was.h.i.+ngton. He'd been shot once in the back of the head during an apparent robbery at his home last September. A Walla Walla native, Fontaine earned a doctorate at twenty-three and had taught at some of the best schools in the country. Michigan, Tufts, Harvard. As my client had mentioned, he'd auth.o.r.ed a widely used textbook on fractal geometry.

He was the oldest of three children and the only son; his parents owned an immense wheat farm just east of Walla Walla. His father had suffered a minor stroke in 1977, and he'd taken the Whitman position at that time so he could help oversee the wheat operation. Students described him as an easygoing man with a pa.s.sion for teaching. An avid runner, fly fisherman, and collector of rare American coins. The photo showed a handsome fellow, sharp features and distinguished silver hair. He had never married and had been living alone at the time of his death. I hoped the same would not someday be said of me.

Victim number two, Carolyn Chang, had been an a.s.sociate professor of mathematics at the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln. A farmer had found her frozen body somewhere north of Manhattan, Kansas, in late December. She'd been raped and repeatedly stabbed. An only child, Carolyn had been born and raised in Honolulu, where her father was a successful building contractor. She'd done her undergraduate work at Harvard and earned her Ph.D. at Berkeley. Though she'd been teaching in Lincoln only five years, she'd been named acting dean of students during one of them. Colleagues and students alike described her as hardworking and demanding. She was thirty-five years old at the time of her death. Like Fontaine, she had never married.

The same photograph appeared in several articles; it was a professional portrait, probably taken for a yearbook or obtained from the university's public relations department. Despite her Chinese surname and Asian features, her well-endowed front and the baby fat in her cheeks suggested at least one of her parents was of Polynesian descent. She had possessed a wonderful smile, wide and unpretentious. I considered her attractive, and I a.s.sumed many of her male colleagues and students had felt the same way. Maybe one of them decided she'd been a little too demanding.

Although her body had been found in Kansas, the location of the actual murder was not known. The lead investigator for the Lincoln Police Department, Detective Amanda Slowiaczek, told reporters Carolyn could have been killed anyplace between Lincoln and the site where her body had been found, approximately eighty miles south of there. Neither her department nor the sheriff in Kansas had any suspects.

The third victim, if you could call him that, had been a thirty-seven-year-old a.s.sociate professor of mathematics at Harvard. Donald Underwood had hanged himself in his upscale Boston town house on Valentine's Day. He and his wife had been separated ten months, but friends and coworkers had noticed nothing unusual in his behavior in the weeks prior to his death. There was no mention of a suicide note. Because the authorities had treated his death as a suicide rather than a murder, the local papers had not seen fit to devote more than a few paragraphs to the story. All I knew was that he was survived by his wife and two sons.

Three victims, three different states, and three different causes of death. That all added up to three unrelated cases, but all three victims had been mathematicians. And not just run-of-the-mill mathematicians, but experts in fractal geometry. The feds had closed the case, but I had a tough time chalking it up to coincidence.

Another thing I had a tough time with was the paper my client had written. It was ent.i.tled "Fractal Dimension: Some Thoughts on Alternatives to Hausdorff-Besicovitch." She lost me in the second paragraph, and after that it might as well have been written using an alphabet created by an ancient civilization from another planet in a solar system that had long since imploded. After twenty minutes of struggling with it, all I knew was that no matter how you measured it, the coastline of Norway was still more jagged than that of Great Britain.

I gathered my papers, gave Zeke one last pat on the head, and walked home. It was approaching ten-thirty, so I donned my running gear and jogged to the post office with Wheat. I live on the outskirts of Nederland-a small town fifteen miles west of Boulder. The postal service won't deliver mail if you live more than two miles from town, so I rent a box and check it six days a week.

There was the usual a.s.sortment of junk mail, including yet another letter from the credit G.o.ds informing me I'd been preapproved for some kind of super t.i.tanium card because of my "accomplishments in life." Once they know you're a lawyer, it never stops coming. I tore each item in half, dumped the remains into the metal U.S. government trash can, and started home. It was a good day to run, about seventy degrees and sunny. Little Wheat detoured now and then to check out a new smell or leave his mark, then raced to catch up with me. His paws didn't seem to bother him, but they sometimes do and I have to walk. Or carry him.

I never take Buck to the post office. Buck is a floppy-eared cross between a Rhodesian Ridgeback and a Great Dane. He was just a puppy when I found him wandering the streets of Denver four years ago. He wasn't wearing any tags and looked emaciated. I figured anyone stupid enough to let a dog roam the streets without tags didn't deserve a pet, so I kept him. Today he weighs 130 and he's extremely protective, so I have to keep him on a leash when I'm in town. Trying to jog while you're tethered to Buck is a great way to strengthen your lats, but doesn't make for a very enjoyable run.

Wheat, on the other hand, is a purebred schipperkee. He's black, weighs about twenty pounds, and has pointy ears. The schipperkee originated in Belgium and was known as a boatsman's dog. We don't boat much, but the little dog is a joy to run with when his paws aren't hurting. I adopted him two years ago, just before moving to Nederland. I had learned of his plight from a newspaper article. His jerk owner had abused little "Blackie" to the point where the jerk's own roommates had called the police. The jerk had kicked the puppy so often that he had suffered permanent nerve damage in his front paws. Surgery helped some, but the dog needed a loving home. One look at the photo convinced me I had to have him. I drove to the shelter, paid the adoption fee, and took the curious animal home. The jerk was charged with cruelty to animals, but made bail and skipped town.

I finished my run, clicked on CNN, and made a peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwich for lunch. Despite the lack of breakfast, I felt great. They say exercise is the best thing for depression, and in my case that is definitely true, but I add 150 milligrams of Imipramine every night just for insurance. I took one of my patented ninety-second showers, dressed, then sat at my desk to consider the case.

I wanted to see the police files on the three victims. This would have been difficult even if they had all died in Boulder, but the three incidents had taken place in locations where I had no contacts. Unlike many private eyes, I had never been a cop, so I wasn't a member of the law enforcement fraternity. I had been a federal prosecutor, but even that was unlikely to get me past the disdain most police officers feel for lawyers. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I dialed information for Walla Walla only to learn the process had been automated so that you no longer spoke with a human being. A female cybervoice recited the number and offered to connect me for an additional seventy-five cents. I said, "In your dreams, sweetcakes," then hung up and dialed it myself. The woman answering for the Walla Walla Police Department informed me that Lieutenant d.i.c.k Gilbert was handling the Fontaine case. He wasn't in, so I left my name, number, and a request that he call me.

I phoned the Lincoln Police Department and asked for Detective Slowiaczek, the woman quoted in the news clippings. I was transferred three times, but finally got her. "Slowiaczek," was all she said. I identified myself and explained the reason for my call.

"Who's your client?" she demanded. She sounded like she was in her thirties. Her abrupt tone suggested my call was about as welcome as one from a sales rep asking her to switch long-distance companies.

"My client," I said, "is a concerned citizen who finds it hard to believe these deaths were unrelated." I heard some noise in the background.

"Tell that a.s.shole I'll be with him in a minute."

"What?"

"I wasn't talking to you," she snapped.

"You sound busy," I said. "All I'm asking is a chance to see what you've got."

"Out of the question," she said.

"I understand it's an open investigation," I said. "If you don't want copies of doc.u.ments floating around, how about I fly to Lincoln and review them in your presence."

"I'm sure that would be a real treat for me," she said, "but it's not going to happen." Losing her patience.

"Look," I said, "I was a federal prosecutor for seven years. I know what I'm doing. I need to gather as much information as possible about these deaths."

"Uh-huh," she said, not impressed.

"Don't you think it's strange," I persisted, "that all three of these people were experts in fractal geometry?" It was one question too many.

"In the first place," she shot back, "I see strange every day of my life. In the second place, you're asking me to violate department policy. And in the third place, the FBI already investigated that and I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'm going to go over it again with some limp-d.i.c.k lawyer turned private eye." I got the impression she didn't like men. I thanked her for her time and hung up before I became a suspect.

The detective who had worked the Underwood suicide was Tom O'Hara. He had the Boston accent and sounded like he was nearing retirement. I envisioned a big, hard-drinking Irish cop with silver hair, a ruddy red face, and a bulbous nose. Probably a flask of whiskey in his desk and a Red Sox pennant on the wall behind him.

"Yeah," he said, "the feds went over my reports. Took about ten minutes."

"That long?"

"It wasn't a Boston case. They were doing legwork for some other office."

"They tell you all three of these people were experts in fractal geometry?"

"Yeah, they told me all that, but you don't need to be d.i.c.k Tracy to see this guy offed himself."

"Any way it could've been staged?"