The Theory of Death

by Faye Kellerman

  “How can you tell emotions over the phone?”

  “You get a feeling for what’s righteous after doing it all these years. I can still be fooled, though. My first impressions aren’t always spot-on.”

  They walked in silence. Then McAdams said, “Are you referring to your first impression of moi?”

  “God forbid!” Decker stifled a smile and put his arm around the kid. “What in the world gives you that idea?”

  “I can do without the sarcasm, Old Man.”

  “What sarcasm?”

  “And your children still speak to you?”

  “Every single one of them. And as they get older, I’ve gained stature and IQ points. Someday even your father won’t seem so bad.”

  “I don’t dislike my father.” A pause. “I don’t actively like him, but no one does.”

  “You may like him more when you’re a dad.”

  “Doubt it. God, me a dad. Pity my poor children. They don’t stand a chance.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. You may rise to the occasion.”

  McAdams laughed to himself. “For an old guy, you’re okay, Lieutenant.”

  Decker was taken aback. “High praise.”

  “As high as I’m capable of giving.”

  CHAPTER 11

  ENTERING KNEED loft—four stories of unadorned brownstone punctured with prison-size windows—Decker checked the directory. Engineering and applied sciences occupied the bottom floor, computer science held the second tier, physics and chemistry shared the third floor, and applied and theoretical mathematics reigned supreme on the fourth.

  The interior of the college was pure function—tiled floors, low acoustical ceilings, long hallways, small classrooms with a whiteboard and stark, wooden desks along with a stale musty smell of too much radiator heat and too little fresh air. Decker and McAdams did a couple of two-steps, dodging speed-walking students with their eyes on the floor. They took the elevator to the fourth floor, a replica of the ground floor they had just traversed.

  A woman with blond hair, dressed in workout clothes, was locking up Katrina Belfort’s office. She had an athletic build of developed arms and developed calves.

  “Dr. Belfort?” Decker asked.

  “Yes?” When she stood up straight, she appeared to be around five eight. Hazel eyes, high cheekbones, and a big chin. A pretty woman bordering on handsome. “Oh . . . you’re the detective?”

  “I am. Peter Decker of Greenbury police. This is my partner, Detective Tyler McAdams.”

  “Right.” She checked her watch. “I totally forgot. It’s been a crazy day.” She checked her watch again. “Uh . . . hold on.” She unlocked the door and ushered the men inside. “I can’t spare a lot of time right now. Things are just too hectic.”

  “With Eli’s death?”

  “Of course with Eli’s death! That gave everyone a shock and then some.”

  “You didn’t see it coming?”

  “Of course not. If anything, he seemed more . . . relaxed. Probably because his thesis was going great and he was into things that excited him.”

  “What kind of things?” McAdams asked.

  “Math things, I would imagine.” She paused. “Eli was reserved . . . cautious with what he talked about. I didn’t have as much to do with him in his upper-division studies as I did when he was a freshman.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well . . .” She looked at her watch. “Oh hell, here goes nothing. Eli was a prize student. He was brilliant. Any faculty member here would have killed to work with him because he had such great promise. But to the victor goes the spoils. It was assumed from the start that he’d work under Dr. Rosser even though his interests coincided more with me than with him. But since I’m low woman on the totem pole and likely to remain that way, I could only stand by and watch.”

  She shook her head angrily.

  “It was clear to all of us that Eli was unhappy working with Rosser. He even hinted about switching to me. Of course, that sent Theo into a rage. I backed down. I not only backed down, I took myself off Eli’s thesis committee.” She gave a dismissive wave. “I’m not saying Theo is to blame. But he certainly was insensitive to Eli’s needs.”

  “When did this drama happen?”

  “It wasn’t drama on my part. Theo makes drama out of everything. It happened about a year ago. Since then, Eli seemed to adjust. Maybe he had a rapprochement with Rosser. I hope so.” Her eyes suddenly moistened. “Not that it matters now.”

  Again, she glanced at her watch.

  “I really have to go.” She swiped her cheeks with her hand. “I’m sorry. This is very difficult to talk about.”

  “One more thing,” Decker said. “I’m hearing some contradictions. Elijah was happy about how his thesis was progressing so well and Elijah was unhappy working with Dr. Rosser who was his thesis adviser.”

  “Like I said, he seemed to adjust to reality. Look, Eli’s emotional swings were in millimeters not miles. He had an almost flat personality, which isn’t unusual for students here. He was more interested in math than anything else, and if the math was going well, he was fine.” She opened the door. “Anything else?”

  “Maybe we can talk another time when you’re not so rushed.”

  “Good luck with that. I’m always in a rush.” She stepped out in the hallway and waited for them to follow. Then she locked her door and exhaled. “Terrible, terrible, terrible what happened. He will be missed.”

  “Did he ever talk about his parents to you?” Decker asked.

  “I didn’t even know parents were in the picture. For all I knew of his personal life, Eli could have been an orphan.”

  THE OFFICE OF Professor Theo Rosser, Ph.D., was spare and clean with a small window that looked over a mud-filled expanse that turned into lawn in the springtime. There was a small sitting area with two wooden chairs, a large uncluttered desk, and a leather desk chair. The walls were filled with diplomas, awards, and accolades. The door was wide open but the professor was nowhere in sight.

  “What now?”

  Decker checked his watch. “He said three-thirty.”

  “Academic Standard Time.” McAdams was checking out his credentials. “He got his Ph.D. from UCLA. The two of you can bond over the Pacific Ocean.”

  “What year?”

  “Nineteen-eighty-five.”

  “Thirty years in academics.”

  “It’s clear that Belfort hates him, but he must have something going for him other than his ability to pick brilliant students,” McAdams told him. “Look at all these awards.”

  “Are they prestigious awards?”

  “No idea. But I don’t think he’d put them on his walls unless they were coveted.” The clock on the wall said three forty-five. McAdams said, “How much longer should we wait?”

  “I’m not in a hurry. Give it another fifteen minutes.”

  “What about Eli’s other adviser?”

  “Aldo Ferraga. We didn’t connect, but I did leave a message. We’ll see if he calls back.”

  With a gust of energy, a balding, thin man blew into the office. He placed his briefcase down on the desk. “So sorry I’m late.” He took off his coat, hanging it on a coatrack. “Feel free to take off your jackets and sit down. It’s just been one of those days.” He let out a sigh. “That’s to be expected after such a terrible tragedy.”

  He sat down in his leather desk chair and threw his head back. “What a terrible waste.” He looked up. “I’m Theo Rosser. Chances are you could guess that without being a detective.”

  “I’m Detective Peter Decker, Greenbury police. This is Detective Tyler McAdams.” Hands were shaken all around. Rosser appeared to be in his mid to late fifties. His eyes were milky, his thinning hair was gray, and he had a stoop-shouldered doughy build. “Thanks for agreeing to see us on such short notice.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Rosser shook his head and sat up. “Was it suicide? That’s what everyone is saying.”

  “The cor
oner hasn’t made a definite determination.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I leave those things to the experts,” Decker said. “Did you know Eli well?”

  “I was his primary adviser. As such, our conversations usually revolved around his research.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “His brilliance is . . . was indisputable. As far as what I thought about him . . . quiet, serious, dependable, an original thinker.”

  “How’d he get along with others?”

  “Math isn’t a social subject, Detective.”

  “Did he have friends?”

  “I wouldn’t know much about his life outside of his work. He didn’t say and I didn’t pry. He could communicate. His presentations, though complex, were well thought out. He was helpful to other students in the lab.”

  That jibed with what Mallon Euler had told them. Decker said, “You don’t have departmental social functions?”

  “Of course we do.” Rosser thought a moment. “He was at our Christmas party about a month ago.” A pause. “That was unusual.”

  “He usually didn’t participate?”

  “Not usually. But he was there, and after a few beers, he was actually quite amicable. He seemed in a very good mood. Things were going well with him in school. That’s why this suicide . . . we were all in shock when we heard about it yesterday. It doesn’t . . . I don’t know. Maybe he had a hidden life that I didn’t know about.”

  “Did he bring anyone to the party?”

  “It wasn’t really a party . . . just something the faculty does to make our upper division students comfortable.”

  “Did he bring anyone with him, Professor Rosser?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” A pause. “He spent some time talking to Mallon Euler. She’s also in the department . . . very bright. Not like Eli, but quite gifted.” Another pause. “He looked like he was trying to calm her down. Mallon can be . . . excitable. I do know that he was helping her out with her thesis. He had patience with her, I’ll say that much. Perhaps they were an item and I was unaware.”

  “It’s a small department for you to be unaware of who’s dating whom.”

  “Social acuity isn’t my forte, Detective.”

  McAdams said, “Was Eli helping out anyone else besides Mallon Euler?”

  “Eli helped anyone who’d ask for help. He was too nice, if you ask me. I was always afraid that people would take advantage of him.”

  “In what way?”

  “He would spend too much time in helping others and not enough on his own work. But I never said anything because with his own assignment, he was always on time or early. Things came easy to him.”

  “What was Eli working on?” Decker asked.

  “It involves a lot of complicated mathematics. Unless you’re in the field, you won’t have any idea what I’m talking about.”

  McAdams said, “A friend of his told us it has to do with Fourier analysis and eigenvalues.”

  Rosser furrowed his brow. “Which friend?”

  McAdams looked up his notes. “Damodar Batra.” When Rosser waved him off, Tyler said, “Eli wasn’t researching eigenvalues?”

  “Only as a starting point. Do you have any idea what Fourier analysis is or what an eigenvalue means?”

  “It has to do with a relationship between matrices and vectors,” McAdams said.

  Decker said, “The mathematics was beyond me, but what I took out of it was a paring down of complex things into simpler parts. What was interesting to me as a detective was the practical applications: the eigenface and eigenvoice recognition. You take a bunch of real faces, assign a value percentage to each part of the faces—like sixty-three percent of this nose, and thirty-seven percent of that nose, and then put them together to make a totally new face. It’s basically a computerized identity kit except you have a lot more features to draw upon. Those percentages of the features were called eigenvalues.”

  “It’s interesting what sticks in people’s minds,” Rosser said. “Of course, that’s what you’d be interested in.”

  “Could you get a little more specific on Eli’s research in layman terms?”

  “First of all, it’s hard to explain in layman terms. You need the mathematics. Secondly, his research is still ongoing.”

  “Meaning there are still original publications to be had from what Eli was doing.”

  “He was part of a team, Detective. We share the work, we share the credit. Any paper he might have produced would have had multiple authorships. His theories were not developed in a vacuum. And what does his research have to do with his terrible, untimely death?”

  “I don’t know if it has anything to do with it,” Decker said. “I suppose you heard that we found hidden papers—a stack of them actually—stuffed behind Eli’s desk in his dorm room.”

  “I have heard. I’d like to take a look at those papers. I need to make sure he wasn’t compromising anyone else’s research.”

  “I have a lot of people who are interested in looking over those papers for the same reason.”

  “As his adviser, I would know right away what he was working on. I just want to make sure he wasn’t poaching someone else’s thesis.”

  “That’s an odd thing to say,” McAdams told him. “Why on earth would you think that Elijah—who was your most brilliant student—would poach someone else’s thesis?”

  “I don’t think that. I just want to make sure.” Rosser’s face tightened. “There’s an easy way to solve this problem. Just let me see the papers.”

  Decker said, “I appreciate your need to keep your research within the confines of your lab, but you also need to realize if those papers are important to his death, I have to keep them under lock and key as evidence. Is it possible for you to give me something that Eli already made public so I can compare it to what we found behind the desk?”

  “How could you tell—as a layman—if it was similar or not?”

  “I couldn’t, but we know people who could.”

  “Just give my research away?” Rosser shook his head. “No thank you.”

  “That’s why I said something previously made public.”

  “It was only made public within the lab. It certainly wouldn’t stop poachers from stealing what might be in those hidden papers.”

  “Professor, we’re taking the papers to someone at Harvard. That’s a given.”

  Rosser turned red. “To whom might I ask?”

  “Someone who doesn’t need anyone else’s research for tenure,” McAdams said.

  “We’ve used him before,” Decker told him. “He’s not about to poach your research. If for no other reason, he’d now be under scrutiny.”

  “Cold comfort.”

  “Let me promise you this,” Decker said. “If you supply us with some papers of Eli’s research and the hidden papers turn out to be relevant to your research, I’ll make sure you get them before anyone else. What do you say?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Of course you have a choice. You can say no. But the best choice you have is to cooperate.”

  Rosser sighed and sat back in his chair. “I probably sound like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.”

  McAdams said, “You’re being protective of your work. We understand academia.”

  “I have tenure,” Rosser said. “It’s not for my personal gain. But not everyone in my lab is as lucky. I have students who are applying to very prestigious graduate programs. I have master-level students who are using my data to try to further their careers at other universities, and I have assistant professors here who are trying to get tenure. If privileged data were to get out, it would screw up people other than me.”

  “I appreciate where you’re coming from,” Decker said, “but that isn’t our intention. The tragedy just happened a day ago and we don’t quite know what is or isn’t relevant.”

  A long pause. “Let me sleep on it. Let me think about what I can give you that
would do the least amount of damage.” Rosser sighed. “Anything else? I’m completely jammed up today. Eli’s death has thrown a monkey wrench into everyone’s schedules.”

  “How specifically are you dealing with Eli’s death?”

  “We’ve formed several ad hoc committees to meet with students. I’ve asked for a counselor to come down. Math people aren’t noted for emotional exuberance but that doesn’t mean that the kids aren’t affected. It’s a mess right now. So if we’re done . . .”

  “I do have another question, Dr. Rosser. Did Elijah have a paid job doing work for the math department?”

  Rosser furrowed his brow. “He worked as a TA in several lower-division classes as part of his tuition. He was here on a free ride, you know.”

  “I do know. Did he work in the department for spare change? Well, a little more than spare change.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Eli was sending home around twelve hundred a month to his family. He said he got it by working a job for the math department. Maybe he kept a little for pocket money. So if you assume that, maybe he was making even more.”

  “Twelve hundred a month?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have no idea where it came from. Maybe someone else in the department hired him on as a research assistant.” A pause. “Strange that he wouldn’t tell me, but as I said, we kept our conversations on his thesis. I suppose you can check with the bursar’s office.”

  “Thanks, I’ll do that.”

  Rosser seemed troubled. “I don’t mind his working for someone else other than me. But he should have said something. Do you know who he might have been working with?”

  “No idea whatsoever.”

  “Well, if it was someone in my department, I’d like to know about it. I don’t like people working with my students behind my back.”

  “I understand.”

  “So you’ll tell me if you find out anything?”

  “Let me find something of significance first. Right now I’m just trying to piece together who Elijah Wolf was.”