The Theory of Death

by Faye Kellerman

  “Stop being peeved,” Decker said. “And for your information, we’ll be asking a lot more questions. That’s what you do in a murder investigation.”

  Mallon’s eyes grew wide. “She was murdered?”

  Decker sidestepped her question. “I’ve got a forensics team going through her place, bit by bit by bit. Plus I have her cell phone and computer. Most of her calls and texts were to students, colleagues, and her brother: times and dates of meetings and things like that. So when you tell me the relationship was professional, I have no reason to doubt you.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear, thank you very much,” Batra said.

  “Keep up the snotty attitude and I’ll really start coming down on you,” Decker said. “Until I know better, you’re all suspects. Got it?”

  The kids said nothing. Batra finally said, “Are you arresting me or something?”

  “If you’re asking if you’re free to go, the answer is yes. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. Makes you look bad.” When Batra didn’t answer, Decker said, “You know, once we break into her e-mail, we’ll probably find out a lot more about her life. So if either of you has something to share, now’s a good time.”

  Mallon was fidgety. “I’m with Batra. I don’t know much about Katrina’s outside life. We almost always talked math.”

  “What kind of math?” Rina asked.

  Mallon looked at her as if she just realized she was at the table. “Fourier analysis.”

  Rina said, “I’m no expert, but it seems like that is a wide-open field when it comes to practical applications.”

  “It has about a billion uses.”

  Decker said, “So maybe you can narrow it down a little for us? For instance, what was Dr. Belfort’s doctorate thesis in?”

  Batra lunged back into his chair and sighed. “The interplay between Fourier transforms and the stochastic oscillator.” He glanced at Mallon. “No need for the death stare. They can find out about her dissertation in a heartbeat. And if they’ve confiscated her computer, they’re eventually gonna find out what she was doing.”

  McAdams said, “And what exactly was she doing?”

  “Nothing illegal, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Mallon said. “It was just frowned upon by the department.”

  Silence. Decker said, “Okay, kids. Out with it. Let’s hear the specifics.”

  Batra said, “Katrina took on a number of outside consultant jobs with major-league hedge funds. To do things like that—on such a large scale—she had to get permission from the department. They have to check for conflict of interest and that kind of thing. I, for one, think it’s a stupid policy.”

  “Your opinion is duly noted,” McAdams said. “You’re saying her extracurricular activities could have gotten her fired.”

  “It would have gotten her in hot water with Rosser. Especially because she doesn’t have tenure.”

  “Why’d she take such a risk?”

  “Money, of course,” Mallon said. “It paid like five times her salary.”

  “So why didn’t she quit the college and become a personal consultant?” McAdams asked.

  “She was waiting for tenure,” Batra said. “That would have given her even more prestige. And the more prestige, the more money. Titles impress a lot of people.”

  Decker said, “And I take it you two were involved with her outside activities?” His question was met with silence. “It’s all going to come out. Just start from the beginning.”

  “She asked us in,” Mallon said. “It’s not like we thought of it.”

  “I wish we did,” Batra said. “She must have been making a boatload of bucks because she was paying each of us around fifteen hundred a month. And there were four of us . . . well, three now that Eli’s gone. That’s six grand a month out of her pocket.”

  “I don’t think he needs specific amounts, Damodar,” Mallon said.

  “Why don’t you let us decide what we need?” Decker now knew where Eli’s pocket money was coming from. “So tell me what did you all do for her?”

  Batra said, “She had a very practical dissertation, good theories that could be put to use by a lot of people. So she began to outsource her ideas to several hedge funds. She got a bite, then another, then another. It became too much for her. So she had us doing most of the calculations.”

  “And her dissertation was about Fourier transforms and stochastic oscillation?”

  “Oscillator,” Mallon said.

  McAdams had taken out his iPad. “A stochastic oscillator is a market-momentum indicator. It tells the direction of movement of a stock not by price or volume but by momentum because momentum usually antecedes price.”

  “Exactly,” Batra said.

  “I have no idea what that means,” Decker said.

  Mallon said, “It’s a percentage indicator that predicts whether or not a stock will go up or down by seeing how it moves in very small increments. If you get a positive momentum indicator—meaning momentum is up, you can buy in before the price actually moves. We’re talking like in nanoseconds.”

  “It’s a quant thing?” McAdams said.

  “Yeah,” Mallon said. “It’s in and out trading.”

  Rina said, “I thought ‘stochastic’ in math means random.”

  “It does,” Batra said. “But ‘stochastic’ in probability theory means a randomness through which order is found.”

  “It’s like this,” Mallon said. “You take a huge set of data . . . thousands of random facts. To make sense out of it, you begin to sort things together. Maybe eventually you see a pattern.”

  “Like flipping a coin,” Batra said. “If you flip it at any given time, you have no way of predicting whether it will land on heads or tails. Even if you flip it a thousand times and get a thousand heads, the next flip will not guarantee a tails. But if you flip it zillions of times, you will eventually see that you have a fifty percent chance of the coin landing on heads and a fifty percent chance at it being tails.”

  “Making sense out of randomness,” Mallon repeated.

  “So where do Fourier transforms and analysis come in?” Rina asked. “She had you breaking down the stock movement into simpler waves to help her predict movement?”

  Batra snapped his fingers and pointed to her. “You’re good.”

  Mallon said, “Katrina had us analyzing the momentum of a zillion stocks on any given day to feed into her data bank so she could make recommendations to her companies.”

  “There must be an existing software program that can do this,” McAdams said.

  “I’m sure there are software programs for everything,” Batra said. “Katrina was working on something much more sensitive and sophisticated. I think her end goal was to sell out to someone for big bucks. If you break down her hard drive, I’m sure it’ll be filled with what we were doing.”

  Mallon looked down. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t bring us into the equation unless you absolutely have to do it. I mean technically I didn’t do anything wrong . . . just working for a professor . . . but I’m sure it would give Rosser just another reason to hate me.”

  Batra said, “The guy has a stainless-steel stick up his butt.”

  McAdams said, “Why do you think Rosser hates his students?”

  “He’s just that kind of guy,” Mallon said. “He takes on one pet student and hates the rest of us.”

  “And Elijah Wolf was the pet?” Decker said.

  “He was until Eli went to the dark side, asking to switch advisers,” Batra said.

  “Since then, Rosser has been especially obnoxious to everyone,” Mallon said. “He gets bad student ratings but he’s head of the department, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  Decker said, “I want to go over where you guys were last night—again.”

  The kids reiterated their stories. Mallon said, “As if I wasn’t freaked out enough about last night, now you tell me Dr. Belfort was murdered. I don’t know how much more stress I can handle. If I wasn’t a senior,
I’d take a leave of absence. Right now all I want to do is get the hell out of here.”

  Decker said, “Mallon, are you sure you don’t have anything worth stealing in your room? Like possibly data from your venture with Dr. Belfort?”

  “First of all, all that data is in my computer. Secondly, anything that we do by hand computation was left at Katrina’s house. So no. Nothing in my room was worth stealing.”

  But Decker wasn’t so sure. He felt that the break-in was part of the puzzle. But he had yet to form the grand picture, let alone how all the pieces fit together. “So neither of you has any papers from Dr. Belfort’s extracurricular activities?”

  “Nope,” Batra said.

  “Nothing,” Mallon said.

  More information to process. More things that could have gotten Katrina Belfort murdered. He was trying to narrow things down. Instead the gulf between unsolved and solved was widening. There was always that chasm to cross. It was always a challenge not to fall in.

  WALKING HOME, MCADAMS turned to Rina. “You’re awfully quiet.”

  “I was thinking. Over dinner, you mentioned the possibility of Katrina Belfort breaking into Mallon’s dorm room because she was looking for something.”

  “And?”

  “What if Katrina was hiding something in Mallon’s room instead of looking for something? Wouldn’t that make just as much sense?”

  “I don’t know, Rina. Maybe Katrina thought that Mallon had her data and was worried she was going to do something with it—either go to Rosser or use it for her own benefit.”

  “Mallon wouldn’t go to Rosser because she was just as involved as Katrina was. And she probably didn’t know all the intricacies of Katrina’s program. But maybe Katrina thought that Rosser was closing in on her.” Rina paused. “Just maybe Katrina took all of her papers and went to Mallon’s room to hide them for safekeeping. Maybe that’s what Eli’s hidden papers are about.”

  “She had all the stuff on the computer, Rina,” Decker said.

  “But it’s harder to break into a computer than to find hand computations. I’m sure at some point she became very protective of her work. And Rosser certainly disapproved of what she was doing. So perhaps she decided to stash them in a safe place.”

  “Okay,” Decker said. “So she hid papers in Mallon’s dorm room. Except we didn’t find any papers.”

  “I know.”

  “And how did the hidden papers lead to her murder?”

  “I don’t know if they did.”

  McAdams said, “Maybe Rosser came to Belfort’s house to confront her about her outside job. They argued and he accidentally killed her. But he still didn’t find the papers linked to the hedge funds. So he goes to Mallon’s room, hoping to find something incriminating there. When he comes away empty, he returns to Katrina’s house to bury her up in the woods. Or more like leave her in the woods. There was no attempt to hide her. On the contrary, whoever brought her up there wanted to make it look like a suicide similar to Eli’s death.”

  “That’s a lot of hypotheses and a very short time frame to work with,” Decker said.

  “Why would Katrina go to Mallon’s room?” McAdams said. “And why would she toss the room? What purpose would that have?”

  “Misdirect?” Decker said.

  “Personally, I don’t see Katrina tossing Mallon’s room to look for papers she already has. That’s taking a big chance.”

  Rina said, “Then if it wasn’t Katrina, who was it?”

  “Maybe it was Mallon,” Decker said. “Maybe she was doing it for attention.”

  McAdams said, “Just this morning you were saying she seemed genuinely shaken.”

  “Things change. Especially since Mallon and Batra were doing something iffy with Katrina.”

  “Why would Mallon sneak into her dorm room, toss it, go back to the library, and then call me in a panic?” McAdams said.

  “If she was guilty of something, she wouldn’t want to draw attention to herself,” Rina said. “So if it isn’t Mallon or Katrina who broke into the dorm room, our mysterious woman is still at large.”

  Decker said, “You’re great at squashing ideas. Do you have anything positive to add?”

  “Such as?”

  “The identity of your mystery woman?”

  “Nope.”

  Decker smiled. “Some help you are.”

  “When are you going to see Eli’s parents?” Rina asked.

  “I was going to go on Sunday. But now it looks like I’m going to Manhattan to visit Katrina’s brother. I suppose I can do it tomorrow if the investigation doesn’t take any sudden turns. I could stop by the farm, and then take him back to Cambridge.”

  “Uh, the him is right here. Since when am I leaving tomorrow?”

  “You need to study.”

  “Oh joy.”

  “I’m still coming with you,” Rina said. “I would like to see Ruth Anne again.”

  “Ah, let her come,” McAdams said. “I like her company.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Don’t go there, pard, unless you really want to hear my answer.”

  “Fine. Come with us. You’re way better company than he is.”

  McAdams said, “I was about to say the same thing.”

  Rina laughed. “As long as you are going to the farm, you might want to ask Jacob if Eli sent him a package—his research or maybe copies of what he was doing with Katrina Belfort. A lot of times, sibs keep secrets from their parents.”

  Decker said, “Jacob said he wasn’t particularly close to Eli.”

  “You only have Jacob’s word for that.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  “Misrepresent the relationship possibly. If you thought they weren’t close, you stop asking questions.”

  “What are you getting at, Rina?”

  “If Eli sent Jacob private stuff for safekeeping, he most likely told his brother to keep it under lock and key. Jacob’s not going to volunteer information like that. Sometimes you need to ask the right questions to get the answers you want.”

  CHAPTER 21

  RINA WAS IN the backseat, half listening to one of her audiobooks, half listening to the boys, who were up front, talking business. It was nine in the morning and they were a half hour away from the Wolf farmstead. It was a pleasant forty degrees outside with a blue sky and a shining sun. Peter was driving, while Tyler drummed the dashboard nervously with his left hand. Theoretically, he had packed up for Boston, but Rina wondered if that was going to happen. He seemed way more interested in Katrina Belfort’s suspicious death than he was in passing his law finals.

  “No one had the perfect alibi.” McAdams sipped coffee.

  “People rarely do at three in the morning,” Decker answered.

  “Ferraga and Rosser were at home, but either of them could have slipped out after the wife went to bed. Then there’s Mallon, who was at the library, but even though people saw her, no one can account for every minute of her time.” McAdams paused. “What about phone calls on her cell to verify where she was?”

  “She showed me her phone,” Decker said. “There’s nothing from ten at night until she called you at three-ten in the morning. The calls could have been deleted from the phone’s software. She’d be savvy enough to know how to do it. But any call she made would still be logged into the phone-company records. Right now we can’t get a warrant to look through her log because we don’t have probable cause.”

  “What about if we get her permission to look at her phone records?” McAdams asked.

  “Sure, we can ask. How do you think she’ll react to that?”

  “No idea. But if she agrees, it’ll help her case if she’s innocent.”

  “It will definitely put her further down the suspect list. Give her a call and ask.”

  McAdams made the call. It went to voice mail. He asked her to call him back, not wanting to leave a request over the phone. “Further down the list? So she’s still a main suspect?”

&
nbsp; “Everyone who knew Katrina is a suspect because we don’t know how it happened.” Decker paused. “Katrina may have accidentally died. But she wasn’t accidentally dragged into the woods.”

  Rina was having a hard time concentrating on the book’s narration. She gave up and pulled the pods from her ears. She said, “Do you see Mallon as having the muscle power to drag a corpse into the forest?”

  “Not on her own, no,” Decker said. “She could have had help. Damodar Batra comes to mind. But like I said, no records of any phone calls from ten to three.”

  “Do you really like her as a suspect?”

  “No. Well, when we talked to her, she was agitated.”

  “Have you given any thought to my theory?” Rina said.

  “Sure, once you come up with a mystery woman.”

  Rina thought a moment. “I still think it’s possible that Katrina was hiding her extracurricular activities in Mallon’s room.”

  “We went over this before, Rina. Batra said that her activities would be on her computer. Why would she go about hiding papers?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t papers,” McAdams said. “She could have hidden a memory stick and then erased her files so there wouldn’t be any record of them in her computer. Memory sticks would be impossible to find.”

  “What’s troubling you, Peter?” Rina asked.

  “I’m just thinking. It takes me a while to integrate all of your suggestions.” Then Decker said, “Everything that you two have been saying makes sense. But for some reason, I keep thinking about the ‘so-called’ suicide note.”

  McAdams said, “Written on a keyboard that had been wiped clean.”

  “It’s still speaking to me.”

  “What’s it saying to you?” Rina asked.

  “If you’re faking a suicide note, why make it sound so personal? From what we’ve discovered about Katrina, she doesn’t seem to have much in the way of personal connections.”

  “That’s why it was a very badly forged note,” McAdams said.

  “I have to agree with Tyler,” Rina said. “It doesn’t sound personal to me. It sounds like stock words for a faked suicide note.”

  McAdams said, “The murderer was attempting to make the death look similar to Eli’s suicide. The whole thing was completely staged.”