"It's not our position to question the ways of our maker, young lady. Our job is to follow His commandments, and in that regard, I regret to say you have fallen woefully short." He shuffled through his papers. "I'm very tempted to have you incarcerated. A little time in juvenile hall might do you well. But the counselors tell me you are highly intelligent and I hate to see that kind of potential go to waste. Even if you haven't done much with it so far." He frowned disapprovingly, an expression in which Esther took decided pleasure. "I'm going to give you one more chance, little girl. One chance only. I'm going to place you in a foster home-"
"Please, don't. I'd rather go to prison."
The judge drew himself up angrily. "I'm going to put you in a foster home. I am personally acquainted with these people and know them to be good, honest, Christian folk. I'll let them see if they can turn you around, teach you to make the most of your talents. And if they can't-" He shook his head. "Well, then may God have mercy on your soul."
This home was not so bad, at least not in the physical way. Here she had to endure lectures, constant berating about how she was a sinner, how her body was a temple and she had defiled it. He called her awful names, but at least he left her alone at night. And she was able to finish high school. She made poor grades in many of her classes; she couldn't have cared less about literature or art. But she excelled in math. She finished two years of trigonometry in one semester, then completed calculus and advanced calculus almost as quickly. They said she was a prodigy. And despite the ugly lectures she had to endure, being a prodigy was better than sleeping in the snow.
Her foster father offered to send her to college, assuming she got a math scholarship, which she did, and assuming she agreed to go to a Christian college, which she did. She was a wild thing, he said, and she needed Jesus Christ to enter her life and tame her, to teach her how to be a good person. The fact that she was Jewish seemed to have altogether escaped him. Didn't matter to her-just so she got out of the house. That was all she wanted. Out of the house. On her own. Free to do math-the one thing she loved in life.
And free to become a mother. She desperately wanted to be a parent. Because she would be a good parent, not like all the others she had been forced to endure, one after the other, over and over again. She would be a good mother.
"You may be asking yourself-what does God have to do with mathematics? Well, let me answer that question for you. God has everything to do with mathematics. The world, indeed, the universe, has everything to do with mathematics. We are surrounded by it. Math is in the air, in the plants, in us, in nature, throughout the cosmos. God is not silent; He never has been. To the contrary, mathematics is how we know that God exists."
Esther watched the salt-and-pepper bearded professor cross the stage of the small seminar room, always staring at the floor, never at the students, as if lost in thought. She had only taken this intersession class, Mathematics and Theology, because it sounded like an easy "A." During the past three years of college life, she had learned to ignore the fundamentalist claptrap that infected all her classes, even math. Did they not understand that this was what made math special? Its purity, the fact that it could not be corrupted by politics or science or theology. Math was unchanging, no matter where you went or what people believed, math was always the same. But as the two-week course progressed, she found herself more and more intrigued by his lectures. Not the nonsense about how God gave the Greeks math just in time to pave the way for Christ, so the Romans could build roads and improve trade and other such activities that would aid the spread of the Good News-that was obvious nonsense. But she was impressed by the impact numbers had made on the world.
She was fascinated to learn about Pythagoras, his enormous contribution to mathematics, and the society he founded to keep secrets out of the hands and minds of the public. She was amazed to learn that St. Augustine, perhaps the greatest of the early Christian writers, believed that numbers were the pathway to God. "Everywhere you find measures, numbers, and order, look for the craftsman. You will find none other than the One in whom there is supreme measure, supreme numericity, and supreme order. That is God, of whom it is most truly said that He arranged everything according to measure, and number, and weight." She was intrigued by the numerous efforts to devise a mathematical formula to prove that God exists, not only comic exercises like Euler's but serious attempts like those of William Hatcher. She learned to play Rithomachia, the ancient math/chess hybrid favored by ancient European mathematicians. But something was missing.
"I admit," the professor continued, "the message is insubstantial and incomplete, and in the end, perhaps it answers nothing more than simply to say, 'Yes, I am here. You are not alone.' But that itself is a potent message. If math can do that for us, if it can give us the language of God, perhaps it is left to us to interpret the message."
Not good enough for Esther, but perhaps she had the solution. The Kabbalah. The ancient text Feldman had introduced to her. What did it say? Life doesn't have to be a prison. We are all in the process of becoming God. She raced back to her dorm room, trying to find her copy, pulling it from the shelves. The world is a war between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. Yes, that was true enough. The forces of light are what we call God. The forces of darkness are discomfort, pain, unhappiness. But this was the good thing: Concealed in every moment of pain is an opportunity to become God.
That was the path, the key, the missing element that these bigoted fundamentalists would never tumble across. We could know God, we could communicate with God.
We could challenge God.
Esther was a good teacher and a gifted mathematician. Her dissertation on Isaac Newton broke new ground, exploring the alchemical and biblical work that consumed more of his time than science or mathematics. Her first published paper won a major prize, guaranteeing her a tenured position with an excellent university. Rumor had it she was working on Reimann's hypothesis, the Holy Grail of mathematical proofs. A long shot-but if anyone could do it, she could. In her leisure moments, she studied the Kabbalah, became almost as knowledgeable about it as she was about math, linking the two, following Newton in his blending of math and theology, his progress from casual study to obsession. And once her professional life was stable, she began trying to become pregnant.
Given her background, sex did not come easy. She found it impossible to establish any kind of long-term relationship; every time she looked at a man, she saw her father's face, his or one of the abusive surrogate fathers she had endured throughout her childhood. She found it much easier to get through one-night stands, no commitment, no long-term involvement-and she never had to look them in the face. She became adept at picking men up, determining what would attract them, what they wanted, then using that to get what she wanted.
Or tried. In fact, she never got what she wanted. For years and years she tried without success to become pregnant. She sought out fertility specialists, unapproved drug therapies, even so-called specialists who she knew in her scientific heart were little better than witch doctors. It was so unfair! There were so many bad parents around-but she would be a good mother! She would be the best mother who ever lived. But never any luck. Nothing ever changed. Until that fateful day in October of last year. When everything changed.
She knew something was wrong the moment she saw the expression on Dr. Lorenz's face. "What's wrong with me? You said it was possible. You said I was capable of conceiving a child. Why isn't it happening?"
"Esther…please sit down."
"I'm not going to sit down. I'm not a child anymore. Tell me what you have to say."
He sighed wearily. "It would be better if you weren't standing."
"Stop treating me this way! Just tell me why I'm not pregnant!"
Slowly, he closed her clipboard. "You are pregnant."
"I-I am. I am! Then-what's wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?" She clutched the doctor's arms. "Oh my God. Is there something wrong with the baby? Is there something wrong with my baby?"
"No, no. The baby appears to be fine."
"Then what?"
Dr. Lorenz looked at her with the saddest eyes she had ever seen. "Esther…you've got cancer. Cancer of the throat."
Her lips parted, but only a choking sound came out where there should have been words. "How-How long do I have?"
"It's impossible to say. Some people live for years with your condition…"
"But I won't."
The doctor lowered his head. "I don't think so, no."
"Will it affect the baby?"
"No."
"Will I live long enough to deliver the baby?"
"I can't say. But even if you do…"
The doctor didn't have to complete the sentence. Esther knew what he was trying to say. Even if she did deliver the baby-she wouldn't live long enough to raise her child. She would never have a chance to be her baby's mother.
Esther sped home and collapsed on her bed, consumed with rage and tears. What kind of a God would allow this? She would have been a good mother, the best mother who ever lived. But now she would never have a chance. And with no father, her child would end up in one of those dreadful foster homes, full of rape and incest and perversion and sick minds inflicting their warped damaged psyches on the next generation. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair! How could God permit this? Why would He give all those wretched people children but deny them to her? He obviously didn't love children-look what He let happen to his own so-called son, what He let happen to his chosen people for centuries, how He allows those supposedly created in his image to lead hellish lonely lives. What was He thinking?
She had no answers. She could not fathom the inscrutable mind of God. But somewhere, just as something in one part of her brain was snapping, another part was stitching something together, something new and…workable. A way to ask her questions, to force God to answer. To let Him know what she thought of Him and His strange and mysterious ways. Math and magic, that was the answer. Calculus and the Kabbalah.
She would need a plan, a way to get His divine attention, to turn His own Holy Word against Him. And she would need a pawn, but by now, turning the minds of little men was child's play to her. Esther would take His bloody image apart piece by piece, destroy the Sefirot limb by limb, find her way from darkness to light by exposing the darkness in the light, the pathetic fallibility of God Himself. She would begin her work at once-calculate her plans and set them in motion.
And then, when she did, may God have mercy on His own goddamn soul.
39
July 31
"If you're going to get inside her head," I explained to the more than twenty federal officers crammed into the briefing room, "and you have to, if you're going to have any chance of catching her, then you have to understand what motivates her."
"Rage?" suggested one of the younger men in the front row, an agent Gilpin.
"Rage, certainly, but rage fueled by what?" The background checks on Esther Goldstein had come in, and they confirmed most of what I had already hypothesized and woven into my revised psychological profile.
"Frustration. Loss of the child she worked so hard to conceive."
"Certainly the child is a factor. But she doesn't know she's going to lose the child. There's only one thing she knows for certain."
"She won't be around to raise her child," agent Gilpin said quietly.
"Exactly so. All her life she's been surrounded by bad parents, at least in her mind. She was determined to be better, to be better than any of them. And now she's being cheated out of the chance. By God."
"Is that why she's using all the religious motifs?" one of the senior officers, agent Ringold, asked. "Is this her way of…filing an appeal? With God?"
"I can't say for certain," I acknowledged. "But I don't think so. I don't think she's interested in an appeal. I think she knows it's hopeless. But all this imagery and philosophy and mathematics she has absorbed from the Kabbalah, all of it relates to the relationship between God and man. That we are made in His image. That we are all potentially in the process of becoming God."
"So she wants to be God. A deity of equal status. So she could overrule His decision."
"That too seems impossible, even in her delusional narcissistic state. I think she knows she's doomed, that she'll never have a chance to raise her child, at least not on this earthly plane."
"Then what? What does she want from Him? A miracle?"
I shook my head slowly. "Not a miracle. An accounting. She's not buying into all that C.S. Lewis misery-helps-us-appreciate-God's-mercy crap. Don't mean to offend anyone, but in Esther's mind, God is not only a son of a bitch-He's a mean son of a bitch. He's the Old Testament God, raining down death and destruction on those who don't deserve it, torturing the innocent, justifying it all in terms of some incomprehensible plan. And that's not good enough for Esther. She wants to deconstruct God's image while simultaneously taking down as many bad parents as possible, and in so doing, to make God answer for what He has done."
"That's…insane."
I arched an eyebrow. "And this surprises you?"
There was another voice from the back of the room. "Ms. Pulaski, we appreciate the work you've done on this case-and other cases as well. But we've all read your preliminary profile on this case and, well, to be blunt, you were dead wrong. You didn't even have the killer's gender correct."
"I'll be the first to admit I've made some boneheaded moves on this one," I said. Best defense is a good offense, right? "We had eyewitness accounts identifying the killer as male and I allowed them to influence me, even though there were contradictory indications: male/female, organized/disorganized, narcissistic/sympathetic. What I didn't realize-but should've-was that there were two people involved, one being controlled by the other. But there's no point dwelling on past mistakes. I've logged over twenty hours in the interrogation room with Tucker, in addition to all the other research and detective work I've done, and I'm here to tell you-I've got it right this time. So if you really want to catch this killer, memorize my report and treat it like your own personal Kabbalah." I closed my folder. "If you'll excuse me, I've got a press conference." DARCY MET ME just outside the conference room.
"They found the body!"
Well, that was good to know. It must've been a more pleasant discovery than the part Esther left behind in Stevens's conference room. "Where was it?"
"Barely a mile away! And did you know this? Did you know that it was behind an apartment building! People went back and forth all the time, but it still took a long time before someone found it."
I wondered how she managed to get the body there without being caught. Late at night, probably. Wrapped in a rug or some such. A smart woman like Esther wouldn't have any trouble figuring out a way. "Seems like every body comes a little closer to headquarters. Any chance she's…I don't know. Slowly bringing her dirty deeds into our face? Teasing us or something?"
Darcy tilted his head slightly to one side. "Do you think that maybe…that maybe…there is some…pattern to the way the Math Lady gets rid of the bodies?"
"I wouldn't be surprised. There's been a pattern to everything else. Do you see any connections?"
He didn't answer. I'd seen that look before. He was off in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land and if I had any brains, I wouldn't disturb him.
"You keep thinking, Darce. I've got to do this miserable press conference."
He snapped out of it. "Can I go with you?"
"To the press conference? I don't know, Darcy-your father never wanted you involved in this case, much less at a press conference."
"But you have to take me!"
"I do? Why?"
"Because-Because-" He raised his hands up and ran them back and forth through his hair. "Because I am your math consultant."
"I don't think the press will be asking any math questions."
"Then-because I am your good luck charm!"
"You are?"
"Of course I am. Do you think that I am? Do you believe in luc
k?"
"I think this is not the best time to get off on philosophical tangents. I have to-"
"And then after the press thing, we can go for custard."
I gave him a long look. "Darcy…we have a very tight deadline. Assuming she keeps to her pattern-the Math Lady is going to strike again today."
Against all odds, Darcy's expression brightened. "Then I will just have to stay with you until then."
It was the most complex algorithm she had ever devised, the most demanding computer program she had ever invented. And for what purpose? No one could possibly decipher this, at least not until it was far too late. So why bother?
Because she had no choice. The Kabbalah was all about numbers, yes, but also about fairness, justice. It dictated that all persons should have their opportunity to crawl out of the darkness into the light, to find their own path to becoming God. To be challenged in their own environments. That's why the amputations were always performed in the chosen one's workplace. That's why an escape hatch-however remote-had to be included in her final act of destruction. That's why, even though they did not deserve it, she would give them a chance. However slight.
Esther was still a little shaky after all she had been forced to do-the branding, the killing, the transportation of the body. She was glad she hadn't had to do it the other times as well. Her final stroke would be much larger, of course, but in its own way, less personal. Her physical presence was not required-just as well, given how weak she felt. The branding, the dismemberment, all that had become unnecessary. She was making a larger statement now, one that would symbolize a strike against all mankind.
When she was finished, she put the electronic detonator beside the blue folder containing her mathematical work, both representative of a lifetime of effort in her two chosen fields of endeavor. If all went well, these two objects would represent her legacy to her daughter, the culmination of a lifetime's work, a hard lifetime, but one to which she had never succumbed, never given in.
Esther poured herself a drink-nonalcoholic, because of the baby-and turned on the television. She had heard there was going to be a conference on what the press were now calling the "Math Slayings." Rumor had it they were expecting another murder soon. But why? Was it possible they had discovered the prime number pattern? Much of their mathematical work had surprised and impressed her, including the discovery of the mathematical algorithmic scheme that allowed the Kabbalistic forces to determine who the victims for each aspect of the Sefirot would be. This was math of the highest order, but they had cracked it, and it had allowed them to capture Tucker, if not to save their own colleague. How was it done?
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