The Fractal Murders

by Mark Cohen

  Blackie, a three-month-old schipperkee, was found in its owner’s, Melvin D. Dawson’s, rented room with limp front paws, unable to walk and in obvious pain.

  The puppy was taken to a local veterinary hospital by Denver police officer Wayne Simmons and found to have a swollen brain and concussion. The veterinarian confirmed the animal had been abused.

  Dawson’s roommates, who claim they had witnessed him throw, kick, and hit Blackie daily, decided they had seen enough and reported the problem to police. The two roommates also claim Dawson kicked their dog down some stairs on another occasion.

  Simmons was told that the roommates had to break into Dawson’s room to get to the dog since his doors were locked. Also, despite Dawson being at work, music was turned up in the room, apparently to mask the puppy’s cries.

  It was explained by Dawson that the dog had been biting on an electric cord a few days earlier so he hit it with his hand to discipline the animal. He said he did not take the dog to a vet because he felt it would be all right.

  Dawson said he only hit the puppy with his hand and never kicked it. Dawson also explained that he disciplined the dog when it defecated on the floor.

  Simmons arrested Dawson so there would not be any problem with retaliation against the roommates. Both Dawson and the roommates who reported him have been evicted, as no animals were allowed in the house. Subsequent investigation revealed Dawson had several outstanding warrants on various other misdemeanor charges.

  She folded the article, handed it back to me, and said nothing. As we passed beneath the bridge over Broadway, I continued the story. “I adopted the dog,” I said. “Later I learned Dawson had skipped town and that a warrant for his arrest had been issued, but cruelty to animals is a misdemeanor, so the cops weren’t making any effort to track him down.

  “A couple of months went by and I forgot about it. The dog seemed to be doing well and I considered myself lucky to have him. Then one day I was in line in a grocery store down near my brother’s gym. The guy in front of me was a scruffy-looking doper and I noticed the name on his check—Melvin D. Dawson. I figured there couldn’t be that many Melvin D. Dawsons in Denver and this guy just looked like the type of sick loser who would abuse a puppy. So I followed him out to his motorcycle and yelled, ‘Melvin.’

  “He just looked at me and climbed on his motorcycle. ‘Hey, Melvin,’ I say, ‘c’mere, I want to talk to you.’ ‘Fuck you,’ he says. I keep walking toward him. ‘You’ve got some outstanding warrants, Melvin, so why don’t you climb down off the bike and we’ll go take care of them.’ He gives me the finger and starts his motorcycle. I don’t want him to get away so I run to him and yank him off the bike, but his jacket’s slick and I lose my grip. The bike falls over and he comes up with a big spring-loaded knife.

  “I’ve had some self-defense training, so I manage to avoid the knife, but that’s just making him angry and he keeps circling me, trying to cut me. The cops still aren’t anywhere to be seen. Finally he corners me between two cars and comes at me. I sidestep him and redirect his arm downward, and the knife slides into his belly. It severs an artery and he bleeds to death before they can save him.” I heard the first crack of thunder. We continued walking.

  When she finally said something, it was, “Why didn’t you just walk away?”

  “I’ve thought about that a lot,” I said. “I don’t have a good answer.” I felt a light raindrop on my arm.

  “You don’t sound very remorseful,” she said. Her anger was slowly diminishing.

  “I could’ve walked away,” I said, “and maybe I should have, but once I started it, I did what I had to do.” I paused. “And the world’s probably a better place for it,” I added. “I know that sounds cold, but there are evil people in this world.”

  “I think I know that better than most people,” she said. A reference to the deaths of her parents.

  “I suppose you do,” I said. A loud crack of thunder stopped us in our tracks for a moment. More raindrops began to fall. We turned around and began walking back toward the mountains in silence.

  “You should have told me,” she said as we neared her home.

  “I know,” I said. “I was afraid to. Afraid I might scare you off. Afraid you’d judge me without really knowing the whole story.” The rain came harder and faster.

  “So,” I said as we reached her door, “what’s the status of Pepper and Jayne?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I need some time.” My instincts told me not to press her.

  “I’ll call you in a day or two to update you on the case,” I said. She nodded, went inside, and closed the door behind her. I glanced toward the creek and noticed the damned Russian olive trees again, then walked to my truck and headed for home.

  34

  SATURDAY NIGHT. Our second night camping. Scott and I were sitting on opposite ends of a small fire in a dry riverbed eighty miles east of Denver. That’s right, east. Trying to camp in the mountains west of Denver in the summer is a poor way to get away from it all. The national parks and forests are just too crowded. Even in the primitive areas you can’t hike more than a few miles without running into other backpacking enthusiasts.

  When we were kids we used to ride our bikes out east of Denver to the old Lowry Bombing Range. The air force kept junk planes there, and we used to explore abandoned missile silos and Japanese internment camps. That was in the late sixties and early seventies, and most of that area is now the suburban cancer known as Aurora, Colorado—a suburb that will one day run clear to the Kansas border.

  So now we just keep going farther east—out onto the high plains. It was a clear night; you could see the Milky Way. The dogs were quiet. Scott looked up at the stars and said, “Jesus, I needed this.”

  “Why?”

  “Bobbi’s still on this decorating kick,” he said. “Wants to paint every room in the house. Every ten minutes she’s busting into my office with paint samples and asking me which I like better, plum orchard or raspberry creme.”

  “Tough choice,” I said. “I like the ambience of plum orchard, but raspberry creme has a certain audacity.” He took a swig from a pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s and handed it to me. I stared at the flickering flames, but said nothing. It would be nice to have Scott’s problem. He must’ve read my mind.

  “Things any better with the math professor?” he asked. “I know you like her.” I thought about that line from Gordon Lightfoot’s song—“a movie queen to play the scene of bringing all the good things out in me.”

  “A little better,” I said. “We’ll see how it goes.”

  We spent hours recalling old times. Grade school, junior high, high school, college. We stared at the orange coals of our campfire. The flames had died down, but we didn’t want to build the fire back up. We were on some rancher’s property and didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. We’d left my truck on the road with the hood up so people would think we’d developed car trouble and headed for the nearest town.

  “What are you thinking about?” Scott asked.

  “When I went to visit Koch, there was this photo in his office. Koch looks really young in it, college age, and he’s standing in front of the American flag shaking hands with a famous public official—and I should know the guy’s name but I just can’t remember it.”

  “Was it a recent photo?”

  “I just told you—he looked really young in the photo.”

  “And he’s what, fifty now?”

  “At least.”

  “So how long ago was the photo taken?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “twenty-five years, maybe more.”

  “Wish I could help,” he said, “but without seeing the photo it’s pretty hard.”

  “I know,” I said. I took a sip of whiskey and stared at what was left of our fire.

  “You give any more thought to going to the bureau?” Scott asked.

  “First thing Monday morning,” I said. “We’ve done as much as we can.”
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br />   “Don’t feel bad about it,” he said. “Polk would have gotten away with it if not for you.” I nodded and stirred the coals with a stick.

  “Strange thing is, in a way Jayne actually helped him out.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She reported it to the FBI in Denver. It should’ve been investigated by someone out of Boston, Seattle, or Omaha, but the call came into Denver and Polk grabbed it so he could cover his ass.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” Scott said. “He was lucky.”

  I took another sip of whiskey. “Pass me the cheese and crackers,” I said. “I’m not used to drinking like this.”

  “Colby or cheddar?”

  “Fuck,” I said. “William Colby.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the guy in the picture with Koch.”

  “The former director of the CIA?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If Hawkins really worked for the CIA,” he said, “that could be the connection. Hawkins and Koch are both economists, and both may have worked for the CIA.”

  “Now we just have to figure out how Polk fits in.” I handed him the whiskey and resolved not to drink any more that night. Whatever my future with Jayne Smyers, there was no point in destroying my health. I found some aspirin in my pack and swallowed them with water from a metal canteen.

  “Preventive medicine?” Scott said.

  “Yeah.”

  The coals died down as the night went on. We pissed on the fire, gave the dogs some water, then crawled into the tent. It was warm on the high plains and there was no need to zip the sleeping bags. I wore only boxers and a T-shirt.

  I was dreaming of Joy when I felt Wheat’s moist nose poking my face. I sat up. Buck was tense, his ears erect. Something was out there. I grabbed my Glock and peered through the screen, but saw nothing. I tapped Scott’s shoulder a few times and signaled him to be silent. “Someone out there,” I whispered.

  “Sheriff?”

  “I don’t see any lights.” Scott’s rifle was in the truck, but he had the night-vision goggles. He placed the evil-looking device on his head and looked through the mesh door of the tent.

  “One man,” Scott said. “With a handgun. Automatic. About a hundred yards out. Coming right at us. Not in uniform. And he ain’t a rancher.”

  “Check the back side,” I whispered. He crawled to the back side of the tent and shook his head to indicate he’d seen nothing. I quickly tied my running shoes. “I’ll try to flank him and get him from behind,” I said. I handed Scott my Glock. “If he starts to raise the pistol, put some holes in him.”

  “Count on it,” he said.

  I slowly unzipped the tent’s back door and began crawling over sand and brush to a position where I’d be able to take the stranger. My head hurt, but I had to suck it up. As I slowly circled away from the tent I hoped like hell I didn’t crawl across a prickly-pear cactus or stumble into a den of slumbering rattlesnakes.

  The stranger was within ten yards of me. I lay perfectly still. By now my eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the stars and I could see that his back was to me. He started to raise the pistol, apparently planning to fire blindly into our tent. I quietly raised myself into a sprinter’s stance and exploded forward. He turned and fired one shot, but missed. I launched a flying tackle and knocked him to the ground. I struck his arm as I hit him and the force of my blow sent his weapon off into the sagebrush. “Got him,” I yelled.

  Scott emerged from the tent, flashlight in his left hand, pistol in his right. The man struggled, but I must’ve outweighed him by fifty pounds. Scott found the weapon—a Sig Sauer nine millimeter—while I wrestled the intruder over onto his back and brought a few hard rights down on his face to stop his struggling. Scott shined the light directly on the man’s face.

  “I wonder who this sorry fucker is,” he said.

  “His name’s Alan Koch,” I said.

  “I’ll have the rancher’s deluxe,” Scott told the waitress. She had auburn locks and was on the wrong side of forty, but was built like a burlap bag full of bobcats. Big Matt would’ve loved her.

  “‘I’ll have a diablo sandwich and a Dr Pepper,’” I said. “‘And make it fast, I’m in a goddamned hurry.’” She just stared at me. “It’s a line from Smokey and the Bandit,” I explained. “Jackie Gleason said it. I’ve always wanted to use it.” She didn’t see the humor in it. “I’ll just have a short stack and some coffee,” I said sheepishly. She wrote it down and walked away with an unamused look on her face.

  “Fuck her if she can’t take a joke,” Scott said. We were in a greasy spoon in the ranching town of Strasburg, Colorado. It was Sunday morning. Koch was under some GI blankets in the back of the truck with enough duct tape around his legs, arms, and mouth to attach the wings to a 747. We’d given him a pretty good beating, but he’d stubbornly refused to tell us a thing. Scott had wanted to take it further, but I’d reminded him that torture is against the law.

  We’d found Koch’s Lexus parked behind my pickup. Someone had planted a tracking device on the rear bumper of my truck, and the equipment to follow its signal was inside the Lexus. It was the type of high-tech equipment Koch could only have obtained from the FBI or a similar agency. Scott punctured the underside of Koch’s radiator hose to make it appear as though he had suffered car trouble.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t wait till tomorrow to go to the bureau,” Scott said.

  “If we try to set up a meeting today,” I said, “Polk might learn about it and God only knows what he’d do. I think we just lay low until tomorrow morning.”

  “He probably knows something’s up,” Scott said. “If this dickhead had succeeded in killing us, don’t you think he would’ve called Polk to tell him the mission had been accomplished?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “So where do we spend the night?” I looked out and noticed a combination truck stop and motel on the other side of the interstate.

  “‘The Old Home Filler-Up An’ Keep on A-Truckin’ Cafe,’” I said. That was the title of a song by C. W. McCall.

  35

  WE WOKE TO THE SOUND of cranking diesels early Monday morning. Enjoyed breakfast at the same greasy spoon, then returned to our room. It was almost eight. I phoned the FBI on my cell phone and asked for Gombold. The receptionist asked my name, but I declined because I didn’t want Polk to know I’d called the bureau. She put me on hold for what seemed like an eternity. “Agent Gombold,” he said.

  “Agent Keane,” I said.

  “Pepper,” he said, “why the hell didn’t you give her your name?”

  “I need to set up a meeting with you and Dittmer this morning.”

  “What about?”

  “I think Polk murdered the three math professors.”

  “You out of your mind?”

  “You won’t think so when you hear the evidence.” I gave him a detailed summary of the evidence we’d developed. The gun, the car, everything.

  “It’s circumstantial,” he said, but his tone suggested he knew the bureau had cause for concern.

  “We’ve gotten indictments with less,” I said.

  “How soon can you be here?” he asked.

  “Little more than an hour.”

  “Okay,” he sighed, “I’ll set it up. Dittmer’s gonna love this.”

  “Don’t tell Polk,” I said. “The son of a bitch sent one of his coconspirators out to kill us a couple of nights ago.”

  “You’re shittin’ me?”

  “The guy’s tied up in the back of my truck,” I said. “Tried to off us with a nine millimeter. I’ll bring him with me if Scott doesn’t kill him first.”

  We checked out of the motel and drove several miles down a desolate country road until we found an old shack, then helped Koch out of the truck so he could empty his bladder. He was wearing the same clothes for the third day and sharing the back of the truck with the dogs, so he smelled like a bum, but that was the least of my concerns.

  W
e arrived downtown at nine-thirty and parked in an all-day lot. We left Buck and Wheat in the truck with our prisoner, then walked the two blocks to the federal building. I phoned Gombold from a pay phone in the lobby and asked him to come down. “Why don’t you just come up?” he asked.

  “I’m not inclined to surrender my weapon,” I said. “Figure you could help us get past security.” He sighed but said he’d be right down.

  He stepped off one of the elevator cars two minutes later. Navy suit, white shirt, solid green tie. Saw us, said a few words to one of the security people, and motioned for us to walk around the metal detector. “You’ve looked better,” he said as he led us into one of the elevators. I hadn’t shaved in a few days and my forearms were covered with abrasions from crawling around in the brush.

  “Felt better too,” I said. “You say anything to Dittmer yet?”

  “Just that there had been some developments that might impact the bureau. Told him you seemed kind of itchy to discuss them.”

  Dittmer was at his desk wearing a white oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a leather shoulder holster. A paisley tie hung loose around his unbuttoned collar. He looked haggard. His weathered face bore a stoic look—one of those men who had seen it all and consequently had toughness etched into his features. Gombold escorted us in and closed the door behind him. I introduced Scott and we all took chairs in front of Dittmer’s massive mahogany desk. Scott was the only one not wearing a shoulder holster; his gun was tucked into the small of his back.

  “What’s this all about?” Dittmer asked. “Tim said there had been some developments.”

  “I think Polk killed those math professors,” I said. He leaned forward and gave me a hard look.

  “I hope you’ve got something to back that up,” he said.

  “I do,” I said. “I’ll start with this. The weapon used to kill Fontaine was a five-shot thirty-eight-caliber Taurus revolver Polk took from a bank robber named Bailey Green last summer. Polk logged it into evidence and, as you know, the weapon later came up missing. Here’s the ballistics report from the Washington State Patrol.” I handed the report to him. He reached for a legal pad and began taking notes.