The Fibonacci Murders

by Dale E. Lehman

  “I know it sounds like a platitude,” Montufar began, “but we want you to know how very sorry we are for your loss. We’re doing everything we can to find out who killed your husband and bring him to justice.”

  Patterson cupped her chin in her hands. “I know you are. I have a cousin with the police down in Richmond. Anything I can do to help, just let me know.”

  “I guess the first thing is if you know of anyone who might have wanted Mark dead.”

  “No. Oh, there were people who didn’t like him very much. He was opinionated and not always polite. But I can’t see anyone hating him that much.”

  “Opinionated how?”

  “Every way.” She actually chuckled and her face lit up for a moment, but the light slipped away as quickly as it had come. “He thought most everyone was a moron in some way or another. He didn’t much like politicians, lawyers, doctors. Police.” She said the last a bit hesitantly, then continued, “Priests, ministers, and rabbis. He thought our minister was a dunce. He only went to church because of me, I think.”

  “What church do you attend?”

  “Columbia Presbyterian. It’s a bit of a drive, but it was the church I went to when I was little.”

  Montufar and Swan exchanged glances. Was this coincidence or something more? Maybe Dumas was onto something after all.

  “What is it?” Patterson asked.

  “Probably nothing. It’s just there was an incident at that church earlier today. I expect you’ll hear about it before too long.”

  Patterson didn’t seem too interested. She gazed out the window at the melting snow, not really looking, perhaps only waiting for something, something that would never again happen.

  “Who would have known Mark would have been plowing that area?” Montufar asked. “And how far in advance would they have known it?”

  “I’m not sure. I never asked him much about that job, and he didn’t talk about it much. He only did it to make some extra money over the winter. He was really a carpenter, but work is always slow this time of year, and with the economy as bad as it’s been, even the busy seasons haven’t been too busy. Probably only the people he works with would have known.”

  “Was there a routine?”

  “Not really,” Patterson replied. “He’d get a call when they wanted him to report in. You’d know the call was coming if you paid attention to the weather reports. He got the call about four in the afternoon the day before he was killed. The snow started later that evening. I guess he would have been out there all night, but I couldn’t tell you where he worked or when he took breaks or anything like that.”

  She leaned back into the sofa and exhaled heavily. “I don’t think anyone wanted him dead,” she said. It came out more forcefully than anything else she had said, which wasn’t saying much but suggested that she really wanted to believe it.

  Montufar pondered this for a moment, perhaps for too long, because Swan quietly asked the obvious question: “Then why was he shot?”

  Patterson shrugged. “Because he was there. Wrong place, wrong time. It’s a busy road. It could have been anyone.”

  “Not just then,” Swan replied. “Very few people were out and about.”

  Patterson slowly shifted her gaze to Swan, to Montufar, back to Swan.

  “Except for the plows,” she said.

  ∑

  The firstborn son turned out to be Andrew Carrington, a twenty-six-year-old HVAC technician in line to take over the family business a decade or two in the future when his father James retired. The young man had been shot at close range in a back corridor at the Columbia Mall early on Thursday, March third while on his way out from completing a job fixing a balky thermostat. He had been on-site before the mall opened for his first job of the day, and, as it had turned out, his last. There had been no witnesses to the shooting, although several mall employees had heard the shot and mall security had arrived on the scene within minutes.

  Peller scrutinized the area but found nothing to suggest anything beyond the bare fact that a young man had died violently. Aside from the body sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood, the corridor was so nondescript that it might as well not have been there. Carrington could have been lying in an undifferentiated expanse of gray suffused with mist.

  Peller let his eyes play over every inch of the body: the head twisted sideways as though still looking for the assailant, the left arm outstretched as though to break the fall, the right leg pulled up with the foot turned inward, probably in a last-ditch effort to recover balance. The shot had come from behind and penetrated the skull almost dead center. Peller was sure he’d never known what happened.

  A sudden cacophony of voices jarred Peller from his thoughts. Turning, he saw a man built like a linebacker trying to push his way through a wall of police officers who were struggling to hold him back. “You can’t come in here, sir!” one of the officers said while another yelled, “Stay back! Stay back!”

  “Let me through!” he barked. “What’s going on? Who’s that on the floor? Damn it, let me through!”

  He forced the officers a few feet forward, then stopped and stared in horror at the body. “Oh my God,” he whispered, then cried, “Andrew! Andrew!” He tried to take another step, but the officers had rearranged themselves to better restrain him, and he couldn’t move. Peller stepped between the man and Andrew’s body. The newcomer was a good four inches taller than he, forcing him to look up. “Who are you?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

  “My son. What the hell happened? That’s my son!”

  Peller looked back at the dead man. “Mr. Carrington, we should go somewhere else to discuss this.”

  Carrington drew back a fist, but the officers yanked him backwards before he could land the punch. “I’m not leaving my son!” he bellowed. “Who did this? Tell me who did this. I’ll kill him!”

  “This is a crime scene,” Peller said sharply. “You can‘t be here. Let’s go to the security office. We can talk there.”

  Carrington glared at Peller, who met him with a face of stone. Finally the father slumped. “Okay,” he said. The officers relaxed their grips on him. He turned away, then with a massive thrust he threw them off. “Where’s security?”

  The mall security guard who had been assigned to the crime scene led Peller and Carrington through a maze of service corridors to the mall office, then through the public area to a private office.

  “This is Janet’s office, but she won’t be in for a couple of hours,” the guard said as he opened the door. “That give you enough time?”

  Peller nodded, and the man exited. The room was nothing more than a large cubicle with barely enough room for a desk and a couple of chairs, but its regular occupant had made an attempt to cheer it with a potted African violet under a tiny grow light and a framed set of prints of Monet’s bridge in various seasons. Peller doubted that they would help today.

  “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Carrington?” he asked. “Can I get you some water?”

  Carrington slumped into a chair and fixed his eyes on the floor. “No thanks.”

  “What brought you here?” Peller asked.

  Carrington worked his jaw for a moment, as though about to spit out something inedible. “Andrew should have been on to his next job. The dispatcher couldn’t raise him. I thought maybe something had gone wrong with the job, so I was coming out to help.” He looked up suddenly. “Do you know who did this?” he demanded.

  Peller shook his head. “It’s too early. There weren’t any witnesses. Tell me about your son.”

  “He was a good kid. There’s no reason for this to happen. Nobody would have wanted to hurt him.” Tears slipped from Carrington’s eyes. He angrily wiped them away.

  “So I guess he was never in any serious trouble?”

  “No, never. He was the quiet one. Smart, good with numbers. His younger brothe
r was the one who got into scraps, not him.”

  Peller felt a chill run down his back. “Andrew was your oldest?”

  “No, his sister Maria is the oldest. He was our second.”

  “Firstborn son, though.” Anger boiling up from his gut, Peller turned away to prevent Carrington seeing.

  “Yeah,” Carrington said, tears filling his eyes. “Firstborn son.”

  ∑

  When finally Peller dragged himself back to headquarters and up to his desk, he found Montufar waiting for him, a new bagged letter in her hands.

  “Damn him,” Peller said, knowing what it was before looking. “Damn him, damn him, damn him! What’s the number now? Seventeen?”

  “Two.” Montufar read it: “’Two shots, two kills. Slower students may wish to ponder my namesake.’”

  “Namesake? What the hell does that mean?”

  “The envelope was printed on—are you ready for this?—an old dot matrix printer. So was the letter. The return address is a nonexistent street in Bel Air. The name he gives this time is Leonidas Pissaro.”

  Peller rubbed his eyes. “And that’s supposed to mean something to us?”

  “I think so. I just got my hands on this a few minutes ago, so I haven’t had time to research it. But I’m betting the name will tell us something important.”

  “All right, look into it. I have to . . .”

  Before he could finish, a quiet female voice behind him interrupted. “I need to see both of you in my office right away.”

  The voice belonged to Captain Whitney Morris, head of the Criminal Investigations Division, and in spite of her subdued tone Peller knew the matter was serious. Not a difficult deduction under the circumstances, but it was more than that. There was a tension in the captain’s face that he had only seen on the worst of days.

  “Right away,” he agreed, turning to follow her. Montufar fell into line behind. Morris led them into her office in the corner of the building. It had windows on two sides, an ample desk, bookcases crammed with heavy volumes on law and police procedure and management practices, and four chairs for visitors. Her desk was the cleanest one in the place, with little more on it than her computer, a notepad, and photos of her husband and three children.

  The last one in, Montufar closed the door behind her and they all sat. Morris took a moment to regard the photos, then said, “Over the past five years, Howard County has averaged three point eight murders per year. This Leo guy is going to shatter that statistic in just a few days if we don’t stop him. Between him and the golf attacks, we’re getting some dirty looks from the powers-that-be. And the press appears to be gearing up for a feeding frenzy.”

  She paused a moment to let it sink in. As if it had to, Peller thought. “Tell me what you need to resolve these cases.”

  He glanced at Montufar. She shrugged, almost imperceptibly. “Mostly time,” he replied.

  “Which is the one luxury we don’t have,” the captain said.

  “Everything has to be priority one. Ballistics, M.E., the works. The notes haven’t told us anything helpful yet, but Corina is researching the names he’s been using. The latest note suggests that’s important. Unfortunately, the only other constants are the numbers.”

  Morris picked up her pen and clicked it a few times. “I can reassign the golfer case.”

  “It might be connected,” Montufar told her.

  “How?”

  Peller shook his head. “We don’t know that. It’s just an off-the-cuff idea Eric had. He thought it odd that two nutcases would be committing high-profile crimes at the same time.”

  After a few more clicks of the pen, which Peller found vaguely irritating, Morris made her decision. “Rick, you work the murders full-time. Eric can ride point on the golfer muggings. Corina, I want you to switch-hit. That way if there is a connection, we won’t miss it. I’ll reassign anything else the three of you have on your plates. If you need any additional support, I’ll get it for you.”

  She waited for the detectives to rise from their chairs, then asked, “What’s the number on this latest note?”

  “Two,” Peller told her.

  “Two what?”

  “Two shots, two kills.”

  She slumped in her chair. A bad sign, Peller thought. Captain Morris wasn’t generally one to show even a hint of weakness.

  Chapter 4

  What is a number? This question is not one most people ask. Number is such an integral part of our intellectual backdrop that the concept scarcely needs explaining. Yet if you had to define number, how would you do it?

  Most likely, you would start by referring to how many items are in a group: four chairs, ten people, a thousand stars shining in the sky. You would intuitively grasp a key mathematical concept: number is a generic property of sets.

  But when someone says, “Eight,” you would still want to know, “Eight what?” whereas I would not. Eight of this or eight of that are both eight, which is sufficient.

  Or it was, before it came down to eight human lives. ∑

  Dumas had given up on quarters and began working with half-dollars. Easier to grip, he told Montufar, but not as easy to palm. He tried a vanish for her and got her approval, which was gratifying but merely a start. Peller was the tough one to fool. His eye was far too keen, spookily so sometimes, Dumas thought, good for detective work but rotten if you happened to be an amateur magician—and not a very skilled one, he had to admit—with Peller in your audience.

  “So anyway,” Dumas said once the trick was over, “I think we should ask for extra patrols in the area around Centennial Park. The mad golfer doesn’t seem to stray too far from the park. What we really need are cops poking their noses into secluded corners. If we can make life more difficult for him, he might make a mistake.”

  Montufar concurred, but something else was on her mind. “Why Centennial Park, do you think?”

  “Convenience? Maybe he lives in the area.”

  Sitting on the edge of his desk, she gazed upward, a faraway look on her face. Dumas watched her with admiration. He had taken some ribbing from other men in the department over the way he looked at her when she wasn’t aware of it, but it wasn’t physical attraction that drew his gaze. Well, not mere physical attraction, anyway. He did find her easy on the eyes. But it was more admiration for how her mind worked, the knack she had for drawing together the seemingly disparate pieces of a puzzle and almost magically making sense out of them. That was it, he thought: she was a better magician than he, only she worked magic inside her head instead of with physical objects.

  “The Fairway Hills golf course is right there, too,” she said. “Maybe that gives him some cover, makes him seem less suspicious. But then, why would he need cover? He carries a concealed sawed-off golf club, not a golf bag. Let’s look at a map.”

  Dumas turned to his computer and in a moment had the requested map displayed. The park proper was nearly a mile wide east to west and half a mile wide north to south, although a part of it extended nearly a mile north. The centerpiece of the park, Centennial Lake, stretched from east to west most of the way. Residential areas abutted the park north, east, and south, while the golf course connected to the park on the southeast corner. The golf course and adjoining parklands extended another mile to the south, weaving around additional neighborhoods.

  “That park would give him access to a huge area,” Dumas said, tracing it with his finger not quite touching the monitor.

  “A lot to patrol,” Montufar added.

  “A number of these areas are on the high side of middle class, too. We could put some plainclothes officers out there, make them look like they have something worth stealing.”

  “How do we provide backup? The bait would be working without a net.”

  “That’s one wild mixed metaphor,” Dumas laughed. He pushed his chair back from his desk and stood.
“I guess we’d better ponder that, though. Meanwhile, I’m going to go through the incidents to date one more time, see if I can find any patterns. I don’t think we’ll catch this nutcase unless we do it red-handed. Red-clubbed, actually.” He grinned, then abruptly stopped when he realized Montufar wasn’t.

  “Good thing your magic tricks are better than your jokes,” she said.

  ∑

  When the ballistics and medical reports arrived in Peller’s inbox on the morning of Friday, March fourth, they confirmed the pattern so far followed by Leo: that of avoiding any pattern whatsoever. Mark Patterson, the snowplow driver, had apparently been killed by a shot from a distance fired from a military-style M40 sniper rifle, while Andrew Carrington, the firstborn son, had been shot at fairly close range with a thirty-eight. Even stranger, although so far Patterson appeared to be a victim of opportunity, Andrew Carrington had clearly been lured to his death. The thermostat he was going to fix proved to have been sabotaged; the store in which it was installed was one he regularly served.

  The utter lack of consistency infuriated Peller. It was plain to him that Leo was toying with him and enjoying the game immensely. If it weren’t for the two bodies lying cold and still in the morgue, it might have been taken for an elaborate practical joke, with Leo laughing at his frustration.

  Then again, that same lack of consistency highlighted the one consistent aspect of the case: the name. And there, Montufar had quickly scored an easy victory. So easy, in fact, that it, too, was irritating. Extra credit points. He could almost hear Leo chuckling.

  ∑

  Immediately after the meeting with Captain Morris, Montufar had performed a single internet search, printed out the results, and brought them to Peller, who scarcely had time to reach his own desk ahead of her.