The Fibonacci Murders

by Dale E. Lehman

  “Ah, it is you,” the voice whispered. “Did you get my note?”

  A monstrous realization suddenly loomed within Peller’s mind. “Who is this?”

  “The note I left on the third floor. Did you get it?”

  Peller sprang to his feet and motioned wildly to Morris with his free hand, trying to get her attention, but she was focused on her computer. “Yes, I got it.”

  “Good. I presume the answer is yes.”

  He had to think a moment before he remembered. The note had asked if he had gotten the message left by phone with Montufar. “Yes,” he said, “it is.”

  Morris finally looked up from her computer. “It’s him?” she asked, more by gesture than by voice. Peller nodded, and she came to stand by his desk.

  “I’m going to give you the next two numbers now,” the caller said, “so pay attention. Building number five. And finally, a gathering of eight.”

  Peller wrote the message down verbatim while Morris read over his shoulder. She leaned heavily on the desk and muttered, “Christ.”

  “Understood,” Peller said, struggling to keep anger out of his voice.

  “Until next time, then,” the caller said.

  Before the connection was broken, Peller demanded, “Why me?”

  Leo’s breathing came heavier, sounded less controlled. For a full five seconds there was no other sound, then the connection was cut.

  Peller replaced the receiver. “Damn,” he said. “He does know me.”

  ∑

  Woodland Road bounded the eastern end of Centennial Park, a backbone upon which about twenty houses, mostly older bungalows, huddled in a clearing in the woods on the west side of the road along a series of unnamed drives. Between the curves and forks in the road and the curious angles at which some of the houses had been built, the area looked to Dumas like a playground where a huge set of building blocks had been dumped and forgotten by a giant child.

  The witness lived in one of the houses that backed up against the trees of the park. It was a smallish place painted a light tan with white shutters and a less-than-new Honda Civic in the driveway. He was leaning against the car talking on his cell phone when the detectives drove up. As they approached him, he said into the phone, “That’s why I say you’re an idiot. I’ll do what I can, but this is the last time. The cops are here. I gotta go.”

  Dumas and Montufar watched expressionlessly as he snapped the phone shut and shoved it in his left pants pocket. A big man, clean-shaven with close-cropped hair, he smiled as though embarrassed that they’d heard what he’d said.

  “A younger and less experienced cousin,” he explained. “Always getting into trouble.” He thrust his hand toward Dumas, who grasped it and shook. The guy was strong. “Luke Frey.” He offered his hand to Montufar with less force.

  The detectives introduced themselves as Frey gave Montufar a measured once-over. “You seem familiar,” he said.

  “Can’t say I recall you,” she replied blandly.

  Dumas barely managed to avoid cracking a smile. Montufar had a knack for deflecting come-ons in a way that left men wondering whether or not they’d been insulted.

  Frey seemed to like it, though. “One of my special skills,” he said with a laugh. “I guess you guys want to talk business. Come on inside.”

  He led them through the front door and into a plain-looking living room furnished with a tan sofa, a few wooden chairs, and a couple of unpretentious end tables. The walls were strangely bare except for a photograph of an elderly man and woman. Dumas noted a clear family resemblance between Frey and the man.

  They sat, and Montufar handed Frey a copy of the sketch of the golfer. He studied it for a moment then said, “Definitely him.”

  “Where did you see him?” Dumas asked.

  “Right here in my backyard, if you can believe it. Two days ago, about nine-thirty, ten o’clock in the morning. I was in the kitchen, in the back of the house, cleaning up after breakfast. I looked out the window just as this guy comes out of the woods, traipses across my yard, and walks down the street. Yesterday I saw the sketch on the news and realized it was him.”

  “Do you remember what he was wearing?”

  Frey nodded. “Yeah. He had on a trench coat. Like that old TV detective. Columbo.”

  Dumas glanced at Montufar. She nodded. They both knew what must have happened. After robbing Regina Collins the golfer had cut back into the woods, crossed the park, and come out here. But on his way to where?

  Montufar put the question to Frey.

  He leaned back with a look of concentration. “Well, I think he must live right here in this neighborhood,. You got a handful of houses here, and a few more off Columbia Road.” He motioned towards the street and a stand of trees beyond. “Just back of those trees. But if I were him, I wouldn’t want to walk all day to get home. I’ll bet he’s right here. He’s probably one of my neighbors.”

  “Do you know your neighbors?” Dumas asked.

  “Nah. I’ve only lived here for about six months and I’m not the outgoing type.”

  The detectives stood, and Frey rose a fraction of a second after them. “We really appreciate the help, Mr. Frey,” Dumas said.

  He looked a bit crestfallen. “It wasn’t enough, was it?”

  “We’ll know soon enough. At any rate, aside from the sketch it’s the best information we’ve gotten so far.”

  That seemed to cheer him up. He opened the door for them and watched as they returned to their car. Montufar looked back just before she slipped into the passenger seat.

  Frey grinned at her and winked. She didn’t return either gesture.

  ∑

  The office that Peller entered in Krieger Hall—home to the Johns Hopkins University Mathematics Department—felt like a movie set. The room was immaculate. Regimented books stood in their appointed squads on the wall-to-wall bookshelves. The professor’s bare white desk was occupied only by a mail sorter, its papers stacked precisely, and a single computer carefully angled to allow easy access without obstructing the view of the door. No photographs or other personal touches marred the cool expanse. The lone window that looked out on the quad showed a meticulously-manicured lawn tastefully dotted with trees. Neither leaf nor blade of grass was misaligned. Peller wondered if the landscapers had been ordered to make the view outside as perfect as the one inside.

  Behind the desk, Tomio Kaneko was hard at work, typing on the computer. A man of average height and slight build, Peller guessed he was in his mid-sixties. Without taking his eyes off the monitor, he motioned Peller in. The detective sat in one of the two chairs facing the desk and waited.

  “Good afternoon, Lieutenant Peller,” Kaneko said, still focused on the computer. “Please call me Tom.”

  “And you can call me Rick,” Peller replied. “I didn’t expect to find you working. I hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”

  Kaneko shook his head. “Unfortunately, even mathematicians serve the bureaucracy. I took the opportunity to work on this report while waiting for you. But I can stop here.” He finished typing and made some final adjustments to the computer; then, folding his hands on his desk, he turned to face his guest. His gaze was intense enough to make Peller uncomfortable. “I understand there is numerically-inclined murderer on the loose.”

  Peller nodded. “We know he’s using the Fibonacci series as a basis for the crimes, but unfortunately the numbers are attached to something different every time, and we can’t anticipate his moves because the information he feeds us is minimal.”

  “Tell me about them.” Kaneko took a blank sheet of paper from one of his bins and picked up a pencil.

  “First was zero, nobody dies. Then a murder with one shot fired, then the killing of a firstborn son, then two victims killed with two shots, then a killing on the third floor of an apartment building. The last one
was done by flooding the apartment with gas from an unlit stove.”

  Kaneko, who had been making a list, looked up, clearly disturbed, but said nothing.

  “He phoned in the next two numbers this morning.”

  “Five and eight.”

  “Yes. Building number five and a gathering of eight.”

  “I see.” The mathematician wrote down those items and studied the list. “Victims, shots, birth order. Victims, building floor, building number. Victims. This could be a pattern, but if so it can’t go on much longer.”

  “Why not?”

  Kaneko shifted in his chair. “Because it would become nightmarish very quickly. As you have learned from your research, each number in the Fibonacci sequence is the sum of the previous two. If every third number is a number of victims, then the next two numbers signifying the number of victims would be thirty-four, followed by one hundred forty-four.”

  Peller mulled that over for a moment. “So you don’t think that’s a real pattern.”

  “No. At least, I hope not. Thousands can be slaughtered at one time. Terrorists have done so, and governments have done so. My father died when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. But those kinds of killings are not mathematically precise, Rick. A mind that is set on killing according to this kind of sequence must demand precision. How do you kill exactly one hundred forty-four people?”

  “Good point,” Peller said. And then he remembered the phone call and a small detail he had written down but not thought about. “Wait a minute. The sequence ends with eight. Leo told me that. He said ‘finally.’”

  “Leo?” Kaneko said.

  “That’s what he calls himself. Sort of. Variations on Leonardo of Pisa. That’s how we figured out he was using the Fibonacci series. Anyway, he didn’t just say, ‘A gathering of eight.’ He said, ‘And finally, a gathering of eight.’”

  “So you think he will stop killing, then?”

  No, Peller thought, not Leo. This was another part of his sick game. After eight, something else would happen, something not in keeping with the pattern he had so carefully built up.

  But then he had another thought. Maybe Leo wasn’t really a serial killer at all. Maybe this gathering of eight had been his real target all along. But if so, why the other murders? To see if they can make the evening news, he could almost hear Captain Morris saying. But that didn’t sit well with Peller. Leo was after something, but it wasn’t publicity. He would have bet his house on that.

  “Listen, Tom. Can you pay us a visit? We can give you access to everything about the case. My partner, Corina Montufar, is convinced there is some pattern we are not seeing, some kind of mathematical pattern more than just the Fibonacci numbers. Maybe when you have all the information at your disposal you’ll see something we can’t see.”

  “Of course,” Kaneko replied quietly. He leaned back in his chair and fixed Peller with the stare of a professor waiting for a slow student to work out an answer. “I can come tomorrow.”

  Chapter 8

  My initial impression of Rick Peller was that of simple efficiency. It seemed to me he had identified the key to the problem facing him and was focused on understanding that key and how it might be used to best effect. Of course, this was a mathematician’s understanding of the matter. I had no experience of how crimes are solved, nor of the messy entanglements that complicate that endeavor. ∑

  For Montufar, Monday morning lay in ruins before it started, destroyed by a barrage of unforeseeable events. Within seconds of her alarm waking her at five-thirty, her sister Ella called, crying so hysterically that it took Montufar several minutes to calm her down enough to learn that their brother Eduardo had been in a five-car pileup and the EMTs had airlifted him to the University of Maryland Medical Center’s shock trauma unit. Montufar said she’d be there as fast as she could, but before she could finish dressing the phone went off again. Expecting it to be Ella again, she answered with a quick, “Yes?”

  It was Peller. “Bad news,” he said. “A murder’s been reported in the south part of the county, off of Clarkesville Road about a mile north of Highland. The address is five MacKenzie Farm Road. The number five. It has to be Leo again.”

  “Rick,” she said, but he didn’t wait.

  “We have to get right on it. The victim was Roger Harrison.”

  She bit her lip, trying to think, but her mind was a whirl. The name was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it.

  “State senator Roger Harrison,” Peller said.

  “Oh, hell.” She sat on the edge of the bed and pinched her eyes shut.

  “You want me to pick you up?”

  She swallowed, hard enough for him to hear, she was sure. “My brother was in an accident this morning. He’s in the hospital. I was about to go there.” Peller said nothing for a moment, so without enthusiasm she added, “I suppose I could meet you down there. I wouldn’t have to stay long at the hospital.”

  “I’ll handle it, Corina,” he told her. “Go take care of your brother.” Before she could reply, he hung up as though not wanting to give her a chance to object.

  I don’t have time to think about it, she told herself, and quickly finished dressing, grabbed her purse and rushed out to her car. As she slipped the key into the ignition, her cell phone went off. Dumas, she noted. Now what?

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “We almost caught him last night.”

  “The golfer?”

  “Yeah. Frey was right. He was living three streets away. The officers doing the canvass knocked on the door, he opened it—and as they held up the sketch to ask if he knew the guy in the picture, they realized it was him. He slammed the door in their faces and took off. The door was locked, and by the time they got in, he was headed out the back door into the woods. They pursued him, but before they could close in, he shot both of them.”

  “Oh, no.” Montufar had an instant mental image of them on life support.

  “Not seriously,” Dumas added quickly. “One of them caught it in the leg and the other in the shoulder and hip. They’ll be okay, but it sure ended the chase in a hurry.”

  “No idea where he went?”

  “Nope. But we know who he is now. His name’s Julian Szwiec, age twenty-two, a high school dropout who’s worked a string of low-end jobs and is currently unemployed. We don’t know much else about him yet, but we should by this afternoon. Whitney is going to hold a press conference at ten this morning to release the name. She’d like us to be there.”

  Montufar rubbed her eyes. Just what she needed. “My brother was in a car accident this morning. I’m just leaving for the hospital.”

  “Oh, hey, I’m really sorry,” Dumas said, his voice quieter. “You need any help? I can stop by if you want.”

  “I’ll be okay. Just let the Captain know. I’ll call in when I know more.”

  She drove to the hospital in a mental fog, unable to sort out anything. The oldest child in their family, Eduardo had given them much of their strength through his cheerful outlook and his belief that they could accomplish anything they put their minds to. Of all her siblings, he was the one who had faithfully kept their family’s Catholic heritage, trusting in God to carry them all through the changes and chances of life.

  Montufar didn’t see herself as dependent upon him, but she had to admit that there had been a few times when she might not have made it without him to cheer her on. Her first year at the academy had nearly been a disaster. The physical rigors of the training, sometimes almost beyond her strength, had left her exhausted and depressed, and more than once she’d been harassed by instructors and fellow cadets on account of her gender, her ethnicity, or both. Eduardo had always been there to keep her focused.

  “Someday,” he’d told her time and again, “all these fools will look up to you. They’re gonna be ashamed of themselves, then.” And there were, indee
d, a few officers who couldn’t quite look her in the eye.

  Arriving at the hospital, she parked and rushed to the emergency room. The waiting area was only a quarter full and relatively quiet. A slight woman with a pale, bony face and raven hair rocked an infant in her arms. The woman seemed barely out of childhood herself. She sat alone, and Montufar wondered if she were one of the myriad teenagers who, unwarned by wiser and older women, had fallen into the trap of some man’s lie. The baby lay still in its blankets, and Montufar hoped that the child was ill, not dying, not dead. In Montufar’s overwrought imagination the scene became a grotesque mixture of the Nativity and the Pietà.

  A few seats to the mother’s left, an elderly black man with a stony gaze held his wife’s hand while she whispered at him nonstop. It was impossible to tell which of them, if either, needed medical attention. Montufar closed her eyes as if by doing so she could close her mind’s eye as well.

  “Corina!”

  Montufar’s eyes snapped open. Her sister Ella, the youngest of her clan, was seated along a wall, waving frantically to her. The note of hysteria remained in her voice. Montufar slipped into the seat next to her and Ella threw herself into her sister’s arms.

  “It’s all right; I’m here,” Montufar said soothingly. “Where’s Eduardo?”

  Ella loosened her grip but kept her face cradled on Montufar’s shoulder. “In surgery. He fractured his skull and pelvis and I don’t know what else.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  Ella shook her head. “Just that he was driving to work and there was an accident with five cars. He got hit from the left.” She choked back a sob. “First mom, then dad, now Eduardo. What are we going to do, Corina? “

  Montufar took her sister by the shoulders, pushed her back so they could look in each other’s eyes, and squeezed gently. “What Eduardo would want us to do. Keep hope alive.”