The Fibonacci Murders

by Dale E. Lehman

  Ella wiped away her tears with the back of her hand and nodded.

  “We have each other, and anyway, he’s going to be fine.”

  Ella looked away. “You don’t know that. He could have some kind of brain injury.”

  “Ella, look at me,” Montufar said firmly. Their eyes met again. “Have faith.”

  Ella let go of Montufar and fished in her handbag for a tissue. “That’s…”

  “What Mom used to tell us. I know.”

  Ella wiped her eyes. Giving Montufar a sidelong glance, she said, “Not what you usually say, though.”

  Montufar shrugged. “Things haven’t been usual. I was thinking about her the other day, and dad, too. Eduardo is more like them than either of us, but they are in us, too. Their faith in us, it’s their gift to us. We just have to remember.”

  Ella nodded. “I’ll try. You were always stronger than me. But I’ll try.”

  ∑

  MacKenzie Farm Road was a cul-de-sac as much in the middle of nowhere as one could get in central Maryland, which wasn’t much to Peller’s way of thinking, but he supposed people liked to think they were getting away from it all. Most were large affairs no more than ten years old built on lots of half an acre or more. Number five was, perhaps curiously given who had lived here, smaller than the rest but looked newer. A two story house with a half-bricked façade and pale blue vinyl siding, it sported a three-car garage and was surrounded by azaleas and tufts of tallish ornamental grasses which had turned brown for the winter and needed to be cut back.

  Roger Harrison, a state senator serving his second term, had been reasonably well-liked by the people of his district. Peller knew he was one of the more vocal politicians calling for fiscal restraint in the face of growing deficits, but otherwise he wasn’t sure what the man stood for. As of this morning, it was a moot point. Whatever causes he might have espoused, it would now be up to others to pursue them.

  It should have been a typical day: the senator was preparing to drive his teenage daughter Paula to high school and then go on to a meeting with some local business owners. Instead, he had been taken out with one shot to the head. Neighbors rushed from their homes to find his body sprawled on the concrete halfway between the door and the car and Paula collapsed to her knees, screaming.

  When Peller arrived on the scene, the crime scene unit had cordoned off the area and a pair of EMTs hovered over Paula. “Take it easy on her,” one of them warned Peller. “We’re moving her to the hospital as soon as you’re done.”

  Peller crouched down in front of Paula. She had been neatly dressed in a pleated wool skirt and cardigan—her choice of wardrobe struck Peller as strangely preppie for this day and age when kids went to school in pajama pants—and her hair and face carefully groomed, but now the hem of her skirt was dirty from the driveway, her hair was shaken loose, and mascara bled down her cheeks. “Paula, do you remember what happened?”

  She shook her head dumbly, her eyes vacant.

  “Anything?” he prompted. “Anything at all?”

  No.

  “Can you tell me which way the shot came from?”

  She looked up at him, eyes haunted. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “It was so loud. It echoed . . .” She dropped her head to stare at the ground. “Daddy . . . .”

  Peller straightened up and nodded to the EMTs. The woman took her gently by the shoulders. “Come on, honey,” she said in the voice mothers use to calm very small children. Peller hoped that the girl would be all right. It was unsettling to see a thousand-yard stare on the face of a sixteen-year-old.

  Now Peller took a good look around, standing next to the spot where Harrison had died. There were a number of possible places the shooter could have been hiding. If not actually in one of the nearby houses—which Peller didn’t think likely but was always possible—he could have been in one of seven or eight stretches of the woodland that meandered behind them. From any of them, it would have been a respectable distance.

  The situation reminded Peller of the first murder. Mark Patterson, the snowplow driver, had been killed while driving past Symphony Woods. The killer had apparently been back in the woods, a pretty fair shot as one of the officers on the scene had commented at that time, through the trees at a moving target. Harrison, too, had been the victim of a pretty fair shot. The other shootings had been done at closer range, but each victim had been shot just once.

  Leo, it seemed, was at least a marksman and quite possibly a sniper. One of the killings had been done with a military weapon, which suggested he had a military background. It wasn’t much, but Peller would take anything at this point.

  He had dispatched officers to talk to the neighbors and wanted to stick around until they reported back. If anything interesting turned up, he would want to interview the witnesses personally. But it wasn’t a day for plans to go well.

  His cell phone rang with the tone he had set for Captain Morris. “We’ve got huge trouble,” she told him.

  “Worse than a dead politician?”

  “Much worse. A whole family has been killed in Clarksville, in a house right next to River Hill High School.”

  “My God.” Peller felt the need to sit down but instead stomped into the middle of the yard and glared at one of the places Leo might have earlier hidden.

  “Eight people, Rick. Just like he said. A group of eight. Father, mother, grandmother, and five children.”

  “All shot?”

  “Execution-style.” Her voice sounded far away.

  “How old were the kids?”

  “The oldest was twenty, the youngest nine. I know Corina’s at the hospital, but maybe we should…”

  “No,” Peller said sharply. “See if Eric can get up there, and I’ll join him as soon as I finish here.”

  Morris let a bit of dead air hang between them. “All right. But we’ve got to stop this animal, Rick. We can’t let this go on any longer.”

  “If you have any suggestions,” he snapped, “I’m open to them.”

  In the ensuing silence Peller nearly apologized, but before he could Morris said, “I wish I did.” The sorrow in her voice told him she wasn’t offended, just desperate.

  Across the street, one of the officers emerged from a vaguely castle-like house and motioned Peller over. “Have Eric call me if he needs anything,” he told Morris. “Something might have turned up here.”

  He hurried to the castle-house, where the officer motioned him in. “The lady of the house, Virginia Smullyan, says she saw a man with a rifle out in the woods.”

  “Can she describe him?” They made their way through a high-ceilinged foyer. On the left, Peller noted a coat closet with full-mirror doors. His reflection looked more haggard than he would have thought. On the right, the walls were liberally hung with oil paintings, mostly nature scenes that might have been local: forests and rivers and one a view of the Chesapeake with the twin spans of the Bay Bridge in the far distance.

  “Yeah, and I think she’s got a pretty good eye,” the officer told him with a gesture at the artwork. “She painted all of these.”

  They found her seated on a plush gray loveseat in the living room, surrounded by more overstuffed furniture in coordinating colors and a scattering of small glass tables. More of her paintings adorned the walls. She was in her mid-fifties, Peller guessed, short and a bit on the dumpy side, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt printed with stylized splatters of paint spelling the words, “Caution: Artist at work!”

  Peller introduced himself, and she motioned him to the chair to her right. He felt like he was sinking into a pile of melted marshmallows.

  “I’m told you saw someone,” he said, pulling himself forward in an attempt to escape the furniture’s smothering embrace.

  “Yes, back there.” She motioned towards the picture window that looked out onto the woods behind the house. “It was
just after seven. The light was wonderful this morning, and it struck me that I hadn’t painted anything right here, close to home. I guess I never realized what was outside my own back door. I thought I might paint our little woods here. I was sitting in that chair by the window when I saw him. He had a rifle and was standing very still just inside the edge of the woods. I thought he was a hunter. We have lots of deer around here.”

  “The season’s over,” Peller said.

  “Oh. I don’t know how that works.”

  He shrugged it off. “Did you see him take a shot?”

  “No, he was just standing there, very still, watching something. I couldn’t tell what, and after a moment I went on to other things. I did hear a shot maybe ten minutes later. I went back to look, but he was gone.” Smullyan folded her hands in her lap and studied them. “I guess he was waiting to kill Roger. That poor family. If I’d been more suspicious, maybe I could have prevented it.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. This guy is smart. Even if we could have gotten here in time to save Mr. Harrison, we wouldn’t have caught him and he would have found another opportunity later.”

  She looked up, eyes wide. “Wait. Is he that Fibonacci guy I heard about on the news?”

  Peller nodded.

  “My God.”

  Not giving her a chance to think about it, Peller said, “I have two very important questions. First, can you describe him?”

  Smullyan nodded confidently.

  “Good. And second, is there any chance he saw you?” He rather didn’t want to ask, because the implication would certainly be frightening, but he couldn’t take any chances with her safety.

  But she wasn’t fazed in the least. “None whatsoever. I was sitting too far back from the window. The sunlight reflecting off the glass would have kept him from seeing anything inside.”

  Peller relaxed. “All right. We’re going to have you talk with a sketch artist, but if you can give me a quick description it will help.”

  She straightened and closed her eyes. “He was tall, maybe about six foot three, and big, but with a lean face. All angles. He looked fit. Maybe that’s why I was thinking he was a hunter. He was clean-shaven, with a military haircut, and wearing dark jeans, a camo jacket, and boots. I don’t know much about firearms, but what I saw him carrying was a rifle. A long gun, anyway.” She opened her eyes and gave Peller the slightest of smiles. “How did I do?”

  “Remarkable,” he said with admiration. “But if he was in the woods and dressed to blend in, how could you have seen him that well?”

  She shrugged, as though it were nothing. “Practice. The more you look, the easier it becomes to see.”

  Chapter 9

  I have sometimes wondered about the applicability of catastrophe theory to human behavior. A branch of mathematics dealing with phenomena that exhibit sudden shifts in behavior resulting from small changes in conditions—think of a landslide, where the side of a mountain suddenly collapses—catastrophe theory has been used to model aspects of human behavior, both individually and culturally. But I am not an expert in this area, so at most I wonder whether or not a particular situation can be modeled thus.

  The temptation was there in the case of the Fibonacci murders. A carefully crafted sequence of events suddenly and without warning gave way to an entirely different sequence of events, just as carefully crafted, on the surface very similar, yet baffling in its differentness. Had something in the killer’s mind pushed him over the lip of a cusp and set off a rapid cascade of events that led to the new sequence, as the landslide transforms the very shape of the mountain?

  Such speculation may lead to profound insight, but often it is vain imagination. ∑

  Monday was Monday all around. Eric Dumas had been helping Captain Morris prepare for her press conference when word of the murdered family came in. Two minutes later, the mathematician arrived looking for Peller. Morris told Dumas to set him up in a cubicle with the files on the murders, after which the detective rushed out to the latest crime scene. Only when he was halfway there did he realize he hadn’t thought to ask Tom if he was okay looking at photos of corpses. People unused to such sights could be squeamish. It wouldn’t do to bring their precious mathematician in only to frighten him off ten minutes later, but it was too late now to do anything about it.

  He arrived at the house abutting the grounds of River Hill High School to find a circus in progress: emergency vehicles, a crowd of anxious and distraught friends and neighbors, and reporting crews of all stripes with recorders and cameras at the ready. He threaded his way through the chaos, trying to look as unofficial as possible until he reached the cordon guarded by five young, grim officers: three men and two women. He flashed his badge and slipped through as a cacophony arose from reporters trying to get his attention.

  The house, sporting pale green siding and a two-car garage to the left, proved to be a comfortable upper-middle-class home that had been well-maintained. Inside, the furnishings offered a curious contrast, mostly European assemble-it-yourself stuff in light woods and pastel fabrics. One wall of the living room had been turned into a photo gallery, where pictures of the family—a very extended family, apparently—were proudly displayed.

  In the center of the wall hung a large photo of eight people in two rows. In back on the left stood a balding, middle-aged father and at his side his blonde wife, a radiant smile illuminating her face. Beside her, a twentyish man as tall as the father draped an arm around his mother’s shoulders and those of a teenage girl whose eyes and smile marked her as his sister. In front, three younger children were arranged boy, girl, boy; while to the right their frail grandmother sat in a low-backed chair, beaming with pride. All were dressed formally: the men and boys in ties and jackets, the women and girls in soft pastel dresses. Although the portrait was posed, there was nothing artificial about the closeness of this family. Dumas thought of Easter and spring weddings.

  On the floor beneath the portrait, dressed in the same clothing they had worn for the portrait, eight bodies had been carefully arranged to mimic it. Father, mother, oldest son, and oldest daughter lay on the floor. The other children and grandmother had been placed on top of them. The oldest son’s arms had been arranged around his mother’s and sister’s shoulders; the grandmother bent and slightly turned to suggest a seated posture. Gaping exit wounds shattered their foreheads.

  Dumas stood, silent, while the crime scene team swirled around him. Beyond doubt, the lifeless pile of bodies was the worst thing he had ever seen. Monstrous. Heartless. Leo’s mocking spirit filled the room.

  Officer Graham, who had come from Jamaica so long ago that Dumas couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t on the force, came to stand next to Dumas. “What evil thing was here, Eric?” he asked, his accent more marked than usual. “They couldn’t possibly have deserved this.”

  “None of Leo’s victims deserved it.”

  Graham’s eyebrows went up. “Leo?”

  “Our name for the monster. Long story. Who reported this?”

  “A neighbor who came looking for the mother. When there was no answer at the door, she went around back and looked in the window.”

  “Must’ve been a terrible shock,” Dumas said, and Graham nodded. Dumas turned his attention to the wall to his left. There, a set of eight kitchen chairs had been placed, the easy chairs and table that normally sat there pushed unceremoniously aside to make room. Cut ropes and strips of cloth lay in a heap in front of the chairs. The wall itself was splashed with blood and tissue and gouged where the spent bullets had driven into the sheetrock.

  “They were bound and gagged when he killed them,” Dumas said.

  “Looks like it.”

  Dumas turned away from the carnage. “Aside from the obvious, what have we got so far, Kevin?”

  “We’re searching the house and the grounds now. So far nothing seems out of place except…” He ca
st a quick glance around the room, then looked away.

  “Yeah. Damn. I need some air.”

  Graham pointed to a doorway. “There’s a back door out the kitchen.”

  Dumas made directly for the exit, only noting in passing that the kitchen was pristine: no dirty dishes, no food left lying about, the small table cleared of all items except a vase holding red and yellow artificial flowers. Outside, he leaned heavily against the house and sucked in the cool air. The overcast sky suggested the weatherman had been right in forecasting light rain for the afternoon. A strip of woods separated the back yard from the school grounds beyond. The building and full parking lot were visible through the bare trees.

  Earlier in the day, Dumas had been upbeat. Having put a name to the golf club crimes—Julian Szwiec—gave him a sense of accomplishment. It wasn’t merely that they were now close to getting a dangerous nutcase off the streets. He felt very deeply that there was a connection between Szwiec and Leo. Sure, proof was lacking, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that hiding somewhere in the woodpile of the evidence lay something they’d overlooked that would prove it. Peller needed to see it before he’d believe it and Montufar needed to find a rationale to believe it. Dumas simply felt it, and he trusted his instincts.

  But that was this morning. This latest murder had left his emotions shattered. His eyes played over the trees as though searching that metaphorical woodpile.

  Trees.

  Woods.

  Strange, he thought.

  Szwiec liked trees. They hid him and gave him cover. That was why he’d chosen Centennial Park. He lived on its edge and used it as a conduit leading him to his victims and safely back home.

  And here were the trees again, as they had been in the murders of snowplow driver Mark Patterson and the double murders of Zachary Rymer and Helen Kamber. Granted that trees were never far away in this county, yet it gave Dumas an eerie feeling. As Montufar had predicted, the case seemed to grow more twisted each day.