The Fibonacci Murders

by Dale E. Lehman

  “It occurs to me,” he finally said, “that this killer might once have been a student with some talent for mathematics. He seems quite methodical. The police believe he was overseas in the military. So perhaps he is a young man who returned from his tour of duty with mental problems.”

  She lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips and blew on it, then made a show of slurping it up. Kaneko had to laugh in spite of himself. Having gotten his attention, she repeated, “You are not the police.”

  “But if I can help…”

  “You might get into trouble.”

  “I don’t think so. All I intend to do is make some inquiries of colleagues and draw up a list of possible suspects. I will then turn that over to Detective Peller.”

  She gave him a skeptical look.

  He shrugged.

  “I know you, Tomio. You won’t be satisfied with a long list of possible suspects. You are driven to find solutions. You’ll try to winnow it down, and that will mean making contact with at least some of the people on the list.”

  Kaneko studied his hands for a moment. “Yes. I suppose it will. But I can’t sit by and do nothing while people are dying.”

  “People are always dying. I had family there, too. In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now we have family here, our children and our grandchildren and, God willing, many more generations to come. We must serve the present and the future, not the past.”

  He looked her in the eyes. She wasn’t afraid. She was just talking sense as she saw it. But so was he. “I agree,” he told her. “And that is why I must do this.”

  Sarah studied his face for a few moments. “Then I will help.”

  ∑

  Jerry Souter caught the press conference entirely by accident. One of the Baltimore news/talk stations had carried it live, and he just happened to have his radio on at the time because the quiet of his house had started to drive him nuts. Once upon a time his wife Amanda and three kids had kept the place in fairly perpetual chaos, but the children were grown and after Amanda’s death from cancer they didn’t come around very often. She had been the one who held the family together, not him.

  Not that he much complained about their absence, but the quiet, that was something else again. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to it. The radio sometimes helped, although he didn’t care for the music played by most stations these days. He didn’t care for talk radio as such, either, but he was pretty good at tuning out the actual words and allowing the chatter of voices to form a backdrop to his day.

  The press conference, though, that was personal. He knew and liked Peller, and was interested in hearing what the police had to say about the crimes. Once it was over, he thought he might walk down to the deli three blocks away and grab a bite to eat. The weather was cool, around fifty degrees, but the sky was mostly clear and the wind light, so he pulled on a light coat and made his way carefully down the steps from his porch to the walk. One of these days, he thought, I should put a ramp in. But not out front. Maybe in back. Don’t want people to think to think I’m old.

  He took a casual look around as he approached the sidewalk along the street. This time of day the neighborhood tended to be quiet, with only light traffic, most adults away at work, the children off to school. So it wasn’t difficult to notice the young man standing across the street two doors down. He was wrapped in an overcoat and his eyes were nearly covered with the rim of a floppy brown hat. The guy looked like he was trying real hard not to look like a spy, Souter thought, which probably meant he was up to no good.

  Souter walked a dozen steps in the other direction, toward the deli, then stopped and turned quickly. The other man had been approaching him at a rapid clip, but once discovered pretended to drop something and leaned over to pick it up.

  “I’m on to you,” Souter called out, then continued on his way, listening for the sound of approaching footfalls but hearing nothing.

  At the deli he bought a chicken, cheese, and tomato sandwich and a glass of iced tea. Business was slow, so he chatted with the owner while he ate, discussing the upcoming baseball season and the slim prospects for the Orioles to pull out of their long slump. Afterwards, he made his way back to his house.

  While still a block away, he saw that the man in the trench coat was still there, shuffling his feet as though waiting interminably for a bus and, it appeared, keeping a close eye on Peller’s house.

  Souter made a nonchalant turn onto a cross street and walked just far enough to be out of the man’s view. Then he pulled his cell phone from his left trouser pocket and called Peller.

  ∑

  “A young man in a trench coat, watching your house,” Dumas said very deliberately after Peller told him what Souter had reported. “Now I wonder who that could be.”

  Peller tossed the wrappings of his fast-food lunch into the break room trash can. “It doesn’t make much sense, though. Why would Szwiec stake out my place in broad daylight? And why would he threaten a passerby while doing so?”

  They both looked to Montufar, who was busy washing up a plastic container. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “It’s a nutty situation. You’re the one with all the nutty ideas, Eric. This should be right up your alley.”

  He laughed, knowing she’d meant it as a backhanded compliment. “Well. Maybe he’s just stupid.”

  “In which case he’s not Leo,” Peller said. “I’ll get an unmarked car sent over there to pick him up. This is almost too easy.”

  Dumas frowned. “Hell. It is, isn’t it?”

  Before he could explain, Peller’s cell phone sounded Captain Morris’s ring tone. “What’s up?” Peller asked her.

  “Another double murder, a couple of teenagers found dead in a picnic shelter at the west end of Patuxent River State Park. You also got another letter.”

  “From Leo?” Peller asked, stunned.

  “Seems so. He must have managed to hand-deliver it. No postage, no return address, just your name on the envelope. Inside it says…” Paper rattled for a moment. Peller took the opportunity to put his phone on speaker so the others could hear. “It says, ‘Killed with three shots, for once deservedly so.’”

  The break room went silent. Then Dumas said, “Corina wanted a nutty idea, so here it is. Leo’s going to get rid of Sczweic, and he’s going to do it right on Rick’s doorstep.”

  “What?” Morris said.

  Peller filled her in on the call from Jerry Souter. “Get some officers over there fast. If nothing’s happening on the street, they have my permission to break down my door and see what’s inside. Corina and I will take the park murders. Eric, you head over to my place in case we’re too late. Which we probably are.”

  Dumas spun around and sprinted out of the building to his car. As he tore out of the parking lot, tires squealing, he mentally flogged himself for being so blind. In hindsight the two cases, so different at the outset, had been on a collision course all along. Leo had hinted at the connection when he spattered mud on Helen Kamber’s body and left her ring lying nearby. When he involved Julian Szwiec in the slaughter of the Mason family, he had sealed his accomplice’s fate. The gun found in the rosebush, Dumas knew, would have Szwiec’s fingerprints on it, not Leo’s. No matter who actually pulled the trigger, the evidence would point only to Szwiec. And now Szwiec had been set up for death on Peller’s doorstep.

  Weaving in and out of traffic while horns honked and drivers cursed, Dumas approached Peller’s neighborhood from the west while keeping tabs on radio reports from officers in the three unmarked cars converging on the area and the four squads quietly moving into position to close off possible escape routes. He was still three blocks away when the chatter picked up:

  “Is that him? Must be. Caucasian male wearing an overcoat and a big hat. Looks like he’s right at the edge of Peller’s property.”

  “Okay, we’re at the south end of the block, just around th
e corner.”

  “You see him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, both ends of the block are covered.”

  “Car 27 in position.”

  “Car 14 in position.”

  “Tyler, you guys back us up. We’ll drive in and try to take him quietly.”

  Dumas stopped on the cross street half a block behind the unmarked car at the west end of the block and announced his presence, then got out of the car and walked casually forward until he could take in the action. He found Szwiec there, shuffling along in front of Peller’s house as if lost. But he must have been wary of the approaching vehicle, for as it came to a stop next to him he turned on his heels and fled. Officers sprang from their cars, guns drawn. Someone shouted, “Police! Stop!”

  From the other end of the street, more policemen appeared in front of Szwiec, who darted into a driveway. For a few moments Dumas couldn’t see anything, but he drew his own weapon and moved cautiously into the yard of the house nearest him. If Szwiec doubled back, he might be able to make his way through the back yards and come out here.

  Shouted orders echoed among the houses, drawing closer. Dumas found himself in a fenced-in back yard, chain link on three sides but blocked by a six-foot privacy fence in the next yard over. He was about to return to the front when a terrified face appeared above the fence. Szwiec had tried to scale it but only got far enough to see Dumas. He hung there for a moment, then dropped out of sight as Dumas called out, “Stop! Don’t move!”

  A gunshot sounded. One of the fence pickets exploded in a shower of splinters and something whistled by the detective’s right ear. He threw himself to the ground, training his gun on the fence, but had no way of knowing where Szwiec might be.

  “That way!” one of the officers yelled. “That way! He’s out front again!”

  From the direction of the street, three more shots sounded. Dumas picked himself up and, maintaining as much cover as possible, made his way to the front yard. When he got there, he saw Szwiec lying face-down in the middle of the road as the officers converged on him, weapons at the ready. A squad car had moved in to block each end of the street.

  A handful of curious neighbors emerged from their houses. “Get inside!” Dumas shouted, trying to turn every direction at once. “Everybody get inside!” But Szwiec wasn’t moving, and in spite of the danger, the gawkers remained.

  Dumas approached the officers, who were talking in hushed tones. “Suspect down,” one of them was saying into the microphone clipped to his lapel. “We need an ambulance.”

  “Who shot him?” another asked.

  “Wasn’t me.”

  Heads shook and more denials were muttered.

  The first speaker exploded, “Damn it, one of us had to have done it!” He looked pointedly at Dumas.

  “I didn’t fire a shot,” he said, “although I almost caught one myself back there.”

  An ambulance siren sounded in the distance, growing closer. One of the officers knelt to examine the suspect. “Guy’s dead,” he reported. “He’s not breathing.”

  Dumas bent over Szwiec’s body and scrutinized it from various angles. “Head shots,” he said, pointing at the left side of the head. “Entrance wounds here and here and here. Three of them.” He felt his stomach do a backflip. “Damn it!” He straightened and glared at each of the nearby houses in turn as though willing them to explode.

  “What?” one of the officers asked.

  “Get a crime scene unit out here right away,” Dumas ordered. “And make sure nobody leaves this neighborhood until we’ve canvassed all the houses. None of us killed him. He was murdered. Right in front of us, he was murdered!”

  ∑

  After lunch, Kaneko sent emails to fifteen colleagues in the Washington/Baltimore area inquiring after students who showed an aptitude for mathematics and who were known to have either left their studies to join the military or to have joined the military after graduation. It had taken him some time to figure out how to phrase the request without raising suspicion. By the time he was talking with Sarah about it, he’d settled on a blatant lie, but one that he thought could be justified by the circumstances: he presented himself as looking into the feasibility of a study on the contribution of university mathematics departments to the military and hinted that such a study could provide support for government grant proposals in the future. To be most effective, he said, the study would need to look not just at students graduating from mathematics programs but also those who simply had gained a solid mathematical background regardless of their courses of study or, indeed, if they had even earned a degree.

  Responses were not long in coming. By afternoon Kaneko had heard back from over half of his contacts, some offering names of former students and some offering suggestions regarding the design of the study. He found the latter amusing if not unexpected, since the study was a ruse.

  The names, however, were of interest. Most, it seemed, had been majoring in science or technical arenas. A few had graduated before joining the military, but most had not. In some cases economic factors were mentioned, while a few students had apparently felt the call of duty. For most part, however, their math professors only knew that they were gone.

  But that didn’t matter. The question Kaneko cared most about was not why they had gone, but which ones were now back home.

  Chapter 12

  Strictly speaking, causality is the realm of philosophers, not mathematicians. Yet causal relationships are relationships, and certain aspects of relationships do fall into the realm of mathematics. Consider the case of Julian Szwiec. Although seemingly uninvolved in the killings at first, as events unfolded the fact, if not the nature, of his relationship to them became obvious. Ultimately he became one of the victims.

  While the police pursued information as to his background, I saw something clearly: Szwiec and the killer were elements of distinct intersecting sets. The parameters defining those sets could reveal the nature of the intersection and lead to identification of the killer. ∑

  At the west end of Patuxent River State Park, a twelve-mile-long stretch of forested land snaking along the Patuxent River, an access road dotted with picnic shelters had become the latest focal point in Leo’s killing spree. Word of the discovery of two more bodies had leaked out, and the news crews arrived just behind Peller and Montufar. Fortunately the shelter where the murders had occurred was a good third of a mile into the park. With the road cordoned off, the crime scene unit was able to work undisturbed.

  The officers guarding the crime scene passed them through. Peller was glad to see that one of the investigators was Kevin Graham. “What have we got here, Kevin?” he asked.

  Graham’s voice was a mixture of soberness, sadness, and disgust. “Sheila Cavenaugh and Ronice Sheppard. Both seventeen. Three weeks till Sheppard’s birthday, according to her driver’s license. Looks like they were cutting class and doing drugs when Leo caught up with them. Sheppard brought the pot and Cavenaugh had the cocaine. We bagged the stuff they were carrying.”

  Cavenaugh was a brunette with fair skin, Sheppard a rather shorter black girl. Both were dressed in tattered jeans, pullover sweaters, and light jackets; both had the painful thinness of a habitual drug user. Both had been shot in the back of the head.

  “Looks like a sneak attack,” Peller said. “They probably never even knew he was there.”

  Two more half-burned joints lay on the concrete pad near the bodies in positions suggesting that the victims had been smoking when they were shot. “Toxicology can tell us more about what they were on,” Graham said. “It’s a bad business. They’re just kids, even if they’re messed up. Are you any closer to catching old Leo?”

  Peller shook his head. “I wish I could tell you something different.”

  “Well,” said Graham, the island ringing in his voice, “fight the good fight. Carry on, mon.” And with that farewe
ll, he turned back to his crime scene.

  Montufar surveyed the bodies sadly. “It’s bad enough having to tell people their child is dead without having to tell them that she’s on drugs, too.”

  “Maybe that’s who they learned it from,” Peller observed cynically. When Montufar made a distressed sound, he apologized. “Sorry. This case is starting to get to me. Insult to injury,” he agreed in a subdued voice. “I can only imagine what my parents would say in a similar situation. But I’m old, Corina. I remember the days before cell phones and Reddit.” He circled the scene. “They fell face-forward, so they were likely shot from over that way.” He pointed westward towards a thick stand of woods, then made his way towards the trees, scanning the ground as he went.

  Montufar took a deep breath, letting the cool air fill her lungs. A faint scent of pine carried in on the light breeze to blow away any lingering stink of cannabis and blood. She suddenly felt a piercing longing to be elsewhere—a sunny mountainside, the shore of an ice-kissed lake, the chapel of an alpine monastery—some place where she could once again find purity. The filth of this case seemed to have taken an obscene life and burrowed into her pores, sinking claws deep into her soul. For the first time since she took up a law enforcement career, she wondered if she had chosen the right path.

  Peller returned. “I think he was back there,” he told her, “but it’s hard to tell. We’ll look, but I doubt we’ll find anything. Those two were like all the rest. Victims of opportunity. But how did Leo know he would find them here? He needed two victims. Somehow he must have known they would be here. Did he know them? Was he watching them?”

  Montufar gazed across the road, the opposite direction from which the shots had apparently come. “That last message,” she said. “’For once deservedly so.’ He’s been killing people who he didn’t think deserved to die. Why would he do that?”