Peller shook his head.
“He has to be going somewhere with all of this. It can’t just be a string of random victims knocked off based on a sequence of numbers picked from a hat.”
Peller’s cell phone went off. “Why not?” he asked. “Maybe Leo really is just a psycho.”
“But…”
“What’s up, Eric?” he said into the phone.
Montufar waited while Peller listened. A few heavy-looking clouds moved in from the northwest.
“You’re kidding.” He rubbed the back of his head. He could feel the tension headache already building. “All right. At least the citizens of the county are safe from golf clubs. We didn’t get much here, big surprise. Let’s meet back at HQ as soon as possible to pull all the details together. Better get Kaneko to come in, too, so we can fill him in.”
Montufar watched him slip the phone back into its holder. “Szwiec’s dead?”
“Shot three times in the head while our guys were chasing him down. Deservedly so, as the man said.”
“Wait a minute. It was supposed to look like we shot him?”
“Maybe.”
“Is Leo getting clumsy? A gun tossed aside, presumably to implicate Szwiec, after which Szwiec is murdered during a police chase? Or is this supposed to be murder by cop?”
Peller shrugged and stared at nothing.
“Geez, maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe he is just a psycho.”
∑
Even with Captain Morris pushing and pulling nonstop, it was nearly eight o’clock before reports, photographs, detectives, and a mathematician were assembled in one conference room. Pizzas had been delivered and were half consumed, boxes and soda cans cluttering one end of the table, when the medical examiner’s report showed up in Morris’s inbox and she printed it out. It contained no surprises. Szwiec had died from severe brain trauma resulting from three gunshot wounds to the head. The evidence suggested that the shots had been fired from a distance and above the victim, probably from an upper-story window in a nearby house.
“If he was there, though,” Dumas said, “he must have gotten in and out pretty quietly. Nobody who was home was aware of anyone in their house, and there was no evidence that any of the houses had been broken into. By the way, Rick, we owe you a new window. You said it was okay.”
Peller reached for another slice of pepperoni pizza. “I take it you didn’t find anything there, either.”
“Not a thing.”
Montufar was shuffling through printed copies of reports. “I don’t get it.”
Morris leaned back and gave a nervous laugh. “I don’t get any of this!”
Montufar took no notice. “The gun at the Mason home has Szwiec’s fingerprints all over it, but nobody else’s. Everything we know about Leo tells us he wouldn’t do that. So obviously we’re supposed to think that Szwiec killed the Masons and tossed the gun. But why would Leo think we’d be fooled by such an obvious trick? People who are disposing of murder weapons don’t just throw them into rose bushes, no matter how thorny. They throw them in the river, or drop them in the harbor, or bury them in garbage and haul them to the dump. Shouldn’t this occur to Leo?””
His head cradled in his hands, Dumas said, “It should.”
“Exactly. So why was the gun tossed?”
The question hung in the air, unanswerable.
“Now,” she went on, “Leo sets up Szwiec. The cops move in to arrest him, he bolts, and in the middle of the chase Leo kills him. Again, the obvious conclusion is that we’re supposed to think one of the cops shot him.”
Peller tapped another report. “Which is impossible. It says here the wounds are more consistent with a sniper rifle than a police weapon. Besides, Leo already told us the magic number: three shots.”
“Unless,” Dumas added, “we suddenly have another killing with three shots.” Absently, he fished in his pants pocket and retrieved a half dollar which he tossed from hand to hand while thinking.
Kaneko, who had been silent for a long time, spoke up: “We don’t understand the new sequence yet. Three could indeed be the next number. However, the meaning of the numbers was established by the initial sequence, so it would not be three shots. It would be a third child, probably a son.”
“I meant it might be a ruse,” Dumas said.
Kaneko shook his head. “Leo is methodical. He will not break the sequence. He must kill five more times to fulfill the pattern set up by the first sequence, and each position in this sequence must have the same meaning as in the first sequence.”
“And that’s the problem,” Montufar said. “Why go to the trouble of implicating Szwiec in the Mason killings and then the cops in the killing of Szwiec if it’s painfully obvious that Leo was the killer both times?”
Dumas palmed the coin, then stared at his apparently relaxed hand. The others nodded approval, unable to tell that he was hiding Kennedy. “He staged it all.”
“We know that,” Peller said. “But why?”
“I don’t mean he staged it for our benefit, to fool us. I mean he’s portraying or reenacting something.”
Montufar leaped from her chair and began pacing the edge of the room, her expression twisted into a scowl of concentration. “Brilliant. Crazy, but brilliant. How about this? He joins the military, lives through a series of traumatic experiences, ends up with PTSD. PTSD patients are known to relive their experiences in nightmares. Do they ever relive them through reenactment?”
The others said nothing, none of them being an expert on the subject, but it wasn’t hard to see where she was going.
“I expect that would be quite a chore,” Peller said. “Tracking down all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in Maryland who may have PTSD, whether diagnosed or not. And that’s just taking into account recent history. What if he was in Vietnam? Hell, he could have been in Korea.”
“That would make him pretty old,” Dumas said dubiously.
“True, but all you need to shoot somebody is a steady hand and a good eye.”
“At eighty? Rick, Korea veterans are—”
“Perhaps,” Kaneko interrupted gently, “you could approach the problem from the other direction.”
The detectives had almost forgotten the mathematician was there, so quiet was he. “Go on,” Morris prompted.
“Perhaps you should inquire into Szwiec’s military connections. If he was not in the military himself…” The mathematician glanced at Peller, who shook his head. “Then likely his contacts include only a few military personnel. If you can identify them, you may be led directly to Leo.”
“Good point,” Peller said. “Unforunately, we’ve had a devil of a time trying to get any information at all on Szwiec.” He leaned forward and extracted one of the folders from the mass of paper. Opening it, he scanned the contents and related the pertinent bits. “We know he dropped out of high school, got a driver’s license and abused the privilege almost but not quite enough to have it suspended, and has worked a few low-end jobs. He doesn’t seem to have any bank accounts. His parents divorced when he was nine; shortly thereafter his father was killed while driving drunk. Ran into a parked semi at high speed. His mother pulled a disappearing act right after Szwiec dropped out of high school. We haven’t been able to find her. Since he dropped out of school, nobody’s had any contact with him. No friends from school that he kept up with. No girlfriend. His neighbors didn’t know him. It’s almost like the guy didn’t exist.”
Dumas flipped his coin again. “And yet, somehow he knew Leo.”
“Seems so,” Peller agreed.
“You need to find his mother,” Kaneko told them.
Dumas tossed the half-dollar from one hand to the other and performed a vanish. Again, not too bad. “We’ve tried,” he said, sounding irritated. “Wherever she went, she didn’t leave a trail. No current driver’s license, no cred
it cards or bank accounts that we can find, no utility bills in her name. She might be dead for all we know.”
Kaneko didn’t press the matter, but his expression suggested he knew something the rest of them didn’t, something he wasn’t ready to share.
Peller didn’t like that suggestion in the least.
∑
While her husband talked with the detectives, Sarah Kaneko settled in with a cup of tea and the computer in her husband’s office. There she busied herself with the case, sifting through the emails Tomio had received in reply to his inquiry. From these, she built an annotated list of students with notable mathematical talent who were known or thought to have joined the military. Twenty-seven emails had come in on the subject, most of which contained more than one candidate. Between logging each name along with contact information and whatever notes she could ferret out from the often rambling messages, she took sips of tea and pondered the randomness of the information.
John Halloran, majored in chemistry, a talented math student, joined the Air Force after graduation. Present status unknown.
Victor Alyabyev, a business major who stood out from the crowd in nearly every math class he took, joined the Marines a year before he was due to graduate. Killed by an IED in Iraq.
Krista Leandres, no declared major, showed considerable aptitude for math and had been encouraged by several professors to pursue it before she suddenly withdrew, enlisted in the army, and was deployed to Afghanistan. She returned home later, but didn’t resume her studies. She may have married a fellow soldier, although that wasn’t clear.
And so forth and so on. There were no common events connecting any two stories, and most of the professors had lost contact with their former students. A handful of students remained in the military; a few had risen in the ranks to become noncommissioned officers. One or two had transferred to other universities to complete their studies. Sarah was concerned about the vagueness of the information. It meant a lot of additional research, probably attempting to get close to the former students. She knew that the odds were against any of them being the killer, but a persistent feeling of foreboding insisted that she had already seen the killer’s name. The premonition chilled her through, and the occasional sip of hot tea was powerless to warm her.
She saved the list, nearly complete now with sixty-one names on it, and went to put on a sweater.
Chapter 13
Although students are first taught to construct proofs by reasoning from what they know, often solutions are found through a process of elimination. But before that process can prove fruitful, one has to know the full set of possibilities. If the correct answer is not in your set of potential solutions, you will have a hard time finding it. ∑
What most bothered Peller as he drove up his street and pulled into his driveway was not that earlier that day Howard County’s most wanted criminal had gunned down Howard County’s second-most wanted criminal right in front of his house while half a dozen of his colleagues watched. That hadn’t been pretty for the department, surely, but what really bothered him was that nobody could figure out where Leo had been hiding when he killed Szwiec. The evidence suggested the shot had come from a height, which meant either an upper floor or the roof of one of the nearby houses. Yet an extensive search of the area, conducted with considerable cooperation from the residents, had turned up no evidence of Leo’s presence.
Peller killed the engine, got out, slammed the door a bit harder than usual, and walked to the front of his property. He gazed up and down the street as though some crucial bit of evidence might suddenly materialize before him, something that everyone else had missed, but naturally it didn’t.
He mounted the steps to his front porch, grimaced at the broken window to the right where the officers had gained entry to search his place, and unlocked the door. Inside, he flipped on the light. The foyer looked exactly as it always looked. Stairs to the left, living room to the right, a couple of mountain landscapes decorating the walls, coat closet straight back.
In the living room, shattered glass littered the dark blue sofa that had been Sandra’s last purchase for the household. That would be fun to clean up. Photos of Sandra, Jason, Belinda, Susie, and Andrew—both portraits and candid shots—hung on the walls. Nothing out of place here, either, except for the broken window.
He moved through the entire house, room by room, taking everything in as though it were a crime scene. Kitchen, dining room, family room, each of the three bedrooms, even the basement and the attic. Nothing. Well, almost nothing.
At first he felt as though he was a stranger here, as though it was not his house but someone else’s, but the farther he went the more he became aware of memories lurking in every corner, peeking out from behind curtains and closet doors. The more he looked, the more they revealed themselves and the more he was forced to confront them. The table where so many family meals had been eaten, so many birthday candles had been blown out, so many games had been played. Jason’s room, where once a crib had stood and where the trappings of infancy had gradually given way to those of childhood and adolescence. The bedroom he had shared with Sandra, still decorated in the floral prints and lace she had loved. The exact spot in the foyer where he had been standing when a pair of officers, both of whom he personally knew, told him she was dead.
Investigation forgotten, he felt compelled to revisit these memories room by room until all the ghosts had shown themselves and he had embraced each in turn. It left him more exhausted than he had ever felt. He dragged himself back to the living room, stared without comprehension at the broken glass glittering like miscast stars on the sofa and floor beneath the shattered window.
The secret, he had told rookie officer Sheila Crane, was to avoid thinking too hard about it. He liked to think himself strong enough to handle tragedy, but maybe he had just been looking the other way all this time.
Turning away from the window, his eyes were drawn to a photo of Sandra and Jason on the front porch swing. Jason had been just two years old then. Sandra’s smile had lit up the whole neighborhood the day he took that picture. He remembered feeling that way as he depressed the shutter.
The picture was hanging off-kilter. Without a thought, he reached up and shifted it a bit to the right. As it moved, a scrap of paper fell out from behind it and fluttered to the floor. Unable to fathom where that had come from, he picked it up. On one side, it bore a message written in small, blocky letters, almost as though a child had written it.
Another firstborn son, then I give you three back. Thanks for the use of your bedroom window.
∑
Dumas arrived at Peller’s house first, and after making sure his colleague was all right he infiltrated the kitchen and made coffee for them. Montufar, for once not operating at warp speed, entered just as he was pouring.
“Are you okay, Rick?” she asked. Dumas heard the concern in her voice, but Peller simply stared into his coffee. She laid a comforting hand on his shoulder before slipping into the chair beside him and picking up the note. “He left this?”
Dumas nodded and handed Montufar a full mug of coffee. She added two teaspoons of sugar from the red stoneware bowl at the center of the table. Dumas checked the refrigerator and found a half-pint of table cream. Like his grandmother, he drank café au lait. He added a heavy dose of cream and sugar to his coffee, put the half-full pot back on the warming plate, and joined his colleagues.
Peller silently warmed his hands on his mug. “You know what my retirement plans are?” he asked, watching the steam swirl up from his coffee.
“Denver,” Montufar said quietly. “Where your family is.” She looked around at the kitchen. There was a sort of old-fashioned stability to the room that brought a sense of calm to those who entered it, and she suspected that Peller must not have made any changes to it since his wife died. Her touch was everywhere—in the cheerful vintage crockery; the cherry-patterned, ruffled caf
é curtains; the pristine tablecloth. She felt as though she had stepped into the 1950s, and wondered if Sandra had been recreating her own grandmother’s kitchen. She suddenly had an overwhelming memory of her own grandmother’s house: the rich scents of cooking, the warm colors, the love and security she had always felt there.
He nodded. “A few months after the accident I started thinking about selling the house, but then I realized that would just add to the emotional upheaval. I can’t live someplace that has no…” He waved half-heartedly.
“Roots,” Dumas suggested.
Peller nodded. “Roots.” He took a sip and closed his eyes. “So I thought I’d wait until Jason’s family had put them down.” He opened his eyes and glared at the note. It seemed to accuse them silently. “Why me? What does he have against me?”
“Do you have any military connections?” Dumas asked.
“I know a few people who were in the armed forces years back. I don’t think I know anyone who’s currently in the military.”
“That can’t be it, then.” Dumas grinned wickedly and nudged the sugar bowl towards Montufar. “If you want to stay somewhere else for a couple of days,” he offered, “I have a spare room in my apartment.”
Peller shook his head slightly. “Thank you, but no. I’m not about to even look like I’m running away.”
Absently, Montufar pulled the sugar bowl closer and added another half-teaspoon to her coffee. “Do you belong to a church?” she asked abruptly, her eyes focused on something well beyond the room.
Peller regarded her, bemused. “When I was growing up, we went to a Methodist church. I fell out of the habit after I left home, though.” He took a sip of his coffee while Montufar stirred hers. “Sandra was more of a find-Jesus-on-your-own type, so she was fine keeping what religion we did have in our home.”
“My family’s Catholic,” Montufar said, finally looking at her companions. “I could make the Sign of the Cross before I could walk.” Leaning back and gazing up at the ceiling, she let out a breath and shook her head. “But after all this, I have to wonder if God’s listening.”
The Fibonacci Murders Page 12
