The Fibonacci Murders

by Dale E. Lehman

  Dumas found the utter exhaustion in her voice distressing. He seldom discussed religion. His thoughts on the subject tended toward the unorthodox even for these times, and such conversations didn’t often turn out well. But Montufar needed some encouragement, so he ventured, “He is. Usually we’re the ones who aren’t.”

  Montufar gave him a long-suffering look, then turned it on Peller. When Peller smiled and raised his cup in salute, she burst out laughing.

  “What?” Dumas asked.

  “That’s an awfully deep thought for you,” she said, poking his shoulder. “But you may be right. My mom would certainly agree.”

  “So,” Peller said, “what is it we’re not listening to here?”

  “It can’t be an accident Leo’s involved you,” Montufar replied. “If we’re right that he’s reenacting events from his military service, in his mind you must represent something connected to those events.”

  Peller took a sip of his coffee and regarded her thoughtfully. “How would a cop figure into events like that?”

  Dumas saw it in sudden flash, as though events were playing out before his eyes. The confusion of a war in which the enemy didn’t wear a uniform, in which a house might harbor either innocents or combatants, in which snap judgments sometimes went horribly wrong, in which fear and anger muddled by confusion sometimes led to tragic mistakes and sometimes drove soldiers over the edge. “You represent the one who stopped him,” he said. “Or the one who should have stopped him. He did something terrible over there, or he was closely involved when someone did something terrible, and whoever should have stopped it didn’t. Now you have to.”

  From the looks Peller and Montufar gave him, he thought he must have just set a new record for crazy ideas. Yet it fit the picture of Leo they had been painting all this time.

  Peller pushed his mug away. “If you’re right, this could blow up in our faces. Whatever he did while deployed, it hasn’t made the news. The military will want to keep it that way.”

  “That’s the least of our concerns,” Montufar said in an unusually subdued voice.

  Dumas found her tone unnerving. Picking up the note and gazing at it to cover his reaction, he asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Leo used Szwiec and disposed of him when he no longer needed him. He’s using Rick, too.”

  Peller grimaced. “But he still needs me, Corina. The sequence isn’t complete.”

  “And when it is?”

  Peller had no answer for that, nor did Dumas. “I give you three back,” Dumas read. “That’s odd.”

  “It’s a negative,” Peller told him. “The next two numbers are one and negative three.”

  “We’d better give this to Tom right away.”

  Peller glanced at the clock on the wall to his right. “It can wait until morning. Let him get some sleep.”

  Montufar took a drink of her coffee. “Someone might as well,” she said.

  ∑

  Sleep, however, was not on Kaneko’s agenda just yet. The list of sixty-one names Sarah had assembled beckoned him. They fell into four broad categories: the deployed, the discharged, the disappeared, and the dead. The first and last held little interest for him. For the most part, the whereabouts of the discharged were known or easily ascertained, but only a fraction of them now resided in Maryland. The disappeared could be alive or dead, deployed or home, and if alive and home might live anywhere in the U.S. They had not truly disappeared. Their former professors simply didn’t know what had become of them. And they comprised over half the list.

  Kaneko, however, was a patient man. One had to be patient to be a mathematician, he mused, since one could spend a lifetime on the most abstruse—some might also say obtuse—problems with no guarantee of success. One also had to know how to look for patterns, not only in numbers but also in structures, and in this case he thought he could see a pattern in the structure of Leo’s life. He saw a young man with both physical strength and intellectual gifts who had enlisted in the military, was involved in intense combat action, and came home mentally damaged. Thus, Kaneko reasoned, he would not be navy or air force. He would be army or marines. He would not have close family who would be concerned for him and care for him upon his return.

  Having decided this much, Kaneko divided the list of those known to be in Maryland into likely and unlikely candidates. There were only four of the latter. This he would supplement with likely candidates from disappeared list, once he had located them.

  And then, he thought, we will see what we have. Let us hope the list remains short. If so, I will turn it over to Lieutenant Peller.

  ∑

  One person in the department did manage a full night’s sleep: Captain Morris. Her husband Daniel, a physician, took considerable pains to make sure his wife stayed healthy in spite of the stress of her job. The more stressful the days grew, the more protective he turned, so that recent evenings consisted of half-hour walks through their neighborhood, tea, and Marx Brothers films. Some might have thought it an odd combination, she supposed, but it worked and she was readily able to fall asleep afterward.

  This particular night was interrupted only by a dream of which Morris could just remember fragments when she awoke in the morning. She had been at a party in a huge hall with hundreds of guests. The hall was nondescript—a bare empty space— and all the guests except two were anonymous.

  The first was Peller. Uncharacteristically, he was the center of attention, holding forth on some topic that she could not quite discern. A crowd had gathered around him, oblivious to all but his voice. She couldn’t understand what the fascination was.

  The second guest she knew was a mutual friend of theirs—Blake Compton, an intense, wiry man who had been a mentor to both of them as they rose through the department’s ranks. Compton had come to law enforcement late, after a lengthy career in the Marines, during which he had risen to the rank of a senior noncommissioned officer. Early in his tour of duty, while stationed in Vietnam, he had received the Navy Cross and the Purple Heart. When pressed for the reason he dodged the question, leaving Morris to wonder if his reticence had to do with modesty, national security, or the diffuse anger felt by so many veterans of that war.

  In the dream, Compton stood next to Morris, listening to Peller. “He talks too much,” he said, nodding at the younger man.

  Morris laughed.

  “Tell him I said hello.”

  “Aren’t you staying?”

  She turned to him, but he was gone, and Morris awoke, startled from sleep. She looked at the clock. Three twenty-seven. She looked at Daniel, sleeping soundly beside her. Draping an arm over him, she soaked up his warmth and was soon asleep again.

  ∑

  The hunter rose two hours before dawn on Wednesday, March ninth, ate a big bowl of cold cereal drowned in milk, downed a tall glass of orange juice and a large mug of hot coffee, and pulled on his clothes: camouflage pants and shirt and brown boots, but not the red jacket one was supposed to wear. During hunting season, the red jacket was meant to keep you from being shot by other hunters, but today there would be no other hunters, at least not unless they were hunting him. He had been careful, very careful, but he wasn’t so stupid as to think that they might not be hard on his trail. It was only a matter of time.

  As it had been before.

  The whole problem, he mused as he checked over the ten-gauge shotgun he’d picked up at a gun show three months back in West Virginia, was that you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. You just couldn’t take chances. Everyone knew that, but everyone wanted to pretend that the white hats and the black hats literally wore white and black. It wasn’t like that at all. Walk into a house and they’re all there, black hats and white hats and gray hats and people who change hats to fit the prevailing style. There was only one way to deal with that.

  Take this guy, this Alexis Chalmers. He was probab
ly okay. But how could one know? He kept a very strict routine, cycling around the neighborhood every morning on his racing bike, always wearing those weird neon clothes that cyclists liked to wear, always taking the same route, up and down the same hills, carefully regulating his speed, timing himself. He could just be exercising or training for a race.

  Then again. That Raheem fellow said he was just trying to make a living, a handyman repairing whatever needed fixing in people’s homes and shops, and look how that had turned out. His real racket was selling information on troop locations and movements to terrorists. How many IED’s were placed in just the right spots thanks to Raheem’s “innocent” business?

  Stuffing the gun into its carrying case, the hunter had to admit that on rare occasions he felt a bit sorry about that one. Not for Raheem, but for his old man. His old man legitimately did the sort of work Raheem did as a cover for treachery. He’d taught Raheem everything he knew about the business.

  You’d think a firstborn son would have a little more respect.

  ∑

  The first item on Montufar’s agenda that morning was visiting Eduardo. Her brother, still looking a bit wan, was awake enough to smile at her when she came through the door. She went quickly to his side and ran a hand lightly over his cheek. “How are you?” she asked, her voice as soft as it ever got.

  He nodded weakly.

  Recalling what Dr. Kendrick had said about the skull fracture and possible loss of verbal memory, she wondered if his silence was due to the injury or simply that he wasn’t strong enough to speak yet. “Well, you’re looking much better this morning,” she told him. “Yesterday you looked like a car had run you over. Today you only look like it hit you.”

  Eduardo cracked a smile and chuckled, although the effort seemed a bit much for him. “Ella?” he asked.

  “Once she knew you were going to pull through, she did, too.”

  “She needs a husband.”

  “You won’t get off the hook that easily.”

  He chuckled again, then closed his eyes. “I’m not good company. Too tired.” He peeked at her with one eye to see her reaction.

  “Nonsense. You’re more fun asleep than most people are awake.”

  He closed his eye again and smiled. “I know.”

  She held his hand for awhile and he drifted off to sleep. She could have stayed there all morning, but a few minutes later her cell phone began vibrating. Her throat constricted when she saw it was Peller.

  Connecting, she asked, “What now?”

  “How’s Eduardo?” he asked.

  “He’s doing okay. Sleeping at the moment.”

  “I hate to do this, but the next victim’s been found, a college student shot while cycling around Clarksville.” He gave her the location and told her he was en route.

  “All right, I’ll be there as soon as possible.” She hung up and looked at Eduardo’s face, relaxed in sleep. Releasing his hand, she moved quietly to the door.

  Just as she was about to leave, he spoke again, although his eyes remained closed. “Be careful.”

  “I will,” she promised. “Get some sleep now.”

  But he already was.

  ∑

  Of all the strange things that had happened in this case, Dumas thought, this was the strangest. Of course he knew it had to do with the sequence of numbers, and Leo had already told them what the next numbers were, but this was no less creepy for it.

  The call had come in while Peller and Montufar were on their way to Clarksville. A woman in hysterics called 911, demanding that the police immediately surround her house to keep the killer out. “It’s him!” she kept insisting. “It has to be him!” There was little doubt who she thought it was, so Dumas raced the three squad cars that had been dispatched to the cluster of houses on Woodlot Road near its intersection with Harper’s Farm Road, not sure if he wanted to beat them there or not. On the one hand, it was probably foolish to wade in alone. On the other, he wouldn’t mind being the one to take Leo down.

  As it turned out, they all arrived at once. The houses, eight in all, huddled between the road and a stand of woods. They were largish homes, upper-middle-class in feel, all unique and yet in some odd way feeling like clones of each other. Four of them stood directly on Woodlot. A narrow lane cut between the middle two, giving access to four more behind, set in a semicircle. The call had come from the northernmost of these.

  One of the uniformed officers accompanied Dumas while the others carefully moved around the outside of the house and, after determining it was clear, fanned out to check the other houses and the woods.

  The door snapped open as soon as Dumas rang the bell, revealing the hysterical woman who had placed the call. “Oh my God!” she moaned. “Thank you, thank you! Oh my God!” She looked to be in her early sixties and was surprisingly short for the size of her voice, standing just under five feet tall.

  “May we come in?” Dumas asked, keeping his expression calm but unsmiling.

  She stepped back and motioned them in. “Yes, come in. It took you forever. Seemed like it anyway. This is horrible! Come here, let me show you this.”

  As she led them back through the foyer to a living room done up like an Italian villa, Dumas said, “I have to apologize, but I don’t know your name. We were in a rush to get out here.”

  “Phyllis Waggoner,” she replied. “I live here with my son Bernie and his wife Magda. Just look at this.”

  She picked up a slip of paper from the coffee table and handed it to Dumas. It appeared to be a fragment of college-ruled notebook paper, possibly ripped from a spiral notebook, bearing a message in carefully-penned block letters: Three potential targets spared.

  “Where did you find this?” Dumas asked.

  Waggoner pointed to the coffee table. “Right there. It’s him, isn’t it?” Her lips quivered as if she were about to cry, but she sucked in a breath and stared into Dumas’ eyes as if challenging him to say anything different.

  He nodded. “It is. But I don’t think you need to worry. He’s basing his crimes on numbers, and today’s number was negative three. He picked you because three people live here, three people who he did not intend to kill.”

  “But he was here. He was standing right here in this room, in this spot, when he left that note.”

  “He won’t be back,” Dumas said. “I think we can be sure of that.”

  Sinking to the sofa, Waggoner watched Dumas bag the note and instruct the officer to call in the crime scene unit. “How?” she asked.

  “It’s how he works. He never targets the same place twice. He mixes things up, tries to keep us on our toes. We’re going to have our people go over your house to see if we can find any material evidence. Fingerprints, that sort of thing.”

  She nodded absently. Just as Dumas turned to leave, she said, “He mixes things up? Then maybe this time he will come back!”

  Chapter 14

  I’ve frequently found that the hardest problems are solved not through incessant work but by feeding the mind and then letting it rest. How often has a breakthrough been made not at the whiteboard or the computer but over dinner, in the shower, or even through a dream. The subconscious is always at work, and it works best when left on its own.

  Unfortunately, when people are dying we are reluctant to take a break. When stumped, Sherlock Holmes gave himself the luxury of smoking his pipe, but we do no such thing lest people think we are not taking the matter seriously. Do more people live as a result? Or do more people die? ∑

  Wednesday afternoon, once the crime scene work was done and the detectives were back at headquarters, Captain Morris called them together again in the conference room and closed the door—rather more pointedly than usual, Peller thought. “So where do we stand now?” she asked.

  “Up against the wall,” Peller replied. “He’s like a ghost. He comes and goes as he
pleases, leaves no trace except for dead bodies, and only tells us enough about his plans to drive us mad.”

  “You’re saying we know nothing.”

  “Nothing of any use.”

  “Not quite true,” Dumas objected. “We’re pretty sure he’s military or ex-military and has enough mathematical training to know how to construct the number sequences he’s been using. We think he’s somehow reenacting events he lived while deployed. The military might actually know about him, about things he did that they don’t want known.”

  “Most of that’s speculation,” Peller replied. “Even if it’s true it doesn’t help us identify or apprehend him.”

  Morris directed an impatient gaze at Montufar, who shook her head.

  “I’m afraid Rick’s right. We can put together enough to have a vague picture of Leo, but he’s been too careful. We can’t get near him.”

  “What about Tom?” the captain asked. “Has he come up with anything helpful so far? Where is he, anyway?”

  “We have to give him the new numbers,” Dumas said.

  “Do that. What else? There must be something we can do.”

  Peller leaned back. “Only thing I can think of is to contact the military. But as Eric said, they may not want us digging too far into Leo’s background.” Morris scowled at him, then looked away. He couldn’t blame her for being frustrated and angry with her crew. They should have had some results by now, at least a suspect or two, but all they could produce were a few educated guesses. And the killings went on.

  To underscore the point, the youngest detective on the force, a twenty-six year old Cherokee woman named Holly Ross, poked her head into the room and made a “phone call” gesture at Peller. “It’s him,” she said.

  “Send it in here,” Morris said before Peller could speak. When the phone rang a moment later, he put it on speaker.