Montufar sprang up and began pacing. “He’s the guy who identified the golfer. He said that the golfer must live in his neighborhood!” She stopped dead and looked at Dumas. “My God, he was on the phone with Szwiec when we got there! Do you remember what he said, Eric?”
Dumas closed his eyes in concentration. “Something about a cousin of his who was always getting into trouble. On the phone he called him an idiot and said it was the last time he was going to help him out.” He looked up at Montufar. “It’s him. It’s got to be him.”
Peller felt their excitement, too, but it wasn’t so conclusive to his mind. “Julian’s mother called Frey a friend, not a cousin. His mother would know who his cousins were. This could just be a coincidence—two people with similar names.”
“Have you noticed?” Montufar asked suddenly. “All the names in this case are similar. Leo, Larry, Lucas—like those families where all the kids have the same initials. Even Leonardo of Pisa, aka Fibonacci. We can’t ignore it.”
“I agree,” Dumas said. “If we don’t move on this and Tom is right about the next number . . .”
The thought hung between them like a cloud of chlorine gas.
“All right,” Peller decided. “Let’s get some backup and pay Mr. Frey a visit. Just as he rose, the phone rang.
“Leave it,” Dumas suggested, but Peller snatched it up anyway and announced himself.
“Last number,” Leo’s familiar voice said.
Peller fought down the urge to drop Frey’s name. Instead, he said, “One hundred nine.”
Leo’s breathing filled his ears. For a moment it seemed the only sound in the universe. Then the voice came again. “I’m impressed. But unfortunately for you, that’s the easy part. And you’ve only just gotten that far, haven’t you? Goodbye, Detective Lieutenant Peller. I doubt we shall speak again.”
Peller managed to say, “Don’t get your hopes up,” before the connection was cut. He replaced the receiver.
Montufar and Dumas stood silent. “Come on,” Peller told his colleagues. “Let’s see if we got it right.”
Chapter 16
That was, without doubt, the most foolish thing I’ve ever done. ∑
Kaneko had a GPS unit in his car, but he seldom used it. He preferred to check maps and get directions online so he knew where he was going before he set out. Today was no different. He located Woodland Road in Columbia at the eastern end of Centennial Park, noted how to get there from his home in Baltimore, neatly penned a couple of notes so he wouldn’t forget the route, and set out.
When he arrived, he found a collection of about twenty squat houses huddled like toadstools in a clearing in the woods on the west side of the road along a series of unnamed drives. The houses seemed to face every which way, as though the streets. had been added as an afterthought.
Lucas Freiberg’s house was one of those that backed up against the trees of the park. It was small, tan, and white-shuttered. A gray Honda Civic sat in the driveway. The neighborhood was quiet as Kaneko got out of his car and carefully closed the door. Birdsong and the faint rush of distant traffic was all he could hear.
Kaneko rang the doorbell and waited, the folder he had prepared saddled in the curled fingers of his left hand.
The man who opened the door fit Kaneko’s idea of a Marine: tall and solid, clean-shaven, his hair close-cropped. His mouth was working as though chewing a stick of gum. Giving the mathematician a measured once-over, he said, “What can I do for you?”
“I’m from Johns Hopkins University. I’m following up on the study you were called about earlier.”
“Oh, right. C’mon in.” Freiberg stepped aside and held the door for Kaneko, who entered and took a quick look around. The room was simply furnished with a tan sofa, a few wooden chairs, and a couple of end tables. A single photo hung on the wall depicting a couple who Kaneko thought must be Freiberg’s parents.
When he turned back to his host, he noted Freiberg taking a careful look around the neighborhood before closing the door. “Make yourself at home,” the man said, and took one of the chairs for himself. “Strange thing to ask about, mathematics and the military.”
“As with most things,” Kaneko said, lowering himself onto the sofa and assuming his usual upright posture, “it is a matter of money. The competition for grants is intense. One of our administrators is hoping to expand the pool of available money. He thinks a demonstrated connection between the two might spur the Pentagon into making additional funds available for advanced mathematical research programs.”
Freiberg laughed. “They’ll throw money at anything that sounds good. It’s hard to make materiel and boots on the ground sound sexy, but advanced math, yeah, that should do it.”
Kaneko thought there was a bit of an edge in that response. “You don’t approve of what we’re doing,” he said in a subdued voice.
“I don’t care one way or the other. I did my hitch. I suppose somewhere along the line math can help defeat our enemies. But when you’re over there in the thick of things, you know what it’s about?”
Kaneko shook his head.
“Chaos. Terror. Blood. Not equations.”
Freiberg fixed Kaneko with a stare that seemed to lower the room’s temperature. The mathematician met it, hoping his thoughts weren’t showing. He had never spent even a second in a war zone, but war was part of him. His home had been incinerated in a blinding flash, his father left to him as nothing but a story told by others. He thought he might in some way know more of war than this man who had walked through its midst.
“I gather you have some follow-up questions,” Freiberg said.
“Yes.” Kaneko opened the folder and took out his pen. “Did your mathematical background play any role in your options for military service?”
“No.”
Kaneko noted the response on the paper. “Did your mathematical background afford you opportunities in the service that might not otherwise have been open to you?”
“No.”
Another note, then, “Did you utilize your mathematical training while in the service?”
“Other than the same counting and adding that everyone else does? No.”
“How about after leaving the service?”
Freiberg gazed at Kaneko for a moment, his face unreadable. “Why would you ask that?”
Kaneko shifted in his seat, suddenly worried. The question had been an intentional trap, one that he expected would only be sprung by someone who had something to hide. Otherwise, it should have received the same curt response as the preceding ones.
“What do you mean?”
Freiberg rose and walked to the window, looked around the neighborhood again, turned back to face the mathematician. “I thought you were interested in math and the military. Why ask about math and civilian life?”
Kaneko shrugged. “I didn’t design the study. I’m just conducting interviews.”
“I haven’t worked since my discharge,” Freiberg told him.
It wasn’t an answer, Kaneko thought, but it was better not to press the matter. Freiberg’s suspicions had already been raised, and that meant he had something to be suspicious of. He glanced furtively at the other and saw him watching as the response was noted down.
“Well, I think that will be all—” Kaneko was closing the folder when he felt a motion beside him and looked up to find that Freiberg had come to seat himself on the sofa. His gaze speared Kaneko. “Do you know what mathematical topic fascinates me most? Did you get that kind of information from my professors?”
Sarah’s premonition leaped forth like an unsuspected predator. “We only have basic enrollment information,” Kaneko said, fighting to keep the fear from his voice.
“Patterns. I love patterns. I seem to have a knack for them. Are you a mathematician or a social scientist?”
“A mathematician,” Kane
ko told him, then realized his mistake. He tried to squirm out of it by adding, “We don’t have the funding to hire interviewers, so we have to do it ourselves.”
“Money makes the world go ‘round. I know. I had a bit of a problem with that myself, jobs being so hard to find. Good thing I had a cousin willing to help me out. But as I was saying—patterns fascinate me. They always have. I see them everywhere. When I was in high school I started seeing them even when they weren’t really there. I saw so many of them that I worried I might have a mental illness. I had to get away from the numbers, so I joined up. Well, that and our country needed defending. The patterns followed me across the ocean and into combat, but that was a good thing. I could see what others couldn’t. I could tell when someone who looked innocent wasn’t.” His eyes gazed on sights that Kaneko could not see, though he could well imagine the slaughter that filled them. “You can’t imagine what that’s like, the power of it, the terror of it, knowing that people live or die because you can see what they are through the patterns they’re part of.”
Freiberg stood. Kaneko took a shuddering breath. Freiberg strode to the window and stared out at the calm day. “When I came home, the patterns followed me back. But now they were different. I saw the life of terrorists in a cyclist, in an HVAC technician, in a family. I didn’t know any of these people. They just happened to cross my path. They weren’t really terrorists. I knew that. They were just people who happened to be parts of patterns over here that looked in some ways like patterns over there. But that made them useful.”
He spun and crossed the room in three steps to tower over Kaneko, who had to press back into the cushions to see him. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Mute with fear, Kaneko shook his head. Somehow he had to get out.
But how?
“Actually, you do. It wasn’t Peller, was it? He could never have figured it out. Not a Lucas sequence. But you could have, and you did.”
Kaneko tried to scramble up, but as soon as his feet found the floor, Freiberg’s fist smashed into his jaw. Fire engulfed his face and spread down his spine. He fell back heavily onto the couch, where the second blow caught him, shrouding his vision.
∑
They glided in quietly, three detectives in one car and four uniformed officers in two squads converging on their quarry from opposite directions. At five minutes to two, the detectives arrived. “His car’s gone,” Montufar observed.
“Maybe he’s gone to the store,” Dumas suggested halfheartedly. All of them knew it was absurd.
Three minutes later the patrolmen arrived. Peller dispatched two to the back of the house and summoned the others to the front door with the detective team. Peller rang the bell and waited, but there was no response.
A moment later, Captain Morris called Peller to report that a search warrant had been issued for the property. “Looks like he’s not here,” he told her. “We should get Frey’s license number and put out an APB on his car.”
“I’ll get on it,” Morris replied and hung up.
Montufar rubbed her arms as though she were cold. “I don’t like this.”
“We might have expected it,” Dumas told her. “If Rick’s right that he plans to attack a big gathering, more likely than not that will take place in the evening.”
“Then why isn’t he here getting ready for it?” she persisted.
“Surveillance won’t be easy,” Peller said. “An out-of-place car would be too obvious and there’s no good angle on the front of the place from the woods.”
Dumas nodded across the street. “Maybe one of the neighbors would let us borrow a window.”
“Have one of the officers check on it,” Peller said. “And I’d better tell the captain we need that press conference.” He began dialing.
“The sooner the better,” Montufar agreed. Her companions occupied with their tasks, she retreated to the curb and perused the house. It was as nondescript as the surrounding houses; nothing outwardly sinister betrayed its occupant. Its silence taunted her. “Eric?” she called, and when Dumas turned she asked, “Have we heard from Professor Kaneko today?”
“The professor? I don’t think so.”
She looked at the house again. This time it made her think of brujos and poison toads. No, she didn’t like this at all. Silently, and for the first time in more years than she could recall, she offered up a prayer.
∑
Kaneko first became aware of his inability to move. It seemed his muscles refused to obey his commands as he tried to reach out, stretch his legs, roll over. The left side of his face throbbed with pain. He couldn’t move his jaw any more than he could his legs. Panic washed over him and he struggled harder, until exhaustion overtook him.
Where am I?
He heard the sound of an engine, the rush of traffic. His eyes were open but he couldn’t see anything, or at least no more than vague contours of lesser and greater darkness.
He remembered talking with Freiberg. He remembered coming to the realization that Freiberg was the killer the police had been calling Leo. Terrified, he had tried to get away, and Freiberg had hit him hard on the jaw. Nothing much registered after that, although he thought there might have been more to the struggle. Not much more, but more.
And now here he was, immobilized in the dark.
But where was here?
Experimentally, he tried moving one arm, then the other. His limbs, he realized, were indeed trying to move at his command, but were bound behind his back. The same had been done to his legs. A choking dryness in his mouth told him he had been gagged.
Freiberg had knocked him out, tied him up, and stuffed him into the trunk of his car.
What a cliché, he thought. He would have laughed if he could, but his throat was too dry for more than a croak.
But where was Leo taking him?
Imagination painted lurid possibilities. Kaneko forced them to the back of his mind, telling himself sternly that the main thing was that he was still alive. By all rights, Leo should have killed him, but something had stopped him, and the mathematician thought he knew what it was.
He didn’t fit into Leo’s pattern. His present situation was a curious repeat of the murder of the family of eight. The housekeeper hadn’t been killed because her death would have disrupted the sequence. Whatever Leo was doing next, he couldn’t kill Kaneko without interfering with the all-important pattern.
But Kaneko knew Freiberg’s secret, too, so it was hard to see how Freiberg could let him live.
It didn’t matter. Kaneko’s objective was to stay alive as long as possible. An opportunity would present itself. Now that things had begun to go wrong for Freiberg, now that a crack had split open the neat little world he’d built around himself, opportunities would arise.
∑
Freiberg had intended to arrive two hours early at the Columbia Holiday Inn—which, sited at the intersection of Maryland 175 and U.S. 1, actually bore a Jessup address—check in, and prepare for the mission. The mathematician’s arrival had thrown a monkey wrench into the works. He had a contingency for the possibility that Peller might be hot on his trail—one that involved going out in a blaze of glory—but he couldn’t get this twist of fate to fit into any of the expected patterns.
As he drove eastward on route 175, carefully moving at the posted speed limit—much to the annoyance of many other drivers who wanted to exceed it by at least fifteen miles per hour—he pondered the implications. The mathematician must have been sent by Peller. At the very least, the police must have Freiberg on a list of suspects. When the mathematician failed to report back, they would know something had gone wrong. But was the little fellow specifically checking up on Freiberg, or had he been visiting multiple suspects? If the former, they would know who to look for. If the latter, they wouldn’t be sure.
Either way, he couldn’t afford to be out in the open
any longer than necessary. His car, in particular, was a problem. They could be watching for his license plate number. He’d have to ditch the car somewhere.
But that led back to the problem of the captive mathematician. Killing him outright would make a hash of the pattern, so that wasn’t an option. Freiberg might make him a part of the operation this evening, but that entailed a lot of risk and would also alter the pattern, even if not as radically. Letting him go was, curiously enough, a viable option so long as it could be done without compromising the mission. That, though, was the problem. Freiberg couldn’t have the mathematician running back to the police before the work was complete.
A considerable stand of woods bordered the rear of the Holiday Inn, separating it and nearby residences from Interstate 95. Freiberg had checked maps and scouted possible approaches through the woods when planning the operation. His original route seemed risky now, since it would leave the car too exposed and he wouldn’t be able to liberate his prisoner without being seen. But given that the weather wasn’t bad today—partly cloudy, temperature hovering in the upper 50’s—he saw an alternative. He could leave the car in a less exposed area and stash the mathematician in the woods. If all went well, he would release him when the operation was complete. If not—well, he’d have to play that by ear.
But it still bothered him that the man was there at all. He couldn’t make it fit into any reasonable pattern. What had Peller been thinking?
∑
As a rule Captain Morris put considerable faith in her team. She paticularly trusted the triumvirate Peller-Montufar-Dumas. The talents of each contributed to a whole that was far greater than the sum of its parts. Rarely did she override them when they were all in agreement.
This, however, was one such time. The general who had accompanied Ralph Arriola to her office had already stressed to her the Pentagon’s desire to avoid public disclosure should Leo turn out to be one of their own. The phrase “national security” had been on his lips almost as frequently as the word “the.” Holding a press conference to ask for help in identifying gatherings of about one hundred people, particularly of military personnel, wasn’t going to sit well with them.
The Fibonacci Murders Page 16
