The Fractal Murders Part 8

"When was the next edition scheduled to be published?"

"There wasn't a firm date, but it was still several years off. I think the last edition came out a few years ago." I felt the footlocker starting to sag a little under my weight, so I stood and faced Bartels.

"Was Professor Fontaine working on anything new before he died? Anything he hadn't written about in the past?"

"Not that I know of. To be honest, I never saw him on campus last summer. He spent most of his time managing the farm."

"How do you know that?" One of the most important questions an investigator can ask.

"I stayed here last summer and worked the harvest for him. He loved that farm; if a combine or tractor broke down, he'd be out there with a toolbox. Wouldn't let anyone else work on 'em."

"He just gave up academics for the summer?"

"For the most part. He'd read the Wall Street Journal every day, but that was like a hobby. He enjoyed charting his stocks and following the market."

We talked another twenty minutes and he gave me his story. A native of Missoula, he was finishing his junior year and would work for the Fontaines again over the summer. Long-term plans included graduate school and a career in engineering.

When I couldn't think of any more questions, I gave him my card and asked him to call me if he thought of anything that might be relevant. I was just leaving when I heard my name. "Mr. Keane?"

"Yes?"

"Who's paying you to do all this?"

"My client was a friend of one of the victims," I said. I didn't tell him she was a math professor. Or that she lived in Boulder. Someone was killing mathematicians; I didn't know who or why, but I didn't want to draw unnecessary attention to my client. Wouldn't be prudent.

When I returned to the motel in the late afternoon, a man in a gray suit was waiting for me. My size, my age. The odds were two to one that he was the FBI's resident agent in Walla Walla. "You must be J. P. Sartre," he said with a smile. I approached my room and opened the door. He followed me, but stopped just outside the doorway. I removed my tie and began to unb.u.t.ton my shirt. "I'm Wallace Gibbs," he said. He removed his credentials from his suit pocket and held them out for me. "I'm the FBI's resident agent in Walla Walla."

"Sounds like a cush job," I said. "I've been here two days and haven't seen a single federal crime."

"It's a good gig," he admitted. "Mind if I ask about your interest in Paul Fontaine?"

"You must be friends with Edna down at the courthouse."

"She knows my number," he said. I continued changing into casual clothes, even though the door was wide open for all the world-or at least all of Walla Walla-to see my s...o...b..-Doo boxer shorts. "I'm guessing you didn't pay cash for the rental car," he added, "so I can get your real name out at the airport if you don't want to tell me."

"My name's Pepper Keane," I said. "I'm a private investigator from Colorado." I handed him one of my cards. "Tell Polk I said hi."

"You know him?"

"Since law school."

"I went to high school with him. Had our twenty-fifth reunion last year."

"Was he a d.i.c.k in high school?" I asked.

"Yeah, he was," he replied. "And he hadn't changed much when I saw him last year." I pulled a pair of khaki shorts from my suitcase and said nothing. "Care to tell me the ident.i.ty of your client?" he asked.

"Nope."

He sort of grinned and nodded his head up and down. "Well," he said as he began walking away, "it was good talking with you." I began to close the door. "Hey," he added, "I really enjoyed The Age of Reason."

8.

HOW WAS WALLA WALLA?" asked Scott.

"It's 'the city so beautiful they named it twice.'"

"Is that what they say?"

"That's what it says on the police cars."

"That's better than 'to serve and protect.'"

"It says that too."

"Oh." It was a sunny Wednesday morning and we were enjoying bagels and coffee in Boulder at Moe's Bagels, on Broadway. Wearing shorts, sitting at an outside table. Moe's is located in an old strip mall that has managed to thrive by embracing its 1950s architecture and leasing s.p.a.ce only to trendy stores and restaurants. It's a popular place.

"I hit it off with the detective up there," I said. "Another ex-marine." I summarized what I'd learned.

"Two million dollars is a lot of money for a math professor," he said.

"He invested wisely." I handed him my copy of the inventory of a.s.sets. He studied it.

"We should be in the wheat business," he said.

"Yeah."

"Bought stocks instead of mutual funds. Kind of risky."

"A couple of people told me he liked to play the market. Can't argue with the results."

"Guess not," he said as he handed the doc.u.ment back to me.

"What did you learn?" I asked.

"You owe me," he said.

"Noted."

"Getting into the databases was easy, but lots of people have pa.s.sed through the doors of those schools since seventy-seven, so I had to design a little program to search for matching names and Social Security numbers. I found three people who fit our parameters. Then I went back and dug up as much as I could on each of them."

"I might have to promote you to vice president for information services," I said. He bit into his bagel, then retrieved some notes from his portfolio.

"Number one is Gail Olgilve. Majored in math at Whitman and graduated in ninety-two. Did graduate work at Nebraska for two years, then on to Harvard for her doctorate. Now teaching in Madison, Wisconsin. She never took cla.s.ses from Carolyn Chang, and her academic trail suggests she never had much interest in fractals or any other type of geometry."

"I don't think our killer's a woman," I said, recalling that Carolyn Chang had been raped.

"Me either, but I wanted to be thorough." He went inside for more coffee, then struck up a conversation with a sophisticated-looking blonde at another table. In her early thirties, wearing a great tan, a little too much makeup, and lots of gold jewelry. Her German shepherd lay at her feet as she perused the Boulder Daily Camera. Scott began by asking the dog's age, then used his Brad Pitt smile to get the basics. "She's single," he said when he finally returned.

"High maintenance," I said. "Tell me about the other two." He looked at me as if to say, Suit yourself, then glanced at his notes.

"The next name that pops up is Mark Sweeney. He spent a year at Whitman, but finished his undergraduate work at Harvard, where he too majored in math. Graduated in eighty-seven. Joins the navy's nuclear submarine program and spends his life doing something that is not just a job, it's an adventure." He handed me some doc.u.ments. They were copies of Sweeney's officer-effectiveness reports.

"How in the h.e.l.l did you-"

"Proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished, the navy rewards Sweeney's outstanding performance by sending him to Nebraska to teach ROTC for three years. While there, he takes graduate cla.s.ses from Carolyn Chang. He earns his master's and goes back to driving subs. Does that for eighteen months, then lands an a.s.signment at Annapolis. By this time, he's a lieutenant commander."

"Jesus, Scott, that's great work."

"I thought so."

"We'll want to take a hard look at him."

"No need to," he said. "He's dead. Struck by lightning last August. Plenty of witnesses." He handed me a newspaper article he'd downloaded describing the incident. Sweeney had caught a lightning bolt while jogging.

"How'd you learn he was dead?"

"Navy officers get effectiveness reports every six months, so there should've been another report in his file. That made me curious, so I called Annapolis and pretended to be an old cla.s.smate. A lady in the math department told me what had happened."

"Death," I said, "the ultimate alibi."

"Cheer up," he said, "I haven't told you about bachelor number three."

"By all means."

"Guy's name is Thomas Tobias. Majors in math at Whitman and earns graduate degrees at Harvard. Despite his credentials, he can't find a tenure-track position, so he takes a temporary appointment at Nebraska. After that, he returns to Whitman for a year to take the place of a professor on sabbatical. Then he lands a job at NYU."

"Let me guess," I said. "African bees stung him to death at Yankee Stadium just hours before Fontaine was murdered?"

"No," he replied, "Tom's case is considerably more interesting than that."

"Why is that?" I asked. He leaned forward.

"Because the son of a b.i.t.c.h has disappeared from the face of the earth."

Later that morning I broke down and called the High Country Clinic. The Sinus Infection from h.e.l.l had returned with a vengeance and I'd decided it was time to go nuclear on it. I'd never had reason to visit Nederland's only clinic, but they got me in that afternoon. I completed my health history, told the receptionist I'd quit my HMO as a result of a billing dispute and would just pay cash, then considered the case as I sat in the waiting area.

Scott had done first-rate work. The database maintained by Harvard's alumni office had alerted him to Tobias's employment at NYU. He'd then phoned NYU and learned Tobias hadn't taught there since the end of the school year a few years ago. He'd made no other telephone inquiries, but tried several commercial locator services, coming up empty each time. He'd even run Tobias through Social Security's master death file. He'd offered to keep on it, but without knowing more about Tobias, Scott's skills would be of limited value. At a minimum, I'd have to disregard the uncertainty principle and make some phone calls. Worst-case scenario, I was going to New York.

The doctor was behind schedule, so I picked up Being and Time and continued plodding through it one page at a time. Heidegger's technical expression for man is "Dasein," which means "being-there." Dasein, Heidegger declared, is the only being capable of raising questions about existence. We are unique because our existence is an issue for us. He wrote: The being that exists is man. Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist. Angels are, but they do not exist. G.o.d is, but he does not exist.

I read that pa.s.sage several times, and I understood the difference between a man and a horse, but I couldn't help but wonder if the horse wasn't better off because it didn't have to wonder about the meaning of life or the inevitability of death-issues that had followed me for years, particularly since Joy's death.

A door opened and I heard my name. I followed a female LPN to an examining room. Young and reasonably attractive, but seemingly detached. She took my blood pressure, said it was a little high, then asked the reason for my visit. I told her the cuff wasn't big enough for my arm, then gave an abbreviated history of my illness. She took it down, then left and promised that the doctor would be along shortly.

The doc turned out to be a slender young carrot-top named Cameron Edwards who had agreed to practice in a rural area in return for the state's a.s.sistance in paying for his education. Instead of sending him to some G.o.dforsaken outpost on Colorado's eastern plains, the state had set him up in a town twenty-five minutes from Boulder and five minutes from a ski area. I described my symptoms and told him I had a sinus infection.

He examined me, then said, "We see a lot of allergies this time of year." I a.s.sured him I had no history of allergies, but he felt the best plan was to start me on an antihistamine and a decongestant. He seemed like a decent young man, but I'd spent a good chunk of one year fighting a sinus infection that had ended in surgery. I recounted that experience and suggested that if he wasn't going to prescribe an antibiotic, he'd darn well better take X rays, draw blood, and perform a throat culture. After a brief lecture on the dangers of overusing antibiotics, he relented. I was glad he didn't take my blood pressure then. I might've popped the cuff.

Being a private eye is not what it once was. I've never had to stand on a dark corner in a trench coat with a revolver in my pocket, and I've never had a sultry blonde sashay into my office and lay down a wad of cash. This being the Information Age, I spent that evening preparing letters to the Alabama Department of Public Safety, the Wyoming Department of Revenue, and forty-eight other state agencies sandwiched between the ends of the alphabet. Not to mention the District of Columbia. Requesting driver's license information on Thomas Payne Tobias, date of birth 2/5/66.

And that was about as glamorous as my evening got because when all fifty-one envelopes were stamped and ready to go, I settled into my black recliner with a green highlighter and my newly purchased copy of Fontaine's Fractal Geometry. It wasn't light reading, but it wasn't any worse than Being and Time. The first edition had been published in 1984, but a second had been issued in 1992, and a third just a few years ago. That's what I had. Like the author of every textbook ever written, he'd ended the preface to the first edition by acknowledging the a.s.sistance of numerous colleagues. n.o.body from Harvard or Nebraska. Same story with the preface to the second edition. The preface to the third edition began with a discussion of the growth of fractal geometry since the publication of the second edition: Fractal geometry has blossomed in ways hardly imaginable when the previous edition of this text was published seven short years ago. What began as an attempt by Mandlebrot to define a geometry of nature today finds application in fields ranging from astronomy to medicine, from cinematography to cartography, from engineering to urban planning, and even in the world of finance.

It ended like this: Finally, I'd like to thank Donald Underwood, a.s.sociate professor of mathematics at Harvard University. Professor Underwood's insights were invaluable, particularly in connection with chapter twelve.

A quick look at the table of contents told me chapter twelve, the final chapter, was devoted to the use of computers in fractal geometry. And a quick look at chapter twelve told me that trying to understand it would be a waste of time. I recalled Gumby's words: "Far as we know, they never spoke with each other, never corresponded." Yet there it was, right there on page viii of the third edition.

It was past nine. I put the book down, let the dogs out, went into my office, phoned Ronald Bartels and told him of my discovery. He stood firm in his belief that Fontaine had never corresponded or spoken with Underwood concerning the textbook or anything else as long as he'd been at Whitman. Fontaine kept all comments on the third edition and had always tasked his student a.s.sistant with organizing and maintaining such letters. "I was still in high school when the third edition was published," Bartels said, "but when the FBI became involved, we dug out that file and went through it page by page. There was nothing from Dr. Underwood."

I thanked Bartels for his time, then thumbed through my Rolodex. Found what I wanted and punched in the number. "h.e.l.lo?" A woman's voice.

"May I speak with Tim?"

"Who's calling?" The new wife sounded younger than the old one.

"Pepper Keane."

"It's for you," she said, "someone named Pepper." There was a brief pause.

"Does this concern national security?" asked Gombold.

"Tim, sorry to bother you, but I just came across something I think you should know about."

He sighed. "This on your fractal case?"

"Yeah."

"Fire away."

"You told me the bureau had been unable to find any evidence that these people had ever phoned each other or corresponded?"

"That's right."

"I was reading Fontaine's textbook-"

"That's a sad comment on your social life."

"I know," I said. "Anyhow, in the preface to the most recent edition, Fontaine credits Underwood as one of the people who read it and provided feedback."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."