The Fractal Murders Page 4

  My brother and his family live just south of Denver, in Highlands Ranch, a wealthy suburb that didn’t even exist twenty-five years ago. It is sixty-six miles door-to-door, but the first leg is mountain driving, so it’s hard to do in less than an hour. His gym isn’t quite so far. I can make it in forty-five minutes if I don’t hit Denver’s notorious rush hour.

  Troy Keane’s Gym is a mecca for serious bodybuilders along Colorado’s Front Range. There are no chrome-plated machines like you see in the spas. He doesn’t sell memberships; everyone pays by the month. He’s done pretty well for a guy who never finished high school. He was giving a tour to two future Schwarzeneggers when I came in, so I waited until I caught his eye, then claimed my permanent locker, changed into my workout clothes, weighed myself, and walked to the back room. The room has no official name, but a weathered black-and-white photo of Ingemar Johansson sits atop the entrance. Ingemar, for those who don’t know, was the last white heavyweight champion. And probably always will be.

  I worked the speed bag for three two-minute sessions, then switched to the heavy bag. I hadn’t thought about Mike Polk in a while and visualizing him helped me hit the bag with a little extra vigor. A former basketball star at one of the PAC-10 schools, he’s tall and left-handed, so I worked combinations I thought would be effective against a big southpaw.

  A successful amateur boxer, I had flirted with the notion of fighting professionally, but it’s hard to succeed as a heavyweight when you’re only five-ten. Joe Frazier had done it, but he’d usually had to take tremendous abuse from much bigger men and hope he could weather the storm until his left hook floored his opponent. I thought practicing law would be a more enjoyable way to earn a living, though I later learned you take plenty of abuse in that profession.

  A few gangly teenagers gathered around when I really started moving the bag. “The secret’s in the hips,” I explained. I stepped back to rest and felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Troy.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought you were Mike Tyson.”

  “An understandable mistake,” I said as I struggled to control my breathing. “We look exactly alike, except he’s black and doesn’t have a big fucking streak of white hair sticking out of his head.” My hair is straight and black, but I’ve always had a small tuft of white just above my right temple. It’s a genetic fluke known as mosaicism. Some people call it a witch’s stripe. I’m told it can be indicative of something called Waardenburg’s syndrome, but in my case it’s just a fluke.

  “You look good,” he said. We gave each other a bear hug.

  “I’ve been running.”

  “What do you weigh?”

  “According to your scale, about two-fourteen.”

  “That scale’s a piece of crap,” he joked. “The owner’s too cheap to replace it.”

  “How about you?”

  “Two-nineteen,” he said.

  “You’re a stick figure,” I said, “you ought to be in the NBA.”

  “Yeah, I might not be able to slam dunk, but when I foul you, you’ll damn well know you’ve been fouled.” We were poking fun at our genetic makeup. The men in our family are short and powerfully built—thick bones and limbs. At five-ten, I’m the tallest living Keane.

  We took turns on the heavy bag, then laced up the gloves and did some light sparring in the ring at the back of the room. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a tall woman enter the room. She had dark hair and a bright future in toothpaste commercials. For a split second I thought it was Jayne Smyers, and in that split second my brother tagged me with a straight left. “Her name’s Pam,” he said as we continued circling.

  “Cute.” She wore a scarlet leotard and shiny silver leggings, but on closer inspection I could see she was only a few years out of high school.

  “You want to meet her?”

  “No, not my type.”

  “What is your type?”

  “I don’t know.” It was a question I’d often asked myself, but one for which I’d never been able to articulate a satisfactory answer.

  “She wants to be a stewardess,” he said. “Thinks serving Bloody Marys to horny old men at thirty thousand feet is glamorous.”

  “They’re called flight attendants now,” I said. “And don’t knock it—most of them take home more than I do.” Though I’d earned enough practicing law to ensure my financial security for life, in two years as a private investigator I’d averaged less than twenty-five thousand dollars annually. Jayne Smyers was the first legitimate client in six weeks to seek my services.

  “You can always go back to representing killers and crack dealers,” he said.

  “Not in this lifetime,” I said.

  We took off the gloves, finished with a quick weight workout, then hit the showers. As a result of listening to Sam Cooke on the drive down, I caught myself singing, “‘Don’t know much about algebra . . .’”

  “Why are you so happy?” my brother shouted.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I guess it just feels good to be working again.”

  3

  WEDNESDAY BROUGHT LIGHT RAIN. Mountain thunderstorms are usually brief, but steady drizzle had been falling since mid-morning and showed no sign of letting up. Buck and I had just returned from a noontime run around the lake when the phone rang. I reached for the cordless unit in my kitchen as I watched a pair of blue jays zoom in and out of the pines behind my log home.

  “Mr. Keane?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Mary Pat McCormick. I’m Professor Smyers’s graduate assistant. She asked me to photocopy some papers for you, and I wanted to let you know you can pick them up whenever you like.” Her voice had a slight throaty quality, like a young Kathleen Turner.

  “Will you be there in an hour?”

  “One of us will.”

  “Great, I’ll come right down.” I returned the phone to its cradle and watched the blue jays take off. They didn’t say where they were going. Maybe Toronto.

  Preferring fountain drinks to canned pop, I stopped at the B&F Market—Nederland’s only grocery store—for a forty-four-ounce diet Coke, then headed down the mountain. The visitors’ lots were again full, so I parked where I’d parked before. In the exact same spot. I was beginning to think of it as my spot.

  My client wasn’t in, but the door to her office was open. In surveying it I noticed a five-by-seven photograph of an older couple outside an expensive adobe home. A second photo showed my client and some other women on a rafting trip. A small plaque on the wall to my right thanked her for five years of dedicated service to a local women’s shelter. The “Fish Without a Bicycle” poster was still there, but so far she hadn’t struck me as a militant feminist. Lipstick and nail polish were usually a good sign in that regard.

  “Mr. Keane?” I turned around. The Kathleen Turner comparison continued to work because she was about five-eight and had more curves than Jessica Rabbit. The kind of body my former partner Matt Simms loves—like the buxom movie stars of the 1940s. She was in her early twenties. She had intentionally frizzed her long auburn hair, but on her it looked good. Full lips, green eyes, no makeup. She wore tan hiking shorts, a man’s blue oxford-cloth with the sleeves rolled up, and leather sandals. Her wide smile oozed optimism and her erect posture projected confidence.

  “You must be Mary Pat?”

  “Mary Pat McCormick,” she said as she extended her hand. Above her shirt pocket was a button urging others to keep abortion safe and legal. Another Catholic girl gone bad.

  “Pepper Keane.” Her handshake was enthusiastic, like that of a young woman concluding an interview for her first real job.

  “Professor Smyers is still in class, but I have the articles right here.” She retrieved a stack of papers from my client’s desk and handed it to me. Held together by a large binder clip, it was a good two inches thick. “That’s every paper they ever published.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. “How’d you get them so quickly?”

  “Just plu
gged their names into MathSciNet,” she said, smiling. “Works every time.”

  “MathSciNet?”

  “It’s the standard search engine for mathematical works.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sorry. I forgot I was talking with”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“an outsider.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m grateful for your help. I’m sure you had better things to do.”

  “Not really. Jayne told me what you’re doing. I know how important this is to her.”

  “Let’s talk about that,” I said. “Why is this so important to her?” I sat down on one of the wooden chairs in front of my client’s desk. Mary Pat took the cue and sat down beside me, then stared at the floor for a moment as she considered my question.

  “She doesn’t like losing, that’s for sure. She wants to prove these three murders were not a coincidence.”

  “Two murders and one apparent suicide,” I said. She forced a polite smile, but she was as certain as her boss that Underwood’s death was related to the others.

  “I’ve never seen her as mad as she was when those agents strolled in here and told her they were closing the case. She really read them the riot act.” I pictured Jayne Smyers confronting Gumby and Pokey. She’s an inch taller than Gombold and I suspected she’d had enough assertiveness training to hold her own with Polk.

  “How did they react to that?” I asked.

  “One guy took it in stride, but the other was a real jerk.”

  “The big guy?”

  Her eyes widened. “You know him?”

  “I’ve known Polk since law school. We were in the same class.”

  “Talk about arrogance,” she said, “I just wanted to smack him.”

  “He has that effect on people.” I’d wanted to smack him ever since law school, but the closest I’d come was a payback tackle in what was supposed to have been a flag football game. Scott McCutcheon called it the greatest flag football tackle he’d ever seen.

  “The other thing is,” Mary Pat continued, “and I’m just speculating, but I think Professor Smyers has a thing about justice. Her parents were killed when that airplane exploded over Scotland.”

  “Over Lockerbie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.” We were silent a moment.

  “Mr. Keane,” she finally asked, “is Professor Smyers in danger?” It was a question I’d already considered from a number of angles.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “If someone wanted her dead, she’d be dead.”

  “That’s reassuring,” she said. Her sarcasm wasn’t directed at me; she was just too young and good-hearted to accept the fact that any person can kill any other person at just about any time.

  “Look at it this way,” I said. “Other than a brief friendship with Carolyn Chang a few years ago, nothing connects her to any of the three victims. And if we assume Underwood’s death was a suicide, the last murder took place more than four months ago.” She said nothing. “If I find something connecting one death to another, I’ll be in a better position to know whether anyone else might be in danger. You have to find the connection to understand the motive. It’s a process of gathering information.”

  “I have an idea about that,” she said. She flung her head to one side to prevent her hair from encroaching on her face. It was a sexy little move.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “We use the Internet. We send e-mails to mathematicians at universities around the country outlining what we know. I’m sure we’d receive lots of useful information.”

  “We probably would,” I said, “but we can’t do it.” I leaned forward and waited until we had good eye contact. “No one else is to know Professor Smyers reported this to the authorities or that she hired me to look into it.”

  “But,” she insisted, “that would be the most efficient way for us to gather information.” Her continued use of the plural indicated she considered herself part of my team. I laced my fingers together behind my head.

  “Have you ever heard of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?” I asked.

  “Of course.” She did a poor job of hiding her surprise that I’d heard of it, but I’d learned some physics in my study of philosophy.

  “What is your understanding of it?” I asked. She played along.

  “It’s a principle of quantum mechanics that holds that it is impossible to measure the position and velocity of an object at exactly the same time because the very attempt to do so affects both the position and velocity of the object.”

  “That’s exactly right,” I said, “and that’s the situation we’ve got here. If these deaths are related, someone took great pains to make them appear unrelated. That suggests what in my Marine Corps days we used to call a ‘highly motivated individual’—someone who would not hesitate to kill again if he felt threatened. We don’t know who the killer is or what his motive was, but the very attempt to find out might alert him to my investigation and put all of us in danger. It’s vital that this remains a secret. I want your word on that.” I was coming on strong, but I believed what I was saying and wanted her to.

  “But,” she pleaded, “we’d just be contacting other math people.”

  “Mary Pat,” I said, “if these deaths are related, the killer almost certainly has some link to the mathematical community.” She broke eye contact and gazed at the floor.

  “I guess you’re right,” she admitted. “Sometimes I dig in before I’ve considered all the arguments.”

  “Me too,” I said. “It’s a hard habit to break.” I unclasped my hands and switched legs so that my left crossed over my right. There was a brief pause, but I enjoyed talking with her and didn’t want to leave. “So,” I began, “you’re working on your master’s?”

  “I just have to finish my thesis. I hope to earn my doctorate here. I’m from Milwaukee, but I love Boulder.”

  “Not as nice as Ennis, Montana,” I said, “but better than East Saint Louis.” That made her laugh.

  “You were in the marines?” she asked.

  “I was a lawyer,” I said.

  “Like the lady on JAG?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “My dad was a marine. I was born at Camp—” She cut herself off when Finn appeared in the doorway. He had evidently just returned from a long run in the rain. He wore a white tank top, maroon nylon running shorts, and top-of-the-line running shoes, the kind with translucent green gel beneath the heel. He was soaking wet.

  “Jayne around?” he asked as he polished his glasses with a small white cloth.

  “No,” said Mary Pat, “but she should be back any minute.”

  He looked at me, put his glasses in place, then stepped forward and said, “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m Stephen Finn.” I stood up and Mary Pat followed suit.

  “Stephen competes in triathlons,” Mary Pat explained.

  “Pepper Keane,” I said. We shook hands. He gave me his triathlete grip, so I gave him my I-can-dead-lift-535-pounds grip.

  “What do you do, Mr. Keane?” He tried to ask it in an offhand manner, but seeing me in my client’s office a second time had him burning with curiosity.

  “Mr. Keane is a private investigator,” Mary Pat said. I was ready to thrash her, but she added, “He’s helping Professor Smyers design a workshop on personal safety for women at the shelter.”

  “A private investigator? Fascinating.” He tried to sound interested, but his tone was slightly condescending. He felt it wasn’t an occupation for the educated. “Anyhow,” he continued as he turned to Mary Pat, “I just stopped by to chat with Jayne. Will you tell her I was looking for her?”

  “I will,” she promised.

  “Nice to have met you, Mr. Keane.”

  “Same here,” I said. He departed and we returned to our chairs. “What does he teach?” I asked.

  “Freshman stuff, mostly. Baby calculus, things
like that.”

  “Low man on the totem pole?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “Two years, just like me.”

  “He looks so young.”

  “He graduated from Harvard at twenty.”

  “Big deal,” I said, “I started kindergarten before I turned five.” She laughed, then gave her assessment of Finn.

  “He can be a bit pretentious, I’ll admit, but he’s not a bad guy, really. His students love him. His biggest fault is that he tries too hard. He’s up for tenure next year and he’s obsessed with it.” I was about to ask the nature of his relationship with my client, but she walked in before I got the chance. She was still as tall as I was and she wasn’t wearing heels. Pink lipstick, powder blue sundress, white sandals. And it wasn’t even Flag Day.

  “Did I miss a good joke?” she asked. I stood.

  “No,” said Mary Pat, still grinning as she came out of her chair, “Mr. Keane was just recounting his academic accomplishments.”

  “Well, Mary Pat,” she said in mock seriousness, “it’s not polite to laugh. It destroys the student’s motivation to learn.” We shared a smile as she walked around her desk and began making a pot of coffee. “Did Mary Pat give you everything you need?”

  “She sure did,” I said.

  “If you need anything else, Mr. Keane,” said Mary Pat as she neared the door, “just let me know. You can leave a message with the department secretary.”

  “I will. Thanks again.”

  “Where are you off to?” my client asked.

  “I have a date with the supercomputer,” Mary Pat replied. “Oh, I almost forgot, I’m supposed to tell you Stephen stopped by ‘to chat.’” They exchanged a knowing look and Mary Pat departed. My client stood at the window behind her desk and stared out at the rain. She had a nice view of the mountains and I had a nice view of her.