10

FRIDAY AFTERNOON. I WAS IN MY CLIENT’S OFFICE, waiting for her to return from a meeting.

My first move that morning had been to phone Ms. Santos once more. I asked if Tobias’s references had provided letters of recommendation. “No,” she said, “but the hiring committee conducted telephonic interviews with them, and they all spoke in glowing terms.” So much for that theory. A poor recommendation from Fontaine might’ve indicated bad blood between the two, and that would have given me some basis, however weak, to suspect Tobias had played a role in Fontaine’s death.

I studied my client’s bookcases. Analytic geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, Riemannian geometry, fractal geometry. She even had Euclid’s Elements and a three-volume treatise on the history of geometry. I was still taking inventory, head cocked to the side like a curious collie, when she entered. She was carrying the latest issue of USA Today and in it there was a story about the latest terrorist attack on the other side of the world.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. She sighed and extended her lower lip at the same time so that the dark strands of hair hanging gracefully over her forehead flew up for a split second. I wasn’t sure if she was frustrated or exhausted. She wore tailored slacks the color of butter, a white cotton blouse, and her trademark pink lipstick.

“That’s okay,” I replied, “it gave me a chance to check out your books.” She stood next to me, looked at her bookcase, and sipped coffee from a foam cup.

“I wish I could tell you I’ve read them all,” she said, “but I’d be lying. The textbook companies send them free of charge.”

“Hoping you’ll use their books in your classes?”

“Yes.” She sat down behind her desk and I took one of the chairs opposite.

“You seem frustrated,” I said.

“It’s been a hectic day,” she said. “I’ll just be teaching one class this summer, but I’m on three committees, including the tenure committee, and I’m just stretched to the limit.” I thought that a funny phrase for a woman of her height, but I kept it to myself. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you don’t need to hear my problems. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to give you an update and ask a few questions.”

She offered coffee and I declined. “You sound better,” she said.

“I finally saw a doctor,” I said. “After I flew up to Walla Walla.”

“Really?” Despite her admonishment not to concern myself with her finances, I read her mind.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “it didn’t cost much. I had more frequent flier miles than I knew what to do with.”

“Wouldn’t you have rather used them for a vacation?”

“I don’t practice law anymore,” I said. “Every day is a vacation.” She gave me a half smile, but said nothing. “Besides, I had to do something to get things moving. The detective who investigated Fontaine’s death is another ex-marine and we hit it off when we spoke on the phone. He invited me up.”

“What does he think?”

“We’re both pretty certain what happened at Fontaine’s house wasn’t a robbery.” I told her about the execution style of the murder and the many valuable items the killer had neglected to take, then summarized my efforts in Walla Walla.

“This Lieutenant Gilbert, does he believe Professor Fontaine’s death is related to the other two?”

“He’s suspicious,” I said, “and he’s willing to help, but I don’t think he feels comfortable with the mathematical aspects of the case. He’s leaving that to us.”

“What about the other deaths? Have you learned anything about them?” I told her I’d spoken with the detective in Lincoln, Amanda Slowiaczek, but that she’d been unusually hostile. I promised to keep on it.

“And Professor Underwood?” she asked. I’d been dreading this conversation. I took a deep breath and told her the police felt he had accidentally hanged himself while jerking off. My language was a bit more clinical, but she got the idea.

“I’ve read about that,” she said. “Does it happen often?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it happens a lot.”

“I guess that explains his death.” She sighed.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “It would be easy to fake. Point a gun at a man, he’ll do whatever you say.”

“I suppose that’s true,” she said, “but if you’re going to stage a suicide, why make it look like an autoerotic accident?” She finished her coffee and placed the foam cup in the waste basket beside her.

“Making it look like an accident allows the cops to close the case without asking a lot of the questions they normally ask when someone commits suicide.” She analyzed that assertion as if considering a mathematical equation.

“Yes,” she said, “that makes sense.” She seemed pleased I was open to the possibility that Underwood’s death had been staged.

“There are two other things I should tell you,” I said. I told her about Fontaine’s reference to Underwood in the third edition of his textbook.

“My God,” she said, “how could the FBI have missed that?”

“Sometimes you miss the obvious because you’re not looking for it. I stumbled onto it because I had nothing better to do.”

“You’re being modest,” she said. “Familiarizing yourself with Professor Fontaine’s textbook was a good idea.”

“There’s one other angle I’m working,” I said. “I was able to develop a list of people who either taught with or took classes from all three of the victims.” I told her about the mysterious Thomas Tobias and my efforts to locate him.

“How were you able to obtain all that information?” she asked.

I smiled. “Persistence,” I said. She waited for me to elaborate, but I remained silent.

“Well,” she said, “you’re making tremendous progress. I don’t know why the FBI couldn’t have done these things.” Still angry because she felt the feds hadn’t taken her seriously. I smiled, said nothing. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I guess I should let that go. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Yes,” I said. “Ask Mary Pat to plug Tobias’s name into the MathSciNet and make copies of all his published articles. It probably won’t lead anywhere, but I have to check.”

“Consider it done.” She started to brew a pot of coffee. “You said you had some questions for me?”

“Tell me more about fractal dimension.”

“I’ll try,” she said, “but what has that got to do with the case?”

“Maybe nothing, but that was the topic of your article and I noticed that term over and over again in the other articles I read. I want to make sure I understand it. Inquiring minds want to know.” She smiled and began my lesson.

“In Euclidean geometry we think of objects as being three-dimensional. A line is one-dimensional, a plane is two-dimensional, and a cube is three-dimensional.” She paused to make sure I grasped the concept. I nodded to show I did.

“In fractal geometry, dimensions aren’t necessarily whole numbers. The dimension of an object can be expressed as a fraction. That’s where the term ‘fractal’ comes from.”

“For example?”

“Remember that coastline we talked about?”

“Sure.”

“If we drew that coastline on a piece of paper, in great detail, we’d see a very crinkly line, right?”

“Yes.”

“In fractal geometry we would say the dimension of the line is greater than one, but less than two. It’s greater than one because it isn’t straight, but it’s less than two because it doesn’t consume the entire piece of paper.”

“So a line with a lot of squiggles will have a greater fractal dimension than a line with just a few squiggles?”

“Yes. You can think of a mountain the same way. If we try to fit that mountain inside a cube, its dimension will be greater than two, but less than three because it won’t consume the entire cube.”

“So, how do you measure fractal dimension?”

“That gets complicated,” she said. “Think of it this way. If you examined that coastline from a satellite, it would look like a relatively straight line. The closer you get, the more detail you see, and this adds to the length of the line. Fractal dimension measures the rate at which the length of the line appears to increase—the rate at which new detail appears.”

“And some guy named Hausdorff came up with a way of measuring this?”

“Very good,” she said, “you’ve done your homework. Hausdorff said you can measure the fractal dimension of an object by—”

“Okay,” I said as I held up my palm, “that’s enough.” She smiled and we shared a brief silence.

For some reason I couldn’t fully articulate, I wanted to ask her out. The rules of professional conduct governing attorneys in Colorado prohibit lawyers from dating their clients because of the fear of conflicts of interest, but I was under no such constraint.

“So,” she said, having finished the lecture, “you were in the army?”

“Marines.”

“I think Mary Pat mentioned that.”

“The haircut didn’t give it away?”

“I didn’t think anything of it.”

“It’s funny,” I said. “When I was young I wanted long hair, but the very mention of it would send my father into orbit. Then I finished law school and joined the marines.”

“Why the marines?” she asked. We had clearly finished discussing the case.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess the short answer is, I wanted to see the world.”

“Did you?”

“No, but I got to know North and South Carolina real well.”

“That doesn’t sound bad. I’ve heard the beaches are wonderful.”

“They are, but the Marine Corps always seeks out the places with the biggest swamps and the most snakes.”

She must’ve picked up on something in my voice. “Oh,” she teased, “are we afraid of snakes?”

“We detest snakes,” I said.

“I grew up in New Mexico,” she said. “Rattlesnakes are a way of life. You just have to watch where you step.” Maybe so, I thought, but that won’t get you very far when you’re trudging through a murky swamp inhabited by copperheads and water moccasins.

We talked for another ten or fifteen minutes. The only child of two physicians, she’d grown up outside Albuquerque. A high school basketball star, several major universities had offered her athletic scholarships, but she’d turned them down to attend a liberal-arts college in Minnesota.

I was enjoying this conversation when Finn appeared in the doorway with a lime green bicycle worth several thousand dollars. He wore black spandex shorts and a bright yellow cyclist’s shirt. A radio no bigger than a deck of cards was clipped to his belt line. The glistening sweat on his body indicated that he had just completed a strenuous trip. “Great day for a ride,” he said to my client. “I just thought I’d stop by and see how you were doing.”

“Come in, Stephen,” she said, “Mr. Keane and I were just sharing stories.” Finn entered, and my immediate reaction was that a man smart enough to graduate from Harvard at twenty should have enough sense to shower after bicycling twenty or thirty miles in the hot sun. I stood up from my chair.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said.

“I should be going,” I said. “I appreciate your time and patience. I think the women at the shelter will really enjoy this program.” I winked at her, but Finn was behind me and didn’t see it.

“You’re more than welcome,” she said with a sly smile.

“Oh,” I said, “I almost forgot.” I handed her the cassette.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“It’s music,” I said. I’d made a copy of the fractal ballet tape Luther had given me. “Consider it a present.” She looked puzzled, but accepted it graciously. Finn said nothing.

I woke up a bit depressed on Saturday. I don’t know how to describe it. “Blue” is probably the best word. It wasn’t a deep I’m-going-to-kill-myself depression, just a mild sadness. I’d suffered from mild depression since Joy’s death, but didn’t get the official diagnosis until I was in the service.

I was a captain assigned to the base legal office at Camp Lejeune. I had a fantastic job, good friends, money in my pocket, and a promising future, but what had been periodic bouts of mild depression became increasingly severe. I couldn’t let go of Joy’s death. Sometimes I’d go two or three nights without sleep because I couldn’t stop thinking about her. When I did sleep, I’d dream of Joy and wake up wishing the dream hadn’t ended. Few things are more frightening than the realization that you’re going crazy, so I sought help from a civilian psychiatrist. The military didn’t recognize the doctor-patient privilege at that time, though the rules have changed a bit since then.

After several visits and a battery of tests, the shrink concluded I was genetically predisposed to depression. Some kind of chemical imbalance. This, combined with my obsessive nature and existential angst, was a recipe for permanent sadness. He prescribed medication, but recommended a therapist and encouraged me to sort through my feelings over Joy’s death.

I wanted to keep the therapy a secret, so every Tuesday afternoon I told my fellow marines I was taking an hour to get a haircut. I’d spend fifty minutes with the therapist and ten minutes getting a buzz cut at the barbershop. My colleagues couldn’t figure out what had gotten into me. Whereas I had previously pushed the envelope of what was an acceptable haircut for a marine officer, I suddenly made Ollie North look like a flower child.

The medication made a world of difference. Things went well until it showed up on a random urinalysis. The navy psychiatrists were satisfied that I was fit as a fiddle and said I could remain in the service, but any kind of mental health history is the kiss of death for a marine officer, so I completed my three-year tour, then returned to Colorado and became a federal prosecutor.

I don’t know why I woke up feeling a bit down. My best guess is that I’d read too much Heidegger the previous night. He uses a lot of words like “equiprimordial,” and it’s always an ego-deflating experience. My other best guess is that it pissed me off to know I was alone while Finn apparently enjoyed the company of Jayne Smyers.

I needed a long run. I took off up Big Springs Road with Buck. As I’ve explained, Buck is a large dog, and the first quarter mile was like trying to water ski on concrete. Once the pavement ended, I let him run free. We ran eight miles—past the lake, around the recycling center, and back down into town. In other places it’s called the dump, but here it’s called the recycling center. People ask me if I have problems running at this altitude, but I’ll take running at 8,300 feet over the humidity of Camp Lejeune any day of the week.

When Buck and I returned home, there was a message to call Dick Gilbert. “Good news,” he said. “I spoke with the homicide dick in Boston and he’s going to send me his file. He thinks I’m wasting my time, but he’s gonna do it.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “What about Carolyn Chang?”

“You were right about that Amanda, she’s something else. Asked if you’d contacted me.”

“Yeah?”

“I told her I had no use for private eyes. That seemed to please her, but when I started asking questions about the murder, she wasn’t very forthcoming. Said she’d have to get back to me on making her file available, but I’m not holding my breath.”

“Strike you as unusual?”

“Hell yes, we’re supposed to be on the same team.”

“Maybe she’s the killer,” I said.

“Yeah, better check that out.”

“Thanks, Dick.”

“Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Will do.”

The run and Gilbert’s call had buoyed my spirits. I spent the rest of the day cleaning and doing chores. By five P.M., it was time for dinner. Too lazy to cook anything healthy, I microwaved ramen noodles and topped them with a slice of cheddar. That brought back memories. When we were twenty-one, Scott and I had hitchhiked to the Texas Gulf Coast over spring break. By the time we reached our destination, we were pathetically low on funds. We camped in state parks and lived on ramen noodles. Whenever one of us wanted to spend money on something unnecessary, the other would say, “Hey, that’s a lot of ramen.” It became a unit of currency. A six-pack of beer was twenty-five packs of ramen. I smiled and punched in Scott’s number.

“McCutcheon,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, “you want to take a road trip?”