The Fractal Murders

by Mark Cohen

“I don’t know,” I said. “A couple of witnesses told me an agent from Denver had reinterviewed them by phone, and I think it was probably Polk.”

  “That’s not normal procedure, is it?”

  “No, but Polk isn’t exactly what you’d call a team player, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he made some follow-up calls.”

  “Why wouldn’t he do the same thing with Hawkins?”

  I shrugged. “Who knows with Polk? Sounds like the physical evidence pretty much clears Hawkins, so maybe there was no need.”

  We returned our room keys to Sergeant Schultz, then headed west on US 6. Wheat sat on Scott’s lap and poked his head out the window. He seemed in heaven as the oncoming air hit his muzzle and blew back his pointy ears.

  We were less than twenty miles out of Lincoln when I popped my palm to my forehead as if to say I could’ve had a V-8. Instead I made a U-turn and said, “Jesus, I am a dumbass.”

  “Where we going?” Scott asked.

  “Manhattan,” I said.

  “Cheaper to fly,” he joked.

  “Kansas.”

  “You want to see where the body was found?”

  “I want to talk to that sheriff. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts he’s got a copy of Amanda’s file.”

  As it turned out, we didn’t have to drive all the way to Manhattan. The body had been found in Marshall County and the sheriff’s office was in Marysville. We made it in less than two hours. A sign at the edge of town welcomed us to “The Black Squirrel City.” Sure enough, in the middle of town there was a small park filled with black squirrels.

  “This trip has been a real education,” Scott said. “First I find out there’s a national forest in Nebraska. Now I learn there are black squirrels in Kansas.”

  “I think the politically correct term is ‘squirrels of color.’”

  The town seemed dead, but anyone with a choice was probably inside, seeking shelter from the scorching Kansas sun. We ate a late lunch on a concrete picnic table at an A&W, then set out to find the sheriff’s office. It wasn’t difficult given that Main Street was only four blocks long. I guessed it was the building with the flagpole and patrol cars in front of it.

  I guided the truck into one of the diagonal parking spaces. I stepped out of the truck and made sure the dogs had water. The building appeared to have been an addition to the much older courthouse. We entered, and at the front desk a beefy female deputy in a brown uniform asked if she could help us. About thirty. Lots of makeup, no smile. I told her we were private investigators and asked if we could speak with the sheriff. She instructed us to have a seat on some orange plastic chairs, then picked up her phone.

  The Sheriff emerged from his office within a minute or two. “Darlene tells me you fellas are private investigators,” he said. He stood six-five or six-six. Late fifties or early sixties. Little bit of a paunch on an otherwise rangy body. He wore no uniform, but sported cowboy boots, tan slacks, and a Western-style short-sleeved shirt. His badge was on his belt. “Lee Bowen,” he said as he extended his hand. I introduced us, handed him a card, and asked if we could talk in private. He led us into his office and invited us to sit down. The walls boasted a dozen awards from civic groups and an eight-by-ten glossy of him shaking hands with Bob Dole.

  “Sheriff,” I began, “we’d like to talk about Carolyn Chang. We believe her death may have been related to two others.”

  “FBI already investigated that,” he said. I was tired of hearing that. He leaned back in his chair, put his feet on the desk, and laced his fingers together behind his head.

  “At the risk of sounding cocky,” I said, “I don’t think they did a very good job.”

  He smiled. “Law degree qualify you to make that judgment?” He had noticed the J.D. on my card.

  “I was a federal prosecutor. I know what a good investigation looks like.”

  “You fellas got sort of a cocky look to you,” he said. He paused to mash some tobacco into an old pipe. “Course, a certain amount of that ain’t a bad thing in law enforcement.”

  I noticed a small black-and-white photo of a football team on the wall behind his desk. The players were all white and had crew cuts.

  “You play football?” I asked.

  “Little bit,” he said. Darlene knocked on the door and asked if the sheriff could step outside. While he was gone, I examined the photo. It was the team picture of the 1965 Philadelphia Eagles. He was in the third row.

  “Jesus,” said Scott.

  The sheriff reentered and closed the door. “One of our nutcases,” he explained. “Wanted to tell me she’d seen two suspicious-looking strangers in town. Driving a green F-150 with Colorado plates.”

  “Want us to help look for them?”

  “I didn’t even want this job,” he said. “Only reason I ran was because old Duncan Grimm was gettin’ too big for his britches. Started wearing four stars on his collar and hauling kids into court for swimming at the quarry.”

  “What did you do before?” I asked.

  “Did a little farming, drilled wells with my sons. But that’s not why you’re here.” He lit his pipe. The aroma was sweet and pleasant.

  “No,” I said. “To be blunt, we were hoping to inspect your file.”

  “You seem pretty sure these deaths were related.” He leaned back in his chair and placed his feet on his desk.

  “We’re not sure,” I said, “but the odds of three math professors—”

  “I understand where you’re coming from,” he said. “My training is in geology and both my boys are geologists, so this old cowpoke actually knows a little something about fractals.” He puffed on his pipe. “But what makes you think you’re going to find something the FBI missed?”

  “I already found something the FBI missed,” I said. I told him about Fontaine’s reference to Underwood in the third edition of his textbook. He smiled. I got the impression there’d been some friction between him and the bureau. “Sheriff,” I continued, “we’ve done a lot of work on this case.” I summarized our efforts, including my trip to Walla Walla, our visit to Nebraska, and our search for Thomas Tobias. “The problem we’re having now is that this detective in Lincoln won’t let us see her file, so we were hoping we could get a look at yours.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “she’s a charmer.” He took his long legs off his desk, sat up straight, and hit the intercom button with his pipe hand. “Darlene,” he said, “bring that Chang file in here, will ya?”

  “Right away, sir.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to let you boys see what we’ve got. We took all sorts of pictures and interviewed lots of folks. County coroner did the autopsy, but we had it reviewed by a forensic pathologist from Wichita.”

  “Would you have copies of the reports from Lincoln?”

  “Should have,” he said. Darlene walked in, handed an accordion file to the sheriff, and remained standing behind him. He placed his pipe on his desk and started flipping through the file. “Bingo,” he said, “we do have some reports from LPD.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. He handed the file to Darlene.

  “Darlene,” he said, “show these fellas where the copier is and let ’em copy whatever they want. Then check and see if we ever arrested a man by the name of Thomas Tobias. They’ll give you the info.”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.” We followed Darlene and made copies of every document and photograph in the file. The copier didn’t have a document feeder on it, so we were able to copy only one page at a time. It took nearly twenty minutes. Darlene sat at her desk and didn’t smile once. We were saying good-bye to the sheriff when she appeared in his office. “No arrests on Thomas Tobias,” she said.

  “That help you fellas?” the sheriff asked.

  “Sheriff,” I said, “we can’t thank you enough.”

  “Do me a favor,” he said, “keep me informed. I’d love to see you prove the bureau wrong.”

  “We will,” I promised.

  We took our newfound treasure, walked past
the suspicious Ford pickup, then crossed the street and headed to the park. A black squirrel was playfully chasing a gray squirrel around a tree. “If only people could get along like that,” Scott said. We sat on a bench and began to read.

  Carolyn Chang’s body had been found in a ditch on a farm about nine miles south of Marysville. Near the Big Blue River—a body of water that, judging by what I’d seen, should have been named Little Muddy Creek. She’d been dead thirty-six to forty-eight hours, and they’d been lucky to find her that quickly. Her body had been dumped in midwinter, a time when farmers are seldom in their fields. Had not one of the farmer’s cows escaped, her body might not have been found until spring.

  From the angle of the stab wounds, the pathologist had concluded her killer was probably left-handed. There was little blood at the scene, indicating she had been killed at some other location. Presumably, she’d been killed somewhere between her home and the ditch where her body had been found. Wherever it had been, the elements had probably long since washed away any visible traces of blood.

  There was no doubt Carolyn had been raped prior to being stabbed. As Susan Thompson had suggested, the pathologist’s report concluded her assailant had worn a condom. She had put up a good fight; there were multiple bruises and lacerations on her face and arms, and skin particles beneath her fingernails. Tests on those particles, and on the unidentified pubic hairs found on her body, suggested there had been only one assailant.

  Despite his laid-back manner, it appeared Sheriff Bowen had done a good job. He and his deputies had grilled every local resident and every known transient with any history of violence or sex offenses, but this had produced no viable suspects.

  The Lincoln Police Department had provided copies of its reports to Sheriff Bowen as a courtesy, and I paid particular attention to those, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why Amanda had been so reluctant to share information. The documents consisted mostly of statements from Carolyn’s colleagues, friends, and neighbors. With one exception, they didn’t reveal anything we hadn’t already been able to learn or guess at.

  Dale Hawkins had voluntarily provided pubic hair samples, but they didn’t match those found with the body. A list of Nebraskans owning a dark, late-model Crown Victoria or Marquis had been cross-checked against a list of violent felons, but this too had produced no viable suspects. Amanda had also checked with the Colorado DMV, but there were no vehicles with an A-M-K prefix matching the description of the sedan seen in front of Carolyn’s home on the night of her death.

  The only new bit of information was that Carolyn Chang had filed a harassment complaint with the Lincoln Police Department a few years prior to her death. Amanda’s report did not provide the details of the allegation, nor did it identify the subject of the complaint. She wrote:

  The evidence developed to date indicates the harassment complaint filed by the victim several years ago bears no relationship to the offenses, which are the subject of this investigation. (See Report # CC-154783-1.) The suspect in that case is not a suspect in the victim’s murder.

  Report # CC-154783-1 had not been provided to Sheriff Bowen.

  When Scott and I had both read all the documents, we looked at our copies of the crime scene and autopsy photos. I’d seen plenty of such photos during my legal career, and I’d even attended a few autopsies, but gruesome photographs were a new experience for Scott. He just shook his head and said, “This guy was sick.”

  “Or wanted us to think that.”

  “That’s even more sick.”

  “Yeah.” We sat for a few minutes, then I clapped my hands and said, “Let’s hit the road.”

  I started the truck, popped an old Merle Haggard tape into the cassette deck, stopped to buy a pop, and headed west for Colorado on US 36. We could’ve made Boulder in eight hours, but it was almost four and we decided we’d drive just halfway.

  We arrived at Prairie Dog State Park just before eight. It was still hot, but we were on the high plains of Kansas now and the humidity was considerably lower than it had been in Marysville. Located just east of Reager, the apparent reason for PDSP’s existence was a reservoir. We found a secluded area by the lake and pitched our tent while the dogs frolicked in the water.

  As the sun went down, we built a fire and later dined on ramen noodles beneath the stars. “Brings back fond memories,” Scott said. I nodded agreement.

  When darkness came I wasn’t the least bit tired, probably because of all the pop, so I dug out the Coleman lantern I’d purchased in 1978 and sat in the back of the truck reading Being and Time.

  Heidegger argued our man-centered view was responsible for mankind’s abuses of nature and for many of the problems of the modern world. “Listen to this,” I yelled to Scott, who was sitting on a picnic table looking at stars. “‘One type of being, the human being, believes that all of Being exists for it.’”

  “Heidegger would have a lot more credibility with me,” he replied, “if he hadn’t been a fucking Nazi.” Like me, Scott has an interest in philosophy. You can’t be an astrophysicist and not have an interest in philosophy. He walked to the back of the truck to retrieve his toothbrush from his toilet kit.

  “‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’” I joked. But he was right. There was no denying that Heidegger, generally considered one of the great philosophers of this century, had been a Nazi until the end of World War II. He later called his involvement with the Nazis “a blunder,” but never attempted to account for his support of the party. I put the book down, climbed out of the truck, and prepared for bed.

  It was still hot, so we opted to lie on top of our sleeping bags rather than inside them. Except for the mosquitoes, we could have slept under the stars. The dogs, of course, shared the tent with us, smelling just like wet dogs should.

  “So what does this math professor look like?” Scott asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “sort of like a tall version of Courteney Cox or Elizabeth Vargas.”

  “That ain’t bad,” he said.

  “That’s just like you,” I joked. “You’re concerned only with how a woman looks. Me, I try to look at the whole individual.”

  “Sleep tight,” he said.

  “Seriously,” I persisted despite my own laughter, “you’re so shallow. Why can’t you see people for their inner beauty?”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  I laughed and turned over onto my stomach.

  After our obligatory swim the next morning, we stopped in town for coffee and some breakfast. It was a little mom-and-pop version of the Waffle House. The glass-enclosed entry contained a few gumball machines and was plastered with notices of upcoming rodeos and farm auctions. The restaurant was nearly empty. A few old-timers sipped coffee at the counter. Five men wearing overalls and ball caps shared a large table toward the rear. It wasn’t quite seven.

  When nobody had greeted us after a few minutes, we seated ourselves at a booth in what was labeled the “No Smoking” section. Anything to the left of the entryway was the no-smoking section. A waitress in jeans and a white cowgirl shirt finally noticed us and said, “I’ll be right with ya.” Her name was Pammy, according to her name tag, and she looked to be a sophomore in high school.

  She brought us water and coffee while we waited for breakfast. Locals started to filter in over the next twenty minutes. Just after my pancakes arrived, three bikers in their mid-thirties sauntered in and occupied the booth next to ours. All of them smoking. The smallest one, who I dubbed Tiny, stood six-one and must’ve weighed two-eighty. All wore ragged jeans and black leather vests. Long, greasy hair. Tiny wore a blue bandanna on his head and had a small teardrop tattooed at the outer edge of his left eye, meaning he’d done hard time. Another had “White Power” tattooed across his forearm. Scott looked at me and rolled his eyes.

  We ignored the smoke, but Pammy didn’t. “You men’ll have to put those things out,” she told them. “There’s no smoking in this part of the restaurant.�
�� Two of the men took a final drag, then extinguished their smokes, but Tiny decided to give her a hard time.

  “Hey, cute thing,” he said, “I’m the kind of man has to have something to suck on. Know what I mean?” Quick as a viper, Scott turned and back-fisted him—hard—on the upper arm.

  “Hey,” Scott said, “can’t you read the sign?”

  “Yeah, I can read the fuckin’ sign,” the man roared as he maneuvered his beefy body out of the booth and came at Scott. In one fluid move, my friend slid out of our booth, stood, grabbed the man’s right wrist with both hands, let out a shrill scream, and bent the wrist back in some kind of joint lock sending the attacker instantly to his knees. I stood up just in case. Shocked, Pammy came to my side. All eyes were on Scott.

  Before Tiny’s pals could exit their booth, Scott looked at them and said, “Don’t even think about it or I’ll break every bone in his wrist. There’s eight of ’em if you count the navicular.” Both of Tiny’s pals looked at me.

  “You a karate man too?” one asked.

  “No,” I said, “but I have a lot of anger left over from childhood.” Dumbfounded, they resumed their seats.

  “Should I call the sheriff?” Pammy asked.

  “I don’t think it’ll be necessary,” I said.

  Scott looked down on his attacker. “Apologize to the girl,” he said. He bent the man’s wrist back just a tad more to provide motivation.

  In obvious pain, but unable to move, the man looked up at Pammy and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Good,” Scott said. “I’m going to let you up now,” he continued, “and you’re going to sit down with your buddies and pretend this never happened, agreed?” With a grimace on his face and gritted teeth, the man nodded. “And if you or your pals so much as flinch in my direction, I’m going to kill the one nearest me. Not hurt, kill. You understand?” The man nodded again. Slowly, Scott relaxed his hold on the man’s wrist and allowed him to stand. Then he let go entirely and watched as Tiny rejoined his companions. Keeping his eyes on the trio, Scott resumed his seat.