The Fibonacci Murders

by Dale E. Lehman

  He paused to enjoy a few bites before continuing.

  “Third, Juana Rojas, age forty-seven, is an attorney married to a cardiologist. They live in a very nice house on the other side of Clarksville Pike from the park. She was all dressed up and ready to go to a party at the home of one of her well-heeled friends, but while she was opening the door of her SUV she was savagely attacked from behind. She received multiple head wounds—including one that fractured her skull—plus bruises on her back and left side. Far more than was necessary to just incapacitate her. She didn’t see the golf club, but her wounds were consistent with those on the previous victims, so we think there’s good reason to suspect the mad golfer again.”

  Montufar looked up suddenly. “He was angry,” she said, sounding surprised.

  “Apparently.”

  “No, Eric. This guy was furious. But the victims’ descriptions of the golfer don’t agree. Remember what Bess Williams said? He was whistling as he walked away. Why would the same man be so furious with Juana Rojas?” She frowned. “Is there a copycat out there? Or was it just because she’s rich?”

  “And he’s not. Makes sense. She had a lot on her person just then, particularly some very pricey jewelry. All stolen, along with her cash.”

  Montufar put down her fork, half of her lunch untouched. A scowl darkened her face. Dumas watched her for a time, visualizing the wheels turning in her head. What was she seeing that he wasn’t? But she said nothing further, so he moved on.

  “And fourth, Lisa Hyeung, age twenty-eight, a nurse working third shift at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Clubbed while sitting by the lake reading a book in the early morning, a spot she frequented to unwind after work. She must’ve been a disappointment to him, because she didn’t have much on her, just a bit of cash. She was wearing a cheap ring. It was found on the ground near her. He must have realized it wasn’t worth his time after he took it off her hand. Again, she saw nothing, but the wound was consistent with the previous attacks.”

  Dumas saw in Montufar’s eyes that something else had clicked, but she hesitated long enough for him to wonder if he’d been wrong. He waited anyway.

  Finally she said, “The double murder. Rick said there was a ring on the ground. A cheap ring. It had belonged to the woman. He also said it looked like mud had been kicked onto her.”

  “You’re suggesting Leo killed her and took her ring, but got mad when he saw it wasn’t worth much? So he threw it down and kicked mud on her?”

  She nodded, but hesitantly. “It sounds plausible. But I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Yeah…” Leo, Dumas knew, was devious. He’d carefully planned the murders to correspond with a mathematical sequence, yet had altered the details of each crime to prevent the appearance of any pattern. If he was also the golfer, then he had assumed a very different personality for those attacks. Dumas thought it just possible. Both crime sequences had an element of lunacy to them.

  So the one time Leo decides to rob a murder victim, it turns out she’s wearing a worthless trinket—another worthless trinket. And the carefully concealed rage that had exploded during the robbery of the wealthy Juana Rojas once again rises to the surface.

  But he found another possibility. “You know,” he told Montufar, “even if the murders and the robberies are done by different people, this suggests there could be a connection between them. Maybe Leo is trying to throw us off the track. He knows what the golfer has done in considerable detail, and uses one of those details to confuse us.”

  Montufar nodded thoughtfully. “Or to tip us off. He told me he was glad that we’d figured out his name. Maybe he wants us to know that he knows all about the golfer, too.”

  “This is getting way too twisted,” Dumas said.

  “And it’ll probably get even more twisted before we understand it.”

  Which Dumas did not particularly want to think about.

  ∑

  While his colleagues dined, Peller broiled himself a cheeseburger and complemented it with a side of store-bought potato salad. He moved mechanically through preparation, consumption, and clean-up. Typically this was the time of day Sandra would slip quietly into his thoughts. Some evenings her presence there would be like a comforting embrace. Others, her physical absence would threaten to overwhelm him. But this evening, she seemed more a silent companion, letting him know he wasn’t alone while giving him space as he mentally picked through the details of the murders, seeking some hidden commonality that might tell him where the next victim would die.

  Nothing.

  He threw some laundry in to wash and tuned the TV to the news. Alongside the usual fires, robberies, and rampant unemployment, the police press conference from Howard County got top billing. Peller found it hard to judge the coverage the way the average viewer might, but he thought the Captain made it look like her detectives knew what they were doing in spite of the efforts of the gathered reporters to find a chink in her armor.

  After the news, he retreated to his den. Feeling as though Sandra was close at his side, he looked through his collection of books: largely history and science fiction with an occasional western thrown in for good measure. Nothing sounded interesting tonight. He sat in an easy chair and stared blankly at the telephone that sat on the table next to him. The clock was just kissing six in Denver—a tad early, but maybe Jason would be home.

  He picked up the phone and dialed. On the third ring, a young voice chirped, “Hello!”

  Peller smiled. “Well, hi there, Susie.”

  “Grandpa! Grandpa!”

  In the background he heard a bit of squealing followed by a distant, “I wanna talk!”

  “How are you today?”

  “I’m good! Guess what? Yesterday at school a fireman came to our class!”

  Leaning back, Peller immersed himself in his eight-year-old granddaughter’s chatter for several minutes. Eventually she finished her recitation of exciting things that had happened, said goodbye, and relinquished the phone to her younger brother.

  “Hi, Grandpa!”

  “Hi, Andrew! What’s new with you?”

  “A fireman came to school!”

  Peller laughed. The six-year-old was known to mimic his sister. “The same one as came to Susie’s class?” he asked.

  “Noooooo! Ours was tall!”

  “Now how do you know that?”

  “Well, ‘cause I saw them go by the window. There was lots of them!”

  By the time Andrew had finished his stories of firemen at school, Peller was convinced that the whole department had been there. Eventually the youngster said goodbye, and Jason took up the phone.

  “Hi, Dad. I hear you have some excitement out your way.”

  “A couple of nutcases,” Peller replied, trying to sound noncommittal.

  Jason said nothing for a moment, as though he were waiting for elaboration, then he changed the subject. “Belinda lost her job today. Her company laid off two hundred fifty people.”

  Peller exhaled heavily. His daughter-in-law had worked in marketing for a large telecom equipment manufacturer. Last he’d heard, she’d been in line for promotion to management. “How’s she taking it?”

  “About as well as anyone. She’s already circulating her resumé, but with this economy it’s going to take some time to find anything.”

  “You okay for money?”

  “For the moment. At least my job is stable, and we don’t have too much debt.”

  “Let me know if you need any help,” Peller said, then after a pause he added, “I could come out there.”

  “You’ve got your hands full there, Dad.”

  It might have been Peller’s imagination, but he thought Jason had said it a bit too quickly. “This won’t last too much longer,” he said. “Once we have these lunatics locked up . . .”

  He let the sent
ence hang.

  So did Jason. Then, “We can talk about it when that happens. I don’t think even you can predict how long it will take to catch them.”

  “I suppose you’re right. Well then, all of you take care of yourselves. I’ll be thinking of you.”

  “We’ll be thinking of you, too, Dad. Please be careful.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  ∑

  Sometime around three in the morning on Sunday, March sixth, on the third floor of the third building of the Cedar Forest apartment complex, a woman died when gas fumes from four unlit stove burners opened full throttle filled her apartment. An anonymous call to 911 made from within the apartment itself alerted emergency responders to the incident, but they arrived too late to do anything more than prevent an explosion and further casualties.

  They also found another hint that the woman’s death was not an accident: a note scrawled in an almost illegible hand. After a bit of mutual consultation and a lot of eyestrain, the investigating team deciphered it as: “Ask Peller if he got my message.”

  ∑

  “When I get done with him,” Peller muttered, “he won’t have any use for a lawyer.”

  Montufar put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Don’t go psycho on me,” she said. “We have enough psychos running around as it is.”

  They stood in the parking lot in front of the building, one of four three-story units nestled in a heavily-wooded tract of land between Cedar Lane and the eastern end of Hobbit’s Glen Golf Course. From the outside, the buildings were neat and trim, with new vinyl siding and undulating ribbons of landscape plants that were no doubt lush and vibrant in the summer. In contrast to the mood, the sky overhead was cloudless and bright, with the sun on the rise in the southeast.

  Seven forty-five, Peller had noted on the car clock before they got out. Four hours and forty five minutes ago, the apartment just above where he now stood was filled with gas and a woman had died. A woman with a name and a family and a life. Lorna Bigelow, age 87, African-American, widow, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, descendant of slaves, a writer of some modest note who had explored the history of Catholicism and slavery in the U.S. through both fiction and nonfiction. Peller wasn’t familiar with her writing, but Montufar had dug up the information somewhere.

  And now Bigelow was dead for one and only one reason: she had lived on the third floor.

  The detectives went inside, up the stairs, and into the apartment. It was modest and clean, furnished in swirling blues and purples and darkish woods. A faint scent of mercaptan lingered in the air, perhaps absorbed by the fabric of sofas and chairs, now slowly being released again. Nothing was out of place. The note had been found on the kitchen counter beside the wall phone that had been used to make the call. The crime scene unit had meticulously gone over the place, but Peller knew they would come up with little or nothing. Leo was too smart and too careful.

  This, Peller thought, is a waste of time. “We’ll need to listen to the 911 call when we get back,” he told Montufar. But he knew that that, too, would be practically worthless.

  She gazed at him for a moment, her eyes concerned. “You sound like you’re about ready to give up.”

  Evading her observation, he said, “We know what happened here, at least basically. Leo gained entry after Bigelow was asleep, turned on the gas, and called 911. Then he left. And here we are, on the third floor. We also know what comes next. Five. But one crucial element remains, and I don’t know how to find it.”

  “What five means?”

  He shook his head and went to the window, which looked out onto the wooded lot behind the building. The golf course lay beyond the bare trees, empty of golfers mad or otherwise. A flock of starlings descended into the treetops, chattering loudly. “No. Why he’s doing this.”

  Montufar joined him at the window. “Yeah. The numbers don’t tell us that. They’re just a vehicle.”

  “But for what? He’s been silent about it.”

  “Maybe…”

  Peller glanced at her. She was frowning at the world beyond, but he knew she wasn’t seeing it. Her vision was focused within, on ideas chasing through her mind like—if it wasn’t too fanciful an image for such grave circumstances—a litter of puppies.

  After giving her a few moments, he prompted her: “You’ve thought of something.”

  She nodded. “What if the numbers are not the only pattern here?”

  “He’s avoided all semblance of pattern, Corina. You know that.”

  “I’m not saying I can see it, but think about it. The numbers follow a fixed pattern, but if he hadn’t pointed us to Fibonacci, we wouldn’t have realized it, at least not so quickly.” She turned to face him, her eyes intense. “The numbers mean things: how many victims, how many shots fired.” She gestured at the room. “What floor the victim lives on. We can’t see any pattern in those things yet, but maybe it’s there.”

  Peller’s first inclination was to dismiss the thought, but he hesitated. Montufar’s intuitions tended towards the uncanny. “Could be,” he replied. “But how many people have to die before we do see it?”

  “I think maybe we need to get some outside help.”

  Very little Montufar said surprised him anymore, but this did. Like most detectives he knew, she usually thought she could handle the cases assigned to her without consulting outsiders. “What sort of help?” He almost expected her answer to involve priests or psychics.

  He could tell she was purposely avoiding his gaze. “Someone whose job involves analyzing patterns. We need a mathematician.”

  Chapter 7

  I had heard of the killings but paid little attention to them. Polignac’s conjecture, a proposition of which you have likely not heard dealing with prime numbers, occupied much of my thought at that time, so much so that mundane affairs largely passed me by. But when the case was set before me, it seemed just intriguing enough to catch my notice.

  It is perhaps fortunate that we cannot always see the end in the beginning. ∑

  Captain Morris had arrived at headquarters just before the detectives did and now listened to Montufar’s proposal with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “Are you sure this will help?” she asked.

  “No,” Montufar admitted. “But it might, and I don’t see how it can hurt.”

  Her gaze descended to meet Montufar’s. “I have to show you something first. This arrived in yesterday’s mail.” She handed an envelope across the desk.

  Peller rubbed his eyes. “Another note from Leo?”

  “No.”

  Montufar examined the envelope. “Typed,” she said. “No stamp, no return address. Addressed to you, not Rick. Hand-delivered?”

  Morris shrugged. “It was in the incoming mail, but didn’t come through the post office.”

  Montufar opened it and read aloud from the enclosed page. “Dear Howard County Police. You may know the pattern, but you don’t know where I will strike next. I will go on killing for as long as I like and you can’t stop me. So you may as well write parking tickets instead of wasting your time on me. P.S. You can start calling me Scorpio. It’s a fitting name.” She put the note down and muttered, “Jerk.”

  Peller shook his head. “Why do they do it?”

  “To see if they can make the evening news,” Morris said. “The point is, you’re going to have to be careful what you feed your professor. We want him chewing on the good meat, not the rancid stuff.”

  “Fortunately,” Peller said, “we know Leo well enough by now. This doesn’t even come close.”

  ∑

  The call seemed straightforward enough:

  “Howard County 911, what’s your emergency?”

  “We have a serious gas leak here.”

  “How many people are in the area?”

  “Just two of us. Me and my mother. I think she’s passed out.
”

  “Okay, I have your address here.”

  While the dispatcher confirmed the address with the caller, Montufar told Peller, “That’s him. It’s the same voice as the guy I talked to.”

  “You’re calling from an apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you get your mother out?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, get yourself out of there. Emergency units and BGE are on their way.”

  “Please hurry. If this place blows up, more than one person will be hurt.”

  “Yes, sir. Just get yourself out of there.”

  Peller pushed back from his desk as the recording playing on his computer ended. “That’s an odd way of phrasing it. ‘More than one person.’”

  “He didn’t want anyone other than his chosen victim to get hurt.”

  Peller thought there was a bit more question in her voice than usual. “Why would he care? The number didn’t refer to the body count this time.”

  “It never has, except once. Otherwise, there has only been one victim at a time.”

  Captain Morris dropped a slip of paper in front of Peller. “Here’s your mathematician,” she said. “Tomio Kaneko. Answers to Tom, so I’m told. Friend of a friend of a friend. He teaches at Hopkins in the city. Given the urgency of the matter, he agreed to meet you in his office this afternoon at three.”

  Peller nodded his thanks, and in Morris’s wake Dumas slipped in. “What are you doing here on a Sunday?” Peller asked.

  “I was called in,” Dumas said, more cheerfully than Peller would have expected. “We got a tip on the sketch of the golfer. A guy who says he knows who it is. Can you spare Corina?”

  The two rushed out, leaving Peller on his own, but it didn’t last. Not more than a minute later the phone rang. Absently he took up the receiver. “Peller.”

  Two seconds of silence elapsed. Then Peller heard the faint whisper of breathing: once, twice, three times. His patience ran out before the fourth exhale, and he snapped, “What do you want?”