Irrational Numbers

by Robert Spiller

  “In which case he more than likely loaded the bike alone.”

  Bonnie nodded and smiled sheepishly. She’d already begun to regret how surly she’d acted toward her friend. “Indeed. Or if he was in cahoots, he and the killer worked in tandem.”

  “I’m not saying I buy into this trumped-up abduction fantasy, but it certainly has a boatload of symmetry.”

  “Doesn’t it, though?” She nodded enthusiastically. “If I’m right, we need to stop calling Rattlesnake’s partner the intruder. From Alf Rattlesnake Quinn’s perspective, Dobbs was the unexpected intruder and”—she waved her hand—“whositz was actually expected.”

  A half smile crept onto Lloyd’s face. “And that’s the problem with your theory. Harold wasn’t expected. And we don’t know if a motorcycle isn’t still out there.”

  “There’s no motorcycle at the range.” A weary-looking Byron Hickman leaned against the waiting room doorway. “I was there this afternoon and know that much.”

  Bonnie pounded her fist onto the arm of her chair. “Then the motorcycle is in the back of Alf’s truck.”

  Lloyd laid a sympathetic hand on her arm. “Bon, it’s possible Harold was mistaken about what he heard. Maybe there was no motorcycle.”

  Of course, that’s true. “Then we’re back to our original problem. How did Whositz get to the range?”

  Byron took a chair across from Bonnie and put his feet up on a long glass coffee table. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and yawned. The face that emerged from behind the hands looked like it belonged to an unfortunate who hadn’t slept in a week. “I’m going to assume Whositz is the unknown assailant who ran off with Rattlesnake and most likely shot Jason Dobbs. I need to speak with both of you about that.”

  Bonnie mirrored Byron’s yawn. Ye gods. Just looking at the man is draining. “Fire away, Kemosabe.”

  “First of all, Missus P, I personally believe Harold’s account of what happened at the range. It jives with what we’ve discovered in the last few hours.”

  “Which is?” Lloyd asked.

  Byron blinked, studying Lloyd’s open, honest face. Finally, as if a wall had broken down, he sighed. “The Colorado Springs police found Alf Quinn’s truck parked in a remote corner of this hospital’s parking lot.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “AND ALF?” BONNIE WAS SURE SHE ALREADY KNEW THE answer, but had to ask anyway.

  “No sign of the man anywhere.” A yawning Deputy Byron Hickman pushed his hat far back on his head, folded his arms across his chest, and hunkered down in his chair. “No sign of violence, either, which supports that harebrained theory of yours that Rattlesnake faked his own abduction.”

  Bonnie could feel heat creep up the back of her neck. “You heard that, did you?”

  Her former student sighed, then offered a weary smile. “Every word. You weren’t exactly whispering, Missus P. However, if you don’t mind, I went ahead and called it in as a kidnapping.”

  Bonnie tried to ignore the additional heat that had moved from her neck onto her face. She waved her hand as if she were giving her blessing to Byron’s decision. “That’s probably for the best.”

  “I’m glad you approve.” The deputy checked his watch, then with what appeared a Herculean effort, pushed himself upright. “If I don’t get moving, I’m going to fall asleep right here in this chair.”

  He stood. “What say we finish our talk on the way out?”

  “Amen to that, youngster.” Bonnie sprang to her feet. She felt like someone whose cage door had miraculously opened. Hot bath, here I come.

  She offered a hand to Lloyd, who declined and stiffly hoisted himself out of his chair.

  Bonnie shook her head in mock disgust. “You two make a fine pair. I was going to offer to race you both to the parking lot, but from the looks of you, I’d win. Then I’d have to contend with the bother of wounded male egos.”

  “Thank you, Bon,” Lloyd said. “You’ve always been the considerate one.”

  “True, all too true.” Bonnie led the way from the waiting room to the elevator. While she was walking ahead she caught bits and pieces of conversation between the two men—“Nine millimeter” from one sentence and “M24” from another.

  When the elevator doors closed, Bonnie wheeled on Byron. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Uh-oh.” The deputy shook his head as if he didn’t approve of uncontrolled cognition. “I’ll bet you have a theory.”

  “Not so much a theory as I want to propose a what if’ She hurried on before Byron could interrupt. “Harold told you about the black nine-millimeter Glock?”

  The elevator door opened, and Byron held the door while they all filed out into the white-lined hall. “And you’re thinking that’s the same weapon that killed Leo Quinn?”

  Byron’s leapfrogging to her next supposition rendered her momentarily speechless. She could see it amused the deputy even as it annoyed her. She stuck her tongue out at him.

  “Very mature.”

  Bonnie threw back her head in mock defiance and led the way along the white-lined corridor. “I don’t have to be mature, youngster. I’m an educator. I’ll be fifteen forever. Now as to that pistol, I’m not saying there couldn’t be more than one nine millimeter in all of East Plains, but just suppose it is the same weapon.”

  “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this, but here goes. If all your speculations are true, then Rattlesnake’s abductor is in possession of the gun that also killed Dwight Furby. We already know the same weapon killed both Leo and Dwight.”

  Again, her former student succeeded in catching her flat-footed. She had been prepared to ask about the Furby-Quinn connection but not immediately.

  Lloyd whistled between his teeth. “How long has the sheriff’s department known about that little tidbit?”

  “Since yesterday morning. And don’t give me that look, Missus P. I don’t have an obligation to keep you informed about all the comings and goings of this investigation.”

  Busted.

  Bonnie adopted a wide-eyed, innocent expression. “The look, Deputy Hickman, that you are so unjustly maligning, is merely that of contemplation. And unlike you and your department, I am more than happy to share all the fruits of my musings.”

  Byron chuckled. “That’s true enough. You are likely to share your thoughts even when they’re not asked for.”

  “I’m going to ignore that unkind remark in favor of a cogent question. Has anyone considered how weird it is that two people who were out on Squirrel Creek Road last Saturday night are now both dead by the same killer?”

  Byron shook his head. “We don’t know that. All we know for sure is that it was the same gun.”

  Bonnie frowned what she hoped was her I’m-disappointed-in-you frown. “Come off it, youngster. What about the tight triangular pattern of shots on both victims? And what about Moses Witherspoon and Gabe Trotter?”

  Byron rewarded her question with a perplexed stare. “What about them?”

  “They were out on Squirrel Creek Road Saturday night, probably in the company of Dwight Furby.” Even as she made the statement, Bonnie wished she could rewind. Since she had spoken with Wilma Trotter, Bonnie hadn’t found the right opportunity to fill Byron in on what the woman had told her. She shared an oh-my-God-I’m-in-deep-feces look with Lloyd.

  Byron’s tired face became like stone, looking for all the world like he might burst through his skin. “And how do you know Spoon and Gabe were out on Squirrel Creek last Saturday?”

  He asked the question in the kind of soft, long-suffering voice that made Bonnie wish for shouted recriminations, the way a child wishes for a spanking just to get his parent’s anger out in the open and over with.

  For a long moment, Bonnie kept a smile plastered on her face while she gathered excuses for not telling the sheriff’s office about her visit with Wilma. One by one, Bonnie sorted through them. A class to teach. A eulogy to write and deliver. The funeral. Jason’s shooting. The passion play with Harold D
obbs. In the end, she discarded them all.

  “I went to see Wilma Trotter.” As she delineated her entire conversation with the eccentric woman, Bonnie utilized all her powers of recollection to make sure she left out nothing. She owed Byron at least that much.

  The telling hadn’t been made easier by Byron interrupting repeatedly, asking for a detail or having a point reiterated.

  How did Wilma look?

  When was the last time the woman saw her son?

  With each interruption Bonnie had to bite back her annoyance. She kept reminding herself that patience was a virtue and whereas she hadn’t been naturally blessed with an abundance of the stuff, nothing would be served by both she and Byron getting out of sorts.

  When she finished, Byron, lips pursed and brow furrowed, merely nodded. Hands clasped behind his back, he paced. Each time he passed where Bonnie stood leaning on Alice’s trunk, he gave her a thorny look.

  On his fourth pass, she reached out a hand and stopped him. “I get it. You’re angry with me.”

  Byron shook his head savagely. “You know what really torques me? Not five minutes ago, you got your bloomers in a twist because I didn’t share some ballistic information with you. All the while, you were withholding something this crucial.”

  Bonnie offered an apologetic smile. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Her former student blinked at her like she might be mentally challenged. “Irony?” He laughed a mirthless laugh. “In what upside-down universe is any of this ironic?”

  Even though Byron still was angry, Bonnie drew courage from his laughter. “It depends on how you look at it. What we’re talking about here is a half-full versus half-empty glass sort of situation.”

  From behind Byron’s back she could see Lloyd signaling she should quit while she was ahead, but she ignored the man and barreled on.

  “We can either view this dual and untimely release of information as an awful mistake or believe that all things work together for good. That’s from the Bible, you know?”

  Byron nodded morosely, like a man condemned to listen to bad music. “I know that. Just as I know you have a point to make.”

  “Indeed I do.” Bonnie linked her hands together like a chain. “I choose to believe that the business about the pistol and the Saturday whereabouts of Gabe Trotter and Moses Witherspoon came to light at this nexus in time so that we could consider them in tandem.”

  Deputy Byron Hickman squinted at Bonnie, giving evidence he was at least partially interested. “Go on.”

  “The black nine millimeter was used initially out on Squirrel Creek Road on Saturday night. Put that fact together with the new information that we can place at least two living individuals in proximity to this same gun.”

  Lloyd joined Bonnie and Byron at the rear of the Subaru. “And when the pistol was used at the fair, Witherspoon was there again.”

  “Another country heard from and right again. Now here comes the complicated bit. Add all of this together with what Harold overheard at Rattlesnake’s.”

  “No more killing,” Byron quoted.

  It was Bonnie’s turn to nod. “Precisely. Which brings up a pertinent question. Considering the same gun was used to kill both Leo and Dwight Furby, why was Alf Quinn supplying weapons to the man who killed his son?”

  Bonnie held up her hand for silence.

  Her baker’s dozen of students scaled back their enthusiasm to a reasonable buzz.

  “This situation presents a unique dilemma,” Bonnie said.

  It seems that once they had a name to glom on to, no one had trouble clueing into facts about Sophia Kovalevskaya. Now they were all vying for the right to present their findings.

  “Did anyone have a partner? That way, two people can get credit for presenting?” Yoki, the oriental student who’d earlier that week had missed out on a Jolly Rancher, and Georgia, a gangly, freckled-faced blonde, raised their hands.

  Bonnie nodded in their direction. “Go for it.” She took up residence at her desk in the back of the room.

  The two girls exchanged nervous glances and then stood. While Georgia appeared as if she might burst into anxious giggles, Yoki adopted the demeanor of a lawyer about to give her summation. Her jet-black hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, she smoothed down her flowered dress. She strode to the front of the room and her dark eyes took in her classmates and finally Bonnie.

  Child, you have a presence. Way to work it.

  “Georgia, will you pass out Sophia’s picture?” Yoki asked solemnly.

  The blonde nodded and snatched up the stack of papers on Yoki’s desk and distributed them to her classmates. When she was finished, she handed the remaining papers to Bonnie.

  The photo showed a young girl, in her midtwenties maybe. The face wasn’t classically beautiful, but possessed strength in the set of the jaw and the intensity of the eyes. Her hair was short, almost mannish. She wore a high-necked blouse clasped under the chin with a scrimshaw cameo. Beneath the photo was the quote, It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in the soul.

  Although Bonnie had read the quote a legion of times, she found herself nodding approval at the sentiment. She herself considered mathematics an artform as well as a science.

  Yoki cleared her throat. While Bonnie had been perusing Sophia Kovalevskaya’s picture, the young oriental girl had ensconced herself behind Bonnie lectern. She extracted an index card from a pocket of her dress and set it in front of her.

  “Say what you know, do what you must, come what may. I think this quote, more than any other, tells what Sophia Kovalevskaya was like. She fought for what she believed in a world where women could do hardly anything except have babies and be wives.”

  Yoki stepped from behind the podium. Once again Bonnie was impressed with the young girl’s charisma.

  Sophia would like your style, cutie.

  Bonnie expected the girl to return to the lectern to check her notes, but she moved to the blackboard. She wrote 1850—1891 on the board.

  “Sophia only lived forty-one years, but in that time she was a lot of things. She was considered one of the leading mathematicians of her time, although she had trouble finding a college to let her in to study. Eventually she would become the first European woman since the Renaissance to receive a doctorate in mathematics. I thought about that fact, and it made me sad and happy at the same time.”

  Yoki inhaled deeply and for a moment Bonnie thought the girl was tearing up. If she was, the moment passed. “I was happy because here was this really passionate, brilliant woman kicking butt in a man’s world. I was sad because I thought of all the other women in almost two hundred years who never got the chance to show what they could do just because they weren’t men.”

  From across the room, Bonnie noted the grumblings of her charges.

  That’s right, ladies. Get pissed off. And don’t for a moment think this crap is completely done away with yet. The glass ceiling still exists, and women still get paid less than 80 percent of their counterparts for the same work.

  “But Sophia wasn’t just a mathematician. She was a scientist. She wrote a paper on the rings of Saturn. The paper got awards.”

  Yoki returned to the podium and checked her notes. “She was a novelist. Her autobiography, Recollections of a Childhood, was like a best seller. It told about growing up in the country with her father, who was a general in the czarist army. She was scared of him, but he saw that she was really, really smart.” Yoki glanced back to where Bonnie sat. “He’s the one who wallpapered her room with mathematical notes.”

  The girl reddened slightly. “Although, Missus Pinkwater, they weren’t Newton’s notes. They were notes about Newton and Leibniz on calculus and analysis. Actually, the notes belonged to a Russian mathematician named”—again, she checked her index card—“Mikhail Ostrogradsky.”

  Bonnie didn’t mind this particular correction. She had known she was stretching the truth when she said Isaac Newton’s notes papered Sophia’s bedroom. Every
body knew Isaac Newton, but who the hell was Mikhail Ostragradsky?

  In a toss-up between the legend and the truth, ladies, always opt for the legend? It makes better press.

  Yoki walked back to the blackboard. She wrote The Nihilist Girl on the board and put it in quotes. “This novel, which was published after Sophia’s death and translated into seven languages, showed another one of her passions. She was a revolutionary. She fought for women’s rights in Russia, and when she moved to other European countries she fought against oppression there, too. She had to marry someone she didn’t love just so that she could travel to Germany to study math. Unmarried women weren’t allowed to travel in those days. Can you believe that?”

  Bonnie smiled at Yoki’s indignation. Honey, that particular stricture is still practiced on three continents.

  Yoki leaned heavily on the podium, her unlined face rigid with anger. “The crummy part was that when she got to Germany, the University of Heidelberg wouldn’t accept her as a student. No women allowed. If it wasn’t for some guy named Weierstrass tutoring her on the sly—I think he was secretly in love with her—she wouldn’t have gotten any degree at all and would have had to return to Russia, the wife of a paleontologist whom she didn’t love.”

  Once again, Yoki inhaled deeply. From what Bonnie could tell, the girl delivered her last monologue in one long breath.

  “A lot of folks thought her husband might have been gay, but he must have liked girls a little. In 1878 Sophia had a baby.”

  A few of the girls giggled at this.

  Nice work, Yoki. You got them now. Bring it on home.

  “Anyway,” Yoki continued, “even with a doctorate, Sophia couldn’t find work in Russia, Germany, or even England. Same old story—no women allowed. She ended up taking a job teaching in Sweden. Her husband asked her not to go. He was a gambler and really bad at business and lost a lot of money, so they needed the money this job would pay. She took their child and went to Stockholm. Not long after, he committed suicide. For the rest of her life, which was only three more years, she blamed herself for his death.”