Betty Jo, erstwhile ally, did not even attend the hearing. A hundred pages of pleading paper and many a phone call later, Nina had her orders, her appointments, and her tickets.
Roger, ally, attended to Dave, non-ally, who remained mostly incommunicado. Roger did not move forward on the conservatorship idea.
“I found another way to handle Dave,” he told Nina. “We had a talk. To be honest, I let him have it. I told him I was disgusted with him. He told me he was disgusted with himself. He said he’s barely hanging on right now, and he can’t help, but he’s not going to interfere with your work.”
“Thanks. Great.”
“It’s the least I can do. That, and pay for your airline ticket.”
“Much appreciated.”
“How much more will you need?”
“I’ll front the rest,” Nina said. “The German official who sits in and the transcriber. We’re staying with a friend who has a car, so it won’t be too expensive.”
“Good luck.”
The case had become an intelligence war; the shooter in Nina’s mind was like Bin Laden, hiding in a cave, making dark forays from time to time. His freedom hurt her. She thought about Chelsi every day, the flutter of her eyes as she lay on the floor so close to Nina, the little business she had built up all by herself, her beauty, her heart.
It felt almost like being shot again herself. She couldn’t rest until the shooter was found; she imagined what it would be like to stand face-to-face with him.
It would happen soon. He was close, watching, unquiet himself. The Heddesheim depositions would break the case, she was sure of it.
Silke became an ally. Over the next few days, she persuaded Elliott Wakefield to fly to Germany from Seattle. She persuaded Raj not to allow Branson, the attorney from Boston, to represent them.
Bob was jubilant that he would be seeing Kurt over his holiday, but he kept giving Nina worried looks as she sat night after night in her bed, reading over the autopsy reports, working on her motions, making endless notes.
“Mom, you’re getting obsessed,” he told her one night. “You’re not going to get him by staring into that math book.”
“It’s interesting.”
“What has math got to do with it?”
“The new defendants are mathematicians.”
“So?”
“So. I’m going to be questioning them. Their work might come up, be important in some way.”
“I have the same brain as you, and I know obsessed. And you’re getting obsessed.”
Nina said, “Okay, it’s true. I don’t know why the mystery of the primes interests me so much. I don’t know if this math stuff has anything at all to do with my case. It’s one way to go, that’s all.” She kept her place with her finger and added, “I’m going to find this sucker, Bob.”
“That’s what I’m worried about. Or else he’ll find you.” Now she knew what was at the root of his worry.
“Come sit on the bed for a minute,” she said. Bob came in and sat down on the edge. His baby picture on the dresser still matched up with this tall fellow, though a curious solidification and elongation had occurred over the years. He still had the mole on his earlobe, dark hair that fell forward, blunt fingers, narrow feet.
“I’m sorry,” Nina said.
“You oughtta be.” Bob said this with feeling.
“I can’t help it.”
“You need a life.”
“I have a very full life.”
“Books aren’t a life.”
“Don’t you think my work is important?”
“I don’t know. I guess it is. But you get into it too much, Mom.”
Nina said lightly, “Do you think I’m going to lose my marbles? Start mumbling to myself on the street? Bob, I’m sane as a post.”
“Well, watch it. Anyways, what if this guy comes after you?”
She wanted to be flippant, say something like “Well, then you’ll protect me.” But he was so earnest, his brow knitted in the lineaments of worry.
“We’re leaving in two days, Bob. Wish and the police are watching out for us. We have a really good security system here.” She was still watching Bob, and she realized how much he wanted to help protect them. In a moment of maternal insight, she asked, “Is that why you’ve been practicing throwing rocks? The bolos?”
“I didn’t think you’d let me buy a Luger.”
Nina sighed. “That doesn’t explain my sneakers on the line,” she said. So he was practicing throwing rocks because he had no other way to protect them. She pulled him closer and put her arm around him. He let her do it. His shoulders were heartbreakingly bony. “Listen, bud, I promise you, we’re going to be fine. Okay? Now go start the laundry or you won’t be able to pack.”
“Okay.”
“Love you,” she said lightly. She kissed him warmly on the cheek. It had been too long since she had done that.
On the day before the flight, at the office, Mick McGregor stopped by. He waited patiently while Nina saw her client out.
“Hi, Mick! What brings you here?”
“You,” Mick said. Sandy let out a muffled “Hmph” from her desk ten feet away.
Mick had a burning look in his eye and a fistful of gladioli. He wore a corduroy sport coat with leather patches on the elbows hilariously reminiscent of the sixties.
“Look at the color of those flowers,” Nina said. “Uh, Sandy…”
“I’ll get the vase.” Sandy went into the conference room and shut the door, mostly.
“Can I buy you dinner?” Mick said. “I need to buy you dinner.”
“I really can’t. I’m leaving tomorrow on a trip.”
“You have to eat dinner.”
“That line only works once,” Nina said, and smiled. She appreciated his obvious interest in her, but he was hard to take seriously, what with the wife and the students.
“How about a quick drink after work? You have to drink after work.”
“True.”
“Don’t you have any more questions for me? Please? Ever been to the top floor of Harrah’s, to the bar there?”
“No.”
“What time shall I pick you up?”
“Six. But I only have an hour.”
Six came and went, but Mick waited for her. When she saw the bar, Nina wished she’d had time to change out of her work suit. The sixteenth floor at Harrah’s consisted of a restaurant and a “view” bar: The view stretched west across the Tahoe valley to the mountains, and across the grassy slopes of Heavenly only a mile or so south of the casino-hotel. Taking a slow leave, the sun still left a gleaming trail across Lake Tahoe to the north, and several of the guests stood at the tall window looking out.
“Lucky time of day,” Mick said. He held her arm and steered her toward a small vacant table in the back.
“I’ll have a glass of white wine,” she said.
“Live a little,” Mick said. “Ever tried B & B?”
“Why not?” It was delicious, sweet. Mick had one, too. He drank it down in a gulp and that marvelously exciting look came back into his eyes. He put his palms together and held them to his face as though he was considering something important, still looking at her. His eyes were dark blue, she noticed.
“It is hard to extricate you for an hour,” he said. “I get the feeling you have to be cajoled from point to point.”
“Are you cajoling me somewhere?” She had to smile.
“To my lair, I hope. Someday,” he added hastily. “I don’t know how to act with you. Masterful, I think, but I’m not really the masterful type. I’m more of the puppy type, to be honest.”
But you know the language of love, Nina thought to herself. “I would have said that you’re the wolf type,” she said.
“Predatory?”
“I do get this feeling of something with paws creeping up on me.”
“Puppies do that too. Then they roll over and beg for it.”
“Wolves call themselves puppies,” Nina said
. “Let’s have another one of those.”
“Okay, the puppy thing isn’t going anywhere, I’m going to take another tack,” Mick said. He ordered another set of drinks and said, “Wow, look at that sunset.” They truly did have an angel’s view of the spectacle from their tower in the sky. The lake was flaming now, a sheet of red shading to indigo above.
Nina let her spine loosen. She was enjoying sitting opposite a charming younger man in a comfortable place, listening to his stories. She even wanted to tell Mick that, but…
He wanted to be in love. Did he care who he was in love with tonight? Did it matter if the splash of his erotic fancy had only accidentally encountered her one day, as she sat on the bank of the river of life staring drily at a book?
Maybe Mick could help keep this grim angry feeling about Chelsi from overwhelming her. It would be such a relief to lie in the freckled arms of this, uh, math professor… what kind of sheets would he have? A grid pattern?
Mick put his hand on hers.
“What are you thinking?”
“About something I read. I’m still reading about prime numbers.”
“The subject does tend to suck you in.”
“Mick, let’s talk about l-i-e-s.” She spelled the word out because she was not sure how to pronounce it in this context.
He took his hand back. “Isn’t it a little soon for that discussion? If I can momentarily adopt a masterful tack, well then I insist that topic will come up much later in our relationship. If ever.”
She laughed at his expression. “I mean in the mathematical sense.”
“Oh, good, ’cause it’s such an alarming word in its plain English sense.” He noted her glass was empty. Again. “Can I get you another one? No more for me. I’m driving.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“These things are small and weak. Like me.”
“Oh, well. Why not.” Dinner would have to come from a cardboard box in the freezer, preformulated, but then, as Bob had mentioned, it usually did lately.
“You want to know about lies, eh? Well, all sorts of lies relate to math. There’s a Chinese professor by the name of Li.”
“Not him.”
“There’s also a Norwegian mathematician from the turn of the century, named Lie. He gave his name to some concepts called Lie Groups and Lie Transformations.”
“Are they used in prime number theory?”
“Maybe. But if so, it’s way over my head,” Mick said. “So much genius has been wasted trying to figure out what the hell the primes are, and why they sit where they sit on the number line, that I’d have to look it up, and I might not know enough about that field to help.
“Here’s the thing about number theory: Any fool can ask a simple question that no genius can solve. Is one a number? What’s the square root of minus one? Why can’t you divide by zero? And the question that has you hooked: How come the primes, the building blocks of all numbers, can’t be located using some formula?”
“It’s true,” Nina said. “It seems so simple. There must be a pattern. I look at the list of numbers, and I think I see a pattern like a mist just behind the list. That there’s some simple little adjustment to be made, and they would fall into a regular sequence-2, 3, 5, 7, 11…”
“There’s a very great mathematician named Grothendieck who said you have to come at things this difficult with the mind of an infant,” Mick said. “Maybe the mystery will be solved someday by some retired postal worker who likes math puzzles. Meantime, let’s talk about one more ‘li.’ ”
“The li that comes close to predicting a pattern of prime distribution,” Nina said.
“Right. Let’s start with maybe the greatest mathematician who ever lived, the incomparable Gauss. Active in math in the late seventeen hundreds. A child prodigy. He kept notebooks, and he only published a small number of his discoveries. It’s said that his failure to let the world into his brain set mathematics back a century.
“When he was fifteen, he wrote a stunning little function in his notebook. He wrote, ‘N over the log of N.’ This predicted approximately how many primes would be found as one went higher and higher on the number line. That teenage observation, with some refinement, became the Prime Number Theorem after about half a century of work by other mathematicians proving it. It’s still the most important thing we know about the primes.”
“You said ‘log.’ A logarithm is some kind of root, is that right?”
Mick scratched his head and said, “I don’t think of it like that, but, yeah, it is a root. The natural log is the power a base number has to be raised to in order to equal the particular prime. Most people have had to study base 10 logs, but the scientific log is called the natural log, and…” He saw Nina’s eyes glazing over and said, “Yeah, it’s sort of a root,” and laughed.
“But not exact?”
“No. Close, but no cigar. Still, close was an amazing leap of creativity. Tantalizing, how close he came.”
“Are we getting closer to li yet?”
“Li. Hold on to your glass. Bring all brain cells into play. Grit your teeth. Ready?”
“Go for it.”
“Li means ‘logarithmic integral.’ It’s a refinement of the theorem that comes even closer to predicting the number of primes up to a certain number, and it gets more and more accurate as the numbers get larger. It still can’t predict individual primes, it just comes closer. Gauss came up with it later. It’s a root of a root, you might say. You make an x,y graph. Make a line representing the actual prime numbers, which of course we know up to a hundred digits or so. Make another adjusted line representing the lies of those numbers. The lines run extremely close to each other.”
He drew a simple diagram on his napkin. A right triangle-“The vertical axis is y. The horizontal axis is x, the number line. Where they intersect is zero”-then added another line starting from the zero point and extending out with an arrow at about a forty-five-degree angle.
“That’s the li line, which predicts how many primes there should be up to any point. But it only works approximately. Each prime is located at some random distance below the li line.” He drew a jagged stepped line which ran under the li line like a narrow staircase. “See where the actual number of primes are located? It’s as though the primes got pulled away from their line and have sunk at different rates.” He spread his hands. “To find out how and why this force acts to distort the prime distribution, I would sell my soul. Now I’m getting romantic. It’s because of those brown eyes of yours.”
Lights were winking on all across the forest now, leaving the mountains and the lake in their mysterious darkness.
“Then Riemann found another pattern, somehow related to the li line, by working with a function called the Zeta Function. And his work still seems like the best approach to finding this force or differential or whatever you might call it. So prime theoreticians went looking in that direction. But so far, the Riemann Hypothesis hasn’t been proved.”
“I’ve been reading about that.”
“I have a really good book about it at home I could lend you. So this is connected to your case?”
“I told you, one of the witnesses is very interested in prime number theory.”
“Maybe he works for an Internet-security company,” Mick said.
“What?”
“Well, really big numbers can’t be factored-nobody can find the primes they’re made of-even with today’s computers. So a company called XYC invented a method of encoding financial and other information using that fact, so information couldn’t be hacked as it traveled from one Web site to another. The code lets you type in your credit-card number for certain eyes only. Ever buy anything on eBay?”
“No.”
“You will soon. Everybody will. Local markets can’t really compete. Where was I? Oh, yes. Internet codes. I have a good book about that at home as well. Want to borrow it? We could stop by there.”
Nina had been lulled into such a scholarly daze by Mick’s dis
quisition that she almost didn’t notice that he had made his move. Maybe she didn’t want to notice, erect defenses, analyze, think it through. “I would,” she said. “I could take it to read on the plane.”
“Let’s go, then. Maybe you should call your son and say you’ll be a little late.”
“Good idea.” Nina called Bob and said she’d be a little late. She wasn’t hungry. The B & B warmed in her stomach. She was on the trail of something intellectually challenging. Mick was a fount, a real fount. He was holding her hand as they emerged into the parking lot.
Okay, be honest, she was on a trail all right, but the trail had just forked, and his hand was confident.
He went on talking during the short trip to his place in the Tahoe Keys, and Nina leaned back in the passenger seat, allowing herself to be fed information as if he were spooning ice cream into her mouth. Up the stairs they went into his dark cabin. He didn’t turn on the lights. He opened the door to his stove-fireplace and a blast of heat came out and flames flickered into action.
“Let me show you something,” he said. He drew her to the window. Outside sparkled one of the canals that led to the lake. The stars shone down.
It didn’t surprise her when he began to undress her. “Ssh, ssh,” he said. “Let’s get comfortable and I’ll show you the books. It’s getting hot in here.”
She had heard that line in a bad rap song, but somehow she was in her slip, and his hands caressed her. “Right in here,” he said, drawing her over the threshold into his bedroom, where a large bookcase took up half the wall. The bed took up the rest of the room, though, and hardly had they entered when Mick engineered her to the bed and said, “Relax, I’ll get it in a second.”
She sat on the bed, tired all of a sudden and acutely aware of Mick kneeling in front of her, sliding his hand up her thigh. In the dark she only sensed his head below her. She took a handful of his hair, ready for the ride.
“This’ll only take a minute,” he said. “You’re really going to like this book, sweetheart. It’s full of details about logs that make you want to be close to somebody who understands. Like I’m close to you right now, touching you. Mmm, you are absolutely luscious. You’re hot, baby. And now I’m going to show you a log, a natural log, you’re gonna get this right away…”
Case of Lies Page 22