Cross Fire (15 page)

Now it had happened again. This was a whole new ball game. With the sniper case raging, MPD brass were going to have a hair trigger on anything even remotely sensitive. They’d want to flip this thing up to Major Case Squad before the morning was out.

I figured that was why John called. If the case got transferred to my unit, I could say I was already consulting on it, ask to take the lead, and then put Sampson back in charge. Just our version of creative accounting, and God knows it wouldn’t have been the first time.

THE NUMBERS KILLER — Jesus God — not now.

When I got to Franklin Square, the entrances were already cordoned off. Additional units were parked on the longer K and I Street sides of the rectangular park, although the action seemed to be just off of Thirteenth, where Sampson was right now waving me over.

“Sugar,” he said when I came up close to him, “you’re a lifesaver. I know the timing sucks.”

“Let’s go take a look.”

Two crime-scene techs in blue Windbreakers were working inside the tape line, along with a medical examiner whom I easily recognized from behind.

Porter Henning’s unofficial nickname is “Portly,” and, widthwise, he makes “Man Mountain” Sampson look practically dainty. I’ve never been sure how Porter squeezes into
some of those tighter crime scenes, but he’s also one of the most insightful MEs I’ve worked with.

“Alex Cross. Gracing us with your presence,” he said as I walked up.

“Blame this guy.” I thumbed at Sampson but then stopped short when I saw the victim.

People say the extreme stuff is my specialty, which it kind of is, but there is no getting used to human mutilation. The victim had been left faceup in a clump of bushes. The multiple layers of dirty clothes marked him as homeless, maybe even someone who slept right there in the park. And while there were signs of a severe beating, it was the numbers carved into his forehead that made the biggest impression. As in the previous murder, it was almost too bizarre.

2^30402457-1

“Are those the same numbers as the last time?” I asked.

“Similar,” Sampson told me, “but no, not the same.”

“And we don’t know who the victim is?”

John shook his head. “I’ve got guys asking around, but most of the bench crashers made themselves scarce as soon as we showed up. It’s not exactly a trust fest around here, you know?”

I knew, I knew. This was part of what made homeless deaths so hard to trace.

“There’s also the shelter just a few blocks up on Thirteenth Street,” John went on. “I’m going to head up there after this, see if anyone knows anything about this man.”

The scene itself was hard to interpret. There were fresh footprints in the dirt, flat soles as opposed to boots or sneakers. Also, some kind of grooved tracks, maybe a shopping
cart, but that could have been completely unrelated. Homeless folks rolled through here all day, every day. All night, too.

“What else?” I asked. “Porter? You find out anything yet?”

“Yeah. Found out I’m not getting any younger. Other than that, I’d say cause of death is tension pneumothorax, although the first strikes were probably here, here, and here.”

He pointed at the crushed side of the dead man’s head, where a pink ooze had filled his ear. “Basal skull fracture, jawbone, zygomatic arch, the whole frickin’ works. If there’s any silver lining, the poor guy was probably out cold when it happened. There’s track marks all over him.”

“All just like the last time,” Sampson said. “Has to be the same perp.”

“What about the cutting on the forehead?” It was the cleanest knife work I’d ever seen. The digits were easily readable, the cuts shallow and precise. “Any initial thoughts about the cuts, Porter?”

“This is nothing,” he said. “Check out the real masterpiece.”

He reached down and rolled the young man onto his side, then lifted up the back of his shirt.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

The math equation covered the whole area from his waistband to his shoulder blades. I’d never seen anything like it. Not in this context anyway. Sampson motioned the scene photographer over to get a shot.

“This is new,” John said. “The last numbers were just on
the face. Makes me wonder if our guy’s been practicing. Maybe other bodies we haven’t found.”

“Well, he definitely wanted you to see this one,” Porter told us. “That’s the other thing. There’s not near enough blood here for the amount of blunt force trauma. Someone pounded this kid, then brought him here, and
then
did the fancy knife work.”

“Doo-doo, doo-doo.”
The photographer let out a snatch of
The Twilight Zone
theme before Sampson stared him down. “Sorry, man, but… damn, I’m glad I don’t have your jobs today.”

Him and everyone else.

“So the question is, why bring him here?” Sampson said. “What’s he trying to say to us? To whoever?”

Porter shrugged. “Anyone speak math?”

“I know a prof at Howard,” I said. “Sara Wilson. You remember her?” John nodded, still staring down at those numbers. “I’ll give her a call if you want me to. Maybe we can head up there this afternoon.”

“I’d appreciate it, that’d be good.”

So much for my quick consult. I had no time for this, but God help me, now that I’d seen the damage this perp was capable of, I wanted a piece of him.

I’D KNOWN SARA WILSON for more than twenty years. She and my first wife, Maria, were freshman roommates at Georgetown and remained good friends until Maria’s death. Now it was just Christmas cards and the occasional chance meeting between us, but Sara hugged me hello when she saw me and still remembered Sampson by name — first and last.

Her tiny cell of an office was in the unimaginatively named Academic Support Building B on the Howard campus. It was crammed with bookshelves to the ceiling, a big sloppy desk just like mine, and a huge whiteboard covered in mathspeak, in different colors of dry-erase marker.

Sampson took the windowsill, and I sat down in the lone guest chair.

“I know you’ve got exams coming up,” I said. “Thanks for seeing us.”

“I’m happy to help, Alex. If I
can
help?” She tipped a pair
of rimless specs off her forehead and looked down at the page I’d just handed her. It had transcripts of the numbers and equations that were found on the victims. We also had crime-scene photos with us, but there was no reason to share the gory details if we didn’t have to.

As soon as she looked at the page, Sara pointed at the more complicated of the figures.

“This is Riemann’s zeta function,” she said. It was the one we’d seen that morning on John Doe’s back. “It’s theoretical mathematics. Does this really have something to do with one of your cases?”

Sampson nodded. “Without going into too much detail, we’re wondering why this might be on someone’s mind. Maybe obsessively.”

“It’s on a lot of people’s minds, including mine,” she said. “Zeta’s the core of Riemann’s hypothesis, which is arguably the biggest unsolved problem in mathematics today. In the year two thousand, the Clay Institute offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove it.”

“Sorry, prove what?” I said. “You’re talking to a couple of high school algebra cutups here.”

Sara sat up straighter, getting into it now. “Basically, it’s about describing the frequency and distribution of all prime numbers to infinity, which is why it’s so difficult. The hypothesis has been checked against the first one and a half billion instances, but then you have to ask yourself — what’s one and a half billion compared to infinity?”

“Exactly what I was about to ask myself,” Sampson said, straight-faced.

Sara laughed. She looked almost exactly the same as she
did back when we were all pooling our pocket change for pitchers of beer. The same quick smile, the same long hair flowing down her back.

“How about the other two sets of numbers?” I asked. These were the ones that had been carved into the victims’ foreheads.

Sara glanced down for a second, then turned to her laptop and googled them from memory.

“Yeah, right here. I thought so. Mersenne forty-two and forty-three. Two of the biggest known prime numbers to date.”

I scribbled some of this down while she spoke, not even sure what I was writing. “Okay, next question,” I said. “So what?”

“So what?”

“Let’s say Riemann’s hypothesis gets proved. What happens then? Why does anyone care?”

Sara weighed the questions before she answered. “There’s two things, I suppose. Certainly, there are some practical applications. Encryption could be revolutionized with something like this. Writing and breaking code would be a whole new game, so whoever you’re chasing might have that in mind.”

“And number two?” I asked.

She shrugged. “The whole because-it’s-there aspect. It’s a theoretical Mount Everest — the difference being that people have actually been to the top of Everest. Nobody’s ever done this before. Riemann himself had a nervous breakdown, and that guy John Nash from
A Beautiful Mind
? He was obsessed with it.”

Sara leaned forward in her chair and held up the page of numbers so we could see them. “Let’s put it this way,” she said. “If you’re looking for something that could really drive a mathematician crazy, this is as good a place to start as any.
Are you, Alex?
Looking for a crazy mathematician?”

MITCH AND DENNY left DC in the old white Suburban before the sun had even come up that morning, with Denny at the wheel as always. He’d handed Mitch some easily digestible bullshit the day before, all about reconnecting with his people now that he was a “real man,” and Mitch had gobbled it up, even taken it to heart.

In truth, the less Mitch knew about the reason for this little road trip, the better.

It was about five hours to Johnsonburg, PA, or, as Denny thought of it when they got there,
Johnsonburg, PU.
The paper mills here put up the same sour stench as the ones he’d grown up around, on the Androscoggin. It was an unexpected little reminder of his own white-trash roots, the ones he’d ripped out of the ground twenty years ago. He’d been around the world more than once since then, and this small town was as close to going home again as he ever cared to get.

“What if she don’t want to talk to me, Denny?” Mitch asked for about the eighty-fifth time that morning. The closer they got, the faster his knee jacked up and down, and he clutched at the stuffed yellow monkey on his lap like he wanted to strangle the damn thing. It already had a tear in its fur where Mitch had pulled off the security tag at a Target in Altoona, right before he’d stuck it under his jacket.

“Just try to relax, Mitchie. If she don’t want you here, it’s her loss. You’re an American hero, man. Don’t ever forget that. You are a bona fide hero.”

They came to a stop outside a bleak little brick duplex on a block of bleak little brick duplexes. The front lawn looked like the place where old toys went to die, and there was a rusty blue Escort heaped in the driveway.

“Seems pretty nice,” Denny said with a frown. “Let’s go see if someone’s home.”

SOMEONE SURE WAS. You could hear the music coming right through the front door, some kind of Beyoncé shit or something like that. It took a couple of rounds of knocking before the volume finally went down.

A second later, the door opened.

Alicia Taylor was prettier than her surveillance photo, by far. Denny wondered for a second how Mitch had ever bagged her in the first place, but then Alicia saw who it was on her stoop, and her face got ugly and nasty real quick. She stayed behind the screen door.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she said by way of hello.

“Hey, Alicia.” Mitch’s voice was husky with fear. He seemed a little flustered, and he held up the stuffed monkey. “I, uh… brought a present.”

Behind Alicia, a little waist-high girl was giving them
wide eyes from under her braided and beaded bangs. She smiled when she saw the toy, but those lights went out as soon as her mother spoke again.

“Destiny, go to your room.”

“Who is that, Momma?”