Strip Search (15 page)

He barely looked up. “Morning, Susan.”

Now that was just weird. “That’s…all you have to say? No pounding me for a psych profile? What’s the deal?”

He did that shrug again, the one that made me want to disconnect his head from his shoulders. “Personally, I’ve always thought psychological profiling was overrated. Good solid detective work—that’s how you solve a case.”

Like hell. I peered into his beady little eyes. “You’ve got something, don’t you?”

“In what way?”

“You know damn well. You’ve found something. Something you think is so brilliant and insightful that you don’t need me. You think you’ve got it all figured.”

“Well, that is my job.”

“Come clean, Granger. What do you know?”

He continued talking with that insufferable indifference, but from the corner of my eye I could see that we were beginning to attract attention. In other words, once again, he was playing for an audience. Building his rep by trashing mine. “I know the killer is male. Right?”

My eyes widened. “Wow! You must have a Ph.D. in psychology or something.”

“I know he’s motivated by some kind of sexual obsession or deviancy.”

“And how did you decide that?”

“Almost all serial killers are, right?”

“There are exceptions. Aileen Wuornos—”

“But most of them are sexually motivated, right?”

“So far, there’s no indication that the victims were sexually molested.”

“Which, as we both know, does not in any way rule out the likelihood that his crimes are sexually motivated. He’s probably impotent.”

“You can’t keep making assumptions in the absence of evidence—”

He held up his hand. “But statistically speaking, I’m probably right, aren’t I?”

I tried to penetrate a little further into that titanium-reinforced skull. “You wouldn’t be playing so high and mighty with me in my own ballpark unless you knew something. Spill.”

Granger stared at me for a long moment. Eventually, he turned around the paper in his hands so I could see it. It was a victimology report from one of his investigating officers, one who had been interrogating the friends of Mohamadas Amir. “Amir was a porn freak.”

I snatched the report out of his hands. “How do they know?”

“It’s more like, how could anyone not know. Everyone who knew him knew. Except his wife, apparently.”

I scanned the report as quickly as I could input the data. “So what wild and utterly unsupported conclusion are you drawing here?”

He spread his arms wide. “Isn’t it obvious? It’s Jack the Ripper all over again.”

I squinted. “Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes.”

“Jack the Ripper was obsessed with everything he perceived as sexually obscene. Prostitutes were the easiest to get at, in nineteenth century London, but his notes to the police show that his sexual obsession didn’t stop with ladies of the evening. He didn’t have access to porn queens or those who favored them. But if he had, I’d be willing to bet he’d have gone after them with that great big knife of his.”

“How does this explain the equation? How does this explain the face peeling?”

“Didn’t Jack the Ripper mutilate his victims?”

“Yes, but in a clearly sexual manner, at least most of the time. You’re extrapolating too much from two bits of information that may or may not indicate a pattern. We need more empirical data before we—”

He held up his hands. “Susan, Susan, Susan. I’m not trying to get you kicked off the case. I’m really not. But I think you’d be more useful if you worked with the evidence, instead of fighting against it.” I could’ve lived with that, but he had to add: “Just because you didn’t find it yourself.”

“I’m not—I just—” I tried to concentrate, get my head straight, but I was having a hard time focusing. “I can’t explain, Granger. It just doesn’t feel right.”

He smiled again and this time, just for good measure, added a little chuckle. “Like I said, I think psychological profiling is overrated.”

“You sorry son of a—”

“Which reminds me.” He pulled another document out of his pocket. “This is a consulting contract. I knew everything was all loosey-goosey and handshakes with O’Bannon, but now that you’re working directly under me, I want a formal signed contract on file spelling out the terms of the employment—and grounds for termination.”

I snatched it out of his hands and read. “I agree to follow all instructions given by my superior officers. I promise to observe the chain of command and show respect to my superior officers.” I pushed it back into his face. “I’m not signing this.”

“If you want to go on working on this case, you are.”

“I don’t care how important you think you are. O’Bannon won’t fire me. And I’m not signing this.”

He took a step closer. “So help me, Pulaski, if you don’t—”

I shoved the contract into my mouth and ate it. Chewed it up and swallowed it, the whole thing. The office spectators began to laugh. Granger fumed, swore under his breath, then pivoted on one heel and stomped away.

Okay, so that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. I still don’t really know why I did it. Well, I suppose I do, in a way. But I knew it would come back to haunt me. Granger would be in O’Bannon’s office first chance he got, trying to get me booted, and now he even had a decent excuse.

I decided to make tracks. They couldn’t fire me if they couldn’t find me, right? Besides, if I wanted to stay on this case, I needed to find out something they didn’t already know. The faster the better.

“DID YOU KNOW that the Eiffel Tower has exactly 2,500,000 rivets?”

“What, like, exactly?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It is true. Gustave Eiffel planned it that way.”

“Wow. That Gustave must’ve been…”

“A master engineer?”

I smiled. “A man after your own heart.”

I was driving Darcy to UNLV by way of the Spaghetti Bowl, what the locals call the loop formed by I-35 and US 93-95 as they circle around downtown Vegas, which seemed to be jammed with commuter traffic around the clock. Fortunately, I had Darcy to keep me company. I’d told him we were going to meet an eminent mathematician, so he decided to entertain me with more of his seemingly inexhaustible supply of numerical trivia.

“Do you know how many Elvis impersonators there are in Las Vegas?” he asked.

I couldn’t hazard a guess. “Way too many.”

“Twelve thousand, six hundred and ninety-two.”

“No!”

“Yes. The growth rate over the past decade has been exponential. If this pattern continues, by the year 2020, one in every six people will be Elvis impersonators.”

I couldn’t resist a hearty belly laugh. “Darcy, you’re cracking me up.”

“What do you mean?”

“You—That—” I kept my attention on the gridlock traffic, but glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “That wasn’t a joke?”

He stared at me blank-faced.

What was I thinking? Darcy didn’t even understand the concept of jokes.

“Have you had lunch?” I asked him. “We’ve got time to stop, if you haven’t.”

“Thank you, but I have already eaten. I had leftover chicken from our dinner last night. From KFC. Do you know what KFC stands for?”

“Yes!” For perhaps the first time ever, I actually knew the answer to one of Darcy’s questions. I felt as if I had won the
Jeopardy
! Tournament of Champions.

“I had double helpings of coleslaw,” Darcy added. “Although now I am thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have. Do you know how many times the average adult passes gas each day?”

“Uh, no, and what’s more—”

“Nineteen.”

“That—can’t be right.”

“It’s true. There was a study done at Cornell University.”

I wondered what lucky graduate student got to write that grant application. “Nineteen?”

“On average.”

“Well,” I said, veering onto the exit ramp. “I’ve never done it. Ever. In my entire life.”

His forehead creased. “Then you would be a statistical anomaly.”

I made a hard left and passed through the campus gates. “I’ve always suspected as much.”

I WAS SO HAPPY and it was so good to see Susan again it has been so long since my dad let me be a detective with her and I missed being a detective with her. I like being with her. I do not know if she’s decided whether she will adopt me I wanted to ask but I was afraid to ask and I thought that if the answer was yes she would tell me so maybe I should not ask. I am glad that she wanted me to be with her but I hope I can help her I like math and math likes me but it is not always easy. At least numbers are better than words. Words can mean so many different things and you never can be sure what they mean because you have to know which meaning is right and you have to know how someone is saying it or see their expression when they are saying it and I can never understand how someone is saying it or why that should matter. Numbers are always the same. One is always one. Two is always two. And one and two are always three. Unless you are not in base ten. But that would be different.

Susan smells good today and she seems okay and her hands are not shaking and that makes me happy. But she is talking funny and that makes me worried. She is talking funny like she used to talk funny except not like she used to talk funny and I don’t really know what I mean but something is not right and I do not like it when something is not right for Susan. For Susan everything should be right because I love Susan and I love Susan and—

Stop. Insert period. Start again. I do not like the way her words are running together, but she does not have that funny smell she used to have when I first met her and as long as she does not have that funny smell everything will be okay. I think. I wish I understood the world but I do not and I never will. That is why I need Susan to adopt me. She could help me. She could take care of me. And I would always try to take care of her.

I GUESS WE got there early, because when we arrived, Professor Goldstein was still teaching a class. It was one of those multitiered amphitheater classrooms with enough seats for at least a hundred students, and there wasn’t an empty seat. What’s more, there wasn’t a bored face in the room; she seemed to have her students absolutely mesmerized, which was amazing, because I didn’t understand a word she was saying.

“Darcy,” I whispered, “are you getting any of this?”

He was staring at the problems written on the chalkboard, which looked to me sufficiently complex to create an atomic bomb. “I am working on it.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“I…I have never seen anything like this before.”

“Does that mean you don’t get it, either?”

He continued staring straight ahead, eyes fixed. “I am working on it.”

I tuned into Dr. Goldstein’s lecture. “The important thing to bear in mind about continuing fractions is that they’re fundamentally no different from simple fractions—except that instead of being able to reduce them in one, perhaps two steps, it’s going to be more like, oh, fifty or a hundred steps.” There was a low ripple of laughter from the classroom. “But never fear—it can be done. And it’s worth the effort. Continuing fractions made it possible for men to go to the moon, for us to send probes to Mars and beyond. They made it possible for us to decode the human genome, to understand the natural process of crystallization. And Tupperware. Never forget Tupperware.”

The bell rang. She laid her chalk back on the tray and brushed her hands together. “Class dismissed. Try to complete all three problems on the board. See you next time.”

I CAUGHT HER as she was packing up her materials and introduced myself. “Thank you for seeing me, Dr. Goldstein.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble. Colin and I have known each other for years.” She offered me a chair. “Are you all right? You seem tired.”

“Do I?” Damnation. “Did you catch me yawning during your lecture?”

She laughed. “No. Everyone does that. But your eyelids seem droopy.”

“Sorry. I’ve been working double shifts on this case. Didn’t get much sleep last night.” I was lying through my teeth, of course. Three little blue pills was definitely too many. “I was impressed by your lecture. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a female mathematician.”

“Well, times are changing. Even if we haven’t come that far in two thousand years.”

“Two thousand years?”

“Since Hypatia. In ancient Egypt. History tells us she was the first female mathematician. Also kept the great Library of Alexandria. Very radical figure, in her time. Many people considered math—all the sciences, actually—a male enclave. Didn’t like having a woman intrude on their turf.”

“What happened to her?”

Dr. Goldstein pursed her lips. “Hypatia was attacked by a mob and dragged from her chariot. Her skin was flayed from her body with seashells. Then they burned the library. As a result, innumerable works of science and literature were lost for all time. Most of the work of Ptolemy. Most of the plays of Sophocles. An immeasurable loss.”

“And, I bet, an end to women wanting to be mathematicians.”

“For a time, yes. But enough about math history. How can I help you?”

“I’ll be happy to explain that, although I warn you, it may take a while. And some of the details…aren’t too pleasant.”

“Why don’t we step into my office?” She gestured toward the door on the left.

“Sure. Darce?”

“Huh?” He stared at the blackboard.

“Let’s go into Dr. Goldstein’s office.”

His head tilted at an odd angle. “If it is okay—I mean if you do not mind or anything—I would like to stay out here.”

I was puzzled. He’d practically begged to come with me, and now he didn’t want to hear what the woman had to say? Still, I wasn’t going to force him.

“Okay. I’ll pick you up on my way out.”

I followed Dr. Goldstein down the corridor into her office. For someone who held the Laura K. McClain Chair in Mathematics, she had a damn small office. Life in academia, I supposed. Of course, I myself had no office at all, so perhaps I shouldn’t be criticizing.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, taking a seat behind her desk. I guessed her to be in her mid-to late thirties, with platinum blond hair and a few tinges of gray. She was not tall, but she was reasonably attractive. She wore a loose-fitting dress that gave no hint as to her figure, but even so, I could see this woman was capable of attracting male eyes.