James PATTERSON - Cross Fire

“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 Beyonce 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.