Perri O'Shaughnessy - Case of Lies

“About what?”

“Leaving the gun. But I didn’t have enough time to think. You have to understand, Nina, it was like somebody else did it.”

Nina was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “But why? Why did you kill her?”

“Why? Why? How should I know? She was just putting up with me. She ragged on me about money, about me having a few beers at night, about brushing my fucking teeth before I went to bed. She was going to have a baby and there wasn’t going to be any room at all for me after that. The gun was in my hand. It happened.”

Nina leaned back and closed her eyes.

“I was tired of her. Everybody gets that way sometimes. I had a gun in my hand. It’s like an accident.”

“An accident,” Nina repeated.

“The whole thing. A series of random events that put the gun in my hand. I haven’t told a soul,” Hanna went on, “except my attorney. How strong is that evidence, Nina? What’s going to happen to me? If she hadn’t given me that look, like I was an asshole, when I looked up at her on that balcony, it wouldn’t have happened.”

“What about Flint?” Nina said. “Was he gagged and bound when you shot him?”

“Flint? Why are you talking about him? That was no crime, not really, he had come there to kill me. It was self-defense.”

“You shot him in cold blood!”

“So what? He deserved it, didn’t he? Fool. He didn’t dream I could take him.”

Nina said nothing. Dave went back to his wife.

“It’s not my fault. I never did anything wrong my whole life. I walked her to church, I folded the clothes, I went and got the paper for her in the morning. For years. Years. Something snapped. I wasn’t myself. I’d had a few. Whatever.”

“Did you kill Chelsi? Did you follow me to Germany?”

“No! It was Flint. I wouldn’t have done that to little Chelsi. Poor little girl. I was so scared while all that was going on, Nina. It was very hard to keep it together.”

“Flint only finished what you started,” Nina said.

“Not at all. You don’t understand. Flint had nothing to do with me.”

“I’m afraid the difference escapes me.”

Hanna’s face drooped. “I appreciate your coming down, Nina. I was afraid you might walk out. It’s good to know that at least you’re going to do your duty and help me in my hour of need. Lucky for me you’re a criminal lawyer, too. I’ll sell the house. You’ll be paid.”

“Don’t put up the For Sale sign on my account,” Nina said. She opened her briefcase and pulled out the legal pleading, never taking her eyes off Hanna. Then she plastered the paper against the glass. “Read it,” she said. He read it.

“You can’t do that!” he shouted. “You’re my lawyer and you have a duty!”

“This is a new matter.”

“I told you I’d pay you. Don’t leave me, please, Nina. You have to help me. I don’t want to go through this with a stranger.”

Nina said slowly, “You know, Dave, I never really knew what evil was until I met you. I could find some excuse for every one of my guilty clients. But you taught me. Now I know.”

“But-”

“Evil is a man who kills his wife and thinks he deserves pity. You make me sick. Listen. Remember this one thing from our conversation.”

“Wait-”

“Remember this through all the years to come, Dave. It was your fault. All of it.” She spat the words out.

“Don’t do this!” He was shouting again. He kept it up while the guard came in and dragged him back into the secure area. Nina sat, her head bowed, until the guard came to fetch her.

THE PRE-CHRISTMAS SNOWSTORM TURNED INTO A whopper. Three feet of snow plumped up the street with mounds of marshmallows. Four feet packed the higher ski resorts. When bright, dry conditions returned, Tahoe went wild. Tourist SUVs clogged the roads in and out, ski racks piled high on their roofs. The Heavenly Gondola sagged with the weight of the people going up and down from the lodge. The lake that never froze, rimmed by its white peaks, gleamed under a cloudless, deep sky. The casinos rocked into the night and Christmas carols jingled across the mountains.

Nina Reilly’s law offices closed, leaving behind a Happy Holidays sign to swing on the door, reminding unobservant clients that the world had shut down. For this short time, all the running hamsters in the town lumbered down from their wheels, ate too much, drank too much, and fell into luxurious stupors. Nobody worked. Even Sandy and Wish went home to Markleeville, Wish’s brown van stuffed full of presents and feed for the animals.

On Vashon Island in Washington State, at his scratched old desk, Elliott Wakefield set down his mechanical pencil and cocked his head at the result. He had checked the equations over and over, and the results never varied. He couldn’t find an error. Starting with any integer on Gauss’s li line, he could first determine precisely how many primes there were up to that point, and then generate the nearest prime by plugging that number into his function. Factoring any-size composite number followed as a necessary corollary of the function.

He had finished his proof, twenty-three pages of closely reasoned math and physics condensed down from two hundred pages.

He got up and wandered around his room, looking at the books, picking up the loose papers on the floor, leaving his notebook displayed on the center of his desk like a black square-cut diamond.

Now what? Ask some colleagues to read it before daring to submit it to a journal? He really should.

He had wanted Silke to read and appreciate it. Now he wasn’t sure what he wanted from it.

“El?” his father called up from the foot of the stairs. “Dinner.”

“Two minutes,” he answered.

The Net was open to one of the XYC bank-account sites inside Bank of America. XYC was cheating with several other Cayman accounts, which Elliott had recently also accessed, but there was still plenty in the B of A checking account he was looking at.

He transferred $1,739,197 to his proxy account. Always a reasonable amount.

Always a prime number.

But that would be theft. He transferred the money back. Aw, I’m only playin’ witcha, he thought.

For fun, he punched in the primary URL for Russia’s military accounts. The Russians, too, were being bad boys. For now, he was just enjoying himself, educating himself on how the world really runs.

You know, El, the fame and immortality thing can wait a while, he thought, beginning a conversation with himself. You’re only twenty-three, you can always publish in ten years. Meantime…

“El?”

… you have changed. Learned a lot.

He twisted back and forth in the chair, thinking.

The money thing wasn’t important either, not really.

But the revenge thing-the revenge thing was important. XYC should have stopped Flint. There would never be another Silke on this earth, and not only were people dead, but he, Elliott Wakefield, would never love another woman.

He thought for another moment, then went to his E-mail server and typed in messages to Professor Braun and to Branson, the lawyer.

To the professor, he wrote:

Forming new company using unbreakable encryption formula. Would like to have you on board. Interested? Will double your fee.

To Branson, he wrote:

Are you available to serve as my counsel on a start-up here in Seattle? My encryption formula is unbreakable. I’ll need some patent work.

He thought, I’ll ask Nina to handle some of the lawsuits. He sent the E-mails and leaned back. Did he want to cannibalize anybody else from XYC? Patty Hightower?

No. Leave the phonies. Keep the competent hard-asses and hit XYC where it would hurt. They thought he was a naive fool. They would find out what it means to take on a mathematician.