“It was the murderer that wecaught, not the next victim,” Zoe said. She was nodding more rapidly now.Seeing it. What Dr. Applewhite wanted her to see.
“Keep it simple,” Dr. Applewhitesaid. “Don’t retreat too far back into your own head, into the equations andsymbols and numbers. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be anything more than aperson obsessed with something. In this case, a number. Start with that.”
“You are right,” Zoe said. Shefelt clearer now, more focused. As always, Dr. Applewhite had opened her eyesto what she really needed to see. “This is about pi. Everything else isextraneous.”
And when they ended the call, Zoefinally had clarity. She knew what she needed to do next.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
“Hello?” Zoe said, trying to doher best impression of a mature and reasonable adult talking on the phone. Atleast it was easier than doing it in person, where facial expression had to beinvolved. “Is this the head of the math department?”
“Yes, speaking. Professor Brown,”a male voice returned over the line. “Who am I talking to?”
“This is Agent Zoe Prime with theFBI,” Zoe said, trying her best not to sound impatient. She had alreadyexplained this to his receptionist, or secretary, or whatever she was, and thewoman hadn’t sounded as though she had taken it all in. “I am investigating alocal murder case and need to request some information that I think you will beable to give.”
“A murder?” The man sounded farmore interested now. “Of course, of course, I will help as much as I can. Whatis it?”
“It may sound like an oddquestion,” Zoe began. “Actually, I am sure it will sound like a very strangequestion indeed. But I need to know if you remember any colleague, past orpresent, or even a student, who was working with pi. They may even have come tothe point of obsession, perhaps trying to work out more digits or prove atheory about it.”
“Pi?” Professor Brown hummed alittle under his breath. “Well, we don’t have anyone like that aroundcurrently. Since the computers started getting it into the billions, I think it’smore of the domain for the tech students and professors. They want to puttogether a program that will work it out for them, not sit there with paper anda calculator.”
“But was there ever anyone in thepast?” Zoe pressed.
“Now… now that you mention it,there was,” the professor replied. He sounded old, and was used to deliveringdry lectures designed to take up an hour of time in a silent auditorium. Hiswords were slow and precise, and it was beginning to irritate Zoe no end. If hecould just get to the point, she could put the phone down and chase this newlead. “Now, he was a stranger character. As a I recall, he didn’t even want tobe called a mathematician like the rest of us. No, he was on a higher plane, orso he thought. He called himself a—what was it now?—oh, a numbers theorist.Huh! You ever heard such a thing?”
“I have not,” Zoe ground out. “Butwhat about pi?”
“Oh, yes, well, he had histheories,” Professor Brown said. “One of them was that pi had a final place. Ofcourse, some of us believe that, some don’t, but not many of us think we’llever find it. He was different. He wanted to calculate it right to that finalplace and show us all the full string.”
“Final place?” Zoe blinked,shaking her head as if clearing it out would help her understand a bit better.It didn’t make any sense. “But pi is an infinite number. It goes on forever.Everyone knows that.”
“Well, we don’t knowanything…”
“Computers have calculated it intothe trillions, even the quadrillions, of digits.” Zoe couldn’t believe what shewas hearing. It was logical, obvious even, that pi would never end. How couldanyone think differently? It was a pure number—a number that never stoppedbeing numbers. Now that she thought about it, she could almost understand beingobsessive about it herself. But not like this.
“No, well, I do agree,” ProfessorBrown said. “But that’s a debate for another time, anyway. The thing was, thisman—he was sure that there was a definitive end. He decided that was going tobe his life’s work. He had some funding to do the research, but when we got acloser look into what he was doing, we cut him off. It just wasn’t goinganywhere, you know. He never managed to find a shred of proof, even build aworkable equation that would demonstrate it. Not even a theoretical one.”
Zoe wasn’t surprised. This man,this numbers theorist, had been chasing after a wild goose. More than that: aflying pig. Something that he was never going to be able to find, because itdidn’t exist.
“What happened to him then?” Zoeasked. “You said he was not working there anymore?”
“No, well, there was something…let me look it up, now,” Professor Brown said, accompanied by the metallicsliding noise of a drawer opening and then the rustling of some paper. “Oh,here we are. I still have his personnel file. Right, that was it; he got into afistfight in the staffroom after the funding was cut. Blamed one of his felloweducators for the loss. That was balderdash, of course. It was all his ownfault.”
“So, he faced disciplinary action,or did he quit?” Zoe asked. She didn’t need the opinion piece so much as thebare facts.
“He was fired,” Professor Brownsaid. “Oh, yes, ma’am. Couldn’t have him on staff any longer. Took us a goodjob to convince the other staff member not to press charges, as it says here.Could have sent him to jail for a long time. He did some real damage. Anyway,the college paid for the medical bills, and we managed to avoid a widerlawsuit, so that worked out okay for us.”
Zoe half-closed her eyes. Shecouldn’t care less about how everything
