you for the respect you’ve shown my friend.’
‘You’re welcome.’
As the Kilkennys followed Ptashnik out of the procedure room, Porter gently placed the shroud back over Wolff’s head.
In the anteroom, Ptashnik located the box Porter had set aside for him on a metal gurney.
‘Before you touch anything, I’d like you to put these on,’ Ptashnik said as he pulled out a pair of white latex gloves from a wall-mounted dispenser. ‘I’m going to have the lab people take a look at this to see if they can find any evidence that might identify the killer.’
Nolan and his grandfather complied with the request; Martin’s thick callused hands pushed the limits of the glove’s claim that one size fits all.
Ptashnik pulled out a pocketknife and slit the tape seal around the cardboard lid. Martin looked down into the open box. Each article of Wolff’s clothing was individually sealed in labeled clear-plastic bags. He looked over the tie, the long coat.
‘This is what Johann was wearing the last time I saw him,’ Martin said. ‘He must have been killed that very night.’
The collars of Wolff’s shirt, blazer, and overcoat were black with long-dried blood.
‘Butchery,’ Martin said angrily. ‘A horrible way for a man to die.’
Martin laid each of the bagged garments aside gently, as if the spirit of his friend were still somehow connected with his belongings. Brittle mud caked the front of Wolff’s coat and pants; the toes of the shoes were scuffed and muddied.
‘It was a foul night,’ Martin recalled. ‘The ground was still soggy from the rains we’d had the day before. Friday afternoon it finally got cold enough to snow. There was a foot on the ground by Saturday morning.’
‘Which worked in the killer’s favor,’ Ptashnik said, absorbing Martin’s recollections. ‘You reported him missing on Saturday afternoon, but the earliest the police would have started making inquiries would have been on Monday. The snow would’ve covered any evidence of the crime over the weekend, and then the workmen came back and filled in the hole.’
Martin pulled out Wolff’s battered leather briefcase from the bottom of the cardboard box.
‘Here it is, Nolan,’ Martin announced.
Ptashnik opened the seal on the evidence bag, and Nolan carefully pulled out the briefcase. He then undid the clasp that secured the top flap over the interior compartment. The dark brown leather was cracked and dirty. He lifted the flap and looked inside.
‘When I left him, Johann told me that he had some paperwork and a little correspondence to finish up,’ Martin said.
Inside, Nolan saw an envelope and six hardbound notebooks. He fished out the envelope. ‘It’s another letter to Raphaele Paramo. May I open it?’
Ptashnik nodded his approval.
Nolan carefully ran his gloved thumb under the envelope’s seal; the brittle glue released at the lightest touch. He pulled out the folded pages and laid them on the gurney.
‘It’s like the others,’ Nolan said. ‘He covers the personal stuff first, then dives into the physics. Take a look at this, Grandpa. He’s telling Paramo about his engagement to Elli.’
Martin quickly read the first part of the letter and smiled. ‘He was a happy man when he wrote this.’
As Martin read the letter, Nolan pulled a notebook out of the briefcase.
‘Johann always kept a notebook with him wherever he went,’ Martin recalled. ‘He was a very private man, particularly with regard to his work. Some of his colleagues thought he was a bit paranoid, and perhaps he was. After all those years of living with the Gestapo looking over his shoulder, I can understand how he might be guarded about what he was thinking. I’m just wondering, what if he dreamed up something brilliant – like Einstein did. There’s a lot of prima donnas running around in a place like Michigan, people who might be a bit put out if a Young Turk like Johann were to show them up.’
‘You think one of his colleagues might have killed him out of professional jealousy?’ Ptashnik asked.
Martin shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. I’m just trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense at all. Johann enjoyed what he did; he even tried to explain to me a little about what he was working on, but it flew right over my poor brain. It just seems to me that the only real thing of value Johann had was what he carried around in his head and what he put in his notebooks.’
‘It’s hard to believe this has been underground for over fifty years,’ Nolan said.
The binding cracked loudly as Nolan opened the volume; the pages were still white and showed little deterioration. The first page contained a few carefully drawn sketches and some accompanying text.
‘What do you make of that?’ Martin asked.
‘The drawings are mathematical, but I’ve never seen an algorithm that generates an image that looks like that. One thing’s for sure, Wolff could draw.’
‘That he could,’ Martin agreed. ‘He had quite a good fist, like a draftsman.’
Nolan scanned the text – written in the same precise hand that authored the Paramo letters – but found nothing his mind could latch onto.
‘This is gibberish,’ Nolan said.
‘What do you mean, lad?’ Martin asked.
‘The text. Take a close look at it.’
Curious, Martin and Ptashnik glanced down at the open notebook. The tiny characters Wolff had so precisely drawn on the page were an apparently random mix of letters, numbers, and Greek mathematical symbols. Nolan studied the composition of the page as a whole. Each character was equally spaced, as if laid out on a grid. The page was the result of a deliberate, precise effort.
‘Maybe he was dyslexic,’ Ptashnik offered wryly.
‘I don’t think so,’ Nolan mused. ‘Wolff took his time with these characters; look how carefully each one is drawn.’
‘Looks like calligraphy,’ Ptashnik noted.
‘Actually, I think it’s cryptography.’
‘Say again?’
‘I’m no expert in this field, but I’ve seen enough encrypted text to think that’s what we’re looking at here.’
‘Why would Wolff do that?’ Ptashnik wondered.
‘Well, he was a physicist,’ Nolan replied. ‘What big physics project was going on in the 1940s?’
‘The bomb,’ Ptashnik quickly offered.
‘No,’ Martin growled, shaking his head. ‘Johann wasn’t working on any bombs. He hated the damn things. He once told me that during the war he did everything he could to keep Hitler from getting the bomb. He was quite proud of that.’
‘Okay, bad example,’ Nolan admitted. ‘But you get the idea. Raphaele Paramo once told his wife that Johann Wolff was the most brilliant mind he’d ever met. Coming from a guy who hung out with a lot of very smart people, that’s some high praise. What if he was working on something just as important as the bomb?’
‘Nolan, Johann wasn’t working for anybody on anything. He was an assistant professor teaching first-year physics. Anyway, if his notebooks were so valuable, why are they still here?’
‘Good point.’ Ptashnik took a look inside the briefcase. ‘There’s no mud in here, and the letter and the notebooks are all clean. This was a violent killing, and it took place in a muddy pit. The killer had to have been right down in there with his victim. Whatever the motive, I don’t think the killer was interested in Wolff’s briefcase. You said that the world of physics wasn’t all that big. What if it wasn’t something he was working on but something he knew? I don’t think the Russians had the bomb back in ’forty-eight. Maybe he knew somebody who was helping them.’
‘The Russians didn’t detonate their first bomb until September of 1949,’ Martin recalled. ‘In 1950 Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, and others were arrested for selling atomic secrets to the Russians.’
Ptashnik shook his head and smiled.
‘Don’t argue with my grandfather, Detective. He’s got a memory like an elephant.’
‘And the girth to match,’ Martin said with a wink.
