Nina wondered if he might try to commit suicide. The idea that he was responsible for the deaths seemed to have sunk serrated teeth into him.
“Have a cup of tea,” she said. “Will you do me a favor, Elliott?”
“What?”
“The snow’s so heavy out there, it’s going to knock down my old deck if it doesn’t get shoveled. I can’t manage it and Bob isn’t here. Would you shovel it for me?”
Elliott followed her like a zombie to the closet and she found him a hat, gloves, and the big aluminum snow shovel. “Go on,” she said. “I’m really worried about that snow.”
“Yeah, why not, snow.” Nina pulled open the sliding door and snow drifted onto the floor. She turned on the floodlight and saw it coming down more heavily than ever. Fine, she thought, let him work out there until he falls down from exhaustion. Then let him sleep, and tomorrow’s another day. She had used the same tactics on Bob now and then when he got into truly terrible moods.
Elliott stomped out there, making deep holes with his boots, and started wielding the shovel with an energy born of all his doubts about himself. He seemed occupied for the moment.
“Nina,” Wish called from the kitchen. He was gulping tea and staring at the computer screen.
“What have you got?”
“Leland M. Flint,” Wish said. “XYC Security. No resume or photo, but look, there’s the name.”
Flint was apparently low on the totem pole, not even a supervisor. The name was listed with many others as “XYC support staff” on the Web site. He had been as easy to locate as a bunion on a small foot, once they had the name and reference.
“They have a killer on their staff,” Nina said. “Maybe they put him up to it, the robbery. As for the other killings, maybe he was on his own, trying to cover up, maybe not.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Call Cheney. And first thing in the morning-”
Wish waited.
“I’m going to sue the bastards,” Nina said. “I always wanted to say that.”
28
SANDY SAID, “HERE YOU GO.” THE complaints and summonses made a very satisfying package. The agent for service for XYC, Inc. was a law firm in Palo Alto, California, home of Stanford University and countless start-up computer-technology firms.
But XYC was no start-up. The company stock traded on NASDAQ and had split recently, capitalized at over $550 million, its value all in a couple of business parks and a couple of patents. The
“Did Wish get Elliott to the airport?” It had stopped snowing, but flights had been delayed even down the hill in Reno.
“He called in and said the plane took off on time. Elliott had the eyes of a cornered squirrel, he said.”
“And that ain’t good,” Nina said, stealing one of Bob’s favorite phrases. “But he’s told his story now. He’ll feel better barricaded at home.”
“Is he crazy?”
“A little. Speaking unscientifically,” Nina said. “But man, can he throw snow off a deck. He was out there again when I got up this morning. He knew he needed the distraction. He and Wish cleared the driveway and stacked my wood.”
“They work it off,” Sandy said.
“It beats headaches. Okay, the pleadings look good. Let’s serve ’em. Have Wish drive them to Palo Alto as soon as he gets back from the Reno airport.”
“ Palo Alto ’s four hours away. And Echo Summit just reopened, so it’ll be slower than usual. Five hours.”
“Which means he can get them there by five o’clock, easily.” An elderly couple walked in and Nina brought them into her office. The will consultation took almost an hour, and when she was free again, Sandy said, “He’s been and gone. I made sure he had the money to stay at a motel if he can’t get home.”
“I wish I could see their faces,” Nina said. “Professor Braun and the gang.”
“If you’re wrong about any of this, they’re going to pulverize us,” Sandy said. “We can’t fight a big company like that.”
“Watch me.”
“Your judgment is shot. You’re taking this personally,” Sandy said, impassive.
Nina started to speak, to defend herself, but Sandy held up a hand.
“That’s the only reason we got this far,” she said. “Bullheadedness. Don’t stop now. There’s a phone message from the college teacher on your desk.”
Nina nodded and went back into her office. Mick wanted to talk to her.
“Hard feelings?” he asked.
“No.”
“It’s rare to meet a mature woman.”
“Don’t push your luck,” Nina said.
“Right. Well, I read the page you copied of Wakefield ’s work. The physics were too hard for me, so I called a physicist friend of mine. The math was too hard for him.”
“So you can’t evaluate it?”
“You need some topflight guy in the field.”
“The field of what?”
“Well, mathematical physics. Michael Berry is your man. He’s a Brit. Bristol.”
“Just tell me what it’s about, Mick.”
“Oh, sure. Write this down. Tell the world. Wakefield claims the primes are eigenvalues of a Hermitian quantum operator associated with a classical Hamiltonian.”
Elliott wasn’t the crazy one for pursuing this, she was, but she made Mick spell the words and wrote everything down. “Is there an English translation?”
“He’s trying to predict prime numbers using properties of real matter. Atoms and their components.”
“Did he succeed?”
“My friend can’t say. We’d need the complete notebook plus a few months.”
“So-we don’t know what he’s doing?”
“Word is he was in a psychiatric hospital. Is that true?”
“I don’t know,” Nina said. “Maybe.”
“Too bad for him, but just about all the greats spent some time weaving baskets in an institution. Andre Weil did some excellent work on Riemann’s theories while in prison during World War II. Incarceration in general has inspired some astonishing leaps forward in human knowledge. Anyway, we have contemplated licking Elliott Wakefield’s feet, Nina. But we’re not sure if he deserves it or not.”
“You’re no help, Mick.”
“Look, he treats prime numbers as if they were real. As if numbers were matter. As if-following this, Nina? As if the actual universe we live and laugh and cry in is nothing but a stream of mathematical information. All for the purpose of finding the error term between the actual distribution of the prime numbers and the li line.”
“He calls it a damping coefficient. The error term. I guess the question is, is he succeeding?” Nina asked.
“Give me more.”
“I don’t have more.”
“He has three hundred more pages, you say?”
“Just about.”
“What do you expect from a single page? The math is hard. Hard like diamonds are hard.”
Mick wouldn’t commit himself to anything more. “So-I didn’t break your heart?”
“My heart?”
“You do have one, don’t you? It’s a physiological necessity, I believe.”
“Oh, that heart. No.”
“I could have gotten pretty passionate about you, but I knew I’d be moving.”
“I hope you stop someday,” Nina said. “For your sake.”
“Don’t judge me, Nina.”
“I just don’t see how anyone on the move all the time can be happy.”
“I don’t see how anyone standing still can be happy.”
“Try having a child,” Nina said. “You put down a root. You feel the wet earth. You don’t want to skitter along the surface anymore.”
“Very poetic,” Mick said. “However, no offense, you move plenty yourself, from man to man and place to place, and I might even hypothesize that your heat on this subject has to do with your own lifestyle. I’m not feeling this rootedness from you that you talk about.”
Nina did not like hearing this. He was turning her judgment back on her. And it was stingingly accurate.
“Touche,” she said.
“Furthermore, there is a hot babe waiting for me at a certain Mexican restaurant. Still friends?”
“Enjoy your dinner.”
“I’ll send you a bill.”
So dinner was on her. She drove to Matt’s with her comforter and pillow, drank a glass of wine in front of a big fire with him and Andrea, and fielded their questions, and really, she wanted to be depressed about Mick and men in general, but she nodded off early and didn’t get around to it.
December 15 rolled around. Christmas shoppers had joined the skiers along Lake Tahoe Boulevard. There was art of the carved-grizzly-bear variety, turquoise jewelry, sporting goods including the new snowshoes that left your heels free, denim jackets with sequins for the slot-machine players, snowmobile rentals. The casinos brought in heavy hitters for the season and vacancy signs disappeared. The concrete pools of summer held three-foot drifts and the white walls along the road were higher. Every inch of snow was a million-dollar windfall for the resorts, and it looked like a
