The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [52]
Cepeda breathed and then he jerked his head toward the window as if he thought he had seen something out there, something that frightened him. “I’m just thinking out loud here. Nobody knows for sure that the Thousand still exist. And I didn’t tell anyone, because if I’m wrong, I’m a crackpot. A joke. My career is over.” When he turned around, Kloska thought the mathematician looked suddenly tired. “And if I’m right, I’ve just pissed off people who know how to make planes fall from the sky.”
Kloska felt a little twinge in his gut. He almost wished he wasn’t hearing this. “So which side was Marlena Falcone on?”
“Marlena would definitely have been one of the mathematici. She was always on a search for something.”
“Harmonia. A theory of everything.”
Cepeda bobbed his head. “Maybe. Yeah.”
“And what does that have to do with her murder? What’s any of it got to do with Solomon Gold?”
“I could only guess. The Thousand would be obsessed with Solomon Gold. The requiem, an alleged marriage of music and mathematics, comes up a lot in neo-Pythagorean discussion. If you were on the acusmatici side and wanted to kill Marlena—either in retaliation for the deaths on those planes or because you thought her research was somehow dangerous or blasphemous—and you wanted to let the mathematici know it was you, then using the gun that killed Gold would be a sneaky way to send a message. It would be very acusmatici to go low-tech and just shoot somebody. They wouldn’t be in favor of using numbers to crash planes, to kill civilians. That’s the kind of ostentatious use of their secrets acusmatici are rebelling against.”
“If any of these people even exist,” Kloska said.
Cepeda admitted as much with a blush.
Later on the toll road, the thrum of pavement underneath them and the monotony of roadside mile markers passing them once a minute, as regular as clock hands, Traden said, “Shit is spooky.”
“Bullshit is what it is,” Kloska said. A-kooz-mah-tee-chee. Math-ah-mah-tee-chee.
“I don’t know what to think.”
Kloska rapped his head against the window until it hurt. “I think we wasted our time coming back.” Traden didn’t answer, perhaps waiting for an apology from Kloska for dragging him twice to Indiana, but Kloska wasn’t going to give it to him. Until Traden had a few more years as a homicide detective, Kloska wasn’t going to apologize to him for anything short of an accidental slug in his ass.
As they passed the Gary exit, Traden tried to clear the window of bugs, but the empty washing-fluid reservoir just moaned under the hood and the wipers spread dry white smudges in a wide arc. “We got the same doer for Falcone and Gold, you think?”
“You mean Solomon Gold killed by a triangle-worshipping cult? No, I still like Michael Liu for Gold. That other thing Cepeda said is feeling true to me, though.”
“What other thing?”
“About how nothing in the real world makes any sense.”
Traden’s phone rang and he fished it out of his coat pocket without taking his eyes off the road. Kloska straightened in his seat. “Talking on the phone while you’re driving, that’s illegal in the city. I’ll write you a ticket when we cross the Skyway.”
Traden, into the mouthpiece: “What did you find out?” He nodded several times. Kloska hated that. Why the hell does anybody nod when they’re on the phone?
“You ready for it?” Traden closed the silver clamshell and dropped it between the seats.
“Just tell me already.”
“The weekend before those planes crashed, Marlena Falcone flew to Miami. When the airports were still closed on Wednesday, she rented a car to drive back to Chicago.”
“I probably don’t have to ask you where she was staying down there.”
“Probably not.”
Kloska made a face and punched the recirc button on the dash, closing the vents of the car to the Gary factory stench. “Bullshit is what it is,” he said, but this time the words were mumbled and agnostic.
17
IF HE HAD BEEN a common guest of the hotel, ordering off a sommelier’s secret wine list, the four ounces of cognac in the Concrete Sheik’s glass would have cost