The Probability of Murder (15 page)

I was up for it. “What kind of paradox do you want? The kind that involves a contradiction? Like ‘All Cretans are liars.’ Maybe a rhetorical paradox, like Oscar Wilde’s ‘I can resist anything except temptation’?”

“Something more complicated.”

“How about a philosophical paradox, like the chicken and the egg?”

“We’ve been through that one, and I know it’s the egg, but don’t ask me to explain it. And I don’t want to hear Zeno’s going halfway to the wall, then halfway again and again, always having halfway left, so he never gets there.”

“Unless…?” I prodded.

“Unless you include the wall in the set, and then he gets there.”

I pumped my fists in the air. “Excellent.”

“It has to do with divergence,” she added.

“Convergence,” I said.

Ariana’s face fell. “I should have quit while I was ahead.”

“Here’s one that might be new to you: the unexpected hanging paradox. A warden tells a prisoner that he will be executed next week, but it will be a surprise. He won’t
know which day he’ll be killed until they actually come for him.”

“We did that a long time ago. The prisoner reasons that he won’t be executed at all. First, it can’t be on Friday because then on Thursday if he’s still alive, he’ll know he’ll be killed on Friday, but then it won’t be a surprise as the warden promised, so therefore—”

“You love saying
therefore
, don’t you?” I interrupted.

Ariana smiled. “I do love saying that. Therefore, he can’t be killed on the Friday. The same applies to Thursday, which sort of becomes the last day, like Friday was, so it can’t be Thursday either or he’ll know on Wednesday, and so on and so forth, back through all the days, and so he can’t be executed at all under those conditions.”

Ariana’s expert reasoning was accompanied by elegant arm waving and many different facial expressions, all conveying delight. It was clear that I needed to seek out some advanced puzzles for our next session.

Buzzz.

“Finally! Food,” Ariana said, and leapt off the couch.

There was no question that puzzles and reasoning exercises made the time go by more quickly.

How many puzzles would it take for the events of the weekend to fly out of my memory?

My mother would have called us two old maids. Having consumed our meals, tasting all the better for having been delivered, we sat in my den. Ariana, bent over the coffee table, worked on her latest beading project, a black evening purse with bling here and there, and a thin, beaded strap. I was comfortable across from her, with a book of puzzles and brainteasers, a pencil in my mouth, my face now and then screwed up in concentration, but not so rigidly as to exclude chatting. Like old maids, indeed.

As we worked, we talked out all our favorite topics, including frivolous gossip in the worlds of beading and higher education. I filled Ariana in on my trip to Bailey’s
Landing and my suspicion that one of the suspect names in Charlotte’s duffel bag was staying with Martin Melrose.

“The guy with the thick glasses?” she asked, holding her thumbs and index fingers in front of her eyes.

“The same.”

“I’ve met him at a couple of your faculty parties. Not that he’s really
there
there. He kind of slinks around and doesn’t look you in the eye.”

“That’s Marty.”

After running through several scenarios that had Marty as a scammer, then a victim, then a killer, all with no earthly evidence, we moved on to questions of love and romance. Did I think the age difference between her and Luke, eleven years younger, was too much? We ended with cosmology: Will we ever be able to detect dark matter, and if so, will it still be called dark matter?

We might have gone on like that for another couple of hours, except that Ariana sat up to stretch her back and in the process knocked over a tin of tiny beads.

Not one to curse, Ariana let out some kind of low-frequency mantra meant to soothe her as she got down on all fours to gather up her supplies. I joined her, but not until I finished writing in the last few numbers of a sudoku puzzle.

“This is funny,” she said, from under one end of the table. “What’s this thing?”

I crawled around my newly cleaned carpet to her side to see what she was talking about. Under the table was a wide piece of masking tape holding a black object to the underside.

I tore the tape off and saw what she’d found.

A small black box, about four centimeters on each side and as thick as the stack of cards in my wallet. Two small wires came out from one end. I laid the assembly gently on the carpet under its original position.

I put my finger to my mouth to keep Ariana from exclaiming, which I could tell she was about to do.

“It’s from a toy Bruce’s nephew brought over. I’ll save it for him,” I said.

I hoped I was fooling whoever had planted a listening device in my den.

After a few deep breaths and a reminder to myself that the box was much too small to be a bomb, I took the device in my hands and studied it carefully.

Ariana, whose eyes by now were like the biggest bead in her collection, mouthed, “Is it a bug?”

I nodded. It wasn’t hard to recognize, but I wished I knew its specifications. Was it voice activated? If it was transmitting, what was the range? It could be a simple recording device, in which case someone would be back for it.

A shiver wove its way around my body at the thought of a return visit from an uninvited guest.

I wished I’d paid more attention to the speaker at the computer science seminar last month. He’d been an expert on surveillance equipment and would have known in a minute what had been taped to my table. I thought of calling Daryl Farmer. Our new computer science program was said to have attracted the best and brightest from high schools all over the country. Maybe Daryl and his friends could take my bug as a project.

Ariana opened a drawer in my end table and pulled out a pad of paper and a marker.

“Listening now?” she wrote.

I shrugged and took the marker. “Maybe recording only,” I wrote in answer. Then I wiggled the wires and wrote, “Maybe listening, too.”

“Call Virgil?” she wrote.

I looked at my watch.

It was close to ten o’clock on a Saturday night. Any self-respecting adult, even a cop, would have a date. Though I doubted Virgil fit that pattern, I hesitated to bother him. I had his cell number but I knew he didn’t text. How could I be sure the little bug in my den wouldn’t pick up my voice even if I walked outside?

Another minute, and I came to my senses. I’d had enough of being a victim for one night. I felt around the device for a battery cover, hoping I’d come to the universal ridges that identified a way in to the circuit. So what if the culprit who’d planted this figured out that I found it?

Bring him on.

A one-of-a-kind feeling for me.

Suddenly, before I could slide the cover and reach the battery, Ariana jumped up and down, unmitigated delight on her face.

“Cops on street,” she wrote.

Of course, Virgil had put a car on my house for the night. A good thing, too, since my enthusiasm for being a heroine was fading fast.

I breathed out and uttered a nearly silent laugh. I hugged her and whispered a thank you.

We grabbed our jackets and headed out the door. I carried the electronic bug the way I’d seen Ariana carry a real, organic bug when she released it to the wild of her backyard, holding it in one palm, and supporting that palm with the other.

An hour later, Virgil and a man in jeans and a fleece-lined windbreaker stood on my welcome mat.

“I brought the expert,” Virgil said, his usual deep voice more resonant at this late hour. He was still wearing his suit, but it bore traces of a nap. I wondered if cops even bothered to own pajamas. He scraped his shoes on the mat, as if he’d walked up a snowy driveway.

“You could have waited till morning,” I said, addressing the new guy especially. He was young and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been at the high point of his date. He carried a box similar to a toolbox, but cleaner looking than any handyman’s I’d ever seen.

“Zeke,” he said, holding out his hand. “No problem.”

“Don’t worry. He gets double time,” Virgil said, slapping Zeke on the top of his cap-covered head with his thick hand as they entered my house. I hoped they were friends.

We made our way to the kitchen island, where Ariana was ready with coffee and tea, pouring mugs for all of us.

Zeke got to work immediately, leaving his mug on the
counter. From his case he extracted a metal box with a familiar readout panel on the front. He also pulled out what looked like a screenless cell phone with two protrusions that were thicker than the wires on the bug we’d found. Next came headphones, which he wrapped around his neck, and a number of smaller devices that he stuck in his pockets.

“I wanted to be ready for anything,” he said. “Though your bug isn’t very sophisticated. A mucho short-range RF transmitter with a recording function. Very low battery power. Your voice wouldn’t register a signal from much more than about twenty-five meters away.”

I did a quick calculation, my specialty. Twenty-five meters was about eighty feet, or the length of my house.

“Someone’s twenty-five meters away, listening?” Ariana said.

Zeke shook his head. “No, the listeners are most likely pretty far away, out of sight. They’ll call in from a phone and get a recording of what’s been said. I can tell you more later, but right now I want to get to work.”

With our okay, Zeke disappeared down the hallway with his tools.

“Zeke’s going to sweep your place,” Virgil said, missing the irony that Ariana and I had already swept in a different way for two hours. “We’ll see if there’s anything else here without your having to search high and low.”

“Thanks,” I said, with mixed feelings about the situation: grateful that I had a friend where I needed one, sorry that I needed him this way.

Virgil, Ariana, and I drank our beverages of choice and talked about things unrelated to the break-in, though it was the reason we were gathered at my kitchen counter when we should be asleep or having fun.

“Bruce should be down off the mountain by now,” I said, refraining from whining that he should have called me.

“Or thousands of feet up, on ice, where no one ought to be,” Virgil said.

“No argument there,” Ariana said.

“Remember the time Bruce went to Wyoming?” Virgil asked.

“To climb at Grand Teton,” I filled in. “That was before I met him, but I heard about it.”

“He fell on some ice and slid fourteen hundred feet into a big rock,” Virgil said, in case Ariana didn’t know.

“You mean, like a quarter of a mile?” Ariana asked.

“Hard to imagine, isn’t it?” Virgil said.

“He told me he broke eight ribs that time,” I said.

“I didn’t know we had that many ribs,” Ariana said.

“Bruce and his partner were in a tough spot. It was too windy for a helicopter extraction. They did a self-rescue and hiked out. And that was one long recovery before he was back to normal,” Virgil said.

“
Normal
meaning he went back as soon as he was healed and climbed a higher mountain, right?” I noted.

“Right,” Virgil said. He laughed. “I’ll never forget the time he told me how a certain route was very popular, since the weather was so nasty that it was a real challenge getting up the mountain before getting snowed in.”

Ariana shivered. “Like that’s a good thing.”

“Then there was that close call when he was at over fifteen thousand feet on the Pink Panther route. I think that was on Mount Foraker in Alaska, and—”

“No more accident talk, okay?”

I hadn’t meant to sound so cranky. Even though the absent Bruce was a likely topic of conversation among his friends, and better than a murder case, I’d had enough disasterspeak.

Virgil showed me his palms. “You’re right. Sorry, Sophie.”

“Why would someone plant a bug in my house?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s a happier topic.” Ariana smiled and nudged me.

Virgil stepped in. “I’m assuming they’re hoping you’ll casually mention where you stashed the money you skimmed off the top of the duffel.”

I gave Virgil a look, then relaxed when I saw his “gotcha” smile and realized he was teasing.

“What if we set a trap?” I asked.

“Brilliant,” Ariana said. “Give them an address where the money is and then lie in wait for them.”

Virgil wasn’t as enthusiastic. “That’s harder to pull off than you think. It’s very seldom that the real guy will come to the pickup. They’re suspicious by nature. So you’ve cornered a dupe and the real guy leaves town. Or they come guns blazing, and that’s even worse.”

I wanted to hear more, but Zeke was back.

“You’re clean,” Zeke said, packing up his equipment.

I pointed to the bug that had been under my unsuspecting coffee table. “Are they coming back for that?”

“Nah, they’ll just call it from a phone, like I said, whenever, and when it comes up empty, they’ll figure either it failed—it’s a cheapie—or you found it. They know we can’t trace it.”

“Call it how? From a regular phone?” Ariana asked.