Chapter 3 #2
“Mr. Sullivan, I’m Dr. Crew. This is Detective St. James.
” She laced her fingers on the cold metal.
No aggression. Just control. “Corbin gave me your message. He said you specifically asked for this meeting. You said you were the responding officer the night my parents were murdered. You claimed you found me. We drove four hours for the rest of the story. Don’t waste our time. ”
“What happened to your neck?” Damien didn’t even try to hide his smirk.
Her fingers found the bandage before she could stop herself. Shoot. The stupid Band-Aid screamed weakness. She should’ve known better in this place.
“I guess I cut myself shaving.” She dropped her hand. “I’m not here for small talk, so get to it.”
“Sure you did.” Damien’s gaze slid to Blade. “I know you.” He tilted his head, studying him like a specimen. “Yeah. You were that chubby kid I booked for the pier stabbing. Funny how that works. Me in chains, you with the badge.”
Blade crossed his arms and leaned back. “Yeah. Hilarious. I’m not the one in shackles.”
She wasn’t about to let Sullivan yank them around. “Spit it out, Sullivan. Say what you have to say, or we walk.”
“Ah, the feisty ones always made interrogations interesting. I miss that.” He drew in a deep breath and pushed it out slowly. “But know what I miss most?”
“Whiskey? Beating your wife and kid?” Now it was her turn to smirk.
“Art.” His voice didn’t rise, didn’t react. That was worse. “There’s no color in this place. Even outside. It’s all gray. Gray sky, gray concrete, gray . . . everything.” He looked up at the ceiling. A gray water stain hovered overhead like a rain cloud.
He was stalling. Winding up to something.
“You wouldn’t think a guy like me cared about art, would you?
” Damien rested his shackled hands on the table.
His index finger moved in slow circles on the steel, always returning to the same point.
“But I’ve studied it. Not the paintings.
What’s underneath. The way the greats used patterns.
Da Vinci knew it. Ever heard of the Divine Ratio? The Vitruvian Man?”
“Yeah.” Tori’s patience stretched thin as piano wire. “What’s it got to do with my parents?”
“I’m getting there.” The chains rattled as Damien shifted forward.
“Art isn’t just pictures, it’s patterns,” he continued.
“Messages hidden in plain sight. Divine architecture. Plato said that God geometrizes, that everything follows math. There’s even a thirteenth-century manuscript with an image depicting God as the cosmic architect.
Six hundred years later, a man named Beno?t Mandelbrot used that image in his book The Fractal Geometry of Nature.
Don’t you see? All creation is governed by mathematical laws. ”
Good gracious, the man loved the sound of his own voice. She felt Blade shift in his chair. Fidgeting. Ready to shut this down. She caught his eye and gave the slightest shake of her head. Not yet.
“Three minutes. Then we walk,” she said. “Get to the point.”
Sullivan’s stare bored into her. “The point is patterns, Dr. Crew. Your parents weren’t random victims. Their deaths were part of a design. Mathematical precision. Divine geometry, you could say.”
The words zinged through her bloodstream like a live wire. Finally. Something useful.
“What kind of design?”
His eyes went to the corner of the ceiling, then back to her.
“The kind that repeats. Over and over. Like fractals.” He rolled a finger. “Your parents were part of something much larger than a simple home invasion. And it’s still happening.”
Blade’s tapping foot stilled. “Fractals?”
Sullivan lit up with a smile. “Ah, you caught that. Very good. A fractal is a geometric shape that repeats itself at every scale. Zoom in on any part, and you see the same pattern repeated infinitely. Fractals appear everywhere. Art, medicine, technology. All over nature. From clouds to blood vessels. Fractals are God’s fingerprint on creation. ”
She caught Blade’s quick brow lift. He was as hooked as she was.
“There was this medieval monk,” Sullivan said, animated now. “Udo of Aachen. Copyist, poet. Forgotten by history until a mathematician spotted something strange in one of his illuminations. The Star of Bethlehem. Drawn with fractals! Six centuries before Mandelbrot’s mathematical equation.”
Damien was pontificating again, and Tori wanted to grab his shackles and shake the words out of him.
“Corbin brought me a Bible, and I can see how it all connects. God’s creation follows these same mathematical principles.
Take the number seven. It repeats throughout Scripture as a symbol of divine completion.
Seven days of creation, seven churches in Revelation, seven seals, seven trumpets. Patterns. Everywhere.”
A siren split the air, stabbing her eardrums. Red light strobed across Damien’s face, painting him in crimson. Blade shot to his feet as the door slammed open. Trussler rushed in with another corrections officer.
A voice over the intercom cut through the sirens. “All inmates return to cells immediately. Lockdown in effect. All inmates return to cells.”
“Interview’s over,” Trussler barked, reaching for Damien’s chains. “Situation on C-block.”
“Wait.” Tori was on her feet too. Four hours in the car for this? For Damien to ramble about Renaissance painters and mathematical theories? No. Not when she was this close. “We need two more minutes.”
“Lockdown. No exceptions.” The second CO, a thick-necked man with sergeant stripes, grabbed Damien’s arm.
“The pattern—” Damien tried to twist back toward her.
“Move it, Sullivan.” Trussler unlocked the chain from the table ring and hauled Damien to his feet.
“Our fifteen minutes aren’t up,” Blade said, stepping toward the officers. “We drove four hours for this interview.”
“And you can drive four hours back,” the sergeant said. “Lockdown means lockdown.”
The pressure behind her sternum built to an unbearable point. All that buildup about patterns and divine geometry, and now they were dragging Damien away before he could tell her anything useful.
“Please.” She hated the desperation in her voice, but she couldn’t stop it. “The pattern. What is it? What happened that night?”
Damien struggled against the guards, chains rattling like wind chimes in a storm. “Give me one minute!”
“Not happening.” The sergeant jerked Damien’s other arm.
The toes of Damien’s prison-issued shoes scraped against the floor as they pulled him away.
He strained to look back at her. “It started with them. Your mother. She knew about the fractals.”
“Move it,” the sergeant said, jerking his arm.
Sullivan’s face flushed red as he struggled against the chains, against the officers, against time running out. The veins in his neck bulged. “It wasn’t just me there that night! It was the start of the pattern! Barclay lied!”
Barclay? Millie Beach Police Chief Barclay?
“Lied about what?” she demanded.
The officers shoved him through the doorway. He twisted in their grip, eyes wild and locking with hers one last time.
“The report is a lie! A cover-up! Barclay created a whole second story—there’s a second murder book!” Damien fought against the guards, desperate now.
The door slammed shut, cutting Damien off midsentence, but his words hung in the air like gunpowder smoke. She felt her hands begin to tremble. Her knees went loose, like the floor had dropped six inches without warning.
A second murder book.