Page 11 of Fatal Pattern

“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 Benoît 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.