The Theory of Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

door, coming in after she had bounded up the stairs.
    The first thing that came into view was a Volkswagen Jetta sitting in the foyer. How they got a full-size car in a lobby was anyone’s guess. Behind the driver’s seat was a steel robot with a sign around his neck, dubbing him Rupert. He wore a beret, sunglasses, and driving gloves. The students coming in and out of the dorm walked around the car as if it was a completely natural phenomenon.
    The rest of the lobby was the usual college mess: used bottles of beer and spirits, discarded red cups that had held beer and spirits, pizza boxes, stale french fries and other assorted old takeout, overflowing trash cans, and outerwear strewn about the floor. Since there wasn’t much fresh air circulating other than the door opening and closing, the garbage reeked.
    “Phew!” McAdams waved his hand in front of his nose. “Poor Rupert. Should we start with him since he seems to be the eyes and ears of Planck?” Tyler bent over and showed the flyer of John Doe’s postmortem to the robot. “You know this guy?” He paused. “It might help to take off the shades, dude.”
    Decker smiled. “Let’s start upstairs and work our way down.”
    They climbed to the second level. Most of the doors were open and the space was a cacophony: music, human voices, and mechanical noises that sounded like hammering and drilling. They started on one side and it didn’t take long for John Doe to be identified by Damodar Batra, a senior with a duel major in math and mechanical engineering.
    “Oh shit!” Batra stared at the picture, his mouth agape. “Is that Eli Wolf?”
    He had pronounced the name
E
-li—long E, long I. Decker said, “Spell it for me.”
    Batra complied. He was short in stature with black straight hair and a dark brown complexion. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, he had headphones around his neck, and surrounded by two laptops, a phone, and a tablet. “What happened?”
    “Is Eli a friend of yours?”
    “Kind of. Eli really doesn’t have friends per se. He’s kinda schizoid, but that’s more of the norm here than not.”
    “So how well do you know him?”
    “It’s a small school and an even smaller math department. We’ve taken some classes together. Now that we’re seniors, we have different advisers, so I don’t see him so often. We’re both busy.” A pause. “My God, he looks … dead.” He looked up. “He’s dead?”
    “Yes, he’s deceased. This is a postmortem picture.”
    “God, that’s totally fucked up!” The boy seemed genuinely shocked. “What happened?”
    “We’re still evaluating,” Decker said. “What can you tell me about him?”
    “Not much. We weren’t like the best of friends but we certainly knew each other.”
    “What was his major?” McAdams asked.
    “Theoretical math.” Batra’s jaw muscles bulged. “I believe he was doing some postgrad work on Fourier analysis and Fourier transforms.”
    Decker turned to McAdams. “Any idea what that is?”
    “Not a clue.” Tyler looked at Batra. “Please explain in simple English if possible.”
    “Fourier did work on temperature gradients like about three hundred years ago. Heat travels from hottest point to coldest point and how fast it travels is dependent on the material. The way to explain this mathematically was figured out by a guy named Fourier. He took complex waves that make up things like temperature gradients and broke them up into simpler sine waves. You guys know what a sine wave is, right?”
    Decker said, “I believe trigonometry was a prerequisite for Harvard.”
    “You went to Harvard?” Batra asked.
    “He did.” Decker pointed to McAdams.
    “Amplitude, frequency, and phase,” Tyler said.
    Batra laughed. “Do you know about eigenvalues?”
    “Nope. But I know enough first-year tort law to sue almost anyone.”
    “You’re in law school.”
    “That is the unfortunate case, yes.” McAdams pointed to Decker. “He, however, is a full-fledged