The Rule of Threes (Special Agent Constant Marlowe)

by Jeffery Deaver

Joseph Ray Whelan makes coffee with boiling water and a drip cone. He sits at his kitchen table. One sip. Two. Three. He pours the rest out. Three is magic. Three consumes him.

On his music app a song is looping. The “Queen of the Night” aria from The Magic Flute. In the opera, the main character, Tamino, is rescued by three governesses, servants to the queen, and starts his journey to enlightenment. He is guided by three young men. The opera is written in a key that has three flats.

“Where?” she said softly. Eventide looked her way. “How did he get to her? That’s the key.” Where always was.

Where the perp lived, where they found the victim, where the would-be victim escaped . . . Where got you who. Sometimes it got you why but that didn’t interest Constant Marlowe much, and in this case, there wasn’t much doubt as to motive. Where?

In her mind Marlowe made a chart, as she often did when considering the geography of a crime scene. North West Crime Scene Parking Lot East South

You could think of a body not in terms of twos—eyes, legs, arms. But in triangles. The triangle made by the breasts and the navel. The eyes and the nose, the ears and the chin. You could see this clearly if you drew lines connecting them. With a pen. Or a knife. Threes . . .

Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher, developed that famous law: the hypotenuse—the long side—of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. This observation gave rise to mathematicians dividing up the mother triangle into smaller ones—for whatever reason mathematicians divided things up. The process was called “dissection.” Joseph Ray Whelan was thinking of this now as he lay in the woods east of the parking lot at Lone Ridge Park. He was watching the police. Dissection . . .