The Tree of Knowledge, Daniel Miller [unputdownable books txt] 📗

spine of the game tree. Puddles executed every movement with the same care and precision as a man walking an endless tightrope. “I’m afraid so. The most disturbing part to me is that, judging by the tree, the thief evaluated dealing with the security guard through force and persuasion equally. There’s literally no acknowledgment that using violence is wrong or more costly. The two concepts are presented as equally valid, and the thief ended up choosing violence.”

The thought made Albert feel queasy. He searched the diagram for some sign of compassion, but the tree rebuffed him with its amorality.

“One part of the tree is wrong, though,” said Ying, pointing to the box titled “incapacitate.”

“What do you mean?”

“According to the tree, the murderer didn’t mean to kill the security guard. You see how the tree branches off at ‘incapacitate’? It looks like the murderer just intended to incapacitate the guard with some poison.”

Albert got up from his chair and looked out his office window. He watched the students roam across the campus quad, laughing and texting. The sun shone brightly, painting a glorious contrast between the school’s emerald-green lawn and the multicolored stone buildings. For the first time in his life, Albert was aware of how far removed his life here at Princeton was from the raw brutality of the “real world.”

“What an honorable thief,” said Albert sarcastically as he continued to gaze out the window. “The problem is that we don’t know that for sure. This is just the prima facie.”

“You’re right. That’s not necessarily the route the thief finally chose.”

“More important, it doesn’t give us any insight into who the thief is or what they stole, and I have no idea what ‘Tree of Knowledge’ means. I have a feeling that Detective Weatherspoon won’t find our observations particularly useful.”

“Are you sure about that, Professor? If you think about it statistically, we can probably narrow it down quite a bit. I mean, how many people can there be who both have the familiarity with decision trees and the cryptography to make this?”

“That’s a fair point, but anyone with an interest in logic and cryptography could do this. Even someone who just took a couple of intro college classes or went down an internet rabbit hole. Just think how many people have taken Turner’s cryptography class—”

Albert swiveled around from the window and grabbed the cryptography book that he had laid on his desk. “That’s it! Turner. Turner’s the only guy I know who uses Latin in his work. Remember?” Puddles paged through the book. “He used to call his first efforts at anything ‘prima facie’ and his second ‘secundus fortuna.’”

“Yeah, second chance,” replied Ying. “Every other person in the field uses the term ‘scenario one’ or ‘base case’ or something normal for their original analysis.”

“He loves the ancient philosophers. Whoever made this must have been a student of Turner’s. Nobody else would have ever put the words ‘prima facie’ on this tree.”

Albert grabbed his leather shoulder bag and stuffed the satchel with the books on his desk.

“Ying, pack up your stuff. We’re going to pay Prof. Turner a visit.”

While Ying ran into the main office of the Math Department, Albert picked up his cell and removed Weatherspoon’s business card from his wallet. He dialed the main line of the Princeton Police Department.

“Hello, could I please speak with Detective Weatherspoon?”

The assistant on the other end of the line blandly replied, “Detective Weatherspoon’s out of the office but should be back shortly.”

Albert pulled his fingers through his hair. “OK, will you leave him a message? Tell him Albert Puddles called and that he’s solved the cipher.”

Chapter 9

Eva smiled as she walked through the gates of the Princeton campus. Besides her house in Los Angeles, this was the only place that had ever felt like home. She wistfully surveyed the students as they meandered across the walkways of the grounds, their backpacks bursting with textbooks and laptop computers. Eva chuckled to herself and remembered how intimidated she had been by kids like these when she attended the school.

Like her mother, Eva had been a mathematical savant from the beginning. By the age of fourteen, she had conquered her high school’s mathematics curriculum, so her mother enrolled her in classes at Princeton. Walking through the gates of the campus, the young girl had felt as though she were in the presence of giants. Each student towered over her small frame and looked down at her in quizzical disbelief.

The classroom magnified her intimidation. The high, echoey ceilings of the lecture halls snarled at her in contempt. The other students squinted at her either in disdain or bemusement; of the two, Eva strongly preferred the former. Disdain she could prove wrong. The professors were tolerable, but they were old and fossilized from the laconic weather of academia, hardly the comforting peers for whom Eva had desperately longed. She was afraid she had no peer—no one who would see her as more than an oddity, a brain incongruously housed in an unimpressive body. Eva was beautiful now, but at fourteen, she had been merely cute. One student had the kindness to welcome her not as a charity case or a babysitting project but as a fellow student, a friend.

Dilbert was his name. Or at least that was the nickname that Eva gave him. His short brown hair sat atop his head with a curl that always made it stick up a little bit, reminding her of the cartoon character. Every day, Dilbert wore a tie and jacket to class like he had just rolled off some sort of prep-school assembly line, and his shirt was always perfectly ironed. All that was missing was a big red crest on his chest pocket. On the second day of Professor Turner’s class, when she thought that she couldn’t sink any lower, Eva realized that she had forgotten her notebook. Dilbert had noticed, torn a piece of paper out of his notebook, and handed it to her