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Carolyn's other piece intrigued me because it seemed out of place in a professional journal. It was an essay in which she had expressed the view that fractals could change the way artists and musicians portrayed the world. "Fractal geometry," she wrote, "offers a new way of looking at space and form. Just as the discov- ery of geometric perspective transformed the way Renaissance painters represented depth on a flat surface, fractals may free ar- tists to portray natural objects as they truly are rather than within the confines of Euclidean concepts of dimension." Underwood had made one attempt to write for a broader audi- ence, and that had been one too many. He had not possessed Car- olyn Chang's skill with the written word. His sentences were long and flowed in no logical sequence. His topic was neural networks, computer programs capable of recognizing fractal patterns. Be- cause of their ability to identify patterns, such programs were valuable tools in efforts to predict the future. According to Under- wood, they had been employed in fields ranging from meteorol- ogy to finance. By now it was past seven o'clock. It had taken nearly four hours to review all twenty-eight papers, but I hadn't discerned any pat- tern or common theme in the writings of the three victims. I pushed the stack to one side, fed the dogs, and started to boil water for spaghetti. Then I placed another call to the cop in Walla Walla. It was an hour earlier on the West Coast. "I think the lieu- tenant is still at the hospital," said the female dispatcher, "but I can take a message." I left my name again and called it a day. Surveying my stacks of CDs, I selected a collection of old Jack Guthrie tunes. The cousin of Woody and a distant relative of Arlo, Jack had died in 1948, but I just love those old western songs. Jack Guthrie, Patsy Montana, Jim Silvers, and anyone else who can yodel. I opened a two-pound package of spinach spaghetti, broke the thin strands in half, and placed the entire contents in the rapidly