Face of Murder

CHAPTER NINE

Back at the FBI field office, Zoe felt like tearing her hair out. That would at least allow her to feel something other than this screaming frustration, the numbers seeming to dance on the page and taunt her the more she looked at them.

She had copied both equations onto large sheets of paper and tacked them to the walls, but it made no difference. She could still only get two-thirds of the way through the workings before she became hopelessly, utterly lost.

It was as if the last part of the equation just made no sense at all. It was so far above her head that it might as well have been written in a foreign alphabet.

“It’s late,” Shelley sighed.

She was right; it was. After waiting for the local cops to show up and handing Jensen Jones into their custody, then making their way back to HQ before settling in to work the slim leads they had, it was now past midnight. Pythagoras and Euler would be hungry, and Shelley’s daughter was no doubt already in bed since hours ago. They should have both been at home.

If this had been a normal, paperwork or testifying in court kind of day, they might have been. But this was a murder investigation kind of day, and that meant the work didn’t stop until someone was behind bars—or put into the morgue before they could take another life.

“You should go home.” Zoe nodded. She felt a little guilty, Shelley being away from home like this. A pair of grumpy cats were very much used to their owner not being home every day, and they had auto-feeders she could turn on whenever she was out of town for this very purpose. A small child would not understand why her mother was always late.

“You, too,” Shelley said. She had picked up her bag and coat, but stood in front of Zoe now without moving. Zoe caught the message loud and clear: Shelley wouldn’t go until she agreed to do so, as well.

She sighed and started to gather her things.

“Are you going to be okay?” Shelley asked. “You look tired. You’ll be fine for the drive home?”

“I am about as tired as you are,” Zoe pointed out. “I just want to crack this equation. Get somewhere with the case.”

“We are getting somewhere. There’s only so much we can do when we’re running low on sleep. A good night’s rest, and who knows? You might see something new when you approach it with fresh eyes.”

If Zoe had wanted advice from schoolroom posters, she could have looked it up herself. She shook her head brusquely, and did not reply.

“Seriously, Z. Take some time for yourself. If you don’t look after yourself, you won’t be any help to anyone. We need you sharp on this one,” Shelley said, obviously not reading Zoe’s irritation.

“I understand the importance of sleep,” Zoe snapped. “I do not intend to sit up until morning studying the equations. You do not have to worry.”

Shelley paused at the door, looking back at her with a softly trouble expression, a frown that only slightly creased her forehead. “I do worry, though. I see how hard you are on yourself.”

Not that Zoe had ever had that kind of mother—but Shelley sure as hell sounded like the stereotypical mother figure she had seen on TV. All nag, as if Zoe was just a child. Never mind that she was senior in her role, she was senior in age, too. She did not need a mother figure, and if she did, she wouldn’t choose a younger woman who was supposed to be taking her orders.

“I will be fine,” she said, her tone short and clipped, and brushed past Shelley to move quickly down the corridor. She opted to take the stairs, knowing Shelley would go down in the elevator, so that they did not have to share one another’s company all the way to the parking lot. The elevator moved at a much faster rate per floor than Zoe could manage on foot, particularly given the twists and turns of the stairwell, but she took them at a slow walking pace just to be sure.

As she walked down the fifteen steps in each block, and counted off the blocks before she would be underground with her car, Zoe’s mind was still on the equations. For all that she had said to Shelley, she probably wouldn’t be able to sleep well with the unsolvable numbers whirling around and around in her head.

They dominated her mind all through the drive home. Maybe Shelley had a little bit of a point about the state of mental distraction she was in, but she wasn’t about to admit that anytime soon. The equations just didn’t seem to make sense.

Whatever happened tomorrow, Zoe could only hope that she would hear something from one of Dr. Applewhite’s colleagues. They needed a break. No, she needed a break. Zoe desperately needed to know the answer to these puzzles—before they drove her mad.

***

As Zoe lay awake, staring up at her dark ceiling and listening to the soothing rainforest sounds that she played at night to shut out the calculations, a different scene entirely came into her head. Instead of the numbers, she thought about Dr. Applewhite. About a time, long ago, when she had been a young woman—and just beginning to trust Dr. Applewhite more than she had trusted anyone. Maybe more than she had ever even trusted herself.

She had been so young back then. So young it was almost painful to think of it now. Like all people of that age, she had thought she was so mature. After being emancipated from her parents and striking out on her own, Zoe had felt like there was nothing she could not do. She was strong, independent, fierce.

And on the other side of the coin, utterly vulnerable and alone.

No one knew, back then, what she could do. There had never been anyone she had felt she could trust enough. Throughout her whole childhood and her early teenage years, Zoe’s mother had pounded the message into her brain: Don’t tell anyone. Keep quiet. Don’t let them notice.

It was her mother’s claim that Zoe’s skills came from the devil that had tortured her the most. Always, whenever she thought about living life more openly, it came back to that. The fear of rejection, of social isolation, of people looking at her like she was evil.

Zoe never wanted to go through that ever again.

Part of the reason she pushed people away, held them at a distance, was that fear. Maybe they looked at her like she was a bitch now, so stuck-up and aloof that they couldn’t stand her. But they didn’t know the truth, and so she would take the alternative.

That fear had almost swallowed her voice and left her mute when she decided to come clean with Dr. Applewhite. But alongside it was another fear, one that had been steadily growing ever since she had first left home: the fear that she would never find a place to belong. She wanted reassurance, wanted someone who would understand. With just one person, she thought, she would be able to go on.

So it was that she decided to spill it all, to pour her heart out in front of Dr. Applewhite and wait to see if she would stomp on it. Maybe it had not been that melodramatic from the outside; just a young girl coming out with the truth, despite the bad experiences she had had in the past. But for Zoe, it had been one of the worst moments of her life, waiting for Dr. Applewhite to respond.

Her response, when it came, had become one of the best moments of Zoe’s life, just an instant later.

“I can see numbers,” Zoe said, her words rushing over one another, almost becoming garbled in her desire to finally get them out. “Everywhere, in everything. Calculations and angles. Counts. They are just there when I look.”

“Tell me everything,” Dr. Applewhite said, her eyes lighting up with fascination.

Zoe hesitated, looking up in surprise. Could it really be that someone was interested in her ability—in a positive way?

“Zoe, what you are describing to me is a very special gift. Tell me how it works. What can you see now?” Dr. Applewhite asked.

There was still doubt, but Zoe pushed on, did as she was told. “Your hair is just under eight inches long. Seven point eight inches, I think. You weigh one hundred and twenty-two pounds and you are five feet, six inches tall. There are fifteen individual pieces of wood in the floorboards of this room. The fingernail of the ring finger on your left hand is four millimeters longer than the one on your right hand. Your—”

Zoe cut herself off, realizing that Dr. Applewhite was staring at her with an expression that Zoe did not know how to read. Had she said something wrong?

Did Dr. Applewhite think she was evil, like her own mother always had? Was she about to throw her out of the office?

“That is absolutely remarkable,” Dr. Applewhite said instead, leaning over the table and squeezing Zoe’s hand. “Thank you so much for sharing this with me.”

And that had been the most relieving, most incredible, moment of Zoe’s life. A weight lifted from her shoulders. A light turned on in front of her eyes.

She wasn’t evil. She wasn’t even bad.

Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance that she could be amazing.

Dr. Applewhite had never judged, never thought badly of Zoe for the things she could do. Instead, she had praised her, been amazed at her skills. She had always wanted to know more. Not because Zoe was a test subject—her study of synesthesia had come after they met, not before—but because she could do something that normal people could not do.

Dr. Applewhite had called it a superpower, not a curse.

From then on, Zoe had had the one thing she had always wanted. Support. Someone to lean on. Someone she could fully and honestly be herself around. Dr. Applewhite never reacted with shock or revulsion when Zoe could tell her the precise angle of a chair leg and how much it needed to be adjusted by to be fixed, or weigh her with her eyes.

She had fully embraced Zoe and all that she could do, for who she honestly was. Finally, Zoe had found someone in whom her trust was not misplaced.

And now there was Shelley.

Telling Shelley her secret had been easier, much easier than the first time. Zoe had the advantage of years of life experience, and years of support from someone who did not turn away. She also had the pressure of her job, of a case that needed to be solved in order to save lives. Though the trepidation had been there, Zoe had been able to push past it and tell Shelley the truth.

Like Dr. Applewhite before her, Shelley had been open and accepting. Had called it a gift.

Back then, Zoe had been happy that she had decided to come clean. She had felt that it improved their relationship, made it easier for Zoe to do her job. But now?

The doubts were creeping in. For all the acceptance that Shelley had shown, she was not as careful with the truth as Zoe had asked her to be. Telling the Special Agent in Charge that she was “good with math” was too close for comfort. Now the nagging, the difference in opinion about how the job should be done, chasing down pointless leads instead of trusting Zoe’s focus.

Dr. Applewhite had been a supportive face, but also a kindred spirit. She believed in the cause the same way that Zoe did. Saving lives, helping people, fighting injustice—that was what Dr. Applewhite did all day long in her continued studies of conditions like Zoe’s own. She understood how important it was that Zoe’s secret never became knowledge amongst her superiors.

Shelley did not share that understanding. Which made Zoe wonder what else she did not share. What else separated them, alongside the few things that they had in common? They were apart in age, in family status, even in their approach to people. What if telling Shelley her darkest secret had been a mistake?

In the end, it was that thought, not the equations, that kept Zoe up all night. Without the FBI, she had nothing. No purpose to her life. What if telling Shelley about the numbers was the thing that was ultimately going to end her career—and take away her reason for being?

CHAPTER TEN

He was waiting in the parking lot at the hospital, waiting for it to slowly empty out.

The doctor would come out soon. He needed to see the doctor. Needed to make the doctor pay.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of his refuge. His hiding place. Like a hunter. Waiting for a deer to come along that he could shoot.

Not a deer. Too cute, too nice. Something savage and wild.

He would eat the—deer for dinner.

Deer, deer… what was… what was he thinking about?

The doctor.

His eyes were trained on the exit, the entrance, the window, the—what do you call it? He waited for a familiar sight. Someone that he recognized. A refuge that he had seen before, because he looked it up, looked it up on purpose.

No, not just anyone. The doctor had to pay. He was going to smash the doctor’s head in like he did the others. The blood and brains spilling out over his fingers like—snakes. Like? The snakes out like brains over blood fingers. Like that. Yes, like that.

He cut himself off with a memory, a gasp of fear still that always came when he thought about it. The cr—the bad thing. The thing that had ruined everything, that flooded into his mind with such clarity he wanted to wail for it to stop.

He didn’t know how he got there. There was nothing in his memory, a gap between getting into the car and then here. Now he was afraid, knowing instinctively that something was wrong. Something had happened.

The car was still around him but not quite quiet. Small noises, like dripping and the settling of metal. He heard those first. Then he pried his eyes open—and why were they closed?—to a light that startled him with its intensity. He gasped and shut his eyes again, wanting to shut it out.

But he had to know. He forced himself to endure the pain of the brightness, his eyes starting to adjust the longer he held them open. Good. Now he could focus a little more, look around. Like he suspected, he was still in the car.

But the car was… well, no longer the car.

On the passenger side, right next to him, everything was mangled metal and twisted and ripped fabric. The seat was destroyed, the frame of the window almost reaching out as if it would touch his elbow. There was something in the car—actually in the car, so close he could touch it—a kind of concrete structure, a block that extended upward.

He followed it up with his eyes and found the source of the startling light. A streetlight.

He had crashed into a streetlight.

The realization flooded in, and in the next moment, the fact that his side of the car was undamaged. The steering wheel was still in place, the door unbent, nothing at all out of order. He had escaped what might have been a very nasty death indeed.

He laughed in relief, but the movement sent pain ricocheting through his head in a way he had never known. He groaned and put his hands up to his temples, grasping there. Something wet—something slick. He pulled his hands down and looked, and saw that his fingers were red with blood.

His eyes focused a little beyond, in front of the steering wheel. There was blood there, too. He had hit his head.

There was the sound of a siren in the distance, and as he looked ahead, he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection from a piece of glass that stubbornly hung on to the bent and twisted structure of the windshield frame. Wide eyes under a forehead smeared with blood, pooling down it. It dripped down, over his left eye and onto his cheek.

The siren was getting closer, as he looked at himself in horror.

Maybe he had not escaped something nasty at all.

The doctor!

He sprang forward, his hands on the handle of the—window. He would get out and go toward him, distract him, get him alone. But—wait!

Over there—the man—another colleague. A robe like all doctors wore, white around his shoulders. The doctor, the doctor! The doctor had to pay! Pay for this agony, this jumble, this mess!

No, no, no, no, no—the other man was ruining everything. Everything. He walked with the doctor and talked with him, flapping his—arm as the words came out, talking and talking and just never shutting up. The doctor talked back and they walked and they talked out into the parking lot.

He shrank in the seat and watched, watched them, waited for something. The third one. The third brains like snakes, it had to be. The sky formed—ribbons like murky water to fall above him, falling, falling. The doctor was getting wet. He went back to the hospital. The other man ran the distance to his refuge and got in and slammed the window shut behind him.

That man, that man! Blast that man and damned him and let him rot in—in space! He ruined it all! The man’s engine started, the light was on through the window, the thrum-thrum of the car moved away. The sky ribbons fell and fell like tears from above, like the whole sky could feel how he was feeling.

And who could know how he was feeling? All of it gone, lost, vanished on the wind like smoke from a—cannon. Disappeared and gone. His mind, his brilliant, beautiful mind. It was everything.

Now the snakes were crawling around up there and the doctor was on call all night and the lights were going on around him and the people ran under ribbons falling so fast. The window mist was the fog in his head, the pain, the words falling like snakes and ribbons.

He covered his eyes until the headache subsided and drove away, back home, back to wait for another chance. He had to make the doctor pay.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Zoe was already wide awake, dressed and ready to go, when her alarm went off in the morning. It had been a restless night, and almost a sleepless one. She had tormented herself all night long, before rising sleep-deprived and groggy to admit defeat.

Even if sleep eluded her, she was determined that the answer to the equations would not. She had some of the finest minds in the math world on the case; even if she was not good enough to figure them out herself, someone else would. That was the mantra she soothed herself with as she drove to the field office, sipping hot coffee and only just managing to concentrate on the road.

She had barely stepped two feet into the office when her cell rang.

“Zoe,” Dr. Applewhite exclaimed breathlessly down the phone.

Zoe was instantly on alert, her body tensing. “Have you discovered something?” she asked.

“No. Well, yes.” Dr. Applewhite hesitated. Zoe got the impression of movement from the noise in the background of the call: rustling papers and fabrics, footsteps pacing, the unusual cadence of Dr. Applewhite’s voice. She was pacing backward and forward. “I’ve heard back from most of the contacts I reached out to. You know what mathematicians are like; can’t resist a challenge. Most of them had a bit of a sleepless night.”

Zoe refrained from admitting that she had had the same experience. The less small talk the better; she wanted the answer, and she wanted it now. “Go on.”

“Well, here’s the thing. They, almost all of them, said the same thing. All agreed they couldn’t solve it—couldn’t make any real headway. But these are some of the best minds in the world, Zoe—really, the sharpest. If they can’t solve it… anyway, they tell me the equations are impossible. A few of them even asked me if it was possible that a practical joke had been played on me. Because, you see—what they think is—the equations are wrong.”

There was a beat. Zoe retraced the conversation mentally, Dr. Applewhite’s last word hanging in her ears. Had she really heard it correctly? “Wrong?”

“Precisely. Whoever wrote them down—well, they’re either writing gibberish, or they don’t understand what they’re writing. Several parts of it are just garbled, just absolute nonsense. There’s no wonder you couldn’t get anywhere with it. No one can.”

Zoe started pacing up and down, mirroring the frantic actions of her mentor, who was clearly just as excited about all of this as Zoe herself. Except that now something was wrong, something heavy sitting inside her chest and threatening to choke her. Wrong? Could that really be the case?

“I do not understand,” Zoe admitted, glancing up as the door opened to admit Shelley.

“I just don’t think your killer even knows what they’re writing on the bodies. This really widens things up, don’t you think? Realistically, if they’re so hard that not even our best and brightest can solve them, you would be looking for the best mathematician in the world. The odds of that happening are very low, you must admit.”

“Astronomically low,” Zoe muttered in reply, closing her eyes briefly against the deluge of calculations that instantly appeared in her mind, zeroes spiraling off into the distance.

Shelley was giving her a questioning frown as she settled her handbag down on a chair and removed her jacket, watching her carefully. Zoe turned away so that she didn’t have to meet her gaze. There was too much to explain, and unlike others who could seemingly multitask, Zoe had never been good at carrying on two conversations at once.

“It seems the most logical explanation would be that this person is simply, well, damaged. Psychologically speaking. A schizophrenic with paranoid delusions, or so forth. Perhaps they think they are writing down something of great importance. Maybe they believe it is a message from God, even. The point is, they have some kind of mental problem. There’s no math in it at all.”

That heavy stone of disappointment had settled firmly in Zoe’s stomach. It didn’t feel right. None of it felt right. But how much of that was her own desire to be right about the importance of the writing? She couldn’t be sure. “Right,” she said, hearing her own voice distantly. “I will take that into account as we investigate further.”

There was a pause on the other end, before Dr. Applewhite spoke again, softer and soothingly. “Zoe, I know it must be difficult to take in. I understand that you wanted the equations to mean something. The thing is, they simply don’t.”

“I hear you,” Zoe said. It was the only truth she could offer just then. “Thank you for going to all of this trouble for me.”

Dr. Applewhite was making overtures of kindness, suggesting that she would do anything Zoe needed, but Zoe had already begun to tune her out. She was looking at the blown-up photographs of the equations, printed in a scrawling hand across the torsos of two dead men.

“I will talk to you again soon,” she said, hanging up the call. She did not have enough presence of mind to know whether Dr. Applewhite had been in mid-sentence when she interrupted.

“Is it bad news?” Shelley asked, quietly.

Zoe had almost forgotten she was in the room. “My contact, for the math professors. They do not feel that there is any lead in the equations. Apparently, they are impossible to solve. The word used was ‘gibberish.’”

Shelley took a breath, blew out a whistle. “Wow. Are we sure about that?”

Zoe searched within herself, trying to find the answer. Did she really believe it? “I do not know,” she said, at last. “It does not feel right. I thought these equations were the key to solving it all. I—I still do. How can they be meaningless?”

Shelley circled their desks to stand next to Zoe, looking down at the pictures. She patted Zoe’s hand lightly, then tapped one of the images. “They aren’t meaningless. Not to us. Even if the equations have no solution, these were written by our perpetrator. That means they have a lot of clues for us. State of mind, handwriting, even the pen he used. That’s forensic evidence. We can still use these to put him behind bars.”

“Or her,” Zoe said automatically, though it was true that the physical evidence suggested the strength of a male. Still, she had been caught out by that once in the past. A woman who had trained as a wrestler, the musculature on her arms far above that of the average female—or male, for that matter. Her strength had been enough to snuff out a life without need for any tools other than her own body.

“All hope is not lost, is what I’m saying.”

Zoe continued to stare down at the images. If Dr. Applewhite was right, Zoe had just wasted some of the most crucial hours of the case fixating on something that meant nothing. And she had been so sure. Could this really be meaningless? Really?

“You aren’t the only one who had trouble sleeping,” Shelley said, giving Zoe a sympathetic smile. Zoe briefly wondered how Shelley could tell, but then, she hadn’t looked in a mirror that morning. The bags under her eyes were probably deeper and darker than ever. “I spent a few hours searching online. Take a look at these.”

She had a sheath of papers that she was distributing across the desk, covering over the crime scene photographs. Zoe wanted to protest, but she held herself back. She would sound petty. Like she couldn’t let the equation theory go.

She didn’t want to let it go, but that was beside the point. When people wanted her to forget something, and she didn’t, there were often arguments and interventions set to follow. Zoe didn’t want that. She could at least pretend she was getting over it, in front of others.

“These two are from local papers, and those are from scientific journals,” Shelley was explaining, pointing at the various printouts. Each of them bore a photograph of the same man, some from different angles; the headlines were all inflammatory. “See here? Professor loses post over controversy. It sounds like this guy got into a pretty public showdown. He was a fairly well-respected theoretical physicist, until he got into an argument with another professor. Things escalated, words turned to blows. The police intervened, and it turns out our guy was drunk on the job. He lost his position, and his reputation hit the rocks. Students and colleagues started coming out of the woodwork, accusing him of inappropriate conduct because of his alcoholism.”

“And he was teaching here?” Zoe asked, nodding as she followed the story. It was a convincing picture. A man with an ax to grind.

“Yes. And here’s the best part.” Shelley paused, flashing Zoe a smile. “Guess who the other professor was.”

Zoe’s eyes had already picked out the name in the text as she scanned it. “Professor Ralph Henderson. Our second victim.”

“Bingo,” Shelley said, grabbing the papers back into a pile and shoving them into her bag. “I have his home address. Reportedly, he hasn’t been able to get work for the past few months since this happened, so I imagine we will find him there.”

“Then we should go,” Zoe said, heading for the door herself. She did not need to turn around to know that Shelley would be right behind her.

Even if nothing else was panning out the way that she wanted it to, a solved case was a solved case. If this ex-professor was behind it all, it would be disappointing—but there would be a killer taken off the streets before any more lives were lost.

That, Zoe reminded herself as they headed for the parking garage, was what really mattered.

Even so, she couldn’t shake that niggling doubt at the back of her min, that this case wasn’t going to be wrapped up so easily.