Face of Murder

It wasn’t like she had anyone else who could help either. Besides Shelley, no one knew about the numbers that she could see. Until the forensics people finally caught on to what she already knew—the height of the perpetrator—there was nothing at all to say that Dr. Applewhite wasn’t guilty. And Shelley just had to be the person that Zoe, in her infinite wisdom, had pushed away tonight.

Not only had she made a mess in the first place, but now it was messed up even more.

Zoe felt something wet drip down from her chin, and was startled to realize that she was crying. It was not often that she engaged in such an outward show of emotion like this, least of all a negative one. She tried to remember the last time that she had cried, and couldn’t. The shock of it caught her breath in her throat, froze the water in her eyes. She wiped her face dry with her sleeve, biting her lip until the impulse went away entirely.

There was something she could do here. There had to be. There was something she had missed, somewhere, and all she had to do was find it.

She ran through all three of the equations, by now learned by heart. They still didn’t make sense, but what if she inverted them? Reversed them? What if she substituted the letters so that all of the equations matched? What if she tried numbers one by one, looked for a solution?

Maybe solving them at last would spell something out, like geographical coordinates. Of course, for that she would need to have the inputs, and she had no idea what c or d or f was supposed to represent.

Something to do with the college maybe?

And the victims themselves—they had to have more to reveal, they had to. Zoe went over the crime scene photographs that she had burned into her memory again, trying to see them in as much detail as possible. Five foot nine, yes, it had to be, and more than one hundred and thirty-five pounds. But how much more? Could she set an upper limit? The perpetrator would not be obese, because they were fit enough to attack and to get away without leaving behind weighted impressions in the ground.

There was something, somewhere, in all of this. There had to be.

If there wasn’t, Zoe was never going to forgive herself.

A buzz from her pocket brought her back to the real world, and she looked down at her phone to see a message alert. It was from John—the man she had seen for just a single date, and who both Dr. Monk and Dr. Applewhite seemed positive she should see again.

What a moment for him to reach out to her.

Hey, Zoe. How are you? I was wondering if you wanted to meet up for a drink?—John

Zoe didn’t need to read this one three times, or leave it until the morning to decide, or turn to her therapist for advice. She knew what she wanted to say. John had been trying for a long time, and it was time that paid off for him. She wrote back and sent it immediately, not hesitating to consider whether she was doing the right thing.

Yes. Are you available right now?

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

The cocktail bar was crowded, but Zoe tried to ignore the mass of bodies dotted around the tables and focus on moving through them. She was bad with crowds at the best of times—too much to see and notice—but John had already texted her to let her know that he was sitting near the window. She just had to get over there.

Had to get through the one-foot gap which narrowed to half a foot where one man had pushed his chair out too far, past the four couples and the three groups, past seventeen glasses on tables. The staff was efficient—no empty glasses left to sit as superfluous. That was a positive sign, at least.

She couldn’t quite see him in the dim lighting until she drew closer, training her steps as close to the glass as possible so that she could effectively blank out most of the room behind her. Then she recognized him—at first by his shape, the same height and bulk as she remembered, and then by the facial features lit by the glow of a small candle on the table. The song playing in the background, under the chatter of those around them, was four beats per bar. Three chords. Simple and inoffensive.

“Zoe,” he said, standing up from his chair as she approached. A little old-fashioned. “You made it!”

He sounded genuinely surprised. Zoe felt a stab of guilt at that. She supposed that she had not been efficient at returning his messages. “John, hello. It is good to see you again.”

John waited for her to sit before he did. “You look wonderful.”

“Thank you.” Zoe was too busy thinking about the fact that she had not dressed up and did not, in fact, look wonderful. It was only when a brief flicker passed over his expression that she remembered: most people liked to have a compliment returned, and she should have politely remarked that he looked good, as well. Such things had always seemed stupid to her. How could one ever think a compliment was genuine, if it was enforced by courtesy?

“I ordered you a martini. I hope you don’t mind,” John said, hastily continuing with many a waved hand gesture. He was wearing a white shirt today. Last time, it had been blue with two-millimeter stripes. “If you don’t like it, I’ll drink it. I just thought I’d better get something for you if I was ordering for myself. I figured you wouldn’t be long.”

He was talking a lot. More than last time, maybe. His rate of words per minute was higher, which normally indicated nervousness. Or fear. “Thank you,” Zoe said again, wondering if she was going to be able to get any more words in edgewise. “I will drink it.”

In truth, she did not drink often. Did she like martinis? She couldn’t even recall. It was a rare occasion that she touched alcohol, mostly because she didn’t like that weird, wavy, out-of-control feeling that everyone else seemed to relish. When the room began to sway and all the numbers got wonky and out of sync. Depth perception, sense of direction, mathematical ability, all of it began to disappear the more alcohol she had. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation.

But tonight, maybe it would be good to get detached from everything a little. To drown out the horrible things she couldn’t help thinking about herself.

“I didn’t think you were going to get back to me,” John admitted, picking up his own glass. It was considerably more masculine than the one prepared for her: a tumbler filled with amber liquid, not a recipe that Zoe could name. She couldn’t find a justification for taking up space in her memory with knowledge about cocktails.

“I have been busy lately.” It was only partly true. Yes, Zoe had been busy with caseloads, paperwork, court cases. But she was always busy with those things. She had been busy when she was talking to him on the dating site in the first place. It was her own personal doubt that had led her to avoid his messages.

“I know the feeling.” John smiled briefly. His lips curved higher on the right than on the left. Oh, yes, that was right: he was a lawyer. “Anything you can talk about? I know these cases are often pretty hush-hush before they get to court.”

Zoe inclined her head, grateful for the out. “Sadly, they are all awaiting trial.” It wasn’t quite true. Her and Shelley’s last big case, the Golden Ratio killer, had been dead even before they prevented his final crime. There was never going to be any trial for him. They had proven beyond a doubt that he was guilty, and that was enough.

But Zoe didn’t want to talk about that. Not now, when she had something bigger on her mind. Besides, it was done and buried. There wasn’t a lot of point in retracing the past.

She sipped her martini, feeling the unfamiliar burn of alcohol down her throat. She saw the size in inches of the olive before she closed her eyes briefly, to shut it out, and put the offending object in her mouth. No numbers tonight, please, she thought. If only she could turn them off. Stop them from flashing up everywhere she looked.

When she opened her eyes again, John was looking at her with an odd expression. “Bad day?” he asked.

Ah. That expression was sympathy. “Difficult case,” Zoe said, and shrugged. “I do not want to talk about it.”

John paused, then nodded. His hair, a light brown cropped short, gleamed with the sheen of good conditioning in the light as his head moved. “All right. Well, this will cheer you up. A funny story about a client of mine. So, we were there in the courtroom, waiting for the judge, and everyone started getting restless. This judge, he’s usually punctual. I mean, they all are as a rule.”

Zoe lost herself in John’s story, trying to listen just to his words, look just at his face. If she focused really hard, she could block everything else out. For a brief moment she felt no guilt anymore, before it slipped back in again. A moment’s relief was a start. She fought to get that control back, to exist only in the flow of John’s voice and the slide of the martini down her throat.

“So we’re wondering what the hell is going on. Time passes, another few minutes, and he bursts in. Come to find out some secretary or something had made an error in the courtroom schedule. All the cases got assigned times, but on the judge’s copy of the schedule, it was half an hour later. He was furious—absolutely raving. Not great for the defense, but for us, it was a great start,” John continued.

She wasn’t used to drinking at all, and she had forgotten how it could change her. She could feel it running through her body like a current in her veins, making her feel strange, not herself. That, in itself, was welcome.

“The defense, he’s just a public defender. Not a great court record. The guy has a hundred different files spilling out of his briefcase, stuff for the next eight or ten cases he has to appear in. He’s worked like a dog. Barely has any idea where he is. So the first thing he does is he gets the defendant’s name wrong. Then he calls the judge by the wrong name. I lean over in a quiet moment and I say to him, maybe we’d better ask for adjournment? You know, let him get up to speed a bit better.

“But he’s cocky, arrogant type. I don’t think he wants to have to come back to this client, either. The guy is practically foaming at the mouth, and so is the judge. Soon enough we start hearing evidence and the defendant is shouting out—screaming every few minutes. Refuting things, calling people names. Judge keeps on warning him. I’m looking at the public defender like, come on, buddy. Let’s call it a day, huh? Let me give you a lifeline. But he’s adamant. He wants to press on.

“Next up the defendant suddenly stands up and says this is all bullcrap and he’s not standing for it anymore, and he wants to see a real judge. The judge gets mad—like you’ve never seen mad before. Steam coming out of his ears. And he asks the defendant if he has the receipt—the receipt to say that his purchase on the land went through, you see. Proof that he paid it out of his bank account or that my client ever received it, anything to show he had ownership. And the guy stands there and splutters and says no, he didn’t bring it.

“And so the judge ended up throwing the case out. Can you believe that?”

Zoe laughed at the appropriate moment, not because it was what normal people did but because the story had actually been funny. “I cannot believe that the public defender did not follow your advice. He must have been some idiot, after all that.”

“Yeah, well, we do get them,” John laughed, finishing his drink. He was clean-shaven, but there was a spot just under the bend of his jaw on the left that he had missed, a tiny piece of stubble. “I bet you get a lot of that in your line of work, too. Idiots, I mean.”

“You could say that. Although I have been known to think they are the people who work alongside me, not the people we arrest, at times.”

“Ouch,” John said, but he was grinning. “Office politics?”

“Something like that.” Zoe would normally stop there, but something made her want to go on. Maybe it was John’s wonderful narrative skills brushing off on her. “I have a hard time keeping a partner. I am not great at not telling people what I think of them to their face, and apparently you are not supposed to do that in the workplace.”

John’s eyebrow quirked. “Oh, dear. Am I about to find out what you really think of me?”

Zoe waved a hand. “I have not known you long enough yet to form a fair assessment, but I am of the opinion that you are an excellent storyteller, at least.”

“That’s good to know.” John took a handful of nuts out of a small dish in the middle of the table and started crunching his way through them. His arms muscles flexed. Zoe had already noted previously that he must have been a regular gym-goer. “So, what’s your partner like at the moment? Is he hard to get on with?”

“She,” Zoe corrected, then shook her head thoughtfully. “Actually, I get on with Shelley better than with anyone else so far. She is not an idiot. She is a lot quicker than I gave her credit for at first, even. And she has such a perfect little family. Really. She is a wonderful person.”

John made a face. “She sounds boring.”

Zoe laughed briefly. “Fortunately she’s not. She can be fierce at times, too. In short, she is a far better agent than I am.”

“But you’re smarter than her.”

Zoe cocked her head. “I did not say that.”

“You didn’t need to.” John tossed back another nut and swallowed it before continuing with a twinkle in his eye. “I can tell. You’re the smartest person in any given room you walk into, aren’t you?”

Zoe flushed a little. “I would not… I mean…”

John waved a hand. “Don’t be modest. Anyway, tell me about this case. Something’s happened between you and your partner that you don’t know how to deal with, right?”

“You are perceptive.”

“You’re talking about this woman like she’s the best thing since sliced bread, but you’re obviously struggling in some kind of way. Or you wouldn’t have accepted my invitation.” Zoe opened her mouth to protest, but John cut her off with a short shake of his head. “It’s okay. I don’t mind how I get you here, so long as I can charm you while I’ve got you. That way I might have a shot at date number three. So, what’s the problem?”

Zoe hesitated. There were a lot of things here that she could not talk about, not without getting into trouble. But there were things that were already in the papers—things that other people would already know.

“Did you hear about the killings on campus this past week?”

John’s eyes widened and his eyebrows shot up. “That’s your case?”

“Yes. And we have a suspect in custody.” Zoe drew in a heavy breath. “Unfortunately, not only am I sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that this suspect is innocent, but I also have a close personal connection with them. Which means…”

“Which means that no one is going to take your word for it, because they assume that you’re too close to see the big picture.” John shook his head. “That sucks. Listen, do you want another drink?”

Zoe paused, thinking about how the martini was already swimming in her system. “I will take a soda.”

She was expecting pushback, but John nodded respectively and got up. “School night—no heavy drinking. Got it. I’ll be right back.”

When John returned, Zoe was quite surprised to find that she had been waiting for him. That she was eager, indeed, to tell him more.

Perhaps John’s skill was not just in telling stories, but also in listening to them, because she did tell him more. She told him all about Dr. Applewhite, minus a few details—like her name, the exact nature of the evidence against her, and the diagnosis that she had helped bring about. She even ended up telling him about getting emancipation from her mother as a teen, about how she had supported herself for a long time. And when she was done with that, she circled back around to her original point, and the equations—which had been mentioned openly in the press—that she was trying to solve.

It was only when she finished this part of the story, and looked up to see that the bar was almost deserted, that Zoe realized she must have been talking for quite some time.

“Oh, I am sorry,” she said, embarrassed suddenly by her loquaciousness. “You must be tired of hearing me talk by now.”

“Not at all,” John said, and the fact that he didn’t even smile when he said it made her more inclined to believe that he wasn’t just being nice. “All of this has been… fascinating. I mean, your job is so much more high-stakes than mine. Not to mention everything that you’ve been through… I can’t imagine coming out of that as strong as you are.”

This time, Zoe knew that her cheeks were heating up. “I am just—average,” she said, even though she knew that was the one thing she really wasn’t. “I do not think I am special just for how I grew up. Everyone goes through some kind of adversity.”

“But you’re brilliant.” John reached out across the table and touched her hand, and there was a hint of laughter on his face—one that she could not interpret. “Wow. I mean, I wanted to see you again after the first date. But this… you were holding out on me. Seriously, I’m blown away by how brilliant you are.”

Zoe barely knew how to reply to that. Most men were not so complimentary, and when they were she would sense that it was not genuine. But John really seemed to mean what he was saying, at least according to her limited ability to tell.

There was another chord that his words struck, however, and it was not a pleasant one. “If I was so brilliant, I would have figured out what the equations mean already.” She sighed, toying with her empty glass. “But I have nothing. Just a jumbled mess.”

“Hey, you’ll get there,” John was saying, but Zoe’s concentration was drifting away from him. She sat up straighter, frowning a little. Jumbled mess… why did that sound so… right?

Jumbled mess… what was it that James Wardenford had told her, when she had him in for questioning?

Something’s wrong. It’s like all of the elements are there, but they’ve been placed incorrectly. Imbalanced. Too much on one side, not enough on the other.

Imbalanced. Placed incorrectly.

There was something here…

“Zoe?”

Zoe frowned at the unwelcome interruption, shaking her head quickly and throwing her hand up in the air to indicate that silence was needed. Her brain was a little slow, still coping with the effects of the alcohol.

Everything was there. The equations had been written out in full, but they didn’t work. Nothing was missing—no extra parts hidden anywhere on the bodies, no missed signs. She had seen that for herself when they found Edwin North.

If there was nothing more to add, that meant that they already had all of the pieces of the puzzle. Zoe had tried to make sense of them by cutting bits out and putting them together, like some kind of mega-equation birthed from the incorrect parts. But that still left the lines she had not included, and the ones that were put together pointed in the wrong direction. Toward an innocent person.

Which meant that she still didn’t have them in the right order.

Edwin North had been able to afford his grand Georgian colonial because he was a neurologist. Not a professor or a student. He had no real connection with the college, but the cause of death seemed to tie him to the others—not to mention the equation scrawled across his chest. They had been mentioned in the papers, but not printed in full. The only person who would know enough about the other equations to finish off the clue pointing to Dr. Applewhite had to be the killer.

Ergo, there had to be a reason why the killer had stepped outside of the college in order to target a seemingly unrelated neurologist.

And what did neurologists deal with? The brain. The brain, which, when it went wrong—like hers did when she consumed alcohol—could mess things up. Jumble them around.

This was it. This was the breakthrough that Zoe had been waiting for.

She snatched her phone up from the table and dialed Shelley’s number from her call list, hoping she wasn’t asleep or screening her calls. Zoe wouldn’t blame her, after what had happened earlier, but Shelley answered after only a couple of rings.

“Z? Are you all right? I’ve been worried about you. I tried to call you, but—”

“I am sorry about earlier. But I need you to listen now.” Zoe tried to keep the distractions to a minimum, hoping that Shelley would be impressed with the importance of what she was saying enough to stop focusing on the past. “I have had a breakthrough. Meet me at the hospital where Edwin North worked as soon as you can. We need to check some patient records.”

“What? Zoe, what have you found?”

Zoe put the phone down without answering. They could talk as they walked through the hospital corridors to where they needed to be. Discussing it now wasn’t going to get them there any quicker.

Zoe returned her attention to John, who was looking at her with a slightly open-mouthed expression. She glanced at his glass and realized he had made the gesture of switching to soft drinks along with her. “I am not used to drinking, and it goes to my head too much,” she said, by way of explanation. “Did you drive here?”

John nodded silently, reaching into his pocket to draw out a set of car keys.

“Good. I need you to drive me to the hospital—and we need to go now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Zoe let go of her seatbelt and breathed out slowly, trying to re-center herself.

“Sorry,” John said. “I tried to drive smoothly, but it sounded like time was of the essence.”

“It was,” Zoe said, opening the passenger’s side door. “It is. I get carsick no matter what. Thank you for the ride.”

She got out and shut the door behind her, her obligations of politeness toward John now completely forgotten. There was something more pressing to think about: figuring out who the serial killer stalking Georgetown really was, and clearing Dr. Applewhite’s name.

Zoe strode across smooth flooring laid out in predictable tile patterns, upset at ugly points by the placement of a chair or a desk in an inappropriate place that messed up the lines, passing the waiting area without seeing Shelley. Her home was much farther away than the cocktail bar had been. Zoe figured she wouldn’t arrive for a while yet. There was no time to sit around and wait for her.

“Neurology department?” she barked at the reception desk. She had been in enough hospitals across the country, visiting victims and taking statements, to know that they were often mazelike and impossible to predict unless you knew the entire history of the building. Maybe it made sense that cardiology should be next to the pediatric ward if you knew that the departments had received funding one after the other for new extensions to the building, but no sane person would have built them like that on purpose. It didn’t help that the plane symmetry was thrown off by refurbishments that cut across old tiles, hurting Zoe’s eyes and making it all the more confusing.

The woman behind the desk was, like almost all receptionists Zoe had ever come across, slow and supercilious. On top of that, she had to weigh a hundred and eighty-five pounds, and she was pushing sixty. She raised eyebrows from behind glasses slid low on her nose, and looked Zoe up and down. “Are you a patient or a visitor?”

“Neither. Where is it?” Zoe hated moments like this, the delay of small-minded people. There seemed to be so many of them in the world, totally unfazed by the concept of efficiency or practicality.

“If you are a patient, you have to sign in at the touchscreen here and wait for your name to be called before you go the neurology department,” the receptionist was saying, pointing a lazy, fat wrist in the direction of the device. “If you are a visitor, you need to collect a visitor’s pass and give the name of the person you are here to see. Visiting hours are over, however, so visitor’s passes are not currently available. If you are neither of those things, you will have to leave this hospital.”

Zoe rolled her eyes and yanked her badge out of her pocket, slamming it down on the desk in front of the receptionist. “I can go wherever I like in this hospital,” she hissed, delivering a glower that she hoped would do the desired job of making this woman do her damn job. “Now, tell me the quickest way to get to the neurology department.”

The receptionist made a show of studying the badge, lifting her glasses up by the arm to push them closer to her eyes as she squinted. “Well, Agent,” she began, as slow as was humanly possible, “you first take the second right, then you will need to go up in the elevator to the third floor. Turn left twice at your earliest opportunities, and then take the third right, and you will be at the neurology waiting area.”