Face of Murder (A Zoe Prime Mystery—Book 2)

by Blake Pierce

  “Read it to me again?” Zoe asked. She was still unsure about Shelley’s theory. Being angry about a dropped grade was one thing, but angry enough to kill?

  Shelley brought up the email on her phone without even a sigh of frustration, to her credit. She had saved the screenshot and brought it along as proof—proof they would need if they were going to confront the student who had sent it.

  “‘Professor,’” she read. “‘I can’t believe you flunked me. Like, are you serious? I tried really goddamn hard on his paper and you just decided to kick me off the course! Teachers are supposed to help and support. Thanks a whole fucking bunch. You’re the worst professor I ever had. I hope you get fired. I’m not the only one who hates your guts. You’re going to get hauled over the coals if the dean listens to our complaints. Try sleeping well tonight, asshole.’”

  Zoe had already zoned out by the time Shelley was done. She had heard it a couple of times before, and this time had not changed her opinion. It was student bluster, that was all. Threats made to his career, not to his life.

  Not to mention that the student in question was studying English, not math. It was not a close enough connection. How could this barely literate student have known to write out complex equations? Complex enough to stump experts?

  And besides, even if this kid was angry with the professor, it didn’t at all explain why he would have gone after the first victim—the student.

  “Well?” Shelley prompted.

  Zoe realized that she had been sitting in silence, failing to respond to Shelley’s reading. She shrugged her shoulders now. “It sounds like nothing.”

  “Come on, he’s directly threatening the professor, Z,” Shelley said. “And this allusion to other disgruntled students—what if he knows others who might have done it? At the very least, we need to bring him in for questioning.”

  Zoe stared out across the dark campus, her arms folded across her chest in front of the steering wheel. “If you say so.”

  It clearly was not the answer that Shelley had been hoping for, as she made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat and turned away.

  Her phone buzzed at almost precisely the same moment, and she looked down to read the incoming message. “I’ve just had an email from a secretary in the admissions department. She sent over Jones’s schedule.”

  “Jones?” Zoe interrupted.

  This time, Shelley did sigh and roll her eyes. “Jensen Jones, the student we’re here to see. I know you don’t think it’s much of a lead, but I thought you were at least paying attention.”

  Zoe shrugged again, offering no apology. She had better, more important things to focus on. The equations. The fact that she still wasn’t any closer to solving them. Waiting around for Dr. Applewhite’s contacts to look at them and get back to her was like agony.

  “Anyway, this is important. Jones was also taking a physics class. And guess who happened to be the student instructor for that class?”

  Zoe stared back at her, unflinching. She wasn’t about to play this game.

  Shelley pushed on, undeterred. “Cole Davidson. As in, victim number one. Jones has a personal connection to both of the victims.”

  “But he does not take math.” Zoe couldn’t hold it back any longer. She refused to believe that there was any way the equations were random, just scrawling meant to distract them. They had a key part to play in this case. They had to.

  Because if they didn’t, then Zoe wasn’t as useful to this case as she thought she was, and it was all just a boring, run of the mill murder. Why it bothered her so much that that might be the case, she couldn’t fully say. All she knew was that she needed to solve the equations, and for them to be the key.

  “Look, I know you could pull rank if you wanted to. You’re the senior agent. But I don’t want to end up with an unsolved case and not be able to say that we left no stone unturned. I’m going in to question him,” Shelley said decisively, opening her door and getting out of the car.

  Zoe sat for a moment, then sighed and opened her own door. At the end of the day, they were partners. They worked together. Even if Zoe had no belief at all that this was a viable need, she was still supposed to support her partner.

  So, she would.

  She caught up with Shelley, who was striding as fast as her legs could take her across the campus, some minutes later. There was a crackling energy coming from the other woman, an anger that bristled from her like the spines on a porcupine. Zoe was familiar with that kind of sensation. She was always provoking anger in others, often at times when she couldn’t work out what she had done wrong.

  At least this time, she knew.

  “I will take your lead,” Zoe said. “If you feel that this kid will give us something, I will back you up.”

  Shelley’s steps faltered a little, before she resumed her course. “Thank you,” she said, a little too primly. Zoe gathered that she was still upset, but why? She had given Shelley what she wanted, hadn’t she?

  Such questions would have to be left for later, or preferably never at all, because they had arrived outside an apartment building just off the side of the campus. Shelley had closed the map application on her phone, by which Zoe understood that they must have arrived. She also knew just standing there in the street that the music booming out of the windows, even though they were closed, was above city regulations for the volume of noise audible in public at night.

  A college student, looking to be nineteen years old at most, was stumbling out of the doorway as they approached. He had a red cup in his hand, and his hands were fumbling with a cigarette. When he looked up and saw the two women coming toward him, his eyes widened to almost a comical degree. The one fluid ounce of liquid in the cup was thrown over his shoulder to land on some bushes, and he walked away quickly, clutching the now-empty plastic receptacle as if his life depended on keeping it out of their hands.

  “Party,” Zoe said, recognizing enough of the signs.

  Zoe pulled her phone out again and brought up a photograph of Jensen Jones from his college registration. He was young, fairly clean-cut. Brown hair, a wide nose, brown eyes. Nothing at all special.

  Which was bad news, because of what Shelley said next. “We’ll have to keep an eye out for him. I guess most of them will scatter and run as soon as we get there. We kind of obviously look like FBI, or at least cops. Might have to catch him as he tries to get away.”

  “Having a party right after murdering two people?” Zoe asked. “Is that really considered a normal reaction?”

  “Not normal, no, but it has happened,” Shelley said. “I could cite a couple of cases, but it’s probably more efficient for us to grab him and find out for sure.”

  “After you,” Zoe suggested, gesturing toward the door.

  Shelley drew a deep breath as if she were steeling herself, then nodded. “Let’s go.”

  Beyond the door of the apartment building, the noise was much louder. To complicate their search, there were three open doors on the ground floor alone—the residents of each of the apartments opening their own spaces up to be a new area of the party. It had spilled across the corridor, up the stairs, and—judging at least by the sheer number of teenagers moving in all directions—through every apartment in the building.

  The appearance of Zoe and Shelley was not immediately noted. A couple of students saw them and ducked past them out the door, no doubt wanting to get themselves as far away from trouble as possible.

  But then the worst possible thing happened: one of the kids, a jock standing at six feet with the build of a quarterback, yelled out in panic. “The cops are here!”

  The call went through the building like wildfire, and panic started to set in. There was no use in trying to stay incognito. Zoe reached into her inner jacket pocket for her badge and brandished it in the air. “FBI. This party is breaking up. Now!”

  The effect was immediate and palpable. Thirty students ran past her in quick succession, all of them from down in the lower apartmen
t rooms. The word was spreading up the stairs, too, and people were clattering down, sloshing their beers onto the carpet as they tripped and stumbled.

  Zoe waited in the downstairs lobby while Shelley went into all three of the ground floor rooms in turn, scattering more students out through them as she did so. Even from where she stood, making no attempt to catch any of the students who continued to run by her, Zoe could see that the place was a mess. Crumpled red cups, spilled food and drink, and no doubt the occasional patch of vomit covered every surface in sight. It had been a big one—the legendary kind of party that kids talk about for months. Too bad they had ended it.

  Zoe couldn’t say she felt any kind of misplaced nostalgia for them. She had rarely been invited to parties of any kind, and it was even rarer that she attended them. Then, as now, this kind of party was too overwhelming. The noise, the people in all directions, the intoxication and temptation of forbidden alcohol—and, judging by the smells in the air, other substances, too.

  With the benefit of extra years of experience, it was still all Zoe could do to concentrate on studying the faces of those who ran by her. She checked each of them for the youth in the photograph, but although there were plenty of near matches, none of them were the real Jensen Jones. She felt like a stone in the middle of a river, the current washing around her. There were plenty of interesting things that caught her eye, angles and figures and signs, but they went by so quickly that she was barely even able to register them before they were gone.

  Shelley reemerged from the third room, shaking her head. Zoe tore her eyes back toward the stairs, just in time to see someone charging down them. A young woman wearing a collection of twelve bottle tops all strung together around her neck, clattering against one another as she ran—

  “There!” Shelley shouted.

  Zoe pulled her attention back from the girl too late, seeing only another blur passing by her. By the way Shelley was pointing, Zoe knew that it must have been their guy. She swore under her breath—he was through the door already.

  She twisted on her feet and sprang after him, keeping him in her sights as he raced away. He was five foot ten, built athletically, muscles straining easily in his calves as his arms pumped up and down. Young, in shape, and clearly an experienced runner.

  Zoe had barely gone five steps before she knew she didn’t have a hope in hell of catching him.

  In her head, the campus spread out before her like a map, topography and angles of incline included. He was snaking away toward the left, making for a group of small buildings that dotted the edge of the campus. Behind them was a fence, built to maintain a barrier between the college and the surrounding town.

  Zoe thought faster than she could run. His path would necessarily have to be curved, following the line of the fence, before he reached a gap and a gate for pedestrians to pass through. That was if he had even brought his student ID with him, which she knew already was needed for exiting at that point, right next to several college facilities.

  “Keep on him!” she yelled over her shoulder, seeing Shelley from the corner of her eye as she herself peeled away to the right. At this speed, he would always outrun her. But she could cross a shorter distance in the same time, and calculating his miles per hour against hers, she knew that she could meet him at the gate.

  But only if she cut a straight line across an open quad, through a narrow corridor between two buildings, and then directly across the parking lot behind it.

  Only if someone didn’t get in her way.

  Zoe pumped her arms and legs harder, speeding up even when she thought she was at her limit, straining against the cold night air streaming into her lungs. It was not often, these days, that she had a real athletic challenge to cope with. And she wasn’t as young as he was. But she pushed, intending to make damn sure that she would be there in time—even if there was a stumbling block in her way.

  The quad passed by in a blur, then it was a shot through the corridor, the thin gap thankfully empty of any other bodies to stumble into her path. The ground underfoot changed to the harsh, jarring feel of tarmac, punishing her feet for choosing to be clothed in plain dress shoes instead of trainers.

  Zoe could still not see the fence on the other side of the buildings, but she could see the gate. She rushed forward with another surge of adrenaline. If she didn’t get there in time…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There was no time to lose. Zoe gave a final, hard push, forcing her body beyond its natural breaking point.

  Zoe’s heart pounded in time with her feet across the parking lot, and she crashed to a halt as her body collided with another. She thrust out her arms instinctively to keep hold of him, and pushed Jensen Jones up against the ten-foot fence so that he could not use his superior build to get away.

  Shelley was only a few moments behind. She was heavily out of breath and red in the face with strands of hair flying out of her chignon, but she was there. She assisted Zoe in slapping a pair of handcuffs around his wrists, behind his back, as they panted out warnings about running from law enforcement and the right to question him. He only hung his head, trying to catch his own breath as well.

  Zoe’s whole body felt like it had woken up. Air and light had supplanted the spaces in between her joints, the stretching out of long-dormant muscles feeling wonderful. Of course, there was also pain; particularly in her ankles, which had not at all enjoyed the jolting across the parking lot. Overall, she felt great. There was something about the rush of wind in your hair as you raced someone else—and won.

  ***

  The apartment building felt different to Zoe, now that it was empty of everyone except for herself, Shelley, and Jensen. The guests had scattered to the four winds, and the residents along with them. No doubt they were going for plausible deniability.

  Zoe poked around the apartment that housed Jensen Jones, sniffing at thirteen cups still full of a liquid that was definitely not water and checking four ashtrays. Shelley had sat the kid down on the sofa in the open-plan room, dragging a dining chair over to sit opposite him. There were not many clean seating options left, so Zoe opted to stand and wander.

  Despite his apparent inebriation, the kid was not far gone enough to misunderstand what was happening to him. In fact, he appeared to have sobered up quite nicely with the joint impact of his run and the revelation that they were FBI, not local cops.

  “It was just a party,” he muttered, his eyes sweeping the floor as if looking for a traitor sign of something more serious. “Since when does the FBI get called to parties?”

  “We don’t, Mr. Jones,” Shelley said, with an air of conspiracy. “Actually, we were looking for you specifically. In connection with another matter.”

  Zoe was already up to twenty-two cups. Just how many people had been squeezed into this party? Given that they were still running when Zoe and Shelley left the building, she had to guess at more than a hundred.

  There was nothing but confusion on Jones’s face. “What other matter?” he asked.

  “There was a professor who tragically lost his life here yesterday,” Shelley said. Zoe watched her face, watching her watch him for a sign. She was getting to know Shelley better. It was easier for her to read Shelley than a stranger. “Professor Henderson was your former professor, was he not?”

  “Yeah,” Jones said, then sat up straighter with a look of alarm. “Hey, but listen, I wasn’t involved in all that!”

  “How did you feel about Professor Henderson?” Shelley pressed.

  “Uh, he was okay. I mean. It’s super sad that he died. Everyone’s in shock.”

  There were seven stubs of cigarettes in the ashtrays. They looked hand-rolled. Probably not tobacco. Zoe lowered her nose slightly and sniffed, her suspicion confirmed by the scent coming off them. And in Jones’s apartment, too. He wasn’t going to be able to put up much of an argument that it wasn’t him, or that he didn’t know the party was going on.

  “I’d like to read you something,” Shelley said, tak
ing out her phone. “Let’s see… it starts like this: ‘Professor, I can’t believe you flunked me. Like, are you serious? I tried really goddamn hard on his paper and you just decided to kick me off the course!’”

  “Okay, okay.” Jones held his hands up. He obviously recognized his own words. “Yes, I sent it. But it—it doesn’t mean I did anything! I was just super angry when he flunked me. After I sent the email I felt kinda bad. I should have been nicer. Maybe he would’ve let me back into class.”

  “So you’re saying that you sent this angry, threatening email to Professor Henderson, coincidentally right before he was brutally murdered in a manner that smacks of personal anger, but you have nothing to do with that?”

  Jones swallowed and looked down. “I get how it looks. I do. But I wasn’t that angry. I’ll just take a different course next semester. Try something different. I haven’t decided my major yet anyway.”

  Shelley switched tacks with a cool and effortless manner, something that Zoe was beginning more and more to admire. “Cole Davidson was the SI in your physics class, wasn’t he?”

  Jones blinked: once, then twice. “I… yes, I guess he was. I mean, I never really spoke to him all that much.”

  “You attended class, did you not?”

  “Yes, but, I, I mean, I didn’t know him or anything, I—I mean—are you really suggesting that I…?”

  “You tell us, Mr. Jones. Did you have anything to do with this? Or do you know who did?”

  Jones shook his head five times in long sweeps side to side, his mouth working soundlessly as the reality of his situation washed over him. Zoe counted beads of sweat on his forehead. He was nervous, but it was hard to tell if that was because he had been caught or because he was being falsely accused.

  “No, wait, this isn’t right,” he said, at last. “I wasn’t—when Cole went missing. I wasn’t in that area. I had class—a night class—you can check the records. And when the professor was killed last night—it was in the night, wasn’t it?”