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

by Blake Pierce

  Zoe glanced up, frowning. “Like medicine? I don’t know. I think you need to have more compassion for that.”

  Dr. Applewhite’s lips quirked at the edges, a trait that Zoe found annoying. What did it even mean? “I don’t know about that. I’ve met plenty of nurses who don’t seem to care about much of anything,” Dr. Applewhite said. “And you’re plenty compassionate. But there are other options. What about law enforcement?”

  Zoe was about to offer a verbal rebuttal alongside the one on the game board, but her hand hovered in midair. That was a striking thought. Law enforcement. What if she could use her pattern recognition, her calculations, all of it, to identify suspects and stop crime sprees?

  What if she could stop murders?

  “Like the police?”

  Dr. Applewhite nodded. “Police, FBI, whatever you want. There are a lot of options around here, and you could move to another state, too. Go be a small-town sheriff if you wanted, or head up a specialist investigation unit. There’s even the forensics department, CSI. It seems like it’s worth considering.”

  Zoe did consider it. She considered it long and hard. So long that their time together was up before the chess game was finished.

  Zoe’s mother had always called her evil. Said the devil’s blood must run in her veins in order for her to do the things she did. Zoe knew that was stupid, because her father was just a man, and her mother was human too—for all her shortcomings. But if she could help people, really help people… if she could put the real bad guys behind bars, wouldn’t that change things?

  Wouldn’t that redeem her, just a little?

  The irony stung. Redeem herself? Ha! Not only had she failed to protect an innocent person in this case, but it was the very person who had suggested she make a career out of it in the first place.

  The case was a mess. Zoe had had no leads before she implicated Dr. Applewhite, and she had none now. In fact, the only lead that could really be called credible in the whole case was the DNA evidence—and that was what had gotten Dr. Applewhite pulled in.

  Zoe felt useless. There was nowhere for her to go on the case, no lead to follow. She had no idea where to start looking for this killer, now that the equations hadn’t panned out the way she thought they would. It was clearly a frame, but Dr. Applewhite came across hundreds of people on a weekly basis. How could they narrow down thousands of people to just one suspect, when Dr. Applewhite wasn’t the type to make enemies?

  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 tha
t 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 w
ay. 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.