by Blake Pierce
Zoe shot her a look. They wouldn’t?
“There is, however, a way around this. A way we can get justice for Dr. North and stop this killer from striking again, without breaking any of the rules,” Shelley went on.
Burke cleared his throat. “What did you have in mind?”
“You look at the records. We can give you the parameters, tell you what we’re looking for. All we need from you is a name.” Shelley smiled sweetly, spreading her hands in front of her as if to demonstrate how easy it would all be. “Tomorrow, once we have him locked up where he can’t hurt anyone else, we come back with a warrant to check the records and make official copies. That way it’s all sewn up.”
Burke looked a little unsure, but he cleared his throat again. “I suppose—for Dr. North,” he suggested.
“Yes. In his memory,” Shelley nodded.
“All right.” Burke sighed and squared his shoulders. “What am I looking for?”
Shelley turned to Zoe, who now understood that was her cue. “A recent diagnosis of dyslexia,” she said. “I can tell you that the man will be around five foot nine and one hundred and thirty-five pounds or more, but we can also consider cases that fall slightly below those figures. It should be in the last six months—most likely even the last three or four.”
“All right, I’ll input that,” Burke replied. “Those figures—you’re expecting an adult?”
“An adult or a teen, college age,” Zoe supplied, a thought coming to her. “Oh—and dyscalculia as well. Or aphasia. Anything that would cause difficulties with written communication.”
“That widens the field considerably,” Burke said, but he was smiling. “I can’t check the records of any other site, of course, but I can tell you if he treated someone here. I’ll be back in two shakes, ladies. Wait here for me.”
When the door was closed behind him, Shelley sat on one of the vacant chairs, much of the pasted-on pleasantness disappearing as she dropped. “Wow. I was just about to go to sleep, and you suddenly cracked the case.”
“Sorry,” Zoe said.
“I wasn’t complaining. So, written communication? You found something in the numbers?”
“I was reminded of something Wardenford said—that it was all out of order, jumbled up. The more I thought about that, the more sense it made. I do not think the killer knows that they are jumbled—or at least, if he does, he is not able to fix it. Neurological damage could also account for a sudden outburst of violence.”
“Dyslexia isn’t something I normally associate with violent outbursts,” Shelley said, quirking the corners of her lips.
“No, but it does not always appear… out of nowhere. That is the wrong term, but you can see what I mean: it does not always develop during the process of one’s early life. That is to say, brain injuries or tumors, or so on, can cause other neurological difficulties to appear.”
“And they can also cause changes in behavior, such as violent mood swings,” Shelley nodded. “Got it.”
“When we have his name, we should move immediately. We do not know if he is planning another attack. Granted, the existing victims appear to perfectly spell out Dr. Applewhite’s equation as a clue for us to chase after, but that may not be the final piece of his puzzle.”
“That’s another thing, we’ll need to verify that she knows him in some way. Or that he could access the equation somehow. I gather it wasn’t widely shared, so that will be another piece of evidence against him they can use in court.”
Zoe nodded. “After we have had that confirmed, we can let her go home.”
Shelley smiled at her, looking tired in that moment. Before they could say anything more, the door opened and Burke returned.
He was hesitant, pausing a few seconds and wetting his lips without saying anything.
“Well?” Zoe asked, impatient. Did he not realize how costly a delay could be? “What is his name?”
“That’s the thing,” Burke said, clasping his hands together. Hands that were conspicuously empty of any kind of printout or note. “There aren’t any patients on file that fit the criteria you mentioned.”
Zoe stared at him, her mouth open. How could this be? Had she made a huge mistake?
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Zoe stood in the almost empty reception area, looking at the patients sitting and waiting to see doctors without really seeing them. Even at this time of night, there were people around—referred from the ER, perhaps, or scheduled for late-night procedures because the operating suites were otherwise full.
“We just have to keep working on it. It was a good theory, but we’ll come up with another one,” Shelley said. “Who knows? Maybe you’re right, but this person hasn’t actually had a diagnosis yet.”
“But Dr. North,” Zoe said helplessly. “There had to be a reason why he was connected to all of this.”
“I know it made a lot of sense. We’ll have to come at it from another angle. Maybe he knew one of the other victims in a way we haven’t put together yet.” Shelley reached out to squeeze Zoe’s upper arm, then checked her watch and sighed. “In the morning, anyway. I’m going home to get a few hours of sleep. You should, too.”
Zoe nodded, though that wasn’t exactly an agreement. She wasn’t sure just yet that she wanted to lock herself into any decisions.
She watched Shelley leave, then pushed herself into action, trailing after her. It was not until Shelley had disappeared out through the wide automatic doors and into the night that Zoe remembered how she had arrived here—and that she therefore did not have a vehicle of her own in the parking lot.
She sighed to herself. She should have asked Shelley to drive her home. Now it was going to be a very expensive cab ride, all because she had been too busy trying to work out how she could possibly have been wrong.
But, really, how could she? It had all made the most perfect sense. Dr. North, targeted because he made the diagnosis. A new brain deficiency partnered with a new level of rage and violence, turning a misplaced anger into a murderous impulse. The equations, left as a message but somehow bungled by a man who could no longer make them work. A mathematician. Someone who would have known both of the other victims from Georgetown.
It all fit so perfectly! Zoe thought about going back and checking that Burke had considered other possibilities, like brain tumors, but she stopped herself. She had been clear—anything that could cause difficulties with written communication. The man worked in a hospital. He would know to check for anything fitting those signs.
Zoe stepped out into the cool night air, grateful for the way that it soothed her head and the aching tension she had barely noticed was building there. She was about to call for a taxi when her eyes drifted left, and she saw him.
John—sitting on a bench just over from the entrance, now lifting a silent hand in greeting.
“You waited for me,” she said as she approached him, feeling dumb for stating the obvious but unable to resist making the statement.
“I figured, since I’m the one who brought you here, you’d need me to take you back as well,” John said, smiling as he got up. “I wasn’t going to just abandon you here, even if your partner was coming. I wanted to make sure you had a way to get home.”
“Thank you,” Zoe said, floored by the generosity with his time. Not to mention the fact that it was cold out, and he had sat outside to wait for her. He hadn’t needed to do any of that. She hadn’t asked him to. In fact, she now realized with a faint embarrassment, she had probably been fairly rude to walk away from him without saying goodbye.
“So, where do you want to go?” John asked, his hands in his pockets as he rocked gently on the balls of his feet. “Consider me your taxi driver. Home? Back to the bar? Somewhere else?”
Zoe thought about it. She didn’t want to go home. She could barely face the thought. Going back to the bar was a bad idea, and a waste of time. Getting drunk wasn’t going to help her solve this case. Any more alcohol and she would probably be crying in John’s l
ap about how badly she had messed up. A mental image which did not at all fit with the way she wanted others to see her.
“I need to go see my friend,” she decided. “The one I told you about, who got arrested because of me. She is at the local precinct. Will you take me there?”
“Of course.” John smiled warmly, making a short bow and gesturing in the direction of the car. “The lady’s wish is my command. Let’s go.”
Zoe couldn’t quite tell whether he was mocking her or being nice, but since he was taking her where she needed to go, she decided that it didn’t matter.
Zoe’s travel sickness was worse than ever as they drove the quiet and near-deserted roads, even though the ride was slower and smoother than the previous journey. The alcohol in her bloodstream was already working its way out of her system, wearing off. Now it was the nausea that came after a drink, as well as the existing reaction to the motion of the car. Just exactly what she needed on a night when everything else seemed to be going so badly wrong around her.
“You didn’t get what you wanted in there, did you?” John asked, not taking his eyes off the road. Zoe appreciated that. It made him seem a more responsible driver.
“No.” Zoe paused, wondering. “How could you tell?”
“You were so fired up on the way here, thinking you’d figured it all out. Now, not so much. I expected you’d be happy if things had worked out the way you thought.”
Zoe took this in, watching the road ahead just as he was. It was a strange sensation, both of them observing this sight together, talking without turning to one another. More comfortable than other conversations, where Zoe had to try and give some kind of facial expression to avoid appearing like a robot, had to try and decipher the meaningless expressions and gestures she saw from others.
“I was wrong,” she admitted, at last. “I do not know how. It still seems like it would all fit perfectly. But the answer was not there.”
“I guess life’s a little like that,” John said, pausing to concentrate as he turned right onto a new road. “Even when we want things to fit perfectly, they have a way of breaking the pattern.”
He was right. Zoe lived her life through patterns, saw them everywhere, understood them intimately. But when it came to real life—human behavior, interactions, feelings—the patterns were often defied.
“It would be a lot neater if it was not this way.”
John gave a short laugh. “It sure would. Easier, too.”
At least they could agree on that. Zoe was still turning this over in her mind when the car stopped, pulling her out of her thoughts to the extent that she looked around in confusion.
“We’re here,” John explained, turning in his seat now to face her. “Anything else I can do for you, before I go?”
Zoe disengaged her seatbelt, taking a deep breath of air. Still air. A blessing. “You have done more than enough,” she said. She felt there should be something in it for him—some kind of reward. Dr. Monk had been telling her to make an effort. Perhaps now was the most appropriate time to put that into practice. “Thank you for everything tonight. We should meet again, sometime when I am not in the middle of a case.”
John beamed, not bothering to hide his delight. Zoe appreciated that. Too many men still acted like children. Hiding their emotions and expecting her to guess. She was never going to be able to guess. “I’ll take you up on that,” he said. “Call me when you’re done with this one. We can go for another meal, maybe.”
“I will. I would like that.” Zoe hesitated, unsure if she had done a proper job of ticking off all the niceties that were expected of her. “Well, then I will see you soon.”
“Goodnight, Zoe,” John said, giving her a look that she felt perhaps indicated the conversation was over and she was free to depart.
Whether it actually did or not, she had no way of knowing, but it was as good a guess as any.
***
Zoe had been worried for a brief moment that she might be waking Dr. Applewhite up, but being held by the FBI for the first time in your life was not a soothing experience. She had been sitting awake, staring at the walls, with nothing else to do to pass the time.
“I am sorry for all of this,” Zoe said quietly, sitting opposite her mentor with a steaming cup of coffee in front of both of them. The staff on duty had insisted that if she wanted to talk to someone being held overnight, it had to be in a proper interrogation room. It had to be recorded.
It wasn’t the way she would have preferred to do things, but it would have to do.
“The wheels of justice have to keep on turning.” Dr. Applewhite smiled, tucking her hair behind her ear. She didn’t sound particularly happy, even if her lips were curved up into the right shape.
“Is that a quotation?”
“At this stage, I don’t even know.” Dr. Applewhite sipped at her coffee. “I’m tired, Zoe. It’s been a long day.”
The guilt hit her even harder. What more could she do? It wasn’t as if Zoe had been sitting around at home, or had resolved just to leave Dr. Applewhite in a cell all night. She had been out there, trying to find a solution for this thing. It just hadn’t happened.
“I am sorry,” Zoe murmured again, wondering if at this point it even made any difference. She continued louder, wanting to take action now more than ever. “I have been working on a theory. I thought you might be able to help me figure out who the culprit could be.”
“Anything to get me out of here quicker.” Dr. Applewhite sighed. “Let’s hear it, then.”
Zoe nodded. “I think the killer has recently suffered some kind of neurological change. One side effect of this would be something like aphasia, dyslexia, dyscalculia. Something that prevents him from being able to write things out properly. That is why the equations do not make sense, and also why the violence has started happening now. I am willing to bet that before this traumatic event, whatever it was, the killer has no history of violent behavior.”
“But?”
“But we went to the hospital where Dr. North worked, and there was nothing in the records. We cannot find anyone who fits the criteria of this kind of recent development alongside the appropriate height, weight, and age.”
“Hmm.” Dr. Applewhite took another sip of her coffee. “Well, the theory works. It doesn’t sound like it should be wrong.”
“That is why I thought you might be of some help. I need you to think back, wrack your brains. Is there anyone, either in the academic world or in mathematical circles? Anyone who was rumored to be a bit strange, or stories that sound a bit off? Glaring mistakes, problems with speech, anything like that?”
Dr. Applewhite sat back in her chair, her eyes roving across pictures that Zoe could not see as she thought. “Mistakes, yes. But those are just part of mathematics. That’s what happens when you try to work on something difficult, something theoretical. My own formula was flawed, after all.”
“Not something like that—not a missed calculation or a failure to carry the one. More like things being written down in the wrong way. Numbers reversed, or put out of order, for example. The way that the equations on the bodies were unbalanced.”
“I work too much to stay up to date with all of the national journals, to read something as embarrassing as that,” Dr. Applewhite protested. “I suppose it would have made a scandal, but I haven’t heard about anyone messing up that badly.”
“It does not need to have been published. It could have been coursework—something a professor at the college noticed and mentioned to you. Someone brilliant that suddenly made mistakes. It has to be a big fall from grace for him to be this angry. If I suddenly lost the ability to draw, given my already limited art skills, I do not think that I would be upset.”
“That’s very insightful. You’ve been working on your empathetic understanding of others, haven’t you?”
Zoe couldn’t say that she had, but maybe just being around someone like Shelley was enough to help her understand more about human nature, in herself
and others. “That is not the point. Think back. Stories, rumors. Hints. Anything you heard in passing. It does not even have to be concrete.”
“Look, I just can’t think of anyone,” Dr. Applewhite said. “Maybe it would be better to ask the professors. Or another neurologist.”
“The change might not have been completely obvious,” Zoe pressed. She couldn’t give up. Not when they were this close to getting somewhere. If she wasn’t right about this, then Dr. Applewhite could go all the way to trial. “The brain—it does not always work in the ways that we expect. Maybe he could have hidden his communication problems by talking less, going underground or something. But someone would have noticed. His personality would be different, he would be quieter. Not as able to perform at the level he was at previously. A star student, suddenly not on the scene anymore.”
“The only students that normally get referred to me by others are the ones who show signs of synesthesia. Not very many, as you might appreciate. Even when we talk about these things, it’s not normally by name.”
“I don’t even need a name,” Zoe pleaded. How could Dr. Applewhite not see that she needed her to try harder, to dig deeper? This could mean the difference between going home in the morning and staying here to await trial, if the killer didn’t strike again. “Just a hint. Someone else we can talk to who might know something. Anything at all.”
Dr. Applewhite was frowning, looking off into the distance. “What was that you said about going quieter?”
“A—a star student,” Zoe said, desperately trying to remember her exact words. “His personality would change and he would go quiet. No longer performing at the same level.”
Dr. Applewhite paused, rubbing her lips with the side of her index finger as she thought. “I… I think there might have been something like that,” she said.
“Who? When?” Zoe practically felt like she was about to leap across the table and rip the words out of Dr. Applewhite’s head herself, if that would make them come out quicker.