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

by Blake Pierce

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It was—yes—I’m sure of it—it was Ralph Henderson.”

  “The English professor who died?”

  “There was a student of his, someone who showed a lot of promise. Ralph told me about how it was such a shame. He had been in an accident or something—a car crash or something like that. Ralph was thinking of recommending him for some advanced training, getting him to work on more theoretical stuff, but after the accident he retreated. He didn’t say anything about the effects on his work—given that he was teaching English, not math—or about him being unable to communicate. Just that he wasn’t so active on campus, retreated into himself, started missing lectures.”

  “Do you know his name?” This was it. The million-dollar question. If they could just find him…

  Dr. Applewhite screwed up her face. “Oh, god, this was a while ago… and I wasn’t even really listening at the time. Let me try to think. I didn’t get any of the details—god, what did he keep calling him?”

  Zoe kept quiet, biting her tongue. Dr. Applewhite needed space to think. Zoe counted seconds, trying not to explode. If she could just keep quiet for thirty—no, maybe sixty seconds—just long enough for Dr. Applewhite to get there…

  “It was… it was something unusual,” Dr. Applewhite said. She rubbed her temples, trying so hard to get there. “Something kind of exotic. God, why can’t I remember?”

  “Something unusual,” Zoe repeated. “And the student, he was at Georgetown, right? He took classes with Ralph Henderson, at least for a while.”

  “Yes, he must have. Otherwise I don’t know why Ralph would have been thinking about putting him forward.”

  It wasn’t a whole lot, but it was something. It was a starting point. From the whole of the state down to one college, and from the whole student population of the college down to those who took certain classes. It might not get them a list of one, but it would definitely get them closer—and even if they ended up with a list of fifty, they could work through it. They could ask questions, check alibis, request medical records.

  “I will call you if we get anything,” Zoe said, getting up. “Try to get some rest. By the morning, we might be putting the real killer in your place.”

  She left the room and a weary Dr. Applewhite behind, indicating that she was done to the guards on duty as she dug out her phone to call Shelley.

  “I have something real,” Zoe said, as soon as the line connected. “He is a student. Dr. Applewhite remembered Ralph Henderson talking about him. We can narrow it down.”

  There was a groan on Shelley’s side. “Z, I literally just got back into bed.”

  “This cannot wait until the morning,” Zoe protested.

  “I know.” A sigh. “I just wish you had called before I took my makeup off and got changed—again. I’ll be at HQ in fifteen.”

  Zoe pocketed her phone and strode along with new purpose, sure now that they were only hours away from having the killer in cuffs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Zoe stood behind the FBI tech, watching him load up a database. The raw data from the Georgetown student list was vast, but it was the starting point. They had to go from there.

  Next to her, Shelley had her arms folded across her chest, and she was leaning forward to get the screen in clearer focus. She had not bothered to neatly redo her chignon this time, opting for a simple ponytail. It made her look more youthful.

  “All right, we’re loaded up,” the tech said, flexing his fingers over the keyboard. “Where are we looking?”

  “First, they should be a student who took a class with Professor Ralph Henderson in the last semester,” Shelley said.

  “Two semesters, just to be sure,” Zoe interjected. “Also include any extracurricular activities he led, if there are any.”

  The tech ran his fingers over the keyboard and made a few clicks, and the names on the screen flashed a few times before reloading in a new order.

  “We have one hundred and fifty results. Anything else to refine it by?”

  “Yes—males only.”

  Another couple of clicks and the list flashed, reloaded. A much smaller selection. “Down to ninety.”

  “Now cross-reference with students that have also taken any kind of class with the mathematics department,” Zoe said.

  “Would he have been majoring in math?” Shelley asked.

  “Hard to say.” Zoe chewed her bottom lip. “It is possible, but then again perhaps he had not yet chosen a major at all before the accident. We should stick to any kind of math class.”

  Flash; reload. They didn’t need the tech to announce the results this time. They all fit on a single view—fifty-three students.

  “Move over so we can read them,” Zoe said, peering over his head. The font size was small, too small for easy viewing.

  The tech leaned back to look at her face, to see if she was being serious. When he saw that she was, he sighed, and scooted his chair to one side.

  Zoe and Shelley stepped forward in unison, each leaning one hand on the desk so that they could make out the names more easily. Adam, Alex, Alexander, Alexei… Even with the knowledge they were looking for something “exotic,” there were still too many options. It was a tough variable to define—what would Dr. Applewhite even define as exotic? Did Alexei fit the bill or was it too common? What about Govinder, lower on the list? Could it be him?

  “We need to narrow it down more,” Shelley said, as if reading Zoe’s mind. “This is going to take too long.”

  “There’s one thing we can do. We’re thinking that this student would have to have been brilliant—someone who would have been trusted by Wardenford to look at his equations. That means he has to have been getting good grades.”

  “Where do I click?” Shelley asked, looking to the tech for instructions. He leaned over to point out the sorting areas on the screen, helping her to select anyone who was getting either perfect scores or almost perfect on tests and papers, the ones in the class with the best grades.

  There were still twenty-two students on the list. It was a good school, after all.

  Shelley blew out a sigh, rubbing her eyes. “Marco, can you print this out for us? Just the ones we noted, please.”

  Marco rolled his chair back across as they stepped out of the way, getting to work.

  “Should we start going to their houses?” Zoe suggested. It was the middle of the night, but that didn’t mean they had to stand on ceremony. They were looking for a serial killer in the middle of a spree, after all.

  “We could,” Shelley said, then rubbed her eyes again. “It’s a shame. This is going to take us all night.”

  Zoe looked over the list. Something was nagging at her memory, snagging her eye as she ran down the names.

  The letters—the capital letters. Could that be it?

  “The equations—there was something odd about them,” she said, opening her notebook to the page where she had copied them out. “Look here—see? The ‘M’ is a capital. But here—on Dr. Applewhite’s version of the equation, before it was jumbled by the killer: the ‘m’ is lowercase. It indicates magnetic quantum value. The lowercase from is correct.”

  “Assigning significance to a letter.” Shelley nodded. “It’s very likely to be a letter that he writes as a capital often. One of his initials. Zoe, that’s brilliant!”

  “Two Matthews and one Matthias,” Zoe read, checking the list.

  “That’s all of them. No, wait—the surnames. There’s a Matthew there as well.”

  “Only Matthias is what I would call exotic,” Zoe noted. “And—look at this. He has not been attending class for a while. His grades sharply dropped, then disappeared altogether.”

  “This must be our guy!” Shelley was enthusiastic, her eyes gleaming.

  Zoe nodded. “But what about his medical records? He didn’t show up on Dr. North’s list. Can we be sure he has a connection to him?”

  Shelley was tapping a pen against
her lower lip, her eyes glazed with that particular look that accompanies deep thought. “You know,” she said, slowly, as if she was still figuring it out while she said it. “I’ve been thinking about something the administrator at the hospital said. He told us he could only check one site, as if he was expecting us to look at records for other hospitals as well. Specialist doctors don’t always just have one hospital where they work.”

  “What?”

  “Well, Dr. North was a specialist, right? A neurosurgeon? Sometimes they will be on staff at a couple of different places in the same area, so that the skills are on hand wherever they’re needed.”

  “Call the hospital and find out where else he worked,” Zoe said, her eyes widening as she grasped what Shelley was saying. “I will try to find a judge who might let us have a warrant so they will release the information.”

  As it turned out, she need not have bothered. Zoe had just finished checking schedules and figuring out that Judge Lopez was going to be in court in the morning, but didn’t have a trial until a little later on, when Shelley burst back into their little investigation room from the corridor where she had been making her call.

  “They’re faxing us through the patient records,” Shelley said. Despite the late hour and her lack of sleep, she was grinning. “I gave them Matthias Kranz and they were able to pick up his records at a hospital on the north side of the city. I told the administrator there it was a matter of life or death, told him this was Dr. North’s killer, and he was happy to bend the rules. Matthias saw last Dr. North two months ago. Even better—he was scheduled for follow-up appointments that he never attended. It sounds like he could have gone rogue. We’ll know more when they send his full records through.”

  Zoe could hardly wait for the antiquated machine to stop printing. She counted how many lines had already come through and calculated the per-page printing speed, feeling despair each time it started on a new page and utter relief when it finally spat out half a page at the end.

  She almost tore them in her haste to snatch them up and start leafing through them, searching for something that would make sense.

  “Anything?” Shelley asked, almost crowding into her and backing off when Zoe made an impatient gesture.

  “Give me a chance to read it. Hold on…” Zoe skimmed the words, flipping pages to his most recent records. “Here. TBI—traumatic brain injury from a car accident sustained two months and twenty-four days ago. Matthias was a passenger and his head hit the dashboard during the crash, after the car’s airbags failed to deflate.”

  “Probably an old model. Students aren’t known for being able to afford particularly road-worthy vehicles,” Shelley commented.

  “He suffered cuts and bruises, but nothing else until he started complaining of headaches and confusion. He was put through a number of tests—CT scan, blood tests, X-ray, MRI, PET… then visual, audio, everything Dr. North could think of. Finally he was diagnosed one month and thirty days ago. Aphasia and dyslexia as an ongoing result of the TBI, with no suggestions for treatment other than managing the symptoms.”

  “It’s permanent?”

  “The doctor recommended that Matthias attend counselling sessions as well as a class for improved cognitive development, but it says here that he never attended. He did not cancel, just did not show up.”

  “This is definitely him, isn’t it?” Shelley grinned.

  “It is just what I was looking for,” Zoe confirmed, flipping back to the first page of the records. “We have his address and contact number here. It looks like he lives just off campus.”

  “Then let’s hope he’s there,” Shelley said, grabbing her jacket from the back of a chair. “We need to bring him in, now.”

  They drove out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building parking lot into the startling blue of an extremely early morning, the sun newly risen. It was still hidden behind the tall architecture around them, and Zoe and Shelley were in shadow as they picked up speed in the direction of the Georgetown campus.

  It didn’t matter, Zoe thought. They were going to be out in the light soon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  James Wardenford cursed and rubbed his eyes, wishing he had been able to get back to sleep. After spending that time with the FBI and going through the withdrawal process from his precious alcohol, he had figured, what the hell? Why not try and go through with it this time?

  It wouldn’t be the first time he had tried to quit, and he was quietly not very confident in himself that it would be the last. Mornings like this were to blame. He had come to rely on alcohol to get him to sleep, and without it he was half-insomniac. Staying up all night feverish and itchy, finally nodding off only to wake up before dawn. His body felt like it was eating itself. Still, that was supposed to stop soon, right?

  Wardenford dressed slowly, cursing again at the aching in his limbs. Life wasn’t supposed to be this hard. He wasn’t an old man yet. He’d played a tough hand for his body to take, though, and it was letting its complaints be known now that he didn’t have a good whiskey to smooth the pain away.

  He was dressed and sitting at his kitchen table with a mug of coffee, trying to pretend to himself that it was Irish, when someone rang his buzzer.

  “Hello?” he said, frowning. It wouldn’t be those FBI girls again, would it? He’d enjoyed going over a puzzle with the smart one, and the other one wasn’t unpleasant to look at, but he’d had enough interrogations to last him a lifetime. Besides, that was where all this discomfort had started, with the sweating and the shakes.

  “Professor?”

  Wardenford’s mind was blank for a moment, appreciating that the sentiment must indicate a student but unsure about the voice. “It’s just Mr. Wardenford now,” he settled for.

  “Sorry, right. It’s Matthias Kranz. I wanted to catch up. If it’s too early, I can go away.”

  Matthias Kranz! Now, there was a student. One of the brightest of the bright. Although, hadn’t Wardenford heard through the grapevine that he never did end up taking a place on that program? Maybe he could ask him about it now.

  Besides, Matthias had always been a polite and respectful boy. It would be nice to see someone who treated him the way he had been used to, back when he still had the support of the community.

  “It’s fine—I’m an early riser at the moment. Please come up.”

  After pushing the buzzer to unlock the door several stories below, Wardenford glanced around at the apartment and down at himself. His clothes were fine, if a little informal—the boy was used to seeing him in a suit jacket, not a sweater—but the décor could do with some hasty rearranging. He closed the door to his bedroom to shut out the mess, and did a rapid sweep of the open-plan kitchen, diner, and living area, throwing away empty bottles and takeout cartons. He even threw away a dirty plate in his haste, having far too little time to get it washed up and put away.

  The knock on the door came before he was quite done, but it would have to do. An apartment that was too clean, too tidy—well, that smacked of a tidy-up, didn’t it? Better for there to be a few things out of place here and there, to give a lived-in impression. Wardenford caught his breath for a brief moment, before heading over and opening the door.

  “Matthias,” he said warming, greeting his former student with a handshake. “How have you been? Come in, come in.”

  “I’m well,” Matthias said, in a manner that seemed almost reticent. “You?”

  Wardenford thought his lack of verboseness might be down to the awkward feeling of meeting someone one is used to seeing in a position of authority, but was now on level footing. Certainly, he had once been extremely talkative, and they had enjoyed many bright and spirited debates after his classes. In favor of improving his impression, Wardenford decided on the spot to ad lib a little. “Oh, just great, yes. I’ve been keeping myself busy with some consultation work.”

  Well, the FBI had asked him for his opinion, hadn’t they?

  Matthias sat down silently on the sofa when Wardenfor
d gestured for him to do so, offering a slim smile. These bright kids—it was always hard to tell with them, wasn’t it? They hadn’t spent a great deal of time developing social skills, usually, and so while they were excellent at navigating classes and partnering up for assignments, talking out of class was another thing.

  “Would you like a coffee?” Wardenford asked, checking the temperature of the glass and pouring himself a top-up. “It’s fresh-made.”

  “Yes, please,” Matthias said, and Wardenford was buoyed by this.

  With the two cups steaming on the coffee table and both of the men seated comfortably, Wardenford found that he was going to have to carry the conversation. Matthias had not said anything more. Rather than asking him outright why he had come—a question to which he might not like the answer, particularly if it turned out to deflate his ego—Wardenford decided to take this opportunity to extract any and all gossip he could about his former faculty.

  “So, what’s new at Georgetown?”

  “People are mostly talking about the bodies.” There was a measured, deliberate way to the way that Matthias spoke now. Like he was choosing each word carefully, and with great effort. What had happened to him…?

  “Of course, of course.” Wardenford nodded. “I’m sure there’s a lot of upset about it. Professor Henderson was a much-loved member of the staff.”

  “Yes.” Matthias sipped at his coffee, his face largely blank.

  “You had lectures with him as well, didn’t you? I seem to recall you mentioning that you were taking some English classes alongside your physics and mathematics.”

  Matthias nodded. “I stopped.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a shame.” Wardenford paused. “Not for you, necessarily. After all, you can take whichever classes seem best fitted to your needs. I simply mean, I would like to know how things are now. I presume there will be a TA or one of the other members of staff filling in. Have you heard if they have engaged a new lecturer for his position yet?”