by Blake Pierce
“No, that is just it,” Zoe replied. “We have a suspect who appears to bear that out. He had a connection to all three of the victims, enough to know their names and be able to get access to personal details such as their home address. He also has links to a white supremacist group. I just do not feel that it is right. He also had access to many more people who fit the same pattern, but none of those others were killed.”
“You’re trying to get into the mind of the killer, figure out what it is that made those three the victims to go after,” Dr. Applewhite said. She was always insightful. Even if her first guess wasn’t right on the nose, she always got it.
“I want to know how he thinks. I thought I did, but I do not. If the man we have in the cells is the one, I was completely wrong about him. It does not fit right, somehow.”
“Is it just the victim selection? You believe that if the man you have in custody was the killer, he would have taken more lives?”
“No,” Zoe said, and hesitated. “Yes. I do not know. It is the thing that worries me the most. But I also do not know about his attitude. When we confronted him for the arrest, he was quick to anger. Shouting things, making a scene. He was rash and irrational. This killer, he has the wherewithal to stalk his victims and then set them on fire. To attack in the middle of the day without being scene. He must plan meticulously. It is the only way he would have gotten this far without being seen or leaving behind more physical evidence that we could use against him.”
“Careful,” Dr. Applewhite said. “You’re almost starting to sound like you understand human nature a lot better than you think you do.”
Zoe flushed a little, even though she was alone in the room and Dr. Applewhite could not see her. “I suppose Shelley is rubbing off on me. But even she does not see it. She thinks I am trying to complicate things too much to tie off all of the loose ends.”
“Do you think that could be right?”
Zoe thought about it, searching deep down inside. Could Shelley be right?
She had allowed herself to get distracted by the 23 enigma. The lack of sleep, the desperation to get the case solved, all of it had been getting on top of her. Could she really, truly trust her own judgment right now?
“It could be right,” she admitted, at last. “But I cannot shake this feeling. I have to look into it more, as much as possible. It is the only way to get rid of the doubt.”
“Then let’s look into it more,” Dr. Applewhite said.
Zoe could almost have cried with relief. It was hard, always so hard, to work against people who didn’t believe in her or understand what she could do. Even though Shelley trusted her most of the time now, she still had that doubt. She hadn’t known Zoe for long enough. Not like Dr. Applewhite had.
Not only that, but Dr. Applewhite had no skin in the game. If Zoe spent days going down a rabbit hole of inquiries, all Dr. Applewhite had to do was listen to her and put up with her antics. She wouldn’t risk losing her job, or losing the case. This was all just extra to her. Part of her duty of care to a former student—and a patient.
“We can break this down the way we would investigate a problem in math. Begin by investigating our base assumptions, then check our working,” Dr. Applewhite continued. “Are you sure about the link between the victims?”
“Yes,” Zoe said, with absolute certainty. “We have checked absolutely everything else. It is the serial number tattoos that are the link. Nothing else makes sense. The first two victims were somewhat connected in other ways, but the third has no connection at all if we discount the tattoos.”
“All right. But that’s not what you said first off,” Dr. Applewhite argued. “Your reasoning is that the Holocaust prisoner numbers are the link, and you have thus made the logical jump that the reason for the targeting is the fact that each of the victims is a relative of a Holocaust survivor.”
“Like you said, it is logical,” Zoe replied.
“But not guaranteed. We start with what we can prove, remember? Only what we know for absolute fact. Go back to the numbers. It might not be connected to the victims’ ancestry at all.”
Zoe mulled this over. “What other connection could it be? The serial numbers mark them out as part of that heritage.”
“You know this more than I do, Zoe,” Dr. Applewhite said. She had a slight undertone of admonishment, like a teacher trying to push a bright student to do better. “Numbers can mean different things. Many different things. Is there another kind of pattern?”
Zoe bit her lip, remembering with some embarrassment her assumptions of the day before. “They all add up to twenty-three. Except they do not, because we were missing one of the digits at first. It took me down the garden path for a long while. I have explored that avenue thoroughly. It was a dead end.”
“No pun intended,” Dr. Applewhite said, as though she couldn’t help herself from finishing off what would have been a poor joke. “That’s just one way of looking at them. Look again, from the other side. Remember, if we can’t first solve for X, then sometimes we have to solve for Y first. Come at the problem from another angle, and see if you can fill in the blanks in a different way. Not to mix my metaphors, but the more puzzle pieces you can put in around an empty spot, the easier it is to guess at what the whole picture must look like.”
“The victims,” Zoe said, grasping hold of this inspiration like it was a life vest. “I was looking at everything to try to help me find the killer. Instead, I can use the numbers to help me figure out who will be the next victim.”
“That’s it,” Dr. Applewhite said, and Zoe could almost hear her smiling through the phone. “Look at the numbers again and try to figure out the victim profile, not the killer profile. If you find the next one and they happen to be in danger, then you can find out who is hunting them.”
That choice of words—hunting—sent a shiver down Zoe’s spine. Whether it had something to do with the Holocaust, or with the tattoos, Dr. Applewhite was right. It was like someone was hunting the victims, taking them down one by one with clinical accuracy.
“Thank you,” she blurted out, in a rush to end the call and get stuck into her new line of inquiry.
“Don’t mention it,” Dr. Applewhite replied, but Zoe was already hanging up on the connection.
***
The first thing she had done had been to verify the numbers. They had been caught out once. She did not want to be caught out again.
The register of bookings was once again invaluable. Zoe murmured a quick thanks in the general direction of whichever officer it had been who had the forethought to grab it and bring it in as evidence, even though she did not know their name and couldn’t deliver the sentiment in person. The entries were all neat and clearly legible, and they told her what she needed to know. They had the full, accurate serial numbers that connected each of the victims.
John Dowling—159225
Callie Everard—35681
Naomi Karling—46535
But there was one interesting detail, something that stood out in a way that nothing else had. Callie’s booking in the register had first been written in red ink, then changed later, one of the numbers changed in blue pen. The first version was not easy to make out, but Zoe flipped back a page and squinted at the marks left behind by the pen until she could make it out.
The third digit had been altered. When the original booking was made, the serial number had been noted down as 35581, not 35681.
But did that even mean anything?
Zoe looked through the images of Callie she had printed out before, checking for her own peace of mind that it was the version with the six that had eventually been tattooed on her. There it was: unmistakable, the images leaving no room for doubt. It was the six that Franks had used.
But what if someone had believed it should have been a five?
Zoe had a thought, something she could not believe had not come to mind in the past. It did not take a long search to throw up a website that had a long and almost complete list of Holocaust pris
oner numbers, hundreds upon thousands of them all stored in a database with as much information about each of them as was possible. She looked up Callie’s number—the one she had had correctly tattooed. It led her to a woman with the same surname, and so therefore must have been the right one.
The other number, the incorrect one taken down at the time of her booking, threw up a completely different result. A man this time, with the first name Evgeny and an unknown last name. Most of his details were incomplete. Sadly, he was like many other prisoners who lost their lives at Nazi death camps: a simple man with a simple life, not some celebrity who was recorded elsewhere. It was likely that all or most of his family members had also perished, or that they never knew what happened to him. No one had been able to give any further information about him for the records. Perhaps it wasn’t even his real first name.
When Zoe searched John Dowling’s number, she came up with his ancestor, the chic and elegant woman whose photograph they had seen at his sister’s house. Zoe felt a little lump in her throat as she looked at the woman’s face once again. It was her, and there was no mistaking it. Almost all of her details were filled in—her name, date, and place of birth and of death, her husband’s name, the related numbers of her family members, the fates of those who had not even lived long enough to be given a prisoner number. She was remembered. Loved.
Naomi Karling’s number also threw up an expected result, a man with the last name Karling who was clearly her great-grandfather. There was no picture here, but enough details about his life—and the place of his death, only fifteen years ago—that she was sure. He was the one.
As it all stood, Evgeny was the odd one out. The serial numbers otherwise brought up real connections, survivors, people with living descendants. Evgeny was none of those things. It had not even been possible to pin down the exact month of his death.
So, if she went with the real serial numbers that were connected to each of the victims, the story remained the same. All relatives of survivors, people who were trying to honor family members in the ink they placed on their bodies. People who might be targeted by a white supremacist with a hankering to wipe out anyone who might remotely be considered a Jew.
But if she went with the incorrect number…
There had to be a connection between them, something that she was not yet seeing. Her eyes flew back and forth over them, analyzing them, over and over again. They had digits in common—threes and fives, in particular. Except that there was no three in John Dowling’s tattoo. Another outlier.
Could that have something to do with it? It seemed too general. In a numbering system that already went as high up as 159,225, there were a huge proportion that already included the digit five. It was too wide a net to cast, and so many of the others that had booked in for a tattoo with Jasper would also have qualified.
She had to narrow it down again. There had to be something else—something that actually made sense, and wasn’t this vague mess of thoughts. She knew already that twenty-three was out, particularly since the additional digit on John Dowling’s tattoo brought his total to twenty-four.
She tried multiplying the numbers together instead of adding them, the numbers flashing so clearly in her head that she had no need to write them down, but the results were wildly different. Not even different in a way that she could see a connection, like them all being prime numbers or all multiples of another number. Again, it was too tenuous.
Zoe turned the digits over and over in her head, coming back again to the fact that they had those few common digits. Maybe it wasn’t the digits themselves, but what they did for the equation, how they added up to make the right fit for the killer’s delusion.
Adding up… delusion…
She had been down this road before. Manipulating the numbers in order to see twenty-three. But there was another way to see them. A way that might jump out, if you were superstitious, or looking for some kind of sign.
She looked down at the list of serial numbers and did the math again, wondering if she could really be right. After all, she had been working in her head, and she was not infallible. But there they were again, as plain as day.
The first three digits of Callie’s incorrect number, 355. Add them up and they came to a total of thirteen.
In the middle of John’s number, there it was again. 922, adding up as individual digits to come to a total of thirteen.
And there again, one last time, for Naomi Karling. Her tattoo ended in 535, the same digits in a different order from Callie’s, making the same total. Thirteen.
It wasn’t crazy, was it?
Thirteen had connotations. The same way that a Chinese audience might recoil from the number four, Westerners were superstitious about thirteen. It was the number of people who had sat down at the Last Supper, and when Jesus stood up first (so the story went), he was the first to die. Of course, Zoe didn’t believe in all of that, but other people did.
There were other things that had come down through history. They said that Friday the thirteenth was unlucky because of Julius Caesar, killed on the Ides of March in a year when that happened to land on a Friday. Of course, those people were idiots, too. Zoe had learned back in high school that the Ides landed on a fifteenth in March, not the thirteenth. It was just a common misconception. But that was all it took to reinforce a superstition. Like a myth hunter seeing a ripple on the surface of a lake and convincing themselves it proved the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, it was easy to believe in so many portents and omens that spoke of the number thirteen being nothing but bad luck.
You didn’t need to have a good education or the ability to see numbers all around you in order to make a connection to the number thirteen. If you were already looking for it, then—just as she had been fooled by twenty-three—you would see it everywhere. Your brain would start looking for it on purpose, manipulating numbers any which way would fit. Once you latched onto that first combination of three digits, you would be able to find them again and again.
And if you were already borderline psychotic, ready to snap, you might think that that was a sign in itself. That you were looking at people who had tattooed themselves with the mark of evil. Zoe felt a shiver run down her spine, a thought of the way her mother would have viewed all of this. She hadn’t been able to understand how a child could be preternaturally good with numbers, didn’t have enough knowledge to realize it could simply be a condition of the brain. She had seen the devil’s work instead.
As she looked at the numbers one last time, Zoe knew. There was someone out there who had seen these numbers, seen the connection to the number thirteen—taking three numbers in sequence, the Holy Trinity, and adding them up to something connected to bad luck instead—and thought it was a sign of evil.
An evil they had to stop.
But for all that she felt that she now understood, there was one thing that bothered her a lot.
No, scratch that: two things.
First, that they had the wrong man in custody, and right now both Shelley and the LAPD were wasting all of their resources barking up the wrong tree.
And second, that the real killer could be stalking his next victim even now—and she had not yet even managed to put together a shortlist of who that might be.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The search had to be methodical.
Zoe thought about it like this: the mistake in the number had been in the booking, not in the actual tattoo when it was finished. That meant two things for her. First, it meant that the person who was actually carrying out the murders had to have access to the diary that Franks would have kept at the tattoo parlor at all times. It could have been any of a number of people, though the field was small enough to be investigated—but working on her own, it would take time.
The second thing was that the person wasn’t around all the time. They hadn’t seen the correction when it had been made in the diary, and they had not seen the finished tattoo. Maybe not even when they cut Callie Everard’s t
hroat and then lit her on fire. Or perhaps their eyes had simply seen what they wanted to see. Other people weren’t like Zoe, she had to remind herself. They didn’t memorize numbers at a glance, or understand them in one. Some people saw numbers just like shapes, and the shape between a five and a six wasn’t so different that they stood out at a glance.
There were six other tattoo artists at Dead Eye Dave’s. Two of them were part-time. Then there were three piercers, one full-time and two part-time, and the receptionist. There was also no way for Zoe to eliminate other people who might come in regularly, like romantic partners of those who worked there, who might from time to time have been able to snatch a look at the appointment book. That left too many variables when it came to the killer. She needed to find out how many potential victims there were. If there were fewer options for victims than there were suspects, it was a better place to start.
So, she had begun her methodical search from the front of the appointment book, a date two years in the past. She had pored over each and every page, taking down the names and serial numbers of the people who had booked themselves in for Holocaust memorial tattoos. They were easy enough to find—Franks had never bothered with much flourish, just noted down the serial number and the occasional additional notation as to style or accompanying illustration.
Once she had the full list, she was done with the book. She set it aside and began to make her way down the list one name at a time, crossing out any serial number that did not have a three-letter sequence adding up to thirteen somewhere inside it.
That was when Shelley came back in, looking tired and rumpled, loosening the top button of her shirt as she slumped down into a chair. “Nothing yet,” she said. “I’m taking a break. Please tell me you have some evidence that means I can stop trying to talk to this asshole.”
Zoe looked up. “Not exactly. Well, not the kind you mean. But as far as I am concerned, you can definitely stop talking to him.”