by Blake Pierce
The angles made sense. She pictured a woman crossing the floor—on a direct, straight line path from the entrance to the offices over to the main exit. She was going home. The projector turned on, deadening her senses, making her blind and deaf for a moment. The bucket entered the room on wheels, and the killer pushed her head down into it until she was drowned. That wasn’t hard to interpret.
It didn’t tell her enough—not yet. She couldn’t see the height of the killer from this scene, because he only had to knock the victim down and get her head into the bucket to carry out the murder. Strength came into it somewhat—the force required to hold down an adult human while they fought for their life, which wasn’t nothing. The killer had to be sturdy enough to accomplish that.
Truthfully, although a violent crime almost always indicated a male offender, Zoe couldn’t even see evidence of whether this had been committed by a man or a woman. She tended to lean toward males, simply because that was the majority result—and statistics were always helpful.
But the scene was giving her nothing else.
Zoe looked up from the bucket and wandered back over to the sheriff, letting Flynn make his own observations. “Have you been able to retrieve any physical evidence?” she asked.
“Other than the body?” Sheriff Petrovski gave her an amused look. “No. No prints on anything, all looking to have been wiped clean. Or maybe the killer wore gloves—it’s hard to say, given that actual cleaning equipment was used. No fibers, hairs, anything that we could pick up. Actually, it was sparkling in here.”
“That is inconvenient.” Zoe sighed. It was always better when there was cold, hard evidence. When you could simply find the right person, get their prints, and wrap up the case to be home in time for dinner. Not that that was happening today. Dinnertime was already long since passed.
“Well,” Flynn said, rising from a squat that had allowed him to examine the bucket up close. “I think it’s clear what we have on our hands here.”
“Is it?” Zoe said, evenly.
Flynn dusted off his hands as he walked back to join them by the door. “It’s some random lunatic looking for crimes of opportunity. He must have had access to the planetarium in some way to get in, so that’s going to help us narrow down the search some more. But he’s obviously looking for women wherever he can get his hands on them without anyone to stop him. Same thing with the victim by the river—maybe he’s a hiker himself, or just a local who knows the area well. No one was there to stop him, something snapped, and he went for it.”
“How enlightening,” Zoe said drily. She didn’t believe a word of it. The marking of a symbol onto the flesh was a deliberate action—it showed reasoning, if not forethought. It wasn’t just a random lunatic. At least, in the sense that any killer could be described as more than a random lunatic. This was done with purpose, and there was some kind of message being created here.
It wasn’t as though Zoe hadn’t seen cases like this before. Like Maitland said, it was the reason why she had been chosen for this task.
“I would like to see the bodies,” she continued. “Particularly the symbols carved into them. I think there is something worth pursuing there.”
Beside her, she sensed more than saw Flynn stiffening, the lines of his back and shoulders going straighter. He didn’t like her decision. That was fine. Because she wasn’t there to make friends—she was there to catch a killer.
“Now?” Sheriff Petrovski asked, with a tinge of disappointment in her voice.
Zoe nodded sharply. “That would be preferable.”
She wasn’t going to wait around—not when there was a killer out there, potentially getting ready to attack again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The coroner’s office was never normally the warmest building you could enter in pursuit of justice, but on this cold November night, it was even colder. Zoe shivered slightly and pulled her FBI-branded windbreaker a little closer around her. Tomorrow, after she’d had time to unpack her flight case, she’d be wearing a thicker coat.
The two bodies lay on metal slabs in the middle of the room, alongside a third slab that remained empty. It was a stark reminder of the stakes that were in play here, and that two bodies could easily become three if they didn’t work fast.
Zoe closed out the sound of Flynn talking to the coroner, a small Asian man with a balding head. She didn’t expect he could tell her anything that the numbers couldn’t; she’d already seen the tox screens, analysis, and other results for the first body and knew that they had turned up clean. The same would be true for the second. There was no evidence in the medical report that would point them to their killer—nothing except his calling card.
Zoe approached the first body and lifted the sheet covering it, examining the symbol carved into her flesh. She leaned close, seeing everything: the three-inch length of the straight upper line, with two-and-a-half- and two-and-three-quarter-inch lines coming down off it. They were both straight as well, though they did not hit the upper line at perpendicular angles, nor run parallel. There was a slight off-kilter angle to them, coming in more like a hundred degrees rather than ninety. Maybe it was the work of a sloppy hand, unable to carve the lines precisely.
Zoe moved onto the second, the astronomer. Here, the symbol was the same. She let the numbers tell her everything: a three-inch cap, two legs coming off at hundred-degree angles in opposite directions, each between two and a half and three inches long.
It was the same hand. She could see everything: the direction of the slash as it was made across the skin, the force applied to create it, even the telltale marks of the kind of tool used. It all matched up. Both of the marks had been made by the same hand. This was no coincidence, or copycat, or even a cult. It was done by one man—one man who was trying to make a literal mark for himself.
Zoe straightened her back, feeling it complain at the lateness of the hour and the length of her day. After the past few weeks she’d had, she needed rest—but that would have to wait. The case was far more important.
“These marks were made by the same hand,” she said, realizing that Flynn and the coroner were no longer talking. “That means we can rule out a group of killers, or some kind of cult. The mark may still hold ritualistic significance for the killer, but it is the same person making them.”
Flynn shrugged. “Makes sense. It still doesn’t leave us with a lot to go on. Especially if the perpetrator is using the symbol to mislead us.”
Zoe shook her head. “I do not believe that. This is a deliberate act. The killer is being led by some kind of principle—logical to him, even if not to us. I believe that he is marking them with the symbol for pi.”
If she expected a grand dawning of understanding and applause after her statement, it could not have been further from what she actually got. “Pi?” Flynn snorted. “That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?”
Zoe blinked. She hadn’t expected him to disagree with her quite so strongly—especially not in front of another professional. “An upper bar with two equal legs coming down from it at angles—that looks like pi to me.”
Flynn leaned over the body closest to him, shaking his head at the carving. “I mean, it could be pi. But it could be anything. I mean, look how hasty and choppy the cuts are. The angles might not even be deliberate.”
Zoe’s mouth twitched with annoyance. This rookie—who did he think he was? She determinedly did not look over at the coroner, because she knew the flat anger in her eyes would give her away. She had never been good at hiding it. “What else could it signify?” she snapped.
Flynn gestured to the symbol, his fingers tracing invisible lines in the air above it. “It could be a set of initials. Two uppercase Ts, next to each other. The killer’s name, maybe—a literal signature. Or the name of something else. Or the legal shorthand for a plaintiff—maybe it’s someone who isn’t happy with the justice system and wants to make a point.”
Zoe felt her resolve beginning to crumble. If she was just seeing the
mathematical connection because she wanted it to be there, then it wouldn’t be the first time. She had interpreted things incorrectly before. Wasted time and resources, allowed more deaths to slip through before they got on the right track and caught the killer.
But she had always been somewhere near to the truth. Her instincts were good, and she knew that. What was this rookie doing, trying to tell her that she was wrong? What experience in the field did he have to make that judgment call? Zoe curled her hands into fists at her sides, feeling her fingernails bite into her palms to release some of the anger before she unleashed it on him.
“I see pi,” she insisted. “I have worked cases like this before. Cases where people get obsessed with certain numbers and concepts. I helped to take down the Golden Ratio Killer.”
“That doesn’t mean every killer is the same,” Flynn argued. “Besides, what does it get us? Even if this is pi, how is that a lead? It doesn’t tell us where to look at all.”
“It could help us to narrow down the suspect list,” Zoe said. She knew he had a point in that, but she wasn’t about to let him think that he had won. Far from it. She would argue her case for as long as necessary—at least until he remembered who the superior agent here was. Who did he think he was, trying to take down her reasoning like this?
“We can’t just jump to conclusions,” Flynn said, with a certain amount of exasperation. He was gesturing with his hands, performing sweeping motions that Zoe’s eyes traced in the air, calculating speed and angle and pattern. “Look, pi can be used to represent certain stress tensors in fluid dynamics. Does that mean we should only be interviewing physicists as suspects?”
Zoe blinked. Stress tensors in fluid dynamics—that was not the kind of thing she had expected to hear come out of Aiden Flynn’s mouth. He was all talk and a sharp suit, but this time there was actually substance to what he was saying. Something that went deeper than cocky arrogance in the recent training, the belief most rookies emerged with that they were now the best agent in the whole of the FBI.
“So what if it is pi?” Flynn continued, with the air of conclusion. “We still have to do our due diligence and investigate the old-fashioned way. We can’t just assume it’s some lunatic going around marking bodies with pi because he wants to honor the cosmic resonance of special numbers. It’s far more likely to be a family member. An ex-husband. It’s almost always a husband.”
“I never said that we should not conduct a full investigation,” Zoe grumbled.
“I guess we’d better pick this up in the morning, then,” Flynn said, checking his watch. “Too late now to go barging in on the family members. And we still need to sort out somewhere to stay.”
Zoe pursed her lips, unable to argue with him. Out of all the numbers she had to deal with, time was the most annoying—simply because it was incessant, and never stopped to allow her to catch her breath.
“Fine,” she agreed. “But first thing in the morning, we get going. I do not want to delay any further than necessary.”
Partly because she had pride in solving cases fast. Partly because she didn’t want the killer to strike again. But most of all, because the quicker this was over, the quicker she wouldn’t have to deal with the rookie anymore.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Zoe still clutched at her seatbelt, trying not to throw up the last pill along with the slice of buttered toast as Flynn steered their rental car along twisting roads far too quickly, taking them deeper into Syracuse to seek out the astronomer’s family.
A night in a motel room bed had done Zoe few favors. As always seemed to be the case in these cheap small-town motels, the bed was almost as solid as a brick, the sheets scratchy and dubiously clean, and the bathroom far too small to have a satisfying shower.
Still, it was something. At least Zoe had been able to rest, which was a boon for her body as well as her mind. With the antidepressants Dr. Monk had given her also working their way through her system after a hasty breakfast, she could almost admit to feeling vaguely human.
Except for the nausea that rose up every time Flynn came up against a bend.
“Can you not take the corners a little easier?” she groaned, as Flynn threw it around yet another at a speed that was distinctly terrifying.
Flynn glanced at her before looking back at the road. “Sorry. I like getting places fast. There’s lives at stake, right?”
“Yes,” Zoe muttered darkly. “Ours.”
He seemed to ease off a little during the last few turns, but it made little difference to Zoe’s roiling stomach—they were already at the address they had gotten from the sheriff, pulling up outside a respectable-looking mid-sized family home with a tiny yard in the front. It put Zoe in mind of Shelley’s home, and she shuddered.
“You’re not cold, are you?” Flynn asked, looking at her curiously.
“No,” Zoe said, shrugging her coat closer around herself. She’d made good on her intentions to dig out a warmer coat, and the late fall weather wasn’t penetrating it yet. “Come on.”
Flynn, meanwhile, appeared to be perfectly fine in only his suit. He stepped out of the car and buttoned his suit jacket, smoothing down the edges, and walked to the door with a confident stride. He seemed unfazed by the weather completely. Zoe privately wondered whether he really did feel the cold, and was too vain to consider wearing an overcoat that might wrinkle the lines of his perfect tailoring.
The rookie made three short, sharp raps on the door, and Zoe watched the dimensions of the frame and calculated the advancing nearness of the audible footsteps until it opened. A man stood there, probably thirty-six, his brown hair, thick brown eyebrows, and the angles of his nose and eyes telling Zoe that he was Elara Vega’s son.
“Carlo Vega?” she asked, before Flynn could dive in and take the lead again. “I am Special Agent Zoe Prime with the FBI. This is my colleague, Agent Flynn. Can we ask you a few questions?”
“It’s about my mother, yes?” Carlo asked, his gaze sweeping between the two of them. There was a downwards cast to his whole face, as though he had spent the night slowly melting.
“That’s right, Mr. Vega,” Flynn replied. “And may we first of all say, we’re very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Carlo said, stepping aside. “Please come in. My wife is in the living room.”
Flynn stepped forward before Zoe could, and she ended up trailing along behind him, navigating an entrance hall and then turning right into a wider room filled with a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table, a television, and various storage units. Zoe took a seat on one of the chairs, glad to be able to distance herself from the other humans in the room—but watched, perplexed, as Flynn settled himself right next to Carlo’s wife.
“Agent Aiden Flynn,” he reintroduced himself, showing his badge and offering her a gentle smile. “You are Mr. Vega’s wife, I take it?”
She nodded. “Taylor, please,” she said. She was about three years younger than her husband, blonde and pretty, still slim. Zoe felt something in her stomach tighten. She couldn’t think about Shelley. Not now.
As Carlo settled himself into the remaining empty armchair, Flynn looked between husband and wife, his voice quiet and friendly as he spoke. “Can you tell me if Mrs. Vega had any problems that might have led to someone wanting to take revenge? Any enemies, neighborly disputes, rivals at work?”
Carlo shook his head vehemently, one-two-three quick as a whip from side to side. “No. My mother was a good woman.”
“She really was,” Taylor put in. “I know all of the old jokes about mothers-in-law, but I got lucky. She was calm and kind. Dedicated to her work and her son. That’s all.”
Flynn nodded. “I understand. But even within her work, you can’t think of anyone who might have been jealous or angry with her? Maybe a theory she managed to disprove, or someone who was trying to get to certain observations first?”
Carlo and Taylor exchanged puzzled glances, both shaking their heads. For a moment, Zoe was lost in the hypnotic
rhythm, the way they shook their heads toward each other and then away in unconscious tempo. Timing in sync. “She was respected in her field,” Carlo said. “She was getting older. She planned to retire within the next few years. Why would anyone want to take her out now when they could simply wait?”
“A few years is a long time,” Flynn pointed out.
“Not in astronomy,” Carlo said, with a light chuckle in spite of the tragedy of the circumstance. “Do you know how often comets come around? Some events take hundreds of years to repeat. And the solar system out there is there forever, or at least for long enough that none of us will be remembered by the time it is no more. A few years in astronomy is the blink of an eye. Mom always said that.”
Zoe didn’t need the numbers to help her count what was going on here: zero leads. Not a single one.
She pulled her focus together to ask a question of her own, sensing that Flynn was beginning to flounder. His last pause had gone on for eight seconds—too many; not the result of a natural pause in conversation. “Does pi mean anything to you, in connection with your mother?” Zoe asked. “Do you know if she was working on anything to do with pi, or saw any particular significance in it?”
Carlo frowned, looking at his wife for confirmation; her expression was blank, if a little puzzled. “I don’t know. Pie? Like what you eat?”
“The mathematical symbol,” Zoe clarified.
There was a momentary widening of Carlo’s eyes, which Zoe measured and leaned toward, thinking this was a sign of recognition, of understanding. There was going to be a reveal now, that pi was at the center of all of this and Elara Vega was specially chosen as a target, and everything was going to fall into place and they would be on the plane home at the end of the day.
“I can’t think of anything like that,” Carlo said, shaking his head slowly. His eyes had returned to their normal size, then even narrowed in a squint. “What does that have to do with anything?”