by Blake Pierce
“There will be dozens of candidates,” Zoe muttered. “Possibly hundreds, even if we narrow it down by only those who still live locally enough. And even then, we will have to jump through hoops to get there. A warrant from a local judge, then waiting for access to the records. Then we will have to check every single candidate with the right birth date to discover whether their current address is still in the local area. And he has access to this information already. For all we know, he picked her out months ago.”
“So, we need to narrow it down more,” Flynn said thoughtfully. “Maybe find another way to figure out who he’s targeting. But wouldn’t it make sense to just get started?”
Zoe blocked him out, trying to think. Things were turning over and over in her head, things that she was fairly sure were useless. The shoe sizes of all four victims, the length of their forearms in inches, their respective waist circumferences. And then pi came into the picture and she was thinking about the kind of equations she could put together with those circumferences, even though it wasn’t a perfect circle, and—
Zoe threw her hands up to her head, gripping hard at her own hair in an attempt to make it all stop. They were so close—so very close. But they weren’t there. And if they didn’t get there, he would kill again.
“Hey, cool down,” Flynn said, sounding alarmed. “I’ll just—I’ll get started now, all right? I’ll go ask the sheriff if she knows a good judge to go for right now. We’re coming up on lunchtime, maybe there’s someone who’s known for getting things rushed through so he can go back to eating.”
Zoe nodded, maybe a few too many times—she’d lost count. “I have to make a phone call,” she said, grabbing her cell phone out of her pocket and clutching it hard until Flynn was gone, one backward glance behind him as he went, as if he was worried she wasn’t going to hold it together.
Maybe she wasn’t.
Zoe hadn’t exactly had a good mother figure growing up—with her own mother determined to punish her for the “devil sickness” of the numbers, and no one else to turn to because of her reputation as a weird child. But she knew one thing, from TV and books and the conversations other people had.
She knew that when you were in trouble, real trouble, you called your mother.
Not her real mother, of course. Zoe had had herself emancipated years ago and never looked back, and besides, the woman was dead now. No, the only real mother figure she’d ever had: the one who had found her at college, told her what the numbers really were, helped her develop and grow, supported her every step of the way.
Dr. Applewhite.
She had little choice right now. Zoe had followed the case as far as she could, and now with the numbers buzzing around her like flies everywhere, there was no way she could see to the end. But she needed to—people’s lives depended on it. And in the past, whenever she’d been stuck in this kind of situation, she had turned to her mentor. And Dr. Applewhite had always, always come through—even if just by lending an ear while Zoe talked her way to her own solution.
The line only rang twice before it connected.
“Zoe?” Dr. Applewhite asked. “Are you all right?”
Zoe bit her lip, hating the way Dr. Applewhite sounded. Her words tight and breathless. Worried. She must have been worrying about Zoe ever since their last conversation ended so badly. “It is me,” Zoe confirmed, trying to keep her voice steady. “I… I need your help.”
“Of course,” Dr. Applewhite said immediately. Her support had always been like that. Unconditional. No matter what Zoe did or said, she was always still there at the other end of the phone. “What is it? Do you need me to come and get you? Where are you?”
“Not like that.” Zoe closed her eyes. “I am sorry. I made you worry. I should not have pushed you away.”
“That’s all right,” Dr. Applewhite said. “I know what you’ve been going through. I’m not about to be angry with you for processing your grief.”
Grief. Yes, that was probably what it was. Zoe hadn’t even thought about giving it a name. It was strange to hear it like that. Part of her wondered if she had any right to the word. She was only Shelley’s partner, not her family member or even her real friend, not outside of the Bureau. They were colleagues. And Zoe was the one who had let her get murdered, right there on her watch. Did she even have the gall to call it grief?
“I hit a brick wall with the case,” Zoe said. It was better to push on. Dr. Applewhite always seemed to know what she meant without her having to say it, anyway. “I do not know where to go, what to do next. And the killer could strike again at any time. His timeline is escalating.”
“All right,” Dr. Applewhite said soothingly. There was a rustling sound, and Zoe had a vision of her mentor setting out a fresh sheet of paper, grabbing a pencil, tucking her gray-streaked dark bob behind one ear. “Tell me all about it.”
“In brief,” Zoe said, because she couldn’t go through the whole case in detail; not only because of the time limitations, but also because she wasn’t allowed, and making this call at all was a huge risk to her career. “The killer carves the symbol for pi onto his victims. In chronological order, the ages of the victims also spell out pi—thirty-one, forty-one, fifty-nine, and so on.”
“I see,” Dr. Applewhite said. “And have you figured out how he knows their ages?”
“They all enrolled or worked at a local college,” Zoe explained. “But that is the problem. The next victim, all we know is her age. It could be any of dozens of women. We do not have the time to track them all down one by one and ascertain their safety. Not the manpower, either. By the time we get there she could be dead, and he could already be on to the next one, and we will still be behind.”
There was a pause on the end of the line as Dr. Applewhite considered the facts. “What do you think Shelley would say?”
Zoe was left speechless at those words, unexpected and unlooked for. When she had recovered enough to find her own tongue, she was resolute. “I cannot answer that,” she said, swallowing against a suddenly dry throat. “Not yet. I cannot go there. Put myself in her head. I am not ready.”
“All right. I understand,” Dr. Applewhite said, and paused. “Let’s try it this way. Do you remember the case where I was a suspect?”
Zoe almost wanted to laugh. Remember? Not only had Dr. Applewhite cause enough to remember it clearly for the rest of her life, but it had been tense and traumatic for Zoe as well. Having to put her own mentor into a questioning room during a murder case had felt like betrayal.
“Well, you remember how you got back then?” Dr. Applewhite pressed on. “You twisted yourself up into a knot over those fragmentary equations. Trying to solve them. Trying to figure out if it was a secret code or a message about the killer’s identity. You began to see things that weren’t really there. You got too close. In the end, it wasn’t the equation itself that solved it at all. It was figuring out the one tic that set the killer apart from anyone else, the one clue to his identity.”
Zoe nodded to herself. The missing piece of the puzzle had been the cognitive dissonance causing the killer to make mistakes in his equations. Matthias Kranz had almost taken another victim, with how long it took Zoe to get to the bottom of it. When she did finally catch up to him and get him in handcuffs, it wasn’t about math at all. It was about a psychotic murderer, a twisted sense of justice and right and wrong, a petty young man with a traumatic brain injury who couldn’t see the world straight anymore.
“It was the murderer that we caught, not the next victim,” Zoe said. She was nodding more rapidly now. Seeing it. What Dr. Applewhite wanted her to see.
“Keep it simple,” Dr. Applewhite said. “Don’t retreat too far back into your own head, into the equations and symbols and numbers. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be anything more than a person obsessed with something. In this case, a number. Start with that.”
“You are right,” Zoe said. She felt clearer now, more focused. As always, Dr. Applewhite had opened her eyes to
what she really needed to see. “This is about pi. Everything else is extraneous.”
And when they ended the call, Zoe finally had clarity. She knew what she needed to do next.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
“Hello?” Zoe said, trying to do her best impression of a mature and reasonable adult talking on the phone. At least it was easier than doing it in person, where facial expression had to be involved. “Is this the head of the math department?”
“Yes, speaking. Professor Brown,” a male voice returned over the line. “Who am I talking to?”
“This is Agent Zoe Prime with the FBI,” Zoe said, trying her best not to sound impatient. She had already explained this to his receptionist, or secretary, or whatever she was, and the woman hadn’t sounded as though she had taken it all in. “I am investigating a local murder case and need to request some information that I think you will be able to give.”
“A murder?” The man sounded far more interested now. “Of course, of course, I will help as much as I can. What is it?”
“It may sound like an odd question,” Zoe began. “Actually, I am sure it will sound like a very strange question indeed. But I need to know if you remember any colleague, past or present, or even a student, who was working with pi. They may even have come to the point of obsession, perhaps trying to work out more digits or prove a theory about it.”
“Pi?” Professor Brown hummed a little under his breath. “Well, we don’t have anyone like that around currently. Since the computers started getting it into the billions, I think it’s more of the domain for the tech students and professors. They want to put together a program that will work it out for them, not sit there with paper and a calculator.”
“But was there ever anyone in the past?” Zoe pressed.
“Now… now that you mention it, there was,” the professor replied. He sounded old, and was used to delivering dry lectures designed to take up an hour of time in a silent auditorium. His words were slow and precise, and it was beginning to irritate Zoe no end. If he could just get to the point, she could put the phone down and chase this new lead. “Now, he was a stranger character. As a I recall, he didn’t even want to be called a mathematician like the rest of us. No, he was on a higher plane, or so he thought. He called himself a—what was it now?—oh, a numbers theorist. Huh! You ever heard such a thing?”
“I have not,” Zoe ground out. “But what about pi?”
“Oh, yes, well, he had his theories,” Professor Brown said. “One of them was that pi had a final place. Of course, some of us believe that, some don’t, but not many of us think we’ll ever find it. He was different. He wanted to calculate it right to that final place and show us all the full string.”
“Final place?” Zoe blinked, shaking her head as if clearing it out would help her understand a bit better. It didn’t make any sense. “But pi is an infinite number. It goes on forever. Everyone knows that.”
“Well, we don’t know anything…”
“Computers have calculated it into the trillions, even the quadrillions, of digits.” Zoe couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was logical, obvious even, that pi would never end. How could anyone think differently? It was a pure number—a number that never stopped being numbers. Now that she thought about it, she could almost understand being obsessive about it herself. But not like this.
“No, well, I do agree,” Professor Brown said. “But that’s a debate for another time, anyway. The thing was, this man—he was sure that there was a definitive end. He decided that was going to be his life’s work. He had some funding to do the research, but when we got a closer look into what he was doing, we cut him off. It just wasn’t going anywhere, you know. He never managed to find a shred of proof, even build a workable equation that would demonstrate it. Not even a theoretical one.”
Zoe wasn’t surprised. This man, this numbers theorist, had been chasing after a wild goose. More than that: a flying pig. Something that he was never going to be able to find, because it didn’t exist.
“What happened to him then?” Zoe asked. “You said he was not working there anymore?”
“No, well, there was something… let me look it up, now,” Professor Brown said, accompanied by the metallic sliding noise of a drawer opening and then the rustling of some paper. “Oh, here we are. I still have his personnel file. Right, that was it; he got into a fistfight in the staffroom after the funding was cut. Blamed one of his fellow educators for the loss. That was balderdash, of course. It was all his own fault.”
“So, he faced disciplinary action, or did he quit?” Zoe asked. She didn’t need the opinion piece so much as the bare facts.
“He was fired,” Professor Brown said. “Oh, yes, ma’am. Couldn’t have him on staff any longer. Took us a good job to convince the other staff member not to press charges, as it says here. Could have sent him to jail for a long time. He did some real damage. Anyway, the college paid for the medical bills, and we managed to avoid a wider lawsuit, so that worked out okay for us.”
Zoe half-closed her eyes. She couldn’t care less about how everything had worked out legally for the college. “Do you have the theorist’s name and last known address there?” she asked, her pen hovering above her notebook.
“I certainly do,” he said. “His name is Ezra Pitsis. Oh, huh, would you look at that—I never even made the connection. pi in his name too, hah! I bet he had some fun with that one. Now, I do recall he had to move in with his adult daughter after he was fired—I’m sure that was a bitter pill to swallow.”
Zoe’s heart was racing in her chest. It was almost too good to be true. Ezra Pitsis… he fit all of the necessary checkboxes. Obsession with pi, a strong link in his name that would likely be enough to push obsession over the edge into psychosis, a violent history, a traumatic event as a trigger… She took down the address eagerly, barely able to wait long enough to thank the professor before slamming the phone down and jumping up from her chair.
She rushed into the corridor in search of the rookie, heading toward the sheriff’s office where he had mentioned he was going last. He was going to want to come with her on this one. They had their guy—and all that remained was to make the arrest.
***
Zoe leaned her head out of the car window, not minding the cold air, and craned up to look at the house number on the wall. “Thirty-three,” she said, nodding rapidly over at Flynn in the driver’s seat. “This is it!”
Flynn practically threw the car into park, somehow managing not to throw them both through the windshield considering the speed with which he did it. They already had the lowdown on the address: Ezra Pitsis had been thoroughly disgraced in the academic world after his violent outburst, unable to find work in any kind of mathematical department anywhere. He had an active LinkedIn profile that listed him as still searching for work. He hadn’t been able to make the money required to move out of his daughter’s home, and they were still both living there, here in North Syracuse.
Zoe leapt out of the car at the same time as Flynn, both of them racing up the path to the front door, Zoe getting there first and knocking hard on the door. It didn’t look too shabby, this house: five rooms on the top floor, Zoe estimated, by the windows, and it was well-kept. Not the kind of tiny hovel she had seen some academics reduced to when their careers came to an end. Pitsis had landed, if not exactly on his feet, then at least not in the dirt.
The door opened just a crack, the kind of suspicious crack that someone allowed if they weren’t sure what to expect on the other side. Only a couple of inches wide, just enough for a woman to look out at them and for Flynn and Zoe to catch only a glimpse of her.
“Hello?” she asked, hesitantly, eyeing them both up and down.
“We are looking for Ezra Pitsis,” Zoe said. “Is he your father?”
“Yes.” She seemed guarded still. Zoe could only make out a little of her face. Asymmetric angles between her eyes, a mouth that was half a millimeter fuller to the left of her cupid’s
bow than the right. “What is this about?”
“We need to speak to your father about an ongoing investigation,” Flynn said.
The daughter seemed to release a heavy breath, looking down at the floor for a moment. There appeared to be a touch of frustration in the gesture. Zoe couldn’t help but wonder.
“Again?” the daughter asked, after a long pause.
Zoe and Flynn exchanged a glance. That was ominous. “He’s been spoken to before?” Flynn asked.
“Yeah, he’s having a hard time right now,” she said. “He just keeps getting drunk and doing stupid stuff. He doesn’t mean any of it. He lost his career, and I guess he’s just lashing out. I keep hoping he’ll get over it. What’s he done now?”
“Is your father home, Miss Pitsis?” Zoe asked, thinking it was best not to tell her what they were actually investigating in case she shut the door on them.
“No, he isn’t,” the daughter said slowly, still looking between them. “I don’t think I’ve seen you two before. You’re not local cops, are you?”
Flynn reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his badge, showing it to her. “No, ma’am. We’re not.”
The daughter’s eyes widened, even in the slim sliver that they could see of her face. She looked up at both of them then, her gaze going between them again, and Zoe silently lifted her own badge as confirmation.
“FBI only get called for serious stuff, don’t you?” she said. It didn’t really sound like a question. The inflection was wrong. Down instead of up. Zoe couldn’t always work out what these differences in normal structure meant, but she could hear them, and the numbers could calculate them and the tonal range. In this case, her best guess was that it looked like doubt.