Face of Fury (A Zoe Prime Mystery--Book 5)

by Blake Pierce

  She took another glance around the room, a visual check. She’d gathered up almost all of her things already, put them into her travel case ready to go. The only things that remained out were those that she would need before leaving: a change of clothes, pajamas, cosmetics, and phone charger. Those she could deal with in the morning.

  The case was closed. A man was sitting in an interrogation room at the sheriff’s station, no doubt even now answering questions about the petty charges they could get him on before it went on to the bigger picture. He was the right weight for the murderer: a hundred fifty pounds, just like Zoe had seen in the shoe prints he left behind.

  So why did Zoe still feel so restless?

  She thought about discussing things further with Flynn, but he was already next door in his own room, preparing himself for the next day. He was probably studying the files, writing down a list of possible questions and techniques, working his way up to it. It was his first case, after all. He would be nervous about getting it right, especially on his own. Zoe didn’t want to disrupt that and shake his confidence.

  Not even to point out that she had been right all along to follow pi, and he still hadn’t apologized for brushing her off.

  But still, something didn’t quite sit right with her. Zoe lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, even though it was too early for sleep. She should really pick up the phone, order some takeout that she could have before it got too late in the evening. But she couldn’t get out of her head for long enough, because something kept bringing her back.

  She replayed the scene over and over again in her mind. At first, her concern had all been for the rookie—whether he was going to shoot, why he had wanted to, what it would mean if he did. But now that it was over and they had at least discussed it, a different view of the scene was emerging in Zoe’s head. She was thinking about Pitsis, and his actions, and how they hadn’t seemed quite to measure up against the understanding she had in her mind of this killer.

  First, there had been his knee-jerk reaction: the madcap exit through the back door and over the fence, and then his punch to Flynn’s face. It was unplanned, inelegant. There was no grace to it, and Pitsis certainly hadn’t seemed like a vicious killer in that moment. The pi killer was an expert at taking his victims out in different ways, based on what was on hand: drowning them in water, beating their faces to smush, strangling them. His actions in those cases had to be reactive, and the response had to be ultimate. There was no room for error. He struck to kill.

  There hadn’t been any reports of escaped assaults or attempted murders, which likely meant that the killer didn’t make that kind of mistake. His victims didn’t get away. He targeted them with immediate brutal force to ensure that they met their end at his hands. A punch to the face, especially one that didn’t even knock his opponent down, seemed not to fit the pattern.

  Not only that, but his behavior once he was down on the ground also seemed odd. Flynn had a gun to his head, ready to shoot. His finger was on the trigger, the safety off. And Pitsis had lain there and looked up at him and told him to pull the trigger. Told him that he had nothing left to lose.

  From Pitsis’s perspective, pi had taken everything from him. His job, his old lifestyle and home, his independence, and his relationships. It had turned him from a talented theorist to an alcoholic with multiple arrest records and warrants against his name.

  He didn’t worship pi anymore. Didn’t feel like it was the meaning of everything. It didn’t even seem that he was pursuing it any longer—not if he was spending every day drinking heavily.

  And could a habitual drunk even manage to work on such complex equations?

  The more Zoe thought about it, the more didn’t it add up. The killer seemed to be honoring pi. The carving of the symbol was like a signature, a sign to their identity. They believed themselves closely wrapped up with pi in some way, and not a hateful way. They weren’t trying to destroy pi or what it stood for—they were reminding people of its existence.

  Zoe couldn’t be sure if she was right, or just paranoid. She’d been too relaxed once before, believed too readily that the killer was put away and there was no longer any danger. That complacency had cost her partner’s life. She never wanted to make the same mistake again. Was that what was coloring her judgment? Making her see shapes where there were only shadows?

  She covered her eyes with the back of her hand, impatient and unable to lay still. She wanted answers to all of this. But not only did she have to wait until morning—if she left, she might never find out. Flynn would finish the case on his own. The interrogation would be his, and Zoe might only be called up in the case of a trial. Maybe not even then.

  But what was she supposed to do? Muscle her way back onto the case and go against her agreement with Flynn? She would be lucky to get away from this without legal action being taken, if she just went back and quietly quit the FBI and Flynn never had to make his report. If she stayed, there could be deeper consequences. She might never get her career back on track, even if she sacrificed everything to try and keep it. Just like everything else—Shelley, John, even her therapy—her career would be one more thing she had lost hold of.

  Zoe sighed with frustration, rolling over and grabbing hold of the pillow. Squeezing it tightly, even violently, gave her a little bit of relief. It was just that she had no handle on human body language, on the meanings that gestures and words could reveal under the surface. She had never been good at that.

  That had been Shelley’s area of expertise.

  As little as she wanted to even think about Shelley, the very brush of a thought against that memory far too painful, Zoe had to do something. She had to go deeper. It was like Dr. Applewhite had said: what would Shelley think about the case? What would she see when she looked at this suspect?

  There was a way to try to get there. It was the one thing Zoe hadn’t wanted to do, above all else: to try to get inside Shelley’s head. To remember the things Shelley had taught her, to see Shelley’s way of thinking. It would hurt like hell. It would burn. But Zoe couldn’t see any other way forward.

  She had to know. And that meant she had to go there—right into the heart of her pain.

  She closed her eyes, rolling onto her back again and letting her head lie flat on the bed without the pillow. It was better this way. More like the way she needed to feel. She took a deep breath, trying to ignore the way it tremored at the end, and counted it: one. Then another. Two. Three. Four.

  Fear flared up inside Zoe, making her panic, squeezing an unwanted whimper right from her throat. Her eyes flew open on the unthreatening white ceiling, stained here and there with nicotine and flaking down in certain patches. No, she had to be strong. She could do this. She forced her eyes closed and started again, a deep breath in. One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four, then five, then six, all the way to ten. She made it without trying to turn back again. It was now or never. She knew the island was there, waiting for her. It was always there.

  Zoe kept her eyes closed, at first. She breathed deeply, inhaling the wonderful clean air of her secluded paradise. She felt the air mattress under her, not a solid bed anymore but a cushioned surface holding her above the water, gently rocking with the current. It was calm and peaceful. Every now and then, a tropical bird called out from the trees. The sun beamed down on her with a reassuring warmth, soothing her cares away.

  Zoe eased her eyes open, taking in the bright blue sky. A single cloud was visible, placed exactly in the right position to stop Zoe from having to squint. She could see easily. High above, a bird wheeled, then dove toward the water in search of fish.

  Zoe allowed her eyes to trail down after it, turning her head to the side to keep it in her field of vision. Now she was looking in the direction of the shore, her eyes on the water but with the sand in her periphery. All she had to do was turn a little further and she would see it.

  Zoe didn’t. She sat up instead, keeping her gaze down c
lose by, at the crystal-blue waters and the small disturbances her hands caused as she dipped into them. She pushed backward through the small waves, propelling herself toward the shore. When the front of the air mattress hit sand, Zoe put her feet down, pushing herself up to stand and drag her makeshift boat up out of the reach of the waves.

  The sand shifted underfoot, soft and warm from the heat of the sun. It was pleasant enough that she would have liked to bury her feet there for a while, let it warm her. But she had to move on. She couldn’t stay here, looking back out at the sea, avoiding the one thing she knew was behind her.

  The one person.

  A hammock stretched between two trees by the water, shaded by the leafy fronds overhead, cooled by the ocean breeze; a perfect resting point. Zoe made herself turn and look and see Shelley cradled inside it, lifting her hand in a silent wave. She was holding a coconut with the top chopped off, a straw and a jaunty cocktail umbrella sticking out of the side. There was a paperback book open on her stomach, pushed flat to save her page. Despite the warmth, Shelley was immaculate as ever, her blonde hair knotted into a smooth bun at the back of her head, her lips shiny with pink lipstick. She lifted up a pair of black sunglasses and grinned as Zoe walked closer, showing off her matching eyeshadow.

  “Hey, Z,” she said, sounding just like she always had. “Did you miss me?”

  “Yes,” Zoe said immediately, stopping right in front of Shelley. She dropped herself down into a beach chair that was at exactly the right height for them to talk. A lump welled up in her throat as she addressed the thing she had avoided telling anyone else for all this time, strangling her words. “All the time. You don’t even know how much.”

  “Yes, I do,” Shelley said. “I know.” She smiled then, soft and comforting without judgment or pity. Zoe had to look away a moment.

  “I’m working on this case,” Zoe started.

  “I know all about it,” Shelley told her. “This whole pi thing. What you know, I know. Well, go on. Ask me, Z.”

  Zoe shifted, shading her eyes as she looked out to sea. “I need your opinion,” she said. “Did we arrest the right guy? Or is the killer still out there?”

  She didn’t emphasize the danger inherent in the wrong answer. Shelley already knew. She had paid for it with her life once already.

  “You already know the answer.” Shelley looked at her gravely for a long moment. “What did Dr. Applewhite tell you? You’re relying too much on the numbers. On the numerical representation of pi.”

  Zoe remembered what Dr. Applewhite had said. Keep it simple. Stop overcomplicating things just because you are able to see all of the layers.

  The layers she could see were not always visible to everyone else.

  Zoe nodded slowly. “I already have the answer.”

  “That’s what I said,” Shelley said, laughing lightly. The sound was caught on the gentle breeze, drifting away from them like a soft cloud.

  “Pitsis is not the killer,” Zoe said, thinking out loud, words spilling out of her like water. “He sees pi just as the number that it is. It is an irrational number, and he wants it to be rational. That’s all. A mathematical problem.”

  “Not enough of an obsession to drive him to murder,” Shelley said, raising her coconut and taking a sip. “Just to drive him to drink.”

  “The killer sees pi as a representation of more than just an irrational number,” Zoe went on. She was on a roll now. “For him, it’s something much more. Not just a number at all.”

  “That’s right,” Shelley said. She picked the book up off her stomach, finding her page and propping it open. “Now, it’s not that I’m not pleased to see you, Z. But don’t you have something to do?”

  “Yes,” Zoe told her. She took one last fleeting look at the island, at Shelley in her hammock, and then closed her eyes. “I do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  It was late, but Zoe couldn’t just go to sleep and forget about the case. If the wrong person was behind bars, that meant that the killer was still out there. He could be stalking his next victim even now. He might have killed again already. Zoe couldn’t wait for the morning.

  She slipped out of her motel room, locking the door behind her, and hesitated, looking at the next room over. Flynn’s room. The lights were out. He was expecting a big day in the morning, and it had been a long few days already; Zoe guessed he was probably asleep already. She didn’t need to wake him up, did she? It wasn’t as though they were really partners. Not permanently. And Zoe could handle this on her own.

  She refused to address the thought lurking in the periphery of all this: that if she investigated this alone while Flynn stayed behind, she would be the one potentially plunging into danger. He would be safe. The door locked, dreams filling his head. He wouldn’t be at risk of dying.

  Thankfully, though, they had picked up two sets of keys for the rental car, so that either of them could drive it at any given time, even if the other one was far away. Which meant that Zoe didn’t have to wake him in order to set off. She got behind the wheel and started the engine, setting up the GPS to take her back to Syracuse University.

  It was entirely possible that there would be no one there at this time of night, but it didn’t particularly matter. The library would be open twenty-four hours a day to accommodate students, who had a time-honored tradition of studying all night long right before a test and spending the whole of the rest of the time not studying at all. Zoe only hoped that she would be able to find the information she needed without the help of the staff, who would be tucked up at home themselves at this hour.

  With the roads almost empty in the darkness, it was easier for Zoe to concentrate. She could see the circumference of the twin beams of light that shot out from the car’s headlights, and she could calculate all sorts of things to do with that, but this time it didn’t stop her from seeing the road itself. She counted her breaths in sets of ten as she drove, keeping her mind sharp for hazards and other road users, putting the numbers at bay.

  The campus library stretched up over multiple stories, high above Zoe’s head in a modern building that had clearly been rebuilt some time in the last decade. She ignored the full-length glass windows except for the fact that they told her where to locate the computer desks as soon as she got inside, rushing past the campus security guard with a flash of her badge that left him with a bemused look.

  The campus library computers were not just hooked up to the internet, which she could have accessed from the sheriff’s station or even just her phone. No, what Zoe needed was something only they could provide: access to the college’s own portal.

  This portal opened the door to a wealth of resources that would not have been easy to find elsewhere. Some of them would only exist here, Zoe knew. There were all kinds of papers, clips, submissions from students and academics at the college, resources for learning, supplementary materials for MA applications, all of the rest of it. She was looking for a needle in a haystack, but now she had access to the haystack, and she knew what the needle looked like, and maybe this computer’s search function would be powerful enough to act as a magnet.

  It was simple enough: she simply searched for one term “Pi.” Setting the parameters to ignore partial terms and include only the word “pi,” with a space afterward rather than as part of a larger word, Zoe watched impatiently as results loaded. The computers emitted a low buzz, an electronic sound that filled the air around her. In the almost stiflingly silent atmosphere of the library, Zoe felt like she could hear everything: a student in a baggy black hoodie pulled up over his head two rows away typing furiously on his keyboard, a young woman in what looked like pajamas under a coat at a nearby desk scratching away with her pencil.

  Zoe did her best to shut them out, focusing on the screen. Thousands of results had come up, but she didn’t have enough clues to refine the search any further. She was just going to have to look.

  She began scanning through each of the listings, starting by double-clicking on
the first result and letting the first page fill her screen. She scanned the title—no—it was a learning resource created for students. A click to the right-hand side of the screen, and the first page of the next result was loading in. No; this one was a dissertation on something completely unrelated, only referencing pi as part of a calculation required to understand the results.

  And on and on, Zoe scanned through page after page. Her eyes slid over the lines easily, rapidly, only her hand moving to click the mouse as she sat back straight and focused. Paper after paper. Report after report. Theory after theory, occasionally diving deeper and scrolling through more pages only to find that the result wasn’t what she was after at all.

  And then she found something that caught her eye. Something very strange indeed. The statistics at the top of the page told her it had been submitted within the last year, but that it had hardly any views. No one else was reading this. It wasn’t a student resource, but it wasn’t a full paper either. There was no publication data.

  And it was very strange indeed.

  It wasn’t a math paper, which was what Zoe had instinctively been looking for. A paper including pi had to be from that department, right? Only, this one wasn’t. And it wasn’t something that had been created by a student, either, something that would have passed through peer review channels many times over in search of a final grade. No, this was something written by a professor.

  A philosophy professor, of all things.

  Zoe focused on the first few lines, read them properly instead of scanning. It was being submitted for peer review, which meant that it hadn’t been published yet but that the professor was aiming in that direction. The lack of views must have meant that his colleagues had refused to read it, for one reason or another. Perhaps they didn’t know about it. More likely, they had not wanted to have any association with it. When that happened, it usually meant that your colleagues strongly opposed the theory you wanted to put forward.