by Blake Pierce
But after a case with her new partner, the inimitable and infuriating Agent Aiden Flynn, Zoe had sent John a simple text: just the word “hi.” Just enough to break the ice. And John, who apparently hadn’t forgotten about her despite the weeks of radio silence, had been only too quick to jump on her invitation for conversation.
He hadn’t let up since, and so Zoe found herself getting out of the car and into the February chill to meet him at a bar downtown. It hadn’t been her choice, of course. John still didn’t know about her ability to see numbers—or, rather, disability, as it seemed at times. The chaotic environment of a bar was not Zoe’s idea of a place to relax. But she had to meet him halfway.
At least, she did if she wanted the relationship to continue. Which, Zoe thought as she pushed open the door to the bar and stepped inside, she wasn’t entirely sure about.
She liked John—really liked him. That wasn’t the issue. This was the issue: the music filtering through the background of the bar that distracted her into counting beats and rhythmic arrangements; the constant rumble of conversation that dragged her into analysis of syllable, syntax, and word count; the sea of people crowding the popular spot, prompting her to perform impromptu head counts and age, height, and weight calculations; the trays laden with drinks, which she could tell at a glance were either under- or overfilled even if by a fraction of a milliliter’s divergence from regulation servings.
But Zoe took a deep breath and counted to ten in her head, stepping just aside from the door so she wasn’t blocking the entrance. She tried to find her inner calm, something she’d been working on extensively with her therapist. There wasn’t enough of an opportunity to do a full meditation here—not in the middle of a bar. But she could at least try to quiet the numbers down.
When Zoe opened her eyes again, the numbers weren’t totally gone. But they had minimized enough that she could see through them, across the crowded space—to the seats at the far end, where John had already sat down at a table. Zoe fought her way across the bar to him, wincing at each contact and trying not to pay attention to the calculations of force they triggered, attempting not to read the total value of the drinks sitting on each table that she passed. Nausea rose up in her stomach, almost making her want to turn and run away; every hair on the back of her neck stood up. This was more than just overloaded senses. She was made of nerves, all of them strumming on high alert at the sight of him. She realized with an overwhelming panic that she desperately did not want him to be angry with her, or to send her away again. She wanted to be near him again, to have the comfort of his conversation, his gentle understanding (even when he didn’t understand a thing). It had been long enough that she had told herself she didn’t miss him. But now, seeing him again, she knew that she had, and it had been terrible, and she didn’t want to feel it again.
“Hi,” she said, as soon as she reached the table, prompting John to look at her with a startled expression. He was handsome as ever in a blue-striped shirt under a dark blue jacket, bringing out the hazel in his eyes. He had that clean-cut neatness that Zoe had always admired, his chin smooth, always dressed smartly even in a more casual setting like this.
“Zoe,” he said, rising to greet her, leaning forward to awkwardly kiss her on the cheek.
“You sound surprised to see me,” Zoe said, wondering with a heart-stopping flutter whether she had, in the chaos of all of the other numbers, managed to get something as simple as the date wrong. Maybe John was expecting someone else.
John flashed her a weak smile before sitting down. “I wasn’t sure you would actually turn up.”
Zoe took a seat, turning that guilt over in her mind. John seemed little changed from when she had last seen him. Though, looking closer, she could see that the diameter of his biceps under his pin-striped shirt had reduced fractionally, that his light brown hair had grown by half an inch longer, and that he had lost perhaps three pounds to his overall body weight.
“So, how have you been?” John asked, sipping at the drink that he must have already ordered at the bar. “Sorry, I should have gotten you something. Did you want me to order for you?”
Zoe unclenched her fists in her lap with some effort and shook her head. “I am not thirsty for the moment,” she said, which was more or less a lie. She just didn’t want to drink alcohol right now. Although it would help to deaden the numbers somewhat, it did it in a horribly uncomfortable way, leaving her off-kilter and confused. She belatedly realized that maybe she should have apologized to John for dropping him without a word before, for cancelling their last date and never explaining why, but the moment was gone.
“Right.” John nodded slowly, looking at the table. His fingers tapped a one-two-three beat on the surface momentarily, out of rhythm with the music. The silence counted on for three, four, five, six, seven seconds. “So. Yeah. I’ve been good. Had some successful cases.”
Zoe nodded. Right: John was a property lawyer. “That is good,” she said, nodding again in what she hoped was an encouraging way.
“It was.” John paused, cleared his throat, shifted in his seat. “I had a friend who got married. I think I told you about that.”
Zoe bit her lip and looked down at her hands. He had. It had been one of the texts she had ignored. Him inviting her to be his date. “I remember.”
“Yeah, well, it was a nice reception,” John said hastily, his words speeding up. Zoe wondered if he felt as awkward as she did. He must. The atmosphere was horrible. If Zoe had been able to focus more on him and less on all the numbers competing for her attention around their table, it would probably have been even worse. “Um. Anyway. How’s work been for you?”
Zoe was at a loss for how to answer the question. It had been horrible. Her partner and best friend had died, on her watch. She’d refused to answer the door or go back to work after her suspension was over. She’d been partnered up with someone new and, yes, managed to solve a case, but almost didn’t make it through. And since then, there had been nothing big to speak of. Nothing interesting she could tell him about. She didn’t have any other friends, either. No one she could share stories about, nothing to distract from her own dire months. How did she answer something like that?
“Zoe?” John asked, his voice pitched low, leaning toward her. “Did something happen? I mean, you went quiet on me with no warning. And seeing you now, it’s… it’s like you’re closed off. Struggling.”
Zoe bowed her head. “You can tell?”
“Of course, I can tell.” John reached for her hand across the table, seemed to change his mind and hesitate, and then lightly touched her fingers. “I like to think we were getting close, before. I can tell when something’s not right with you.”
Zoe nodded slowly. “You are right,” she admitted. “Something has been not right for a long while.”
“What is it?”
Zoe looked up at John’s face. It was open, clear, and welcoming, full of encouragement. Acceptance. She took a breath.
“The last case before I… cancelled our plans,” Zoe said, not quite willing to say before I broke things off with you, “things went wrong. Agent Rose, my partner.”
John squeezed her hand. They had met, after all, on a double date with Shelley and her husband. Back before everything was destroyed. “She was killed.”
Zoe looked up in surprise. “You knew?”
“Of course I knew,” John said, though his tone was gentle. “It was all over the news, Zoe. An FBI agent doesn’t just die in the course of duty without there being reports on it. I went to her memorial service.”
“You did?” A lump was forming in Zoe’s throat. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go. She’d watched from afar and stayed away from the other mourners. She hadn’t felt worthy of joining them.
“I’ve been worried about you,” John said. “I didn’t want to push you, but I guessed it had to be because of Shelley that you wanted to be alone. That’s why I didn’t give up on waiting for you. I wanted to be here when you
finally found the strength to push through.”
Zoe stared at their table, trying to ignore the diameter of the circle and the thickness of the wood. He’d known all along, but he’d never said anything. Never forced her to talk about it. At the same time, he’d never given up. She realized that the noise of the bar had faded away for a moment; she’d been able to concentrate.
This was why she had always liked being around John. His patience and thoughtfulness, the way he had always seemed far more interested in her well-being than anything else. Once, she remembered, he’d driven her around for a case and waited outside even though she’d interrupted their date. He was a good man. She had no idea what she could possibly have done to deserve him.
“It has been difficult,” she said, eventually. “But I have been seeing my therapist. I went back to work. I even have a new partner.”
“That must have been hard,” John said, sympathetically. Zoe felt a squeeze in her chest as she nodded. “What’s she like?”
Zoe felt the heaviness in her heart lift a little at the distraction. John was like that. Always knowing when the conversation needed to move on. “He,” she corrected. “He is insufferable, really. A rookie who thinks he is the best agent ever to come out of training. But we solved the last case together, so I suppose he is not all that bad.”
John flashed her a quick grin. “He’s not good-looking, too, is he? I hope I don’t have competition.”
Zoe laughed in spite of herself. “Believe me,” she said. “Aiden Flynn is not competition.”
There was a buzzing in her pocket then, something that she felt even above the sensory overload of the bar, and she reached for her phone quickly. Not that she wanted the distraction—in fact, things were going so much better than she expected. But she was an FBI agent, and you didn’t just ignore a call.
She felt her heart sink as she looked at the screen. She hadn’t been here for ten minutes, and it was Special Agent in Charge Leo Maitland’s number flashing up. In all probability, their date was over.
“I have to take this,” she said, regretfully.
“It’s okay,” John said, with a smile. “Work, right? Go ahead.”
Zoe nodded and got up, her mind tracing the quickest route to the door between the moving bodies of the bar, answering the call as she went.
“Agent Zoe Prime,” she said.
“Prime,” Maitland repeated, his voice a bark in her ear that she made out easily even above the music. “Get here ASAP. We have an urgent case.”
The line cut off almost immediately, before Zoe had managed to get out her affirmative reply. His urgency was infectious; she couldn’t hesitate. She stepped out along the sidewalk and back toward her car, almost breaking into a run as she went.
CHAPTER THREE
Zoe stepped in through the doors of the J. Edgar Hoover Building without paying much attention. It was soothing, in many ways, to come back to headquarters like this; every line of the place was so familiar to her that she could let the numbers fade into the distance. But at the same time, it was so familiar that any little change was jarring, setting the numbers into a domino fall of wrongness that distracted her utterly. She tried not to fixate on the scuffed and folded edge of a carpet that had clearly been damaged somehow in the last week, and took the stairs up to SAIC Maitland’s office.
The climb was not a short one, and Zoe knew exactly how many stairs she had to go before she got there, but the physical exertion was welcome. It was a way to push herself differently, to try to quiet out the numbers crowding in her head. It didn’t always work. But at least she could calculate her own elevated heartbeat, which was useful and interesting, rather than the mundane and not at all useful numbers the buildings and her coworkers threw up.
Special Agent Aiden Flynn was already standing out in the hall waiting for her, which irritated her a little. He had probably taken the elevator, which was almost like cheating given that she had taken the longer and harder route. Still, there was an upside to his beating her there: they could go in together without Zoe having to wait around.
“Been out on the town?” Flynn asked jokingly, nodding at Zoe’s attire. She took in his own clothing—much more casual than she was used to seeing him in, jeans and a Henley, like he’d been sitting around at home—but didn’t bother to reply.
Zoe merely nodded a greeting and knocked on the door right away, listening for Maitland’s deep voice urging her to come in. She stepped inside and faced her boss, which was no small task. At six foot three, with a forty-five—no, she realized; now a forty-six-inch chest, and biceps that were fifteen inches around, the man was intimidating at the best of times.
But under the graying buzzcut, Maitland wasn’t really so bad as all that. He had been kind to her over the last couple of months, giving her and Flynn easier cases to work on, time to work through the pain of losing Shelley. It had been difficult to come back to work for the last case, which Maitland had insisted Zoe was the best fit for. He had been right—but she’d been grateful for the break. Cases that took a day to solve and involved minimal contact with other human beings were always better on her mind.
“Got something new for us, Chief?” Flynn piped up, annoyingly as always. Zoe felt like she ought to slap the back of his head and teach him some manners, like the mothers in sitcoms.
Maitland glowered at him for a moment at the interruption—he had been putting the finishing touches to a piece of paperwork—but he nodded. “Yes, I do.” He hefted a file of loose papers and tossed it toward the front of his desk. “New spate of killings in Salem. Two victims so far. From the reports on the ground, I think we need a keen mind on this one.”
“Salem, like the witch place?” Flynn asked, grabbing up the file greedily and flicking through the scant pages and more numerous photographs.
“Salem, Massachusetts,” Maitland confirmed gravely. “And this has been a public one. Yesterday, commuters came across a victim hung from an overpass first thing in the morning. Today, it was a couple of teenagers hanging around before school that found the body hanging from a telephone pole, so the local PD managed to avoid a second public spectacle. But that’s a victim a day so far, and our killer is far from shy. There haven’t been any clues identified by the officers on the ground as yet—they’re completely lost, and they need your expertise. We need you to get in, solve it fast, and get out before there’s too much media attention on this one. With Salem’s tourist reputation on the line, they can’t afford for this to get out of control.”
Maitland was using a lot of aggressive terms. Zoe had the feeling that she was expected to get this done as soon as possible, and it was going to involve someone who was just about to graduate to serial killer unless they caught him in time. It would be a lot of pressure. The kind of pressure she was under when she slipped up and let their killer get to Shelley.
And the first case she had worked on with Flynn had involved a similar kind of pressure. He’d almost cracked, looking like he was ready to shoot a suspect dead—a man who later turned out to be innocent. It sounded like this case would be a lot. Maybe more than either of them could take.
It would be a bad idea to accept this one, she thought. She didn’t even know if she was up to the task right now. She barely had a handle on the numbers, and the last thing she wanted was to trigger them to get worse again.
“Agent Prime,” Maitland said, calling her attention and making her realize that she had missed part of their conversation while she was deep in thought. “What do you think? If you’re not feeling ready, there’s a post-traumatic stress clinic coming up over the next couple of days. A chance for agents who’ve seen combat in the field to really workshop those feelings. I could put you in for that.”
That got her attention. Working on self-care was bad enough when it was only her therapist who was making her do it. As good as it had been to reconnect with John, talking about her feelings still made her want to shudder.
“We can take this case,” she said, e
arning what she was sure was a glimmer of amusement in Maitland’s eyes. “It needs your best minds on it, right?”
“That’s right.” Flynn grinned next to her, doing his best impression of an idiot. Zoe rolled her eyes. She hadn’t been talking about him.
“Great,” Maitland said, reaching for a couple of plane tickets that were sitting to the side of his desk. “Your flight leaves in an hour. I hope you had a good night’s sleep last night. Your contact will meet you at the airport. They’re predicting another death tonight, so you’ll need to hit the ground running.”
Zoe took a deep breath as she took the ticket from his hand, Flynn stepping forward to do the same. It was going to be a long night. So much the better.
If she didn’t sleep, she couldn’t dream about all the ways she had failed in the past.
“Come on,” she said to Flynn, already heading for the door, impatient to be on the way. With a case like this, there wasn’t any time to wait—they had to go now, before the killer struck again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Zoe met Agent Flynn once again at the airport gate, her always-ready flight bag in hand and her date night outfit switched for a sober suit.
“You have the file?” she asked, realizing he had been the one to walk away with it under his arm.
Flynn snorted, dressed now in one of his expensive-looking sharp suits, all fine angles and tapering. It made Zoe wonder how he could afford that kind of wardrobe on an FBI salary, especially as a junior agent. He probably didn’t. She suspected that he came from money. Just one more thing that made her dislike him, when she thought of her own cramped and tiny apartment, the life she’d carved for herself without the support of family. “I’m not stupid,” he said. “It’s right here in my bag.”