by Blake Pierce
Beside Zoe, Flynn made an impatient noise and shifted. The symbol carved into the bodies was part of their holdback for now; information that only the killer and the investigators knew. If someone came forward and confessed, or brought up the carving somehow, they would know that it was the killer for sure. But Zoe knew from experience that they could only keep it to themselves for so long. Sooner or later, probably sooner, it would be smart to put the full details into a report for the national database, which would make quick matches to any similar cases in other states. Serial killers didn’t often respect boundaries and state lines. In fact, most of them were smart enough to know that crossing those lines would delay the investigation.
“It’s nothing,” Flynn said, waving a dismissive hand in the air. When Zoe looked at him, he was shooting her an annoyed glance from the corner of his eye. “If you can think of anything that might be suspicious—anything in your mother’s behavior that changed recently, any bad blood, even from years ago—please do get in touch. Anything may help, no matter how small.”
He was holding out his card—shiny and new, his name and contact details next to the FBI logo, looking as if they had been printed just yesterday. Crisp and white, all of the corners still precise and sharp angles, not worn down and rounded out from weeks or even years of sitting inside a business card holder in pockets and suitcases. He was ending the conversation, cutting it off. Zoe would have pressed the issue and asked more, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she could see in their faces that they knew nothing. But he hadn’t asked her, had plowed right through her questions, and that was irksome.
At any rate, she wanted to be out of there as soon as possible—away from the distracting counting of tchotchkes on surfaces, measurements of picture frames, analyzation of the people in them. Zoe rose as he did, taking some balm to her wounded pride in the fact that, older than him as she was, she could straighten her spine faster and to a more perfect line than he could.
Flynn was shaking Carlo’s and Taylor’s hands, and Zoe did the same with mechanical instinct. Then she was analyzing grip strength, and by the time she was satisfied with her analysis, they were walking back out to the car, and the rookie’s phone was beeping out a consistent and rhythmic pattern from his pocket, and he was answering the call.
Zoe concentrated on bringing herself back to the present moment enough to get into the car, grabbing hold of the blister pack in her pocket and quickly shooting back one of Dr. Monk’s pills to quiet the numbers a bit. She sat silently in her seat, waiting for it to take hold, as Flynn stood leaning on his side of the car, still on the call.
Zoe could see exactly one-quarter of his body through the window of the driver’s side door. Below the shoulders, above the waist. She tore her eyes away, trying not to measure the different aspects of his body. It was much of a muchness to her what she saw—the numbers were everywhere, on everything, after all—but she understood from previous interactions that it could be considered rude.
Flynn yanked the car door open and threw himself into the seat, starting the ignition as he spoke. “I just got off the phone with administration at the planetarium,” he said. “They’ve emailed me a full list of the employees there. We can cross-reference them against the hiker’s known associates. Might throw up someone who knew them both.”
Zoe squinted at him, looking back in her memory. She didn’t recall that coming up in conversation before. “They just sent you that, off their own backs?”
“No,” Flynn said, indicating as he pulled out to resume driving along the road. “I asked for it last night.”
“You did not tell me,” Zoe snapped, her tone just as accusatory as she intended.
Flynn glanced in her direction for a brief moment, then focused back on the road. “I didn’t think I needed to. I’ve got the GPS set for the river site. Should take us twenty minutes to get there.”
Zoe, who had already seen that the display predicted twenty-seven minutes and was not heartened by his rounding down, was not about to let it go. “You need to tell me everything you do in pursuit of the case,” she told him flatly. He should have known as much already. He was fresh out of training. It was protocol. “You should have run it by me, as the senior agent.”
The bulge of Flynn’s lower jaw tensed, popping out as he gritted his teeth. “Well, I’ll do the work of running the checks myself. You don’t have to worry about doing it. Especially if you’re going to keep on chasing this weird delusion about pi.”
“We follow the leads,” Zoe fired back, her own teeth gritted now. “Whether you personally agree with them or not.”
“Sure.” Flynn shrugged easily. “You follow the wacky pi thing, and I’ll work on cross-referencing people who actually knew both of our victims.”
Zoe clamped her mouth shut, almost literally biting her own tongue. What did she care? So long as he was busy doing something tedious, away from her, she wouldn’t have to deal with him. It was better that he was out of her way, so she could get to the bottom of things in the least possible time.
All they had to do was take a look at this crime scene, and they could go their separate ways. Zoe just hoped, with a strength that almost surprised even her, that there wasn’t going to be another murder—because if there was, she was going to have to spend even more time with this insufferable rookie.
She was just going to have to solve this pi riddle as quickly as possible.
CHAPTER NINE
He stood at the edge of the pond, his eyes drifting across the water and the body floating beneath it. Something so calm and peaceful about the still, glassy surface. Universal. Like looking up into the dome of the sky—something alive and moving, yet so still and flat at the same time when viewed from another angle.
Life, the universe, the cycle of everything. Funny how it could be so beautiful—when it was really, at its heart, only an objective formula, a pattern developed perfectly for the creation of life. The disk of the sun. The spiral of the DNA double helix, creating everything and everyone. The concentric rings that rippled across the still and glassy surface of this pond as soon as something disturbed it.
He was not one to wait for something to happen. He liked to make it happen himself, to have it be all at his own hand. The water was special, almost sacred, if such a thing could exist. He leaned forward carefully, making sure not to overbalance or to shuffle his feet forward over the edge and into the pond, extending just one index finger a little way from the bank. Under the water, her face floated gently, disappearing for a moment under the passing body of a fish.
He plunged his finger into the water and then out and watched, enchanted and mystified, as the circles billowed out from the point of entry. They spread far across the water, some of them reaching the bank and even bouncing back, others moving into the distance until they dissipated. Perfect circles, perfect miniature waves, all created by just the touch of his own finger.
He did not look away or move back, even when the circles were all gone, leaving her face visible again. He simply waited the appropriate amount of time and then extended his hand to do it again. There was something so beautiful and calm about the circles. So long as he was watching them, he felt that everything might just be fine.
But he could not just keep watching them forever. It wouldn’t be enough. It was never enough. Not since the first one, right here in the pond, the one that began it all. He was on a quest for something deeper than the beauty of the circles, even though they might have been enough for a lesser man, enough to sustain him for a hundred lifetimes.
Not this man. No, he was different. Born different, maybe, or selected for this task—who could say? This was what he was attempting to discover. If he could get to the bottom of it all, then he would be able to stop. He lifted the club at his side and hefted it, making a practice stroke through the air, imagining the crack as it hit the back of the next one’s skull.
He was making a plea to the universe, a call as loud as he could make it, sending ripples
of energy out there into the ether, into the very fabric of life itself all around him. Removing things from the natural cycle of life. Disturbing the calm, glassy surface of the universe and making those ripples billow out, watching them until they hit a bank somewhere and bounced back.
The plea was this: show me the truth. Give me clarity. If he heard back an answer, everything would be complete. Everything would make sense at last. And he thought that it might already make more sense to him than it ever had to anyone, across the whole of time, because no one yet had ever seen the way that he saw. Those beautiful circles in the universe, which must and would take him somewhere, someday, to a place of understanding, crystal clear like the chime of a bell, like the surface of the water.
In order to make that happen, sacrifices had to be made. But in exchange for the ultimate truth, what sacrifice would be too great?
In order to get his answers, he had to do it again—and he had to do it tonight, before time ran out. Before something floating on the water, like a water spider with its legs outstretched and looking for food, sensed the ripples first, and cut him off from the answers that he sought.
CHAPTER TEN
Zoe looked around the trail, taking a deep breath of the fresh November air. She was wrapped in a coat, warm enough to keep out the sting of the cold from everywhere but her face, and it felt bracing rather than unpleasant.
Finally, she was alone. Only the sounds of birds in the distance, probably warning each other that a human was around judging by the rhythm and tone of their calls, interrupted the peace. And while she could still see plenty of numbers here—the circumference of trees, the depth of the river, the pattern of growth given by all of the greenery around the river’s banks—at least it was less intrusive than the numbers given off by another human.
Even as she felt the peace exuded by the natural beauty of the scene, Zoe also knew that this was the place where a body had been found. That of Olive Hanson, forty-one years old, five foot six, erstwhile hiker. The crook of the river seemed to embrace the bank where she had been found, placed just so, her shirt hiked up out of the way so that the killer could carve his symbol into her flesh.
The rookie was off chasing his lead about the potential connection between acquaintances. It was a small enough area here, and Zoe didn’t exactly doubt that he would find a link or two. It was whether or not they would be relevant that was the problem. She knew in her gut that he was on the wrong track. This was about the symbol, not the women. Maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She’d come across many motives for murder. Killers who needed to strike in specific locations. Killers who were all about the particular time of their attacks. Even killers who hunted down and killed their own wife, or mother, over and over again, recreating her likeness as closely as they could in strangers. There would be a key to this one. Zoe just had to figure out what it was.
Zoe stood behind the taped-off area, not wanting to add her own confusion to the mess beyond it. There were two pairs of footprints that matched, the same boot but in different sizes. The sheriff’s team, where they had come in to remove the body. These she could ignore, stripping them away from her impression of the crime scene.
That left two other sets of prints: one smaller yet than the others, which must have belonged to the victim with her size 7 feet. Zoe could see the weight of the imprint, the way that she had strolled along here slowly, simply walking for the enjoyment of it. Then someone followed her: a man’s size 11.5, moving along the bank behind her. The man who wore them weighed around a hundred fifty pounds, Zoe could see.
The victim had paused at the very apex of the river’s curve, looking out at it. The current was free-flowing, the leaves from a few trees around the banks falling to gather at the edges of the river or carried along by it, a mixture of brown and orange. It was beautiful, really. No wonder she had stopped to look. The imprints of her hiking boots were there, deeper than elsewhere, a slight variance as she stood with her weight shifted onto one side.
She was probably just enjoying the natural scene, thinking her own thoughts. Zoe listened to the rush of the river, particularly as it gathered those dead, rustling leaves, as well as the sigh of the wind through the branches that remained. Her hearing was impaired; Zoe was confident that the killer had snuck up behind her without her awareness. His steps were light, a slightly deeper impact toward the toe, as if he were literally tiptoeing toward her.
He had strangled her then. Zoe cast her mind back to the crime scene photographs that had been in the file: contusions across the neck, a red line imprinted with a corded pattern. He had used some kind of rope or cord, not as harsh a material as twine, something strong enough to withstand his full force pulling back on her neck as he choked her to death with it.
Finally, he had taken her whole weight and dragged her, leaving two shallow lines in the soft shore where the points of her boots had disturbed the mud. Then he had laid her face-down in the water, just enough for it to catch at her hands, face, and upper torso. Not enough for the current to pull her away.
It was a deliberate act, Zoe thought. Measured. He wasn’t trying to hide the evidence when he put her in the water—wasn’t expecting her to wash away. He had placed her deliberately with the toes of those boots anchored in the soft mud, keeping her in place. She could see the deeper indentation, since disturbed, where the sheriff’s men had pulled Olive free.
So, why? What was the significance of the water? If it was about leaving her where she stood, then why would he bother to drag her forward to that precise place?
There was something here, something nagging at the corners of Zoe’s mind. If she could just see it—grasp hold of it—but nothing seemed to click. She looked at the scene again, moving her eyes in a practiced and logical grid pattern, left to right and up to down. Everything flashed out at her: the heights of the trees both as an absolute figure and as relative to one another; the number of leaves still clinging to some of their struggling branches; the number of rocks sticking out of the current and their precise locations in conjunction with one another. The flow of the river, how fast it moved, where it choked or flowed more quickly. The velocity of the wind as it stirred the branches and knocked down another seven leaves in one fell swoop.
There was too much here. Zoe was trying to see one thing, one clue, but the problem was that she could see it all. Everything, jumping out at her, crawling on every surface and even in the gaps between objects, telling her their distances and what that implied about root systems and available nutrients. It wasn’t all useful. It couldn’t be. But how was she supposed to narrow it down?
Zoe reached for the pack of antidepressants in her pocket, giving them a reassuring rattle before taking one out and popping it onto her tongue. She swallowed with practiced ease, staring around at the riverbank, waiting for something to happen.
She knew from the printed report that the police had already taken the time to talk to Olive Hanson’s family before Zoe and Flynn had even arrived in the state. There had been nothing particularly noteworthy about what they had said. It was just like Elara Vega. Hanson was an ordinary woman, without enemies or rivals, simply enjoying her own life in her own way. No conflicts with neighbors or estranged husbands, no sign of any trouble in her life, no change in her behavior. There was nothing there, not a single lead, and Zoe didn’t believe there would be anything to find.
So, why her? And why here?
Zoe’s cell phone rang in her pocket, startling her back to a more present moment. It was getting colder. She stepped back from the taped-off area, the tape flapping sharply in the wind as it hung from stakes pushed into the ground, and dug out the phone. The display told her that Dr. Applewhite was calling, and she hesitated.
She didn’t want to talk to anyone. Not now, and not about anything personal. She had to solve this case—everything else was secondary. She hadn’t wanted to talk to her old mentor before, when she was simply sitting at home; now shouldn’t be
any different.
Then again, Zoe thought back to all of the times in the past when Dr. Applewhite had helped her with her cases. Calmed her down. Made her see past the numbers, to understand the wood made up of the individual trees.
Maybe it would help again today.
“Hello?” Zoe said, answering the call before she could think better of it and change her mind again.
“Oh, Zoe!” Dr. Applewhite exclaimed, sighing as if in relief. “Where are you? I went to check in at your place and you weren’t there.”
A sharp pang of guilt, entirely unexpected, hit Zoe in the chest. “I am allowed to leave my apartment, you know,” she said, reacting with knee-jerk anger.
“Well, yes,” Dr. Applewhite conceded. “It’s just that you haven’t, much. Lately.”
“I know.” Zoe took a breath of the sharp, cold air. “But I decided to.”
“Where are you, then?”
“Syracuse, New York,” Zoe said. “Or just outside it. On a hiking trail.”
“On a hiking…?” Dr. Applewhite repeated. Zoe wasn’t surprised at her reaction. It wasn’t as if Zoe was known for her appreciation of hard-to-reach nature spots, certainly not enough to go out of state to visit one. “Wait. Are you working a case?”
“Yes,” Zoe admitted. That was all she said, at least for the moment. There was not a large amount she could say without getting into trouble if it ever came out that she had shared confidential case details with an outsider. Not that it had ever really stopped her before.
“That doesn’t seem like a very good idea, does it?” Dr. Applewhite asked, her tone incredulous. “Given the state that you’ve been in lately?”
“What state?” Zoe snapped, her head beginning to ache. “Maryland?”
