by Blake Pierce
He looked ahead, left and right, seeing rooms in all directions. There was a cold breeze coming from one direction, and Flynn instinctively followed it, putting his hand on his gun as he ran headlong around the tight bends of the entrance hall and into an open living space. There was a wide set of double glass doors at the far side of the room, thrown open onto the balcony.
And the man who Flynn knew must be Tom Taylor was already halfway over it.
“Stop!” he yelled, gaining a precious second as the man looked toward him in a panic but then redoubled his efforts. He was climbing down, Flynn could see—moving onto the front of the balcony and the precarious handholds that it afforded, ready to swing to the next balcony along. If he made it, Flynn would only be able to follow him—there was no time to try to break into the next apartment and the next and the next, while Taylor monkey-barred his way along the building.
By the time Flynn climbed down there himself, Taylor would have a huge advantage. Not only that, but Flynn would be endangering himself by attempting the climb. There was only one option that came to his mind as he hit the balcony bodily, his legs skidding forward with momentum and only the railing stopping his progress, looking down at Tom Taylor and the one hand he was using to hold onto the metal below.
He was a murderer, Flynn reminded himself. In his mind’s eye, a face floated into his vision, a face from his past. One that reminded Flynn what it was like for the families left behind when their loved ones were murdered. He couldn’t let a killer get away. And so he reached over and caught at Taylor’s wrist, and then kicked his fingers until he had to let go of the railing, and then threw Taylor toward the ground with all his might.
The man tumbled through the air, giving a strangled scream of surprise, his eyes wide as he fell without any control.
Flynn paused long enough to see him hit bottom, and then ran back out of the building, using common sense to work out how to reach the door to the enclosed back of the property and dashing outside as quickly as he could.
He hadn’t needed to rush, in the end. Taylor was winded, floating with wide eyes in the swimming pool that Flynn had seen down below. He’d known instantly it was the only safe option: one more swing, and Taylor would have been above concrete, not the pool. If he’d fallen then, he would have died without revealing any details about his murders. Now he was safe, if a little wet. Flynn could take him in for questioning, get him to trial. This had been the best option on offer.
“Tom Taylor,” Flynn panted, pausing at the side of the pool. “You’re under arrest for murder.” He knelt and leaned forward across the water, grabbing hold of Taylor’s arm and pulling until the man was lying on the side of the pool, still blinking owlishly and breathing hard.
“How did you choose your victims?” Flynn demanded. He wanted to press home the advantage, while Taylor was in shock and disoriented.
“Wha… what are you…”
“Were you working alone?” Flynn asked, pushing him, shouting it into his face. He needed to know. He needed to be sure that he’d stopped the problem at its root.
“Y… yeah, I was alone,” Taylor stammered. “Hell, man. I didn’t know you would come down on me like this.”
Flynn frowned. “You expected a light response to murder?”
“Murder?” Taylor was gasping and shivering in the cold air, shaking his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Christ, Flynn thought, he was going to have to get the man booked at the sheriff’s station soon and wrapped in a blanket before he got hypothermia. “The three women you killed,” Flynn ground out. “We know all about them. Signing them with your initials wasn’t a smart move.”
“W-what?” Taylor shook his head rapidly. “I didn’t kill anyone, man. I thought you were here about the thefts!”
It was Flynn’s turn to blink in surprise. “Thefts?”
“Y-yeah, I took a few things on the job. Emptied a couple of cash boxes left overnight. I know I wasn’t supposed to, but they hardly pay me anything. I just wanted a little extra, man, that’s all. I’ll tell you everything you want to know, but I didn’t murder nobody!”
Flynn stared down at him, both of them breathing heavily after their exertion, for a long moment. “You’re just a thief,” he said, partly a question and partly a statement.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Taylor replied, his face still full of panic.
Flynn stood slowly, keeping an eye on the prone man. He was still going to have to bring him in. Either Taylor was just a petty thief, or he was an accomplished liar—because he was putting on a pretty convincing display.
Flynn rubbed a hand over his face. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered to himself. This was going to be a whole lot of paperwork and not a lot of result.
He was going to have to bring the guy in for questioning anyway, check out his alibis, that kind of thing. But he was already fairly confident that he was going to end up releasing Taylor into the custody of the sheriff for his theft case, and having to start again on the rest.
Just when Flynn didn’t think his mood was going to be able to get any worse, his cell phone rang—and looking at the screen, he saw Agent Zoe Prime’s name flashing up on it. The last person he wanted to hear from right now, but he had to answer it anyway; it was his job.
“Agent Flynn,” Prime said. “I am at a new crime scene. Well, sort of.”
“What?” Flynn found his hand forming into a fist and had to deliberately relax it. “Why aren’t you getting ready to fly home?”
“I was still listed as the primary contact,” Prime said, her voice even and seemingly unapologetic. “You need to get here.”
Flynn stared down into the deep end of the pool, shaking his head. This was all kinds of screwed up. First, he jumped the wrong suspect, and now his alcoholic partner had reinserted herself into the case. Excellent. “Fine,” he said, sullenly, uncomfortably aware of how much it made him sound like a teenager. “I’ll have to wait for someone to come by from the sheriff and take a guy into custody for me. Then I’ll drive over.”
Flynn ended the call without waiting for Prime’s response, inwardly seething. Could his first case be going any worse? The bodies were starting to pile up—and whatever Prime had meant by that “sort of,” Flynn had to bet it wasn’t going to be anything good.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Zoe looked up at the sound of the engine in the distance, calculating the speed of the vehicle from the frequency of the roar and how quickly it was getting louder, as much as she could hear above the pounding inside her own head. It was going fast. Agent Flynn, she had to presume.
She returned her attention to the small pond they had been called out to. Situated about a quarter mile behind the isolated house that it belonged to, it was only about eight feet deep, but the depths were murky enough. Reeds grew around the banks, and there were a number of ornamental fish whirling around in a panic at the disturbance of their habitat. She knew how they felt. Her head was roiling almost as badly as her stomach had when she’d driven over, an unfortunate consequence of last night’s diversion.
The fishes’ disturbance was caused by two men in diving gear who were just now emerging to the banks, holding something heavy-looking just under the water. As Zoe watched, it broke through the surface, transforming into a recognizable shape as they pulled it onto the grassy bank and laid it there.
It was a body, that of a woman. She was pale and misshapen, already bloating and stinking. There were a number of small marks visible all over her skin—cup-shaped red or white welts that Zoe understood as wounds revealing the insides of her flesh. It was not hard to work out, from the shape and size of the wounds, what had caused them. The fish would have been going hungry without their owner to feed them.
“What’s going on?” Agent Flynn demanded.
Zoe turned to see him striding toward her. She turned away from the view, which included his walking speed, to focus on the body. “Sheriff Petrovski called me,” she
said, nodding toward it. “They had a new report of a body. Female victim. It does not seem like a coincidence.”
“She was in the pond?” Flynn clarified. It wasn’t a hard guess to make. Not only was the woman still streaming with water as the two divers climbed onto the banks on separate sides to rest, but she was also still tied to a couple of sandbags wrapped around her body.
“They just brought her out,” Zoe told him. “The neighbor came by and spotted her, floating at the bottom of the pond, after she did not answer the door.”
Flynn made a sharp intake of breath, shaking his head. “Any word on time or cause of death?”
“Not yet,” Zoe said. She eyed him sideways; he hadn’t said anything yet about the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be there. Maybe he didn’t want to discuss it in front of the others. “We should take a look.”
The smell worsened considerably as they moved closer to the body. Not just the usual smell of rotten meat, but something fishy, too. Flynn grabbed hold of his tie and held it over his nose and mouth, but Zoe simply refocused her mind on the numbers. As Sheriff Petrovski joined them, Zoe snapped on a pair of gloves from inside her coat pocket, preparing to make a preliminary examination.
“There is an impact site on the back of the head,” Zoe said, pointing to a small lump visible through the woman’s hair. It surrounded an open wound, which the fish had got into, their small mouths biting away the raw flesh from inside. It would have attracted them more than the rest of the body, but the evidence was still there. “It looks as though the killer hit her over the head, then drowned her. Just like our victim in the planetarium, though a much larger body of water.”
“Why do you think he had to weight her down? So we wouldn’t find her?” Flynn asked, his voice muffled by the tie and strained by the effort of not reacting to the smell.
“So she would not wake up and swim,” Zoe said. It helped to be matter-of-fact in these examinations. Trying to simulate the kind of emotions others expected her to have was exhausting, and if accused of being callous, she could explain that compartmentalization was the only way to survive in this job. People usually expected that. “But I do not think she did wake. Her wrists do not show any sign of having fought against the ropes.”
Petrovski let out a low whistle and took a step back. “I wouldn’t have thought I’d say it, but I’m glad you agents are here,” she said. “I don’t even want to touch this one, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. Is it him?”
Zoe knew what she was asking. “Only one way to be sure,” she said. She reached for the victim’s wet shirt, clinging to the bloated skin, and moved it up gradually, taking care not to damage anything. This was all evidence.
And there it was: the pi symbol, carved into the skin with the same precision and cold confidence as all the others.
The same killer had struck again—or, at least, had struck; looking at the body and the signs that it could give her, Zoe could see this wasn’t exactly a fresh kill. The limbs were floppy when she tried to move them, with whiter areas of skin around pressure points and darker areas pooling in the back, where the woman had lain on the bottom of the pond. There was no waxy texture to the skin yet, a tell-tale sign of an older body, and though the water may have changed the rate of breakdown somewhat, Zoe could be confident in her analysis.
“This is his first victim,” she said. “At least, that we know of.”
“Are you sure?” Flynn asked, looking slightly green behind his tie. Petrovski had taken a step away and was looking resolutely up into the sky, as if she couldn’t bear to look at the body anymore.
“The coroner will be able to confirm, but I believe this body is three or four days old,” Zoe said, stepping back and snapping her gloves back off. She rolled them inside out, careful not to touch the outer surface with her bare skin, and held them that way until she could find somewhere to dispose of them. “Certainly not as old as a week, but she still predates Olive Hanson. Do we know yet who she is?”
“Yes,” Petrovski said. Zoe hadn’t been sure she was paying attention. Even now, she kept her eyes roaming the clouds as she spoke. “Lara Brownlee. She’s the homeowner here. Her neighbor was able to provide a preliminary ID from the water, but we’ll get a family member in to confirm that as soon as possible.”
Zoe squinted down at the corpse, calculations whizzing in front of her eyes. It was so much harder, after the water. “She was in her early thirties? Late twenties?”
Petrovski snapped to action, rummaging in her pocket and drawing out a battered notebook. “She’s thirty-one,” she confirmed, leafing through a few pages back and forth, obviously reviewing what the neighbor had told her. “No immediate family in the area, which is why we’re going to have to wait a little. Also why no one had yet raised the alarm. I guess she wasn’t in a regular enough habit of contacting family for anyone to notice she wasn’t responding until now.”
“And this is her own property?” Flynn was clarifying, but Zoe’s mind was racing in another direction. Something was sparking, she knew it. This newest piece of information—the age of the victim—it was important, so important, and if she could just grasp…
And she did, everything becoming clear all at once. Zoe’s eyes snapped open wide, turning shocked to both Petrovski and Flynn. She looked between them with excitement, at the blank expressions they returned to her. They hadn’t yet figured it out. They hadn’t made the connection, not like she had.
“I see it,” Zoe said.
“See what?” Flynn asked, frowning.
Zoe laughed out loud, causing the divers—who had been slowly preparing to get back into the water and check for any more relevant evidence—to turn and stare. It wasn’t the most appropriate reaction at a crime scene, Zoe knew, but she couldn’t help herself. How could she react any other way?
“I see it now,” she repeated, looking at Flynn with a grin she couldn’t keep off her face. It wasn’t over. She hadn’t lost her touch, or her mind. She had him now, and they would get this case solved sooner rather than later. “The proof. The pattern. Can you not see it? I was right all along.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Zoe wanted to laugh at the expression on Flynn’s face. Her headache was all but forgotten, the pain ignored in the face of euphoria. The rookie was clearly so confused—and he thought he’d be able to solve the case without her! Well, he wasn’t the one laughing now.
“I don’t get it,” Flynn said, impatiently. “You’re going to have to explain.”
“Look at the ages of the victims,” Zoe said.
“We already checked that out,” Flynn frowned, shaking his head. “None of them seem to be connected. There’s no common factor. With this body at thirty-one, that leaves us even less connected than before. He seems not to be targeting a particular demographic at all.”
“But put them together in a sequence,” Zoe prompted.
Flynn screwed up his face, pulling a notebook out of his pocket to begin leafing through it. “I don’t remember the exact figures,” he said.
“I do,” Zoe told him. She was still grinning; she couldn’t help it, even though she knew that she probably looked like a maniac. She had never been great at controlling her facial expressions. And everything had been so dark for so long, this one slice of victory was almost overwhelming. “I will tell you them. In order from the first chronological victim, the body here, to the most recent, at the state park, they run as follows: thirty-one, forty-one, fifty-nine, twenty-six.”
Flynn screwed up his face even further, and when Zoe glanced at Sheriff Petrovski, she saw that the older woman seemed only to be waiting for the answer. “We can’t all be math geniuses,” Flynn said, scraping his hair back over the top of his head with an impatient gesture. “Just tell us the punch line.”
Zoe couldn’t even find her enthusiasm dampened by his sullenness. It was just too good to be the one to get to tell him that he had been wrong—and she had been right, even all the while he scoffed at her a
nd called her crazy. “Do you recognize this number? 3.1415926…”
It took a moment for the penny to drop. “Isn’t that pi?” Flynn asked. Then his expression changed, his eye widening, his jaw falling slack, everything giving way to shock. “Wait—that’s the exact sequence of the ages?”
“It is,” Zoe told him cheerfully.
“It’s pi,” Flynn stated flatly. He looked none too pleased about it. “Jesus Christ… you were right.”
It wasn’t exactly an admiring statement, an admission that she was good at her job. It sounded more like Flynn was disappointed. But Zoe would take it, because either way, it meant that she was the one who had her head screwed on tightly after all.
“Matching the symbol carved onto the bodies,” Zoe said. “They are not just random killings. They are based very carefully on the ages of the victims to create a specific sequence.”
“Wait a second, but they aren’t not random, either,” Flynn interrupted. “All along we’ve been looking at these as crimes of opportunity. That’s still true. The killer has to wait until he can get the right woman of the right age, alone and in a place where no one will interrupt the killing or catch him. He’s not abducting them or luring them into a trap—just being near them at the right time to take advantage.”
“It would seem that way,” Zoe conceded. She wasn’t about to argue and tell him that he couldn’t be right as well—not when she was trying to be magnanimous in her victory. “Rational and logical, following a numerical sequence, but carried out as soon as opportunity allows.”
“So, what are you saying? He picks out a victim and just… what? Stalks them until he can get them alone?” Petrovski asked.
