by Blake Pierce
“Maybe.” Zoe hesitated. “There have not been any reports of uneasiness or a feeling of being followed amongst the women. But if he is careful, cautious, and quick, that does not rule out this kind of attack.”
“But how would he know their ages?” Flynn asked. “He would have to know them personally, wouldn’t he?”
“But you have checked,” Zoe pointed out. “Of all the people who came up in your searches, Olive Hanson against Elara Vega, there was only one correlation, and he has an alibi. And I do not think our killer would rely on hearsay. He needs to know precise ages, or he risks getting it wrong.”
“So, how does he know?” Petrovski put in. “He must have access to some kind of information.”
“The victims must all be in a database,” Zoe said, thoughtfully. “Something that records their ages, and that the killer has access to read.”
“But that sounds like it could be just about anything,” Flynn said, his shoulders slumping. “Mailing lists, online stores, even a petition that they all signed—how are we going to figure out how he knows?”
Zoe cast her eyes back toward the front of the property: the house, and behind it, the road, where the car was waiting. “With good old-fashion detective work,” she said, looking right back at Flynn and holding his gaze to see if he would challenge her. “A logical approach, and a lot of research.”
He held her eyes for a moment, then ducked his head. “Then we’d better get going,” he replied. “We need to stop this guy, and fast.”
Satisfied, Zoe nodded to Petrovski and began the walk back across the yard. She was back on the case. And this time, they knew exactly what they had to do to get it solved.
***
“Anything?” Zoe asked, glancing up as Flynn let out a heavy sigh.
“Not yet,” he said, clicking at something on his screen with such fury that it was a wonder the mouse didn’t collapse.
Zoe eyed the tension evident across the straight ridge of his shoulders without a word. He was feeling the pressure; that was understandable enough. His first case, and already he’d made a big blunder—basically assaulting a man who turned out to have nothing to do with the case at all. But at least the guy had actually been a criminal, even if a very small-fry kind. He was going to see his day in court—and possibly two of them, because there was still the chance he might try a lawsuit over his handling by the FBI.
Still, for the moment the man had been released, partly as a way to appease his indignation, without the necessitation of bail. If Flynn was lucky, he was going to get away with it. But that still left them with a killer on the loose, and despite knowing now where to look, it was still like searching a haystack for—if not a needle—then certainly a specific piece of straw.
“It is not unusual to make mistakes in your first cases,” Zoe attempted. She didn’t particularly feel like appeasing him, but then again, he had put himself out for her last night. And if she was going to stay working the case, she needed him on side.
“Yes, well, I’m probably making a mistake right now,” Flynn snapped, fixing her with a cold stare. “For all I know, you’re still popping pills every time my back is turned and I’m going to have to abandon the search to take you to the hospital.”
Zoe bit her lip lightly. She deserved that. Her head was still pounding, but she hadn’t dared take anything for it. “I have not taken anything. You have my word that I will not. The case comes first.”
“Likely because you’ve run out,” Flynn scoffed.
Zoe couldn’t tell him he was right.
“At any rate, you need my help,” she pointed out. “This is a big task.”
“I’m aware of that,” Flynn said icily. “You help today. As soon as we’ve tracked down the killer, you’re on a flight, and I mean that. No worming your way back in. I’m still furious.”
Zoe nodded meekly, hoping it would be enough to stop him from pressing the matter further. So long as she was still here, she could still work on the case. That was as much as she needed.
Zoe refocused on the screen in front of her. As well as the computer that had been left set up for them in their assigned office at the sheriff’s station, someone had found a laptop somewhere in a storage cupboard so that Flynn and Zoe could research different areas at the same time. He was doing more of his beloved cross-checking: looking for the interests that their victims had in common, trying to ascertain if there was any kind of local association that might have their details.
Charitable causes, stores, bars and restaurants with loyalty schemes—there were so very many possibilities in the local area. Zoe’s head spun when she tried to count them all, and that was saying something, because counting things was like breathing to her. Worse than breathing. She could deliberately hold her breath, slow it down or speed it up. She couldn’t make the numbers stop.
Except, there was that thing Dr. Monk had taught her, wasn’t there? A way of tying the numbers to her own breathing. A meditative exercise that had worked before. When she was with Shelley. Zoe hadn’t wanted to try it since then. Hadn’t want to try to go back to that calm place, in case she saw Shelley there. In case it didn’t work anymore, because Zoe didn’t deserve that kind of calm.
But she was out of the pills, and those had barely worked as it was. There was no chance she was going to be able to get her hands on more alcohol, not with Flynn’s watchful gaze on her—and besides, Zoe was thinking about swearing off it altogether. She’d never liked the way it made her brain fuzzy. She needed her mental skills still sharp—but in control. That was the big problem.
She needed to think. And if she was going to be able to think properly, then maybe she needed to try an old favorite—even if it had to be painful to even try.
Zoe closed her eyes, grateful that Flynn was turned away. She placed her hands flat on either side of the laptop, feeling the smooth wood of the side desk that someone had carted into the small office. She felt the flat surface of the office chair against her spine, the solid floor underneath her feet. She breathed in deeply, counting one. And out.
A second breath, and out. Three, and out. Calmer, deeper every time.
Five, seven, nine, all the way to ten. Zoe could feel herself entering that restful state, something like dreaming but not at all like being asleep, a place where she could let her body relax entirely and try to let go. Let go of the stress, the numbers, all of it, even if only for a second. She wasn’t quite ready. It had been a long time, and she wasn’t in practice. She started again from one. Deep breath in, then steady out. Two. Three.
To ten again, and Zoe knew it was now or never. Everything else had faded away. She was no longer counting the audible ticks of the clock on the wall, no longer having to see dimensions and calculations everywhere she looked, the links between numerical yet inconsequential values in the lists that she was trying to see. The only numbers were those attached to her breaths, one to ten over and over in a repeating cycle that was never faster, never slower.
Zoe opened the eyes inside her head and she was there. Floating peacefully on the gently rocking current of the sea, her spine supported by the flat surface of an air mattress, the sun beaming down ahead. Gentle calls of tropical birds rang out overhead. She was there.
The sand looked so soft and wonderful. Zoe could imagine standing on it, how it would feel when her feet sank a little, the sand between her toes. Her own footprints preserved clearly in the part of the shore lapped by the gentle waves. And what was important was that she could feel it, and she had no compulsion to count every grain of sand, and when she looked down at her feet she only saw the joy of it and not the calculations of the volume of sand she had displaced.
She left the numbers there.
Zoe opened her eyes—her real eyes—and part of her stayed there, on the island. Part of the numbers came back with her, and that was fine, because she didn’t need them gone entirely. She just needed them to clear her vision enough to let her see, and to be there when she needed to call on th
eir help.
She just had to think. If she could think clearly, without the numbers getting in the way now, she knew she would find it. There had to be something that all of the victims had in common.
They were all local. Zoe searched their addresses, and their home records; looking back through the census information, she could see that all of them had lived in the Syracuse area for a long time. Not all of them for their whole lives—while Shacora and Olive had been born there, Elara had been an immigrant some thirty years ago. The newest victim, too—Sheriff Petrovski had identified her as Lara Brownlee—she had only lived in Syracuse for a little over a decade, having been raised at the other side of the state.
Something about those comparative ages sparked in Zoe’s mind. Lara had been in her late teens—around eighteen years old—when she came to Syracuse. So, why?
Because she wanted to study?
Spurred on by this thought, Zoe looked up the local college. There were a number of faculties included within Syracuse University, and a wide range of fields of study.
And there were a few alumni lists online—nothing comprehensive, but enough that Zoe had a flash of hope.
She started going through the list, checking them one by one: a search for the victim’s name, plus the college, to see what came up.
Elara Vega was the first hit. Not as a student; she had not even been in the local area when she was in her early twenties, which was why Zoe had started with her—thinking it would be easier to disprove the theory. But there she was, listed on an old document about staff. She had taught there as a professor for some years, gaining teaching experience in the science department, leading students on explorations of astrology. She had stopped teaching some time ago to work at the planetarium full-time, but the link was there.
Zoe moved on to Olive Hanson. As the next oldest victim, it was likely there would be less evidence of her academic record. But there she was, quoted in an article about the alumni association, telling the reporter how much she had enjoyed a get-together to mark a decade since her graduation.
Shacora Maxwell was easy; Zoe had already seen in the report gathered by Sheriff Petrovski’s men that the part-time security guard had also been a part-time student. She was taking classes until the very day she died. And that just left their newest find, Lara Brownlee.
Who had graduated from Syracuse University seven years ago, at the top of her class, according to an online article which featured a photograph of her, younger and with a less flattering haircut, grinning with a certificate framed in her hands.
She had it.
“Flynn?”
“Hm?”
“Syracuse University.”
He looked up at her, a flash of understanding in his eyes. Perhaps he was a little sharper than she had so far given him credit for. “All of them?”
“Three students and a professor.”
“Is the information all available online?”
Zoe shook her head, smiling a little more as she realized the implications. “Three of them are a matter of public record. Not Shacora Maxwell. She was still studying. No graduation list, no alumni report, nothing. She would only be known as a student to someone with access to the university infrastructure itself.”
“Someone at the school.” Flynn snapped his fingers in the air. “Staff and faculty members.”
“We cannot rule out students,” Zoe said. “This killer is a mathematician. If not in major, at least in method. They may be someone with advanced skills in related areas. Someone who could hack into what I assume is a fairly basic school registration system to access student and faculty information. It may even be someone who has access to paper files. A volunteer who helps out in the office. All we know for sure is that they have access to Syracuse University.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t narrow it down much,” Flynn said, rubbing his thumb across his lower lip. Zoe, who had read studies about oral fixation and the subtleties of body language in a largely failed attempt to better understand it, wondered if the gesture would have been disarming to another woman. “But at least we have a lead. We know that the next victim will be a student of the college.”
Zoe’s eyes widened fractionally as she followed the thought through. “But so does he,” she said. “And he has enough of a lead that he could be hunting her down as we speak.”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
He glanced around before settling behind the computer, checking that he was alone. It was easy enough to be alone here. There was hardly ever anyone around that showed any interest in what he was doing. It made things so much easier.
He flexed his fingers above the keyboard for a moment, before starting to type. The records system was old and clunky, and well overdue an update; not that he was complaining. It was that old-fashioned set-up that had allowed him to easily get access, not just to current students but also to alumni and faculty. And while the search function was barely useful at all, he could at least do things the manual way.
Opening a list of alumni for a particular school within the college, he nestled further into his chair, hunching his shoulders and head forward to get a closer view of the screen. He knew that current students would be little help—mature students were few enough that needing an age this specific meant diving into past records.
And if that didn’t work, there was always faculty. He’d find someone, somewhere.
The research was long and challenging, but he didn’t mind it. It was a wholly different kind of work to the actual sacrifices, but both had their part to play in all of this. The sequence was coming together, and he had a shot at finding someone who was fifty-three years old.
He’d already figured out the range of birth dates that would work. He was scrolling through the list, checking off each one, starting with the year. Not a lot of matches. That was already apparent. It was a ripe old age. The list was long. He would find someone sooner or later.
He stopped, double-checked, triple-checked. The date worked. This woman, she was in the right age range. He looked across, checked out her last known address, and carefully jotted it down on a piece of paper along with her full name. There was even a landline number, though he wouldn’t be so stupid as to give the police a phone record link between himself and one of the victims. He knew they would be looking for him. There was no point in handing them the smoking gun.
Very interesting, this woman. Turned out she’d gone back to school eight years ago to get her master’s degree. Good for her. Self-improvement was an admirable thing. After all, that was all he was trying to do. To find new knowledge out there in the universe, the one single truth at the core of everything. In fact, she probably would have approved of his search. That would make it all the easier.
That was, of course, if he could track her down. He opened a new window, started searching on social media. It was amazing how much information people would give away about themselves on social media. She had a few accounts; she evidently wasn’t great at using the location tag feature, which was typical of an older woman who had not grown up part of the internet generation, but it didn’t matter.
It typically didn’t matter, not when they had stayed local. Because he was local too, and he recognized the sights. The image she had posted of her son and his girlfriend, strolling along on a nature walk just outside of the city. Another group shot, all of them around a table at a local restaurant that he had attended himself—probably taken at a Christmas gathering, judging by the caption.
Yes, she was still local. And in one of her shots she had even posted a view of the interior of her home, light streaming through a square thick-framed window in the front room. He opened up Street View and typed in that last known address. He squinted, comparing the architecture. Yes, she was still there.
He snorted to himself. She was making this too easy. Maybe it really was fate. Everything coming together to deliver him what he needed, so that he could make the necessary sacrifices and get the answers that he sought. You really ha
d to wonder, even when you had a rational mind and weren’t given to religious fantasies. You had to think there was some kind of larger force at work, a pattern to be followed.
Well, he wasn’t going to let anyone down. He checked the woman’s Facebook profile, saw that her job was listed. A local workplace, too—no long commute for this one. She would be at one of the two locations sooner or later, and he could begin to track her from there. An opportunity would arise. It always did.
The decision was made. He logged off the computer, switched it all off, and gathered up his notepaper with the addresses that he needed. It was as good as done. Tonight, she was going to die.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Zoe paced back and forth in the cramped office space, only managing four steps in either direction before she had to execute a turn and go back the other way. “It is impossible,” she said out loud, her brain racing to think of new possibilities even as she verbally proclaimed defeat. “We cannot narrow it down.”
Flynn had his hand clamped over his forehead, as though he was trying to hold his brain in. “Let’s just go over it again. Slowly. We know that the victim has to be fifty-three years old, and somehow connected with the university.”
“Yes. Staff, student, or alumni. Three categories,” Zoe said.
“Well, she’s not likely to be a fellow student. She’d be too old,” Flynn said. “We can rule that out.”
“No, we cannot,” Zoe pointed out. “She could be a mature student. And we do not even know for sure that it will be a female. They were all white or Latina until Maxwell. Who is to say they will not all be female until the one that is not?”
“All right, fine. But the first thing we need to do is to figure out who is even a candidate. How do we do that? Talk to the college for records?”
Zoe was still pacing. At each turn, she almost hit the wall, she was going so fast. She couldn’t bear to stand still. She needed to be out there, doing something. Not in here, trapped with the numbers that were beginning to overwhelm her thoughts again as her calm faded completely. Her normal stride length was twenty-nine inches, but abbreviate that due to the smaller space and her restricted stride, and the room was eighty-two inches across; but she’d already known that, of course, because she could see it in the dimensions of the room laid out whenever she looked at the floor.
