Face of Murder

“Do you want me with you?” Shelley asked. She, too, had been watching for any kind of sign, while they chased surveillance footage from areas around his apartment over the phone. So far, nothing had shown him leaving his apartment. It didn’t mean that he hadn’t slipped by in an area not covered, but it did mean they had nothing to threaten him with.

“No.” Zoe made for the door, buoyed along by a new determination. “You watch him. Closely.”

“Call him professor,” Shelley called after her. “You’ll stroke his ego. False sense of security.”

They couldn’t keep him at the field office for long. A long time for him, surely, but in terms of their investigation, not long enough. If he didn’t crack soon, they would have to let him leave. So, she would have to make him crack.

Zoe entered the interrogation room and resumed her seat opposite Wardenford, who greeted her with a cheery smile.

“Time to let me out yet, Agent?”

“Not yet.” Zoe paused, opening the folder at such an angle that only she could see the contents. “How are you with math, Professor?”

Wardenford seemed to swell with ego as she gave him his former title. Shelley had been right. “It’s one of my specialties,” he said. “Of course, math goes hand in hand with physics. It’s been my life’s work.”

Zoe nodded. “I understand,” she said. “Then perhaps you can help us out with something? We have some equations that we are trying to figure out.”

She first reached for the printouts she had created: the equations alone, copied out on the computer, rather than the crime scene photographs. No blood, no sign that they had anything to do with the killings. She laid them down one by one in front of him, watching his face as he leaned forward to study them.

There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes, at least not that Zoe could see. She glanced up toward the black glass wall, as if she could see through and divine what Shelley was thinking. Of course, there was nothing to see there.

Back to Wardenford; he was lifting the printouts in his hands now, comparing them side by side, rubbing his mouth and resting with his fingers over it as he leaned on his elbow. He spent longer looking at the first than the second. He frowned deeply, then deeper, the furrows on his brows lengthening and sinking.

Minutes stretched on. Zoe kept count of them: four, six, ten. He was still staring at the equations, shifting in his seat sometimes, even mouthing things to himself as he worked through them. Zoe let the silence continue, not wanting to interrupt. What he said and did now was important.

“They’re unsolvable,” he declared at last, throwing the two pieces of paper down onto the desk. “This is some kind of trick, isn’t it?”

“Trick?” Zoe raised an eyebrow.

“You think if you can frustrate me with an equation I can’t solve, I will be vulnerable to questioning and end up admitting everything. Well, I can’t admit anything. I didn’t do it.”

“This is not a trick, Professor,” Zoe said, opening her folder on the desk and spinning it toward him so that he could see it. Inside, the images were piled haphazardly: the equations scrawled out on torsos, blood, close-ups of the injuries to the heads. “We really do need to figure out those equations.”

At last, there was a reaction on Wardenford’s face. Not the kind of reaction that Zoe had been hoping for—a microscopic twitch, a flinch, a tiny tell that would give him away. Patterns were easy to spot in human behavior. There should have been something that told her he knew what he was looking at, and he was lying.

But there was nothing there. Just revulsion. Wardenford paled, gasped, covered his mouth. Finally, he squeezed his eyes shut and moved his head away so that he no longer had to look at them. “That’s horrible,” he finally managed. “Cole and—and Ralph. God. Who could do something so violent?”

“The same person who wrote out those equations.” Zoe tapped the paper in front of him, drawing his attention back. “So tell me, Professor. Help us. What do they mean?”

Wardenford stole a glance at the crime scene shots and shuddered before looking down at the paper. Zoe had seen that before. People would look again and again at things they found disgusting or distressing. They couldn’t help themselves.

Of course, people also looked again and again at things they were proud of.

“They don’t mean anything,” Wardenford said. His face was ashen now, and the cheeriness was gone entirely. In that, at least, Zoe had achieved her goal. “They ought to, but something’s wrong. It’s like all of the elements are there, but they’ve been placed incorrectly. Imbalanced. Too much on one side, not enough on the other. You won’t be able to solve them or find out what they mean. They’re wrong.”

Zoe sighed, slumping back into her chair. It was the same as the others had said. Dr. Applewhite and her colleagues had been right, and she hadn’t wanted to admit that. But it was getting harder and harder to deny that these equations weren’t solvable.

At least, not yet.

“Imbalanced,” she repeated, her brain starting to work.

“Yes,” Wardenford confirmed. “See, here? This one should really have something there, but there’s nothing. It doesn’t make sense this way.”

Imbalanced… what if that was the whole point? What if these were not individual equations to be taken separately, but part of a larger puzzle?

Zoe thought back to their last major case, to the Golden Ratio killer. His plans had seemed different at the beginning. It was only as he filled in more points on the map, took more victims, that the spiral shape became clear.

That was a terrible thought—that she might need more information. Need another death. But it did make a lot more sense than what they had already—which was nothing.

Zoe spun the two printouts toward herself and grabbed a pen from her pocket. She started to balance the equations out—adding them together. It was easy to see the spaces, now she understood to look for that kind of pattern. And it was easy to see the things on the second equation that stood out, begged to be put somewhere else.

She worked in a frenzy, forgetting that Wardenford was even in the room. This was more important than the interrogation. If he was right, this could change everything. Maybe they could work something out from this, some kind of formula, or a prediction of what the next equation would be. Any little clue along the way could help them figure out who the killer was.

That was, of course, assuming that it wasn’t Wardenford and he wasn’t stringing her along like a puppet, watching her dance.

Zoe paused then, looking up to see that Wardenford was watching her. Closely. She stopped writing. Perhaps that thought was right. Perhaps she was playing right into his hands, taking the bait.

“You don’t see things like others do, do you?” he asked, unexpectedly.

“What?”

“I’ve met people like you before. You’ve got a way with numbers and patterns, am I right? You’re a synesthete.”

Zoe instinctively looked toward the darkened glass, hoping the tech had left the room. If Shelley was the only one hearing this, it wouldn’t be so bad. But this was on record. Taped. Anyone could see it. She fought a rising sense of panic, her hand flying up to just below her collarbone, her neck. She felt that same stifling feeling that came when she sat in the passenger seat and the seatbelt seemed to choke her, but there was nothing there to pull away.

“I knew it. You remind me exactly of someone I mentored years ago.”

Zoe was torn between anxiety over her secret being outed, and the shock that he could tell just by looking at her. “What are you talking about?” she asked, hoping it would sound like a deflection but also prompt him to explain how he had known.

“I know brilliance when I see it. You have an instinctive way of working with the numbers, and it’s not just that. You’re constantly assessing things, sizing them up. I can recognize it because I’ve seen it before.”

“With your student,” Zoe replied, which was not an admission, but still encouraged him to go on all the same. She was walking a dangerous line. If anyone saw this, she would have to flat-out deny it—or come clean. At least not having the admission on tape was a slim comfort.

“Yes. She was gifted—just gifted. I noticed her skills in class, and invited her for some extra sessions to see if we could coax out that genius. Lo and behold, she had capabilities I had never dreamed of. To look at a math equation and know the answer, just like that.”

“What happened to her?” Zoe was desperate to know. After the news Dr. Applewhite had told her, of the student committing suicide, it was of the utmost interest to her. Had she been successful in life? Started a family, maybe?

“Ah, well, I don’t really know.” Wardenford coughed quietly, wearing an embarrassed expression. “I ended up quitting, you see. Coming over here to work instead. That was after my divorce; I had to get away. All my problems started there.”

“That is when you began drinking.”

“Right.” Wardenford sighed heavily. “That’s the part of the job I miss the most, you know? Nurturing young minds, helping them come to their full potential. Like you—putting the skills and talents they have to good use. Helping them to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. I suppose all that is gone, now. No college anywhere near here is going to touch me, and I doubt I’ll have a good reference if I apply elsewhere.”

Maudlin self-pity. Zoe was just about to tell him to shut up and stop feeling sorry for himself, and go work on getting the things he wanted instead of drinking himself to death. Perhaps happily for her career, that was the moment that Shelley threw open the door and interrupted instead.

“Agent Rose,” Zoe remarked, surprised that she would break protocol by entering the interview room. Perhaps one of their superiors had arrived, and Shelley had come to warn her…?

“Agent Prime, a word, please,” Shelley said, moving back into the corridor to let Zoe out.