Face of Murder

“We might have our killer,” Shelley said, with such obvious glee that it sent a thrill up Zoe’s spine. She was right. That kind of break could crack the whole case wide open, give them a name. Once they had that, they could get him in for questioning, get him to tell them everything. Hairs weren’t always worth what they used to be in a courtroom, but a confession was.

And this was exactly the kind of evidence that Zoe knew Shelley could put to good use in extracting a confession.

All the tools they needed to close the case may already have been sitting in that evidence bag.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Zoe walked back into the interrogation room, holding a fresh set of color prints that were still warm from the machine that had spit them out.

“Oh, you’re back,” Wardenford said. “I thought you might have forgotten about me.”

Zoe eyed his hands and spotted the telltale shake. He was no doubt anxious to get out of FBI custody and go home for a drink. He’d been with them for hours now, and he was a serious alcoholic. The ratio in his bloodstream was decreasing, leaving behind the physical symptoms he would no doubt do anything to avoid.

Zoe had done anything but forget about Wardenford. During the drive back to HQ, she had formulated a plan. Shelley would go to the forensics lab and encourage a rush on the hair that they had found, using her natural charm to get it done quicker than Zoe could. Meanwhile, Zoe would talk to their former suspect.

Maybe it was obvious now that he was innocent of being the killer, but that didn’t mean they needed to let him go right away. He had been able to glean something, at least, from the equations—and he had spotted Zoe’s abilities right away. That meant that, for now at least, he was an asset.

An asset who could help them with this latest piece of the puzzle.

“Take a look at these,” Zoe said, dropping the photographs in front of him and taking her seat.

She was banking on the fact that Wardenford would be distracted enough by the allure of the mathematical puzzle to not notice that he had now been proven innocent. Just as she herself would not be able to resist attempting to work it out. True to form, he snatched up the pictures immediately, his lips moving silently as his eyes traced over the new equation.

Zoe watched him carefully as she had before. There was still no flicker of recognition, not that she could see; only eagerness to take on a challenge. She had harbored the small suspicion that Wardenford could still have been involved, with an accomplice taking down North, but now that was gone. His reaction coupled with the shaking of his hands, which were not steady enough to tackle a victim or write out a clear equation, told her everything that she needed to know.

Dr. Edwin North’s family and colleagues may hold more answers. Shelley would move on to talking with them after she had visited the lab, but Zoe wanted to be here. Working on this. She still felt that this was the most important part of it all—that putting the equations together might reveal a larger solution, something that required lengthy workings and complex enough math to stump even the experts.

Even Zoe, until, she hoped, enough was revealed to facilitate that breakthrough.

The only sound in the interrogation room was the ticking of the clock above the door and a slight shuffle of papers now and then, as Zoe and Wardenford both studied copies of the photographs in silence. The equation was just as before: seeming to make sense up to a point, then disintegrating into nonsense. There was a mismatch somewhere, something that did not fit.

“It’s wrong,” Wardenford eventually declared, planting his hands firmly onto the tabletop to hide their shaking. “Just the same as the other two. The last part is broken.”

Zoe had already reached the same conclusion, but there was something about what he said that drew her attention. “The last part?”

“Yes, the final three lines. Look at them—they’re totally unbalanced against the rest of it. This one even switches to different symbols. Where is N in those lines? The first section seems weighted towards using N as a crucial part of the equations, where it does not appear at all in the end part.”

Zoe cast her eyes over the equation again, though her memory had already told her he was right. The last three lines… was there something in that?

Seized by a sudden inspiration, she flipped back through her notebook to where she had written out the first two equations. “There must be a connection between all three,” she said.

“That’s a false equivalency,” Wardenford shook his head. “Just because the same person wrote the three equations on bodies in the same way, does not necessarily mean that they are part of the same overarching equation or connected in a further way.”

Zoe could not listen to him. How could she? If he was right, then there was no way to solve the equations. And if there was no way to solve them, then there was no extra clue hiding in there which would help her to link the three victims and trace the link back to the killer.

There had to be some kind of connection.

There just had to be.

“You’re wasting your time,” Wardenford insisted, but Zoe was no longer hearing him. She started to scribble out the last three lines of each of the equations on the back of one of the photographs, in order. Just the last three lines, the three that didn’t make any sense in each of the cases.

When she was done, she stopped and looked at it. It made a full equation in itself, and now the signs were starting to make sense. This was something that she could understand, at last. This was something—somehow—familiar?

Wardenford reached for the paper and spun it around so that he could read it, his eyes flashing from left to right over and over. It was beginning to dawn on Zoe exactly why that equation looked familiar, something rushing through the synapses in her brain to tell her just where she had seen it before—

And, oh. Oh no.

“I’ve seen this before,” Wardenford said, even as Zoe’s mouth opened to cut him off, to tell him to stop. “It’s a theoretical equation that a local mathematician came up with. It made quite a stir, actually. Her name was something—what was it now? Apple… Applewhite. Dr. Applewhite, that was it. This is her equation, in full.”

Zoe knew now what she had done. It was clear. She had been desperate for a way to make sense of it all, and so she had fallen back on something that she recognized. Just like how other people supposedly saw a face on the moon, instead of measurable craters and hills and valleys. There was no face on the moon.

In just the same sense, there was no way that Dr. Applewhite really had anything to do with this.

It couldn’t be right—it was all just a coincidence. Maybe Zoe had even copied out the equations incorrectly. She flipped back in her notebook, checking and rechecking.

“That’s your culprit, then,” Wardenford pronounced, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms at ninety-degree angles across a puffed-up chest. “Dr. Applewhite. She’s got offices somewhere nearby, does studies on people with abilities like yours. Hang on, you probably know her, don’t you? She must have finally cracked.”

Zoe’s mind was racing, trying to find a possibility which explained all of this. Coincidences happened, even if they were not statistically likely. In fact, that’s all they were: the collision of things that were somewhat likely, happening in an order which was less likely and yet still possible. In an infinite universe, everything that was possible to happen would happen. That was the theory, wasn’t it?

“This cannot be anything to do with Dr. Applewhite,” Zoe blurted out abruptly, pushing all of the photographs together into a messy pile that she could scoop up into her arms. “You are no longer a suspect, Mr. Wardenford. You are free to go. See them at the front desk about getting a taxi.”

She rushed out of the room, opening the door awkwardly with one hand holding the bundle of images against her chest, and almost collided with Shelley in the corridor.

“In here,” Shelley said, her voice harder and flatter than Zoe had ever heard it before. She barely had time to register what was going on before they were both sealed away in the observation room adjoining the interrogation room, where on the other side of the black glass James Wardenford was getting up to leave.

“How much of that did you hear?” Zoe asked, hating the tremor in her voice as she asked it. Hating the fact that there was something she hadn’t wanted anyone to hear at all.

“More than enough,” Shelley said, shaking her head. “Zoe, there’s something else you need to know. Forensics already came back on those hair follicles. They didn’t get a match in our database.”

“That does not mean anything,” Zoe pointed out. “Only that our suspect has not been previously arrested. We will be able to find a suspect eventually, and then we can test them against the hairs.”

“We already have a suspect,” Shelley said. Her voice was low and soft, but Zoe still flinched away when Shelley reached out to put a hand on her upper arm. “Z, we have to follow through on this lead. You know we do. We have a professional obligation.”

“There is no lead,” Zoe snapped. “I simply wrote it down wrong. I will go back to our files and work out where I went wrong. There is absolutely no real connection here. Taking a sample slice out of the equations—you could make them resemble anything, if you wanted to.”

“I know you don’t want to see it,” Shelley said. Her tone was still soothing, but there was a determination in her eyes that Zoe understood fully. There was no getting away from this. “Call Dr. Applewhite and find out where she is. We have a responsibility to ask her to submit to a DNA test.”

“It will not show anything. She is not connected, not in any way,” Zoe argued hopelessly. She knew that Shelley was right. She wouldn’t even be able to submit paperwork omitting this without risking her job. She could even go to court for withholding something this serious.

“Then she will be ruled out. But, Z, you should prepare yourself.” Shelley gave her a stern look. “We have to obtain a DNA sample from Dr. Applewhite. And if it matches, we will have to arrest her for murder.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Zoe had a sick ache in the pit of her stomach. She couldn’t tell whether she was about to throw up, lie down and die, or give birth to some kind of monstrous child. The feeling had been growing by the second since Shelley had laid down the law, and now it was threatening to totally consume her.

Zoe had had no intention of implicating anyone, especially not her beloved mentor. She could see clearly that it had all been her own mistake. There was no connection—truly, none at all.

She just couldn’t get Shelley to see that.