Face of Murder

The tech ran his fingers over the keyboard and made a few clicks, and the names on the screen flashed a few times before reloading in a new order.

“We have one hundred and fifty results. Anything else to refine it by?”

“Yes—males only.”

Another couple of clicks and the list flashed, reloaded. A much smaller selection. “Down to ninety.”

“Now cross-reference with students that have also taken any kind of class with the mathematics department,” Zoe said.

“Would he have been majoring in math?” Shelley asked.

“Hard to say.” Zoe chewed her bottom lip. “It is possible, but then again perhaps he had not yet chosen a major at all before the accident. We should stick to any kind of math class.”

Flash; reload. They didn’t need the tech to announce the results this time. They all fit on a single view—fifty-three students.

“Move over so we can read them,” Zoe said, peering over his head. The font size was small, too small for easy viewing.

The tech leaned back to look at her face, to see if she was being serious. When he saw that she was, he sighed, and scooted his chair to one side.

Zoe and Shelley stepped forward in unison, each leaning one hand on the desk so that they could make out the names more easily. Adam, Alex, Alexander, Alexei… Even with the knowledge they were looking for something “exotic,” there were still too many options. It was a tough variable to define—what would Dr. Applewhite even define as exotic? Did Alexei fit the bill or was it too common? What about Govinder, lower on the list? Could it be him?

“We need to narrow it down more,” Shelley said, as if reading Zoe’s mind. “This is going to take too long.”

“There’s one thing we can do. We’re thinking that this student would have to have been brilliant—someone who would have been trusted by Wardenford to look at his equations. That means he has to have been getting good grades.”

“Where do I click?” Shelley asked, looking to the tech for instructions. He leaned over to point out the sorting areas on the screen, helping her to select anyone who was getting either perfect scores or almost perfect on tests and papers, the ones in the class with the best grades.

There were still twenty-two students on the list. It was a good school, after all.

Shelley blew out a sigh, rubbing her eyes. “Marco, can you print this out for us? Just the ones we noted, please.”

Marco rolled his chair back across as they stepped out of the way, getting to work.

“Should we start going to their houses?” Zoe suggested. It was the middle of the night, but that didn’t mean they had to stand on ceremony. They were looking for a serial killer in the middle of a spree, after all.

“We could,” Shelley said, then rubbed her eyes again. “It’s a shame. This is going to take us all night.”

Zoe looked over the list. Something was nagging at her memory, snagging her eye as she ran down the names.

The letters—the capital letters. Could that be it?

“The equations—there was something odd about them,” she said, opening her notebook to the page where she had copied them out. “Look here—see? The ‘M’ is a capital. But here—on Dr. Applewhite’s version of the equation, before it was jumbled by the killer: the ‘m’ is lowercase. It indicates magnetic quantum value. The lowercase from is correct.”

“Assigning significance to a letter.” Shelley nodded. “It’s very likely to be a letter that he writes as a capital often. One of his initials. Zoe, that’s brilliant!”

“Two Matthews and one Matthias,” Zoe read, checking the list.

“That’s all of them. No, wait—the surnames. There’s a Matthew there as well.”

“Only Matthias is what I would call exotic,” Zoe noted. “And—look at this. He has not been attending class for a while. His grades sharply dropped, then disappeared altogether.”

“This must be our guy!” Shelley was enthusiastic, her eyes gleaming.

Zoe nodded. “But what about his medical records? He didn’t show up on Dr. North’s list. Can we be sure he has a connection to him?”

Shelley was tapping a pen against her lower lip, her eyes glazed with that particular look that accompanies deep thought. “You know,” she said, slowly, as if she was still figuring it out while she said it. “I’ve been thinking about something the administrator at the hospital said. He told us he could only check one site, as if he was expecting us to look at records for other hospitals as well. Specialist doctors don’t always just have one hospital where they work.”

“What?”

“Well, Dr. North was a specialist, right? A neurosurgeon? Sometimes they will be on staff at a couple of different places in the same area, so that the skills are on hand wherever they’re needed.”

“Call the hospital and find out where else he worked,” Zoe said, her eyes widening as she grasped what Shelley was saying. “I will try to find a judge who might let us have a warrant so they will release the information.”

As it turned out, she need not have bothered. Zoe had just finished checking schedules and figuring out that Judge Lopez was going to be in court in the morning, but didn’t have a trial until a little later on, when Shelley burst back into their little investigation room from the corridor where she had been making her call.

“They’re faxing us through the patient records,” Shelley said. Despite the late hour and her lack of sleep, she was grinning. “I gave them Matthias Kranz and they were able to pick up his records at a hospital on the north side of the city. I told the administrator there it was a matter of life or death, told him this was Dr. North’s killer, and he was happy to bend the rules. Matthias saw last Dr. North two months ago. Even better—he was scheduled for follow-up appointments that he never attended. It sounds like he could have gone rogue. We’ll know more when they send his full records through.”

Zoe could hardly wait for the antiquated machine to stop printing. She counted how many lines had already come through and calculated the per-page printing speed, feeling despair each time it started on a new page and utter relief when it finally spat out half a page at the end.

She almost tore them in her haste to snatch them up and start leafing through them, searching for something that would make sense.

“Anything?” Shelley asked, almost crowding into her and backing off when Zoe made an impatient gesture.

“Give me a chance to read it. Hold on…” Zoe skimmed the words, flipping pages to his most recent records. “Here. TBI—traumatic brain injury from a car accident sustained two months and twenty-four days ago. Matthias was a passenger and his head hit the dashboard during the crash, after the car’s airbags failed to deflate.”

“Probably an old model. Students aren’t known for being able to afford particularly road-worthy vehicles,” Shelley commented.

“He suffered cuts and bruises, but nothing else until he started complaining of headaches and confusion. He was put through a number of tests—CT scan, blood tests, X-ray, MRI, PET… then visual, audio, everything Dr. North could think of. Finally he was diagnosed one month and thirty days ago. Aphasia and dyslexia as an ongoing result of the TBI, with no suggestions for treatment other than managing the symptoms.”

“It’s permanent?”

“The doctor recommended that Matthias attend counselling sessions as well as a class for improved cognitive development, but it says here that he never attended. He did not cancel, just did not show up.”

“This is definitely him, isn’t it?” Shelley grinned.

“It is just what I was looking for,” Zoe confirmed, flipping back to the first page of the records. “We have his address and contact number here. It looks like he lives just off campus.”

“Then let’s hope he’s there,” Shelley said, grabbing her jacket from the back of a chair. “We need to bring him in, now.”

They drove out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building parking lot into the startling blue of an extremely early morning, the sun newly risen. It was still hidden behind the tall architecture around them, and Zoe and Shelley were in shadow as they picked up speed in the direction of the Georgetown campus.

It didn’t matter, Zoe thought. They were going to be out in the light soon.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

James Wardenford cursed and rubbed his eyes, wishing he had been able to get back to sleep. After spending that time with the FBI and going through the withdrawal process from his precious alcohol, he had figured, what the hell? Why not try and go through with it this time?

It wouldn’t be the first time he had tried to quit, and he was quietly not very confident in himself that it would be the last. Mornings like this were to blame. He had come to rely on alcohol to get him to sleep, and without it he was half-insomniac. Staying up all night feverish and itchy, finally nodding off only to wake up before dawn. His body felt like it was eating itself. Still, that was supposed to stop soon, right?