Face of Fury (A Zoe Prime Mystery--Book 5) Read online

  The rookie. It was the rookie, she realized, and he was looking right back at her.

  What the hell had happened last night?

  “Agent Prime,” Flynn said stiffly. He sat up, cracking his neck, the bone clicking loudly. “Got a headache this morning?”

  “Yes,” Zoe admitted, hoping he was going to offer her some kind of painkiller, maybe a glass of water.

  “Good,” Flynn snapped. Zoe was getting the feeling that he wasn’t happy with her. Not that that was anything new. Was it still about the interrogation with the engineer? He’d been out of line. What had happened after that? “You deserve it. I’ve got a sore head of my own, after sitting here watching over you half the night.”

  “Watching over me?” Zoe repeated. She felt like she was playing catch-up. Talking about a film she hadn’t seen.

  “After your little party last night.”

  Party… that rang a bell. With an internal groan, it came back to her: the frat house. They’d gone inside, and it had all been too much, and then she’d staggered into the kitchen…

  The pills. She must have had some kind of reaction from mixing the alcohol with the pills.

  “Oh,” she said, dimly, trying to process it all. Had she done something embarrassing? Wait, but Flynn probably thought she’d only been drunk—he didn’t know about the pills—didn’t realize it was a mistake. Didn’t know about the numbers that had caused her to need all of this in the first place.

  “Oh is right,” Flynn said, gathering himself up and stretching out his arms. “I didn’t want to leave you alone all night in case you choked on your own vomit or something. So I had to sleep here, on this sofa, which I can assure you is much less comfortable than the frankly low-standard beds this so-called motel has to offer.”

  “I am sorry about that,” Zoe said, trying to get her thoughts in order. She felt the heat of a slow blush traveling across her face, outside of her control. “I mean, thank you. For watching over me. Getting me back here.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Flynn said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what your other partners have let you get away with, but you jeopardized the case and acted in an unprofessional manner. I’m not cool with that.”

  “I am sorry,” Zoe started again, a little taken aback by his reaction. He hadn’t exactly been the most professional agent himself, always undermining her and making her look bad in front of other people. Sure, she’d messed up—badly, actually, but… well, she’d wanted to tear a strip out of him herself, and she’d held back. It seemed he wouldn’t do her the same courtesy, even when she was clearly humiliated by what had happened.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Flynn said, shaking his head viciously. “You were drinking on the case. Tricked me into going into that frat house just so you could get yourself trashed. I had to haul you out of there in front of all of the potential interviewees—kids we aren’t going to be able to get any respect out of now. When this thing is solved and we get back to base, I’m going to be reporting your conduct to SAIC Maitland and putting in for a different partner.”

  There was so much he didn’t know. Maybe it would be better that he did whatever he wanted, that Zoe never had to work with him again, but she didn’t want to let him have the wrong impression of her. She was a good agent. She wasn’t like this. But Shelley, and then the pills, and then a simple mistake…

  “I did not mean for that to happen,” she said, wanting to explain herself. It was somehow important that he knew. That she could let him know he could still trust her, even as much as he had trusted her judgment so far—which was not very much. “It was not a trick. I did not know…”

  Zoe cut herself off, hearing the familiar tone of her cell phone ringing out from the bedside table. She reached for it, feeling her head protest at the movement, and checked the number. It was local. She had to answer.

  “Hello, Special Agent Zoe Prime speaking,” she said, closing her eyes momentarily against the throbbing in her temples.

  “Agent, this is Sheriff Petrovski. We’ve just been alerted to a new body.”

  Zoe swore under her breath, pinching the bridge of her nose to try to hold back the headache some. “Where?” she asked, grabbing the motel notepad and pen off the side table, ready to scrawl down the address.

  Making excuses, recovering from last night, even showering—it was all going to have to wait. Zoe took down what the sheriff told her and terminated the call, tossing the pad across the room to Flynn.

  “We better get moving,” she said. “He has struck again.”

  ***

  Zoe got out of the car, grateful beyond words that the car journey was over. She bent over a little as she breathed in fresh air deeply, trying not to throw up. Flynn’s driving was getting more and more erratic, and she could swear he was doing it on purpose because he knew her head was killing her.

  The movement of bending over sent a fresh wave of pain through her skull, and Zoe cursed out loud, straightening up and closing her eyes for a moment until the spinning stopped. When she opened them again, Flynn was already striding away ahead of her toward Sheriff Petrovski and her men, arrayed in a general cluster around what had to be their crime scene just past the edge of the trees.

  Zoe took advantage of that moment, with no attention on her, to reach into the pocket of her jacket. Maybe one of Dr. Monk’s pills would make her feel better. She went to insert her thumbnail into the foil to pop out one of the pills, but to her dismay, it went right through: the hollow behind it was already empty.

  In a panic, Zoe turned the blister pack over, looking at the side without the foil. She could see it clearly now: all of the little chambers were empty, every single one of them already opened and taken. She’d had the whole lot. How had she gone through them so quickly? They were supposed to last a lot longer, and now she had nothing.

  Zoe swallowed down a lump of dismay and anxiety in her throat and thrust the empty packet back into her pocket, striding forward and trying to pretend her brain wasn’t swinging around inside her skull and ricocheting off every surface as she followed Flynn. She had to at least act professional. She already had the aloof act going for her—it wasn’t hard to maintain stony silence. She could do this.

  Except that she wasn’t sure that she could, because the trees all around her were catching her attention with their numbers, their heights and girths, their probable ages, the number of branches they had below a certain level, the dimensions, angles, and depth of scratches left by angles. And then there was the sheriff and her men and all of their numbers and measurements and sizes and angles and all of the rest of it, and words floating up into the air like moths, syllable and rhythm and line length, all their own kind of free verse poem that Zoe couldn’t stop herself tracking.

  Flynn was saying something, though Zoe could barely make out what, with the numbers and the pounding in her head. She gulped in cold morning air and headed directly for the body, needing to find something to focus on, something that would block out all the rest. At least she could be helpful there. Not only that, but it was what was expected of her. A good cover.

  Zoe stood over her, looking down. The body was splayed out across a round tree stump; she would have liked to see it without the body on top, to count the rings and know the precise age of the tree. But maybe it was irrelevant. Most likely. Most people didn’t read into everything the way that she did.

  She focused her eyes on the body again, trying to ignore the numbers that had no bearing. The woman was tall, five ten, and weighed a hundred eighty pounds. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six; Zoe would have to check later. And her shirt, part of what looked to be an official park ranger uniform, was lifted up to display her stomach, three lines carved into it.

  A straight line across the top, two coming down from it. The pi symbol, with exactly the same angles and dimensions as the last two. This third one proved it: it wasn’t coincidental or somehow unrelated. The symbol was carved by precisely the same hand, and it had the most import
ance here. It was the only thing that was always the same, except for their gender.

  Everything about this one was different. She was taller and heavier, more of a substantial woman than the other two, and far younger—by two decades at least. Not only that, but she was black, which meant that the killer was now crossing racial lines. A white woman, a Latina, and a black woman. That was rare. Serial killers normally stuck to one race, one type of person. When they mixed things up and targeted just about anybody, it made them that much harder to track down.

  Zoe breathed out through her nose, trying to hold it together. She moved around toward the head, examining it with a clinical eye. Most people would have had a hard time even looking at the pulpy, beaten-in mess that hardly bore any resemblance to a face anymore. It was all shattered bone and red, sticky insides, but all Zoe could see were the numbers. The sheer number of blows it would have taken to reduce the face to this, making it difficult to even guess the dimensions of the murder weapon, each of the impact sites overlapping so many times that it was hard to see where one ended and another began.

  Hard even for her meant almost impossible for anyone else. Zoe doubted even the coroner would be able to tell them what was used, except that it was large and heavy enough to inflict serious damage. The girl’s face was just gone. This would have to be a closed casket.

  Zoe moved back around. The ground was scattered with dead leaves; it was hard to see footprints, but she knew she no longer needed them. She’d seen enough at the riverbank to begin to build a picture of the killer in her head. What was important was the one piece of evidence he had left them to conclusively point to his identity. His calling card. His symbol.

  Zoe tried to focus. There was something nagging at the back of her head, like an itch that wouldn’t let itself be scratched. She was missing something here, she knew it. Something that would connect it all, unlock some grand secret that the killer didn’t want her to know. What was it…? Her head was thumping.

  Zoe leaned forward, closer, getting a more intimate view of that slashed symbol, the way the skin parted before each cut. What was it that he was trying to say? Her head pounded in protest at the pressure of leaning forward, pulsing like the beat of a drum, steady and strong, one, two, three… There was something here… A bird called out three times fast and then one longer, trilling note… the sheriff said something in five syllables… Zoe’s head pounded harder and harder…

  The face was gone. For a moment when Zoe looked up at it she saw Shelley’s face, her eyes open in shock, her mouth open, blood spatter from the wound at her neck cast in a delicate spray across her pale skin.

  Zoe straightened just in time and rushed away, far enough from the crime scene to avoid disturbing the evidence, and vomited at the base of a tree, hoping it would hide her from view.

  She panted, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, groaning and hoping there was nothing more to come out. The dimensions of her own vomit crawled across her vision, telling her the volume she had lost and recalculating the probable amount of alcohol and anti-depressant left in her system.

  “Agent Prime.”

  Zoe looked up to see Flynn blocking out what little light managed to filter down amongst the trees to the floor. “I, ah,” she said, trying to come up with an excuse. “I guess I am not as good at dealing with these violent ones as I thought I was.” It was not something she wanted him to think, exactly, but then again, didn’t the most human and empathetic people often vomit at crime scenes?

  “Or at handling your booze,” Flynn said flatly. He didn’t offer her a hand to get up from her crouch, but just watched as she pushed herself back to her feet with the tree as support, putting her other hand to grip her forehead as she did so. “If you can’t do your job, Agent, I need to request someone who will.”

  “You are being hasty,” Zoe said, waiting for the world to stop spinning around her again. “I can do my job better than you can.”

  “No, you know what? I’m done,” Flynn snapped. “These killings seem to be totally random and irrational, and if we’re going to catch him, we both need to have absolutely clear heads. It’s going to be hard enough as it is, without you losing control.”

  “Wait,” Zoe said. Something had cut through all the spinning, all the noise and the numbers, the thumping pain and the nausea. Something as sharp as an arrow had flown right into the target, making her realize something that she should have seen all along.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “We are missing something,” Zoe said, really meaning “I am missing something,” because she didn’t expect that Flynn would be able to follow. “There is a bigger picture here. Just like pi.”

  “Just like pi…?” Flynn shook his head. “This again?”

  Zoe’s mind was racing. Random and irrational: something about the way that Flynn said it had set off a siren in her mind. It sparked off what she had already been thinking about: pi.

  Pi, as a number, appeared to be a long string of random digits that followed no pattern or logic. It was random and irrational. Just as the murders seemed to be.

  But the thing about pi was that this random and irrational sequence was only random and irrational to the human mind. It did follow a formula, a pattern—just not one that humans had yet been able to grasp. Mathematicians could calculate it to a long sequence, even trillions and quadrillions of digits long—so many that it was impossible to read them all in one lifetime, let alone to begin to do anything with them.

  The very existence of pi implied a greater design, some kind of bigger picture that humans were not yet able to grasp. It was a perfect ratio that was always present in every circle: the ratio of the circumference to the diameter. Insert it into an equation, and you could make the numbers come to life. Zoe had the ability to look at a circle and see those numbers right away, her head computing the numbers easily, but for others, it was even more mystifying.

  “They are not random and irrational, they just look it,” Zoe said, trying to be patient as she explained, even though she felt the tug of his question holding her back. She needed to keep thinking, to follow this train of thought to the end. “Just like pi. We have no idea how to understand the sequence, no rule to follow to see how the sequence repeats. But that does not mean there is no rule, only that we do not yet understand it. And we are the same. We do not understand yet the rule behind these murders.”

  “Isn’t that kind of the point of a murder investigation?” Flynn asked, screwing his face up. “Finding out who did it and why? I don’t see what that has to do with pi. It’s the same for every case.”

  Zoe shook her head, turning around in a circle as she tried to think. “You do not get it. It is deeper than that. More involved.” He couldn’t see what she was talking about. Was there even any point in trying to explain it? No one understood what she was talking about half the time anyway, and this was far more complex than what she was normally trying to say. “This is almost philosophical. A search for a pattern where there seems to be none. Making the irrational rational, at least in a mathematical way; there is not much in the way of rational thought involved when you are killing someone over a formula.”

  “Jesus, I’m starting to think you actually might be crazy,” Flynn said. Zoe wasn’t looking at him anymore, didn’t bother trying to read his expression. “Wait a minute, what’s that?”

  Zoe turned again to see Flynn crouching down by her, reaching out for something that glinted in the light as he picked it up. Zoe recognized it immediately, went to snatch it back. Her blister pack.

  Flynn held it out of her reach easily, using the advantage of her height, as he squinted up to read the name printed across the packaging in a repeated motif. “Agent Prime, are these anti-depressants?”

  Zoe’s mouth worked without sound for a moment. Her instinct was to lie. But a quick Google search was all that would be needed to uncover the truth, and she had given herself away by reaching for them. Not that she would have let them go unclaimed. They would
have to be entered into evidence, form a red herring that could totally derail the case. She had to be honest. The pills didn’t belong to the killer. They were hers.

  “Yes,” Zoe finally ground out. “But that is private. Give it back.”

  “Why do you need it back?” Flynn asked. “It’s empty. Hold on—you’ve been taking these while we’ve been working the case?”

  “That is my business,” Zoe said sullenly. She resisted the urge to reach for the blister pack again, feeling like a kid with her books being wrenched away from her by the bullies at school.

  “No, I think it’s my business too,” Flynn said flatly. The pack went into his pocket, away from her view. “You were drinking last night. That means you were mixing alcohol and medication while on the job.”

  Zoe said nothing. She looked at the ground, seeing the number of leaves that had freshly fallen. There was nothing she could say.

  “Jesus Christ.” Flynn barked out a laugh, though it didn’t sound humorous at all. “I wondered how you managed to get yourself so drunk in the few minutes I was gone. Pills and alcohol. Prime, you could have died. If I had known what was going on I would have taken you to the hospital to get your stomach pumped.”

  Zoe felt like rolling her eyes. “That is a little melodramatic,” she said. “I was not in any danger. I only had one drink.”

  “And you were acting like you’d had twenty.” Flynn paused, looking over to where the sheriff and her team were marking out a perimeter with crime scene tape. The muscle in his jaw flexed, a habitual movement that Zoe was subconsciously tracking: three times now. “I can’t wait until the case is over to report this. I have to do it now.”

  “What?” Zoe snapped, her eyes going to his as he turned back to face her. “You cannot do that. We are so close to catching the killer. He has already taken three lives.”

  “And I’ll continue trying to stop him on my own, and when they send out a replacement agent I’ll be able to get them up to speed so we can get this done,” he said firmly. “You are in no condition to be working. You shouldn’t be on the job if you’re having to take these pills, and if your instinct is to drink on the case, then you have deeper problems. You need to go home.”