Face of Murder

There was no time to lose. Zoe gave a final, hard push, forcing her body beyond its natural breaking point.

Zoe’s heart pounded in time with her feet across the parking lot, and she crashed to a halt as her body collided with another. She thrust out her arms instinctively to keep hold of him, and pushed Jensen Jones up against the ten-foot fence so that he could not use his superior build to get away.

Shelley was only a few moments behind. She was heavily out of breath and red in the face with strands of hair flying out of her chignon, but she was there. She assisted Zoe in slapping a pair of handcuffs around his wrists, behind his back, as they panted out warnings about running from law enforcement and the right to question him. He only hung his head, trying to catch his own breath as well.

Zoe’s whole body felt like it had woken up. Air and light had supplanted the spaces in between her joints, the stretching out of long-dormant muscles feeling wonderful. Of course, there was also pain; particularly in her ankles, which had not at all enjoyed the jolting across the parking lot. Overall, she felt great. There was something about the rush of wind in your hair as you raced someone else—and won.

***

The apartment building felt different to Zoe, now that it was empty of everyone except for herself, Shelley, and Jensen. The guests had scattered to the four winds, and the residents along with them. No doubt they were going for plausible deniability.

Zoe poked around the apartment that housed Jensen Jones, sniffing at thirteen cups still full of a liquid that was definitely not water and checking four ashtrays. Shelley had sat the kid down on the sofa in the open-plan room, dragging a dining chair over to sit opposite him. There were not many clean seating options left, so Zoe opted to stand and wander.

Despite his apparent inebriation, the kid was not far gone enough to misunderstand what was happening to him. In fact, he appeared to have sobered up quite nicely with the joint impact of his run and the revelation that they were FBI, not local cops.

“It was just a party,” he muttered, his eyes sweeping the floor as if looking for a traitor sign of something more serious. “Since when does the FBI get called to parties?”

“We don’t, Mr. Jones,” Shelley said, with an air of conspiracy. “Actually, we were looking for you specifically. In connection with another matter.”

Zoe was already up to twenty-two cups. Just how many people had been squeezed into this party? Given that they were still running when Zoe and Shelley left the building, she had to guess at more than a hundred.

There was nothing but confusion on Jones’s face. “What other matter?” he asked.

“There was a professor who tragically lost his life here yesterday,” Shelley said. Zoe watched her face, watching her watch him for a sign. She was getting to know Shelley better. It was easier for her to read Shelley than a stranger. “Professor Henderson was your former professor, was he not?”

“Yeah,” Jones said, then sat up straighter with a look of alarm. “Hey, but listen, I wasn’t involved in all that!”

“How did you feel about Professor Henderson?” Shelley pressed.

“Uh, he was okay. I mean. It’s super sad that he died. Everyone’s in shock.”

There were seven stubs of cigarettes in the ashtrays. They looked hand-rolled. Probably not tobacco. Zoe lowered her nose slightly and sniffed, her suspicion confirmed by the scent coming off them. And in Jones’s apartment, too. He wasn’t going to be able to put up much of an argument that it wasn’t him, or that he didn’t know the party was going on.

“I’d like to read you something,” Shelley said, taking out her phone. “Let’s see… it starts like this: ‘Professor, I can’t believe you flunked me. Like, are you serious? I tried really goddamn hard on his paper and you just decided to kick me off the course!’”

“Okay, okay.” Jones held his hands up. He obviously recognized his own words. “Yes, I sent it. But it—it doesn’t mean I did anything! I was just super angry when he flunked me. After I sent the email I felt kinda bad. I should have been nicer. Maybe he would’ve let me back into class.”

“So you’re saying that you sent this angry, threatening email to Professor Henderson, coincidentally right before he was brutally murdered in a manner that smacks of personal anger, but you have nothing to do with that?”

Jones swallowed and looked down. “I get how it looks. I do. But I wasn’t that angry. I’ll just take a different course next semester. Try something different. I haven’t decided my major yet anyway.”

Shelley switched tacks with a cool and effortless manner, something that Zoe was beginning more and more to admire. “Cole Davidson was the SI in your physics class, wasn’t he?”

Jones blinked: once, then twice. “I… yes, I guess he was. I mean, I never really spoke to him all that much.”

“You attended class, did you not?”

“Yes, but, I, I mean, I didn’t know him or anything, I—I mean—are you really suggesting that I…?”

“You tell us, Mr. Jones. Did you have anything to do with this? Or do you know who did?”

Jones shook his head five times in long sweeps side to side, his mouth working soundlessly as the reality of his situation washed over him. Zoe counted beads of sweat on his forehead. He was nervous, but it was hard to tell if that was because he had been caught or because he was being falsely accused.

“No, wait, this isn’t right,” he said, at last. “I wasn’t—when Cole went missing. I wasn’t in that area. I had class—a night class—you can check the records. And when the professor was killed last night—it was in the night, wasn’t it?”

“Around eleven p.m.,” Zoe spoke up, examining a sideboard behind him. He flinched at the sound of her voice.

“Right, so, then, I couldn’t have done that either,” Jones babbled, holding his hands in front of him in a gesture of appeal. “I was working. I work in a bar. Extra money, to get me through college. My boss will tell you. And I’ll be on the cameras there, too.”

There was a moment of silence that met this proclamation. Zoe and Shelley met eyes, both thinking the same thing. He had an alibi, one that would be exceptionally easy to check. And they would check it—of course they would. But for now, he was looking increasingly unlikely as a suspect, and they would have to let him go.

Or, at least, let him go to a different kind of law enforcement.

“You’re twenty years old, isn’t that right, Mr. Jones?” Shelley asked.

He nodded mutely.

“Well, I can smell the alcohol on your breath from here. Special Agent Prime?”

“There are smoked joints in the ashtray.”

“That’s two counts.” Shelley smiled, as if she and Jones were sharing a friendly discussion. “Not your best week for decisions, is it?”

Jones groaned. “Oh, come on, I didn’t do anything. You can let it go just this once, right?”

“Wrong.” Zoe loomed behind him. “We will wait here with you until the local police can come and pick you up. We would not want you to go and dispose of any evidence.”

Jones buried his head in his hands as Shelley got up to make the call, and Zoe watched him carefully for signs of running again. The tension in his muscles remained slack, and the angle of his feet to the floor remained the same; he was not priming to leap.

Even the satisfaction of knowing that she had been right was not enough to make her feel better. There was still the not at all small matter of two murders to solve, and this night had not taken them any closer to doing that. If anything, it had put them further away.

Zoe checked her watch. Twenty-four hours since Professor Henderson had been murdered. They only had another twenty-four to really get it right.

Beyond that, their chances of solving this case dropped dramatically, and there was a murder-crazed mathematician out there who would get away with it.

CHAPTER NINE

Back at the FBI field office, Zoe felt like tearing her hair out. That would at least allow her to feel something other than this screaming frustration, the numbers seeming to dance on the page and taunt her the more she looked at them.

She had copied both equations onto large sheets of paper and tacked them to the walls, but it made no difference. She could still only get two-thirds of the way through the workings before she became hopelessly, utterly lost.

It was as if the last part of the equation just made no sense at all. It was so far above her head that it might as well have been written in a foreign alphabet.

“It’s late,” Shelley sighed.

She was right; it was. After waiting for the local cops to show up and handing Jensen Jones into their custody, then making their way back to HQ before settling in to work the slim leads they had, it was now past midnight. Pythagoras and Euler would be hungry, and Shelley’s daughter was no doubt already in bed since hours ago. They should have both been at home.

If this had been a normal, paperwork or testifying in court kind of day, they might have been. But this was a murder investigation kind of day, and that meant the work didn’t stop until someone was behind bars—or put into the morgue before they could take another life.