Face of Murder

He was waiting in the parking lot at the hospital, waiting for it to slowly empty out.

The doctor would come out soon. He needed to see the doctor. Needed to make the doctor pay.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of his refuge. His hiding place. Like a hunter. Waiting for a deer to come along that he could shoot.

Not a deer. Too cute, too nice. Something savage and wild.

He would eat the—deer for dinner.

Deer, deer… what was… what was he thinking about?

The doctor.

His eyes were trained on the exit, the entrance, the window, the—what do you call it? He waited for a familiar sight. Someone that he recognized. A refuge that he had seen before, because he looked it up, looked it up on purpose.

No, not just anyone. The doctor had to pay. He was going to smash the doctor’s head in like he did the others. The blood and brains spilling out over his fingers like—snakes. Like? The snakes out like brains over blood fingers. Like that. Yes, like that.

He cut himself off with a memory, a gasp of fear still that always came when he thought about it. The cr—the bad thing. The thing that had ruined everything, that flooded into his mind with such clarity he wanted to wail for it to stop.

He didn’t know how he got there. There was nothing in his memory, a gap between getting into the car and then here. Now he was afraid, knowing instinctively that something was wrong. Something had happened.

The car was still around him but not quite quiet. Small noises, like dripping and the settling of metal. He heard those first. Then he pried his eyes open—and why were they closed?—to a light that startled him with its intensity. He gasped and shut his eyes again, wanting to shut it out.

But he had to know. He forced himself to endure the pain of the brightness, his eyes starting to adjust the longer he held them open. Good. Now he could focus a little more, look around. Like he suspected, he was still in the car.

But the car was… well, no longer the car.

On the passenger side, right next to him, everything was mangled metal and twisted and ripped fabric. The seat was destroyed, the frame of the window almost reaching out as if it would touch his elbow. There was something in the car—actually in the car, so close he could touch it—a kind of concrete structure, a block that extended upward.

He followed it up with his eyes and found the source of the startling light. A streetlight.

He had crashed into a streetlight.

The realization flooded in, and in the next moment, the fact that his side of the car was undamaged. The steering wheel was still in place, the door unbent, nothing at all out of order. He had escaped what might have been a very nasty death indeed.

He laughed in relief, but the movement sent pain ricocheting through his head in a way he had never known. He groaned and put his hands up to his temples, grasping there. Something wet—something slick. He pulled his hands down and looked, and saw that his fingers were red with blood.

His eyes focused a little beyond, in front of the steering wheel. There was blood there, too. He had hit his head.

There was the sound of a siren in the distance, and as he looked ahead, he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection from a piece of glass that stubbornly hung on to the bent and twisted structure of the windshield frame. Wide eyes under a forehead smeared with blood, pooling down it. It dripped down, over his left eye and onto his cheek.

The siren was getting closer, as he looked at himself in horror.

Maybe he had not escaped something nasty at all.

The doctor!

He sprang forward, his hands on the handle of the—window. He would get out and go toward him, distract him, get him alone. But—wait!

Over there—the man—another colleague. A robe like all doctors wore, white around his shoulders. The doctor, the doctor! The doctor had to pay! Pay for this agony, this jumble, this mess!

No, no, no, no, no—the other man was ruining everything. Everything. He walked with the doctor and talked with him, flapping his—arm as the words came out, talking and talking and just never shutting up. The doctor talked back and they walked and they talked out into the parking lot.

He shrank in the seat and watched, watched them, waited for something. The third one. The third brains like snakes, it had to be. The sky formed—ribbons like murky water to fall above him, falling, falling. The doctor was getting wet. He went back to the hospital. The other man ran the distance to his refuge and got in and slammed the window shut behind him.

That man, that man! Blast that man and damned him and let him rot in—in space! He ruined it all! The man’s engine started, the light was on through the window, the thrum-thrum of the car moved away. The sky ribbons fell and fell like tears from above, like the whole sky could feel how he was feeling.

And who could know how he was feeling? All of it gone, lost, vanished on the wind like smoke from a—cannon. Disappeared and gone. His mind, his brilliant, beautiful mind. It was everything.

Now the snakes were crawling around up there and the doctor was on call all night and the lights were going on around him and the people ran under ribbons falling so fast. The window mist was the fog in his head, the pain, the words falling like snakes and ribbons.

He covered his eyes until the headache subsided and drove away, back home, back to wait for another chance. He had to make the doctor pay.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Zoe was already wide awake, dressed and ready to go, when her alarm went off in the morning. It had been a restless night, and almost a sleepless one. She had tormented herself all night long, before rising sleep-deprived and groggy to admit defeat.

Even if sleep eluded her, she was determined that the answer to the equations would not. She had some of the finest minds in the math world on the case; even if she was not good enough to figure them out herself, someone else would. That was the mantra she soothed herself with as she drove to the field office, sipping hot coffee and only just managing to concentrate on the road.

She had barely stepped two feet into the office when her cell rang.

“Zoe,” Dr. Applewhite exclaimed breathlessly down the phone.

Zoe was instantly on alert, her body tensing. “Have you discovered something?” she asked.

“No. Well, yes.” Dr. Applewhite hesitated. Zoe got the impression of movement from the noise in the background of the call: rustling papers and fabrics, footsteps pacing, the unusual cadence of Dr. Applewhite’s voice. She was pacing backward and forward. “I’ve heard back from most of the contacts I reached out to. You know what mathematicians are like; can’t resist a challenge. Most of them had a bit of a sleepless night.”

Zoe refrained from admitting that she had had the same experience. The less small talk the better; she wanted the answer, and she wanted it now. “Go on.”

“Well, here’s the thing. They, almost all of them, said the same thing. All agreed they couldn’t solve it—couldn’t make any real headway. But these are some of the best minds in the world, Zoe—really, the sharpest. If they can’t solve it… anyway, they tell me the equations are impossible. A few of them even asked me if it was possible that a practical joke had been played on me. Because, you see—what they think is—the equations are wrong.”

There was a beat. Zoe retraced the conversation mentally, Dr. Applewhite’s last word hanging in her ears. Had she really heard it correctly? “Wrong?”

“Precisely. Whoever wrote them down—well, they’re either writing gibberish, or they don’t understand what they’re writing. Several parts of it are just garbled, just absolute nonsense. There’s no wonder you couldn’t get anywhere with it. No one can.”

Zoe started pacing up and down, mirroring the frantic actions of her mentor, who was clearly just as excited about all of this as Zoe herself. Except that now something was wrong, something heavy sitting inside her chest and threatening to choke her. Wrong? Could that really be the case?

“I do not understand,” Zoe admitted, glancing up as the door opened to admit Shelley.

“I just don’t think your killer even knows what they’re writing on the bodies. This really widens things up, don’t you think? Realistically, if they’re so hard that not even our best and brightest can solve them, you would be looking for the best mathematician in the world. The odds of that happening are very low, you must admit.”

“Astronomically low,” Zoe muttered in reply, closing her eyes briefly against the deluge of calculations that instantly appeared in her mind, zeroes spiraling off into the distance.

Shelley was giving her a questioning frown as she settled her handbag down on a chair and removed her jacket, watching her carefully. Zoe turned away so that she didn’t have to meet her gaze. There was too much to explain, and unlike others who could seemingly multitask, Zoe had never been good at carrying on two conversations at once.

“It seems the most logical explanation would be that this person is simply, well, damaged. Psychologically speaking. A schizophrenic with paranoid delusions, or so forth. Perhaps they think they are writing down something of great importance. Maybe they believe it is a message from God, even. The point is, they have some kind of mental problem. There’s no math in it at all.”

That heavy stone of disappointment had settled firmly in Zoe’s stomach. It didn’t feel right. None of it felt right. But how much of that was her own desire to be right about the importance of the writing? She couldn’t be sure. “Right,” she said, hearing her own voice distantly. “I will take that into account as we investigate further.”