Face of Death

She stepped back, gesturing for the piece of paper, taking it from Shelley’s hands and examining it herself. The name of the place was right. So then, why wasn’t it where it was supposed to be?

Zoe looked up, and by chance her eyes dragged over another part of the map as she oriented herself, and the name jumped out at her. There. But not at all where she had expected it to be. It was way off to the side, far above the latest pin. Zoe pushed the new marker into the wall and then stood back again, taking it all in.

And, oh, how stupid she felt at that moment, now with all of the clues in her possession.

What she had at first mistaken for a straight line with clumsy deviations, and then for a curve, was in fact neither of those things. The turn was too steep to be accurately described as a curve. It was a shape instead, a shape that had yet to be completed.

But it was too steep, again, for it to be a circle. If the data points ever did meet in a closed loop, it would have been squished and off-centered, a strange misshapen thing. The pattern mattered far too much to the killer for him to make that kind of mistake. No, it was not a circle.

It was a spiral—or it was going to be, once he finished it.

A little squished, a little strained, but a spiral.

How could she have missed this for so long? Rubie wouldn’t have needed to die if Zoe had worked out that the next point would be somewhere along that highway. They could have stationed cars and dogs and helicopters. They could have caught him, even if his spiral was too deviant from a truly composed shape to be completely accurate with her estimations.

But did that fit with what she was thinking? If he was focused on the pattern, would he really allow it to be so imperfect? That didn’t seem to sit right with Zoe.

The victims didn’t matter, and they never had. Their killer was just picking someone in the right place at the right time—for his purposes, at least—and making them into a pin on a map. If the victims didn’t matter, and the killer was so angry at his latest victim for running, then—

Zoe took the pin out of the woods, where the body had been found, and moved it back to the very entrance of the access road. The point where he had actually attacked.

“Shelley, was the victim found dead in the place where the attack happened?” she asked, urgency in her voice.

Shelley flipped through the other pages that the fax machine was still spitting out, frowning. “Hold on, let me… Um… No, it doesn’t seem like it. The man was found outside a farmhouse—wait, man? That breaks the pattern.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Zoe said impatiently. “Come on. Where was he attacked?”

“On the grounds of the farm.” Shelley stepped forward, placing her finger on the map. “Here. It looks like he ran.”

Zoe moved the red pin, just a small degree. But when she had done that, the spiral was neater, more composed, more aligned with what she might have expected. It turned out that they had been looking at it wrong from the very beginning. It was not the sites where bodies were recovered that mattered. It was where the attacks took place—the specific and precise locations where the killer wanted them to be.

The phone rang again, somewhere distantly at the range of Zoe’s attention. She ignored it, letting Shelley take care of it. That was not important right now. What was important was the pattern.

He had not waited for the gas station attendant to round a corner because he wanted to distract her, or give her false hope, or because it was all a game. It had been there because it had to be there, otherwise his spiral would not work.

In fact, looking at it now, Zoe would call it a perfect spiral. Nothing was a mistake, and there was no deviation. This was a perfect spiral of the kind that was seen everywhere in nature, a Fibonacci spiral, the spacing decreasing in precise ratios until it reached an end point.

That meant two things. The first was heartening: it was that there was going to be an end to the murders.

The second was less so.

It was that there were three more murders to come before the spiral was complete.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Zoe waited for Shelley to finish her call, tying up loose ends, discussing the latest body. All kinds of thoughts raced through Zoe’s mind, calculations and flashes of the prior crime scenes, things linking up and making so much more sense. She saw distances between scenes, diminishing in distance each time, painting the picture that she should have seen all along.

Shelley put the phone back in its cradle and moved back to the fax machine, seemingly unaware of the epiphany that had overwhelmed Zoe for the long minutes since she had seen it.

“I have it,” Zoe breathed at last to get her attention, staring at the map in a mixture of wonder and horror. “I know where he is going to strike next.”

“What?” Shelley looked up, abandoning her attempt to marshal all of the pieces of paper that had finally stopped coming through the fax machine. “But I didn’t even tell you the rest of the details yet. What if this isn’t one of his?”

“It is his,” Zoe said.

“But it’s a man—that breaks his profile. Most killers don’t break gender or race lines. They target one thing and one thing only.”

“Shelley.” Zoe turned, gestured to the chairs. “I know they tell you all of that stuff in training. The statistics, the general rules that killers move by. But believe me—this is his. I can see his pattern now. Let me explain it.”

Shelley sat, her eyes wide, her arms folded on the desk in front of her. She looked totally nonplussed, though whether at the fact that Zoe finally had the answers or at the way she had spoken to her, Zoe couldn’t tell.

“We are dealing with a schizophrenic,” Zoe began, standing in front of her, presentation-style. “I believe he will have a precise form of schizophrenia known as apophenia.”

Shelley opened her notebook and wrote that down. “What does apophenia mean?”

“An apophenic is someone who is obsessed with patterns. When they are suffering from a delusional episode, they may feel that the patterns are speaking to them or that they are a sign left by a higher power. They see two things and create a connection between them, when there really is nothing there to see.”

“So, for example…” Shelley chewed on the end of her pen, frowning as she thought. “If I was saying out loud that I didn’t know what to do with my life, and I saw an advertising billboard immediately afterward that said ‘Visit Nashville,’ I would think that God was telling me to go to Nashville.”

“Good example. Except that with schizophrenics, this can go much further. They latch onto signs and patterns, and they become truly obsessed. Their lives become dedicated to these patterns. They might stand on a train track and wait for an encroaching train because the pattern told them to.”

“Or they might kill someone.” Shelley’s voice was soft and quiet.

Zoe paused, giving Shelley a moment’s respectful silence as she had noted others doing in serious situations, then nodded. “We thought for all of this time that he was cleaning up his crime scenes to prevent us from tracing him, that he was an accomplished and educated killer, someone who had enough knowhow to stop us from catching him. If I am right, that may well have been simply a lucky side effect of his need to keep the pattern intact. He erases himself, any marks left behind that could distort the pattern. That is all.”

“So, you know what his pattern is?”

“I do.” Zoe moved over to the map, indicating the red pins. “Look. If you follow them around in chronological order, we clearly have the beginnings of a spiral. A perfect spiral, in fact, modeled on the Fibonacci spiral.”

Shelley furrowed her brow. “That’s… hold on, let me try and remember. Something to do with nature, ratios in nature?”

“Correct. It is a series of numbers which define the ratios of many naturally occurring things. We see it in the shells of snails, the way petals grow on flowers, weather formations such as hurricanes. Almost everything, actually. To an apophenic, it might as well be catnip. The perfect obsession, because it really is everywhere.”

“But that means he has to keep killing, in order to finish the spiral.”

Zoe pulled out three new pins, pushing them into the precise points on the map where the spiral should be completed. “Three times. One of which will be tonight.”

“And those are the locations.” Shelley slipped her pen into her mouth, chewing the end of it. Her eyes were flicking backward and forward between Zoe and the map, as if she were trying to find some secret hidden message of her own.

“We need to put out alerts, and get a team together to stake out tonight’s location.”

“Wait,” Shelley said, shaking her head. “Are you… sure about this? I mean, you’ve moved some of the pins. And we’ve got no real clue about who the killer is, let alone whether or not he has any psychological problems. We’re going to mobilize half a state’s worth of law enforcement professionals on one location, based on the fact that there may be a spiral pattern? What if he’s just circling around his home, going out to a new location every night and getting closer because he’s getting cockier?”

Zoe had to admit, the way Shelley described it made sense. This wasn’t a television show, when the arrogant yet genius agent could pull all of the Bureau’s resources to track down a simple hunch. They needed proof, tangible evidence, and failing that, a strong sense of possibility. Much stronger than guesswork.

But it wasn’t guesswork. It was just hard to convince someone of that when you weren’t able to explain to them exactly how you knew what you knew.

“He would still move in the same direction.”