Face of Murder

Zoe sat as she was bidden, setting down a takeout coffee in front of Shelley. It had become a habit of theirs. Zoe provided the coffee, and Shelley would provide all the polite conversation that was needed during the case. Each of them taking care of something that they could actually manage.

“Special Agent Rose has all the information, but I’ll give you an overview. We have two bodies on our hands already, and this looks like a local case, so you won’t need to travel.” Maitland folded his arms over his chest, causing the material of his suit to visibly strain at the shoulders. “We’ll be under some pressure from the local press given that one of the victims was high-profile in the community. You are no doubt also familiar with the urgency of preventing a third death and having the term ‘serial killer’ attached by journalists.”

Zoe nodded. That kind of reporting could cause hysteria and end up impeding the case. It was also likely to spread the news further—and that meant more national or even international press to deal with. FBI agents were used to dealing with high-pressure situations, but that did not mean they were welcome. Particularly for Zoe, who would be counting microphones and analyzing the lengths of television camera cables rather than concentrating on her press conference speech.

“Given your lateness…” Maitland continued. Zoe felt her mouth beginning to open in protest, but she clamped it shut. She had arranged to take some time off this morning for her brunch, exchanging some of the many, many hours of unpaid overtime she had worked. She was hardly late. But one did not argue with the Special Agent in Charge of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “I have already briefed your partner. I will leave her to dispense the details to you. Given your proclivity for math, we thought this would be an excellent fit for your skillset. Don’t let me down.”

Maitland swept out of the room without pausing to look back. Zoe noted his hand straying immediately to his pocket as he left the room, and figured the inch-thick bulge was likely a cell phone. He was a busy man, with calls to make and further briefings to give. It wasn’t likely that they would see him much until the case was done—unless they messed something up, in which case he was liable to come down like the figurative ton of bricks.

Given Maitland’s size, and that a ton was two thousand pounds, he wasn’t really like a ton of bricks at all. More like a tenth of that value.

“Two victims,” Shelley said, grabbing Zoe’s attention without so much as a polite triviality to start the conversation. She was starting to know Zoe better, and she must have realized by now that such comments would make no positive difference to their relationship. Zoe had noticed at least a seventy percent decrease in small talk since they had begun working together. “Both of them in our own backyard. DC metro area.”

“I hope not in either of our actual backyards. As federal agents, you would think we might notice.”

Shelley’s eyes flashed with a spark as she nudged Zoe in the ribs. “Was that an actual joke? What’s in this coffee?”

“I was with an old friend this morning. I suppose it put me in a good mood.”

“Then I’m sorry to break that.” Shelley pointed to the two victim files, spread out carefully and separated in a deliberate way. “This is the first victim, from about a week ago. He was a young grad student, found on the grounds of the Georgetown campus. His head was bashed in with a heavy object—forensics say that it was probably a bat.”

“Six days,” Zoe murmured, her eyes scanning the file. She picked up his information: six feet tall, one hundred eighty pounds, twenty-three years old.

“Sorry, yes.” Shelley was evidently still getting used to the precision that Zoe expected, even if they were finding it easy to settle in in other ways. “The second victim was last night. An English professor at Georgetown, his head was smashed repeatedly against the side of his own car until irreparable cranial damage had been inflicted.”

“The college is the connection.”

“Not just that.” Shelley shuffled the photographs, drew out overhead shots that showed the crime scene in full. “Both of them had their shirts ripped open—and I mean ripped, with some violence. It seems the act of killing wasn’t enough to sate the killer’s anger. Then there are these… well, see for yourself.”

Zoe all but snatched the images from Shelley’s hands. She had already begun to recognize the form of the markings scribbled across both men’s torsos, and a closer look confirmed it. They had both been emblazoned with complex mathematical equations—complex enough that Zoe pulled out a chair and sank into it without taking her eyes away.

“Have these been shown to any potential witnesses? Friends, faculty members, students?”

“In the case of the first victim, yes. The local cops showed the image around. Heavily cropped to just the equation itself, of course. They just finished circulating the other shot this morning, though we may still be able to dig up a few more leads, I suppose.”

“And?”

Shelley shrugged. “No one knows what it means.”

Zoe knew well enough that the math department at Georgetown had a good stock of professionals, and if they couldn’t figure it out, that meant that this was some serious kind of equation. “It looks like quantum math.”

“That’s what a few of the professors said. But they don’t recognize it as anything that any of them have seen before, or been working on.”

Zoe continued staring at the equation, her mind racing along and through all the complex signs and numbers and letters, trying to find at least an entrance into the pattern. “What other leads do we have?”

Shelley sifted through a few more pages. “I was just getting there when you came in. Let me see… the student’s roommates and friends have all been questioned, as well as his family and teaching staff. He was in an area of the campus which isn’t covered by cameras, right in a dead spot.”

“Convenient,” Zoe sighed. She wished that just once, they would get hold of a case that had been committed in full sight of witnesses or caught on camera. Of course, they didn’t usually call in the FBI for the ones that were easy to solve.

“As for the professor, looks like there were only cameras at the entrance to the parking lot. So many people come in and out of there all day, and we don’t have eyes on one of the pedestrian exits at all. Nothing suspicious caught on camera.”

“No leads at all,” Zoe noted, propping her chin on one hand as she went over the equation for the seventeenth time already. Slower, faster, it wasn’t making much difference. This was like nothing she had ever come across. Far beyond the level that she had studied during her own time in college.

She switched to the other one, the professor. It seemed just the same. What was this?

“What do you want to do first?” Shelley asked, completing her own study of the files.

“Just a second.” Zoe had not even taken the time to check the second victim’s particulars yet, but there was time for that. She took out her notebook and pen and started writing, making quick and sharp indentations on the page as she began to sketch out an initial working. Greek letters, lines, brackets, downward-pointing triangles—all symbols in quantum math had an equivalent meaning that would reveal a number. M divided by t” minus t’, one divided by s’ then added to one divided by s”, and so on and so forth, all to find the value of B

which could later be inserted back into another line of the equation to work out the value of another figure.

The workings started easily enough. If the value of M was equal to the value of r’, then the first two lines made perfect sense; but then the third line disrupted it all, and appeared to give a totally different value for M. Fine; she worked it through another way. Perhaps M was, in fact, double the value of r’, which still made enough sense there, and made the third line work—but by the sixth line, the value of M had to be shown to reach zero, and there again it all made no sense.

When Zoe looked up again, she had no idea how much time had passed. At some point, Shelley had sat down opposite her, and was thumbing through something on the screen of her cell.

“This does not make any sense,” Zoe announced.

Shelley looked up, lifting a carefully shaped eyebrow. “You can’t work them out?”

Zoe’s lips flattened into a thin line before she could make herself admit it. “I cannot work them out yet,” she said. “Maybe we are missing some kind of clue. This is definitely all of it? There was not something written on their backs, or arms, or elsewhere?”

“I know as much as you know,” Shelley said. “I’ve been reading up on the professor. Nothing stands out from his academic history, or from what I can see of his personal life that has made it online.”

“Check the photos again,” Zoe suggested, handing her a bundle and picking up some for herself. She pored over the shots, her eyes taking in the angles of bones, the degree at which a leg had bent in death, the length of the rips in their shirts versus the visible strength of the material and its stitching. Nowhere could she see any connection. Not in their heights, weight, their ages—and no hint of any other ink slashed across their skin.

The worrying thing, of course, was that mathematical patterns became easier to predict the more data you had. Two numbers could seem unconnected, any number of possibilities between them, too many to decide on a definite course. Three numbers, well, that would allow one to make more of a case, begin a formula. But that would require another death.

And they certainly didn’t want another death.

“I’ve got nothing,” Shelley said, shaking her head.

“Swap,” Zoe suggested, handing her bundle over and taking Shelley’s in return. “The only thing of note is the angle of the impact on the first victim’s head. The attacker was a little shorter, probably five nine.”

And again, it was the same. The same frustrating nothing. No hint of ink on clothing, no trailing off of the numbers underneath fabric, nothing in the general vicinity. The parking garage spaces were not numbered, and nor were there numbers on the walls, on the concrete columns holding up the ceiling, on the grass near where the student was found.

Nothing.

Zoe gave up, shaking her head. “I need to see the professor’s body,” she said. “It is the only way we are going to spot something that the photographs do not already tell us.”

“Great,” Shelley said. It was possible that she was being sarcastic; Zoe had always had a hard time telling the difference. “Then let’s go take a close look at a dead guy.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Zoe tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as they drove over to the local coroner, glancing sideways at Shelley. There was something about this case that was already bothering her, and she had to voice the doubts that were creeping into her head before they became obsessive. “It’s funny that Maitland knew I would want to work on a math-based case. I have never discussed with him that I enjoy working with numbers.”

Shelley cleared her throat slightly, not turning to meet Zoe’s eyes. “Well, I volunteered us for this one. I just happened to hear it coming in, and, well, the chief agreed we could take it.”

Zoe digested this for a moment. She didn’t usually get things from her boss just because she asked for them. “Just like that? You did not need to persuade him?”