Face of Murder

Shelley was twisting the pendant she wore, a gold arrow set with a diamond that she had inherited from her grandmother, around and around in her fingers. “I told him that since you were really good with math, we would be able to get a better start on it than anyone else.”

Zoe resisted the urge to slam on the brakes, keeping the car steady and smooth. She focused on the road until the rushing in her head had slowed down, and spoke deliberately and calmly. “You said I was ‘good with math’?”

“That’s all I said, I swear. I didn’t tell them the truth. Not about, you know, what you can do.”

Shelley sounded apologetic, but that was not quite enough to make the roaring in Zoe’s ears go away. Good with math. That was close to the truth, too close to be comfortable. It was almost an admission.

Maybe she had made a grave mistake, trusting Shelley to not give away her secret. But her partner had sworn, so many times over, that she would never reveal it to anyone without Zoe’s consent. While she technically had still not done that, it was close. Too close.

“Look, it’s fine, isn’t it?” Shelley asked. Her voice had risen in pitch now. “I’m really sorry if you didn’t want me to say that, but it’s just a little piece of the way things really are. Not the whole picture. And anyone can be good at math, you know? It doesn’t make you that much different.”

Zoe’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel, so tight the rubber grips made a quiet noise, and she worked her jaw stiffly. “It was not up to you to tell them that.”

“I just—I didn’t think it would be a big deal, to say that much.” Shelley sighed, slumping back against the passenger seat headrest. “I messed up, I can see that now. I’m sorry. But after you solved our big case in Kansas, surely they would have to figure that you’re good with numbers anyway. I know I can’t tell anyone, and I won’t, but I don’t know why you feel you need to hide it.”

Zoe gritted her teeth. Of course, Shelley didn’t understand. Shelley hadn’t been there. She hadn’t been forced to pray by her bed on the cold floor all night, her mother shrieking and sermonizing about the devil’s gift. She hadn’t been scolded at school for her distraction, or made fun of and ostracized by the other children for the uncanny things she could tell just by looking at them.

She hadn’t been there through every failed relationship Zoe had endured, misunderstood time and time again, left with nothing but the label “freak” and another broken heart.

“It is my secret to tell, or not, as I choose,” she said firmly, once her heart was beating slow enough again that she could say the words instead of spit them, and Shelley had the wisdom to forgo a reply.

They pulled up outside the coroner’s office and Zoe slammed the car door behind her, stalking over to the entrance. Then she stopped. It would do no good at all to go into the examination with this kind of energy hanging over her. She had to forget it, put it on a shelf inside her mind and come back to it later. For now, she had to be professional.

The coroner, a trim Asian woman in her mid-forties with sharp eyes and hair cut at a sharp ninety-degree bob in line with her chin, was obliging enough. She showed them the professor’s body, and stood back respectfully while they made their examination.

Lying naked on the metal gurney, the man was reduced to nothing more than white meat. Take the sheet away, and it was hard for Zoe to connect and keep connected the lines between this hunk of dead flesh and the man it had been. Whoever he was had long gone. She could see it still, in the yellowed fingertips that spoke of a nicotine habit and the small inch-long impression over his left ear where he had spent years wearing ill-fitting glasses. But the essence, the being, whatever it was that had once filled this body and animated it, was nowhere to be found.

It was better that way. People distracted her. They hid their true selves behind words and gestures that she could not always understand. But bodies could not lie. They were as they were, no more and no less.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that his face was gone. Smashed inward. The nose had been reduced to an entirely flat plane of the face, all the bumps and curves pressed against the inside of his skull now. The right side of the head, too, was cracked and squashed, bearing clear lines of impact. No one could have survived that. Even one of his eyes was gone.

The equation was there on his torso, written out sideways from the top of his chest to just below his navel. It was all as it seemed in the photographs—the full piece had been captured faithfully. Wearing uncomfortable white disposable gloves, Zoe turned over each of his arms and legs, and even hefted him onto his side with Shelley’s assistance. Nowhere could they see any other trace of ink, or indeed any marking that could hint at being a missing part of the equation.

“They didn’t miss anything,” Shelley said out loud, confirming the growing frustration that was building in the center of Zoe’s forehead.

“The other one.” Zoe turned to look at the coroner. “We need to see the student as well.”

The coroner shrugged, making a gesture that seemed to suggest she thought it pointless, and walked over to open another tray of the metal filing cabinet that served as a temporary resting place. She tugged it open with a long scraping sound of well-oiled metal on metal, and stepped back to allow them access to the resident.

The college student looked even younger than he had in the photographs, lying on the cold metal tray with all the blood drained out of his cheeks and the color with it. The top of his head was a mess, open and crushed inward. He was covered with a respectful sheet, but respect was only an obstacle in this case. Zoe stepped closer and tugged it aside, noting Shelley’s reluctance to do so.

For a long second, Zoe stared, unable to comprehend what she was looking at. Then she briefly wondered if they had pulled out the wrong body, but she had recognized his face from the crime scene photos. Finally, disbelief reigned, and she turned on the coroner with a glower that had the other woman backing away.

“Where are the equations?” Zoe asked, her tone low and flat, menacing enough to tell anyone about the anger behind it.

“Well, we performed the autopsy,” the coroner stuttered, feeling for a metal table behind her to steady herself. “We always wash the bodies to perform the autopsy.”

“You scrubbed away the evidence.”

Shelley stepped closer to lay a gentle hand on Zoe’s arm, perhaps warning her to cool down. Zoe ignored it. She was seething, every muscle in her body wanting to explode in a burst of energy and throw something at the wall. Maybe at the coroner.

The only reason she didn’t was that it was very clearly against the professional code of conduct. How could they have allowed something like this to happen?

“Who authorized the cleaning?” Shelley asked, her tone quiet and calm. She stepped forward, slightly in front of Zoe, as if shielding her.

The coroner fumbled for paperwork, still stuttering, her face gone pale. Zoe couldn’t take any more. She stalked out of the room with a growl in the back of her throat, slamming the door behind her for good measure. It being a swing door, the movement lost some of its effect, but it released some of the tension in her body all the same.

Shelley joined her a couple minutes later, finding her pacing up and down at the end of the corridor.

“We should have them written up for tampering with evidence,” Zoe said, as soon as Shelley was close enough to hear.

“They were within the scope of their instructions,” Shelley sighed, shrugging her shoulders. “The photographer felt they had captured everything. We’re just going to have to take their word for it.”

“They should be punished anyway. Do they not have common sense? It was clearly evidence. And the lead investigators not having even seen the body yet!”

“Well, in fairness, this was a local case when they did the autopsy, not a federal one. What’s done is done. We just have to work with what we have.”

Shelley was being rational; too rational. Zoe didn’t like it. She wanted a justification for the frustration she felt, dammit, a common feeling between the two of them. She hated being made to feel like she was the freak with the problem. Things being done incorrectly was a problem. People were supposed to do the jobs they were paid for. That was how society worked.

“Something like that should have been obviously important,” Zoe said, trying one last attempt at lulling Shelley into her own rage.

It was not to be. “We’ve got to keep moving anyway,” Shelley said, stepping outside and looking back to make sure Zoe was following her. “Should we go talk to the professor’s wife next?”

Zoe nodded, giving up. Maybe she was overreacting. She had been told that she could do that, on occasion.

There was more to this case than the physical evidence on the bodies. Of course, the math was tantalizing, as was the target of a respected university. But there was always another story to be heard from the family of the victims, the people who knew them.

Perhaps Mrs. Henderson would be able to shed some light on her husband’s death—and get this frustrating case wrapped up sooner rather than later.

CHAPTER FIVE

Shelley took the driver’s seat, an uncommon occurrence when she was driving with her partner. Shelley knew that Zoe was normally carsick, but today she was so preoccupied with her equations that she hardly seemed to notice the roads flashing by. She wasn’t even clutching at her seatbelt, her usual tell for discomfort.

Shelley glanced over whenever she had a chance—waiting at intersections or paused in a line of traffic. What Zoe was scribbling down frantically across multiple pages of her notebook made no sense at all to her. They might as well have been hieroglyphics.

Zoe had a real gift when it came to numbers, but there were other sides to that too. A single-minded obsession could take over at times, like now. As much as Shelley wanted to help, she had no idea what was required—and Zoe wasn’t about to tell her. She was like that fairly often, too. Quiet, closed off. Shelley had heard the stories about her previous partners, and it wasn’t hard to extrapolate that she maybe had given up on trusting people with her thoughts a long time ago.

Zoe was used to working alone. If she had her way, Shelley was going to change that. It just might take her a long while to get there. In the meantime, she would have to keep prompting her and reminding her to share her thoughts.

Just maybe not about math. Shelley could trust her to work on the math alone.

The English professor lived across town, in one of the flashier suburbs, white-painted houses with wide lawns and matching white fences. Shelley pulled up outside, killing the engine, and waited for Zoe to notice.

She didn’t even look up.

There were times when Shelley felt that she needed to tread carefully around Zoe—to handle her with the utmost care. With kid gloves. Which was somewhat ironic, given that Shelley spent all of her time at home being a parent. There were more than a few times that she felt she was doing the same thing at work, even if Zoe was the older of the two of them.

“We’re here,” Shelley said, softly, not wanting to startle Zoe out of the middle of the calculations she was working on.