Morrison made a face, which she took to mean he was probably insulted by her decision to remove him from the car, but she didn’t care. Nor did she particularly pay any attention to him as he programmed the address into the GPS and got out, allowing Flynn to duck in and take his place. It only took them a couple of moments to be on the road again, traveling at Flynn’s usual breakneck speeds past witch-themed tour operators and public stocks left now for the amusement of tourists.
As much as Zoe hated the feeling of nausea that his driving style always induced, at least they would get to where they needed to be quickly—and tonight, time was absolutely of the essence.
“I’m glad to see the back of him,” Flynn commented, earning a brief nod from Zoe. She was thinking about the case, trying to turn things over in her mind. Running all the numbers again, attempting to get closer to a guess on the killer’s physical attributes. Unfortunately, there was very little data to go on. She knew that she was going to need more.
“I don’t know how you did that,” Flynn said, shaking his head. “At the crime scene. You did those calculations in your head.”
“Calculations?” Zoe repeated, lost for a moment. She had been following her own pathways, far away from the conversation, and now felt left behind.
“When we arrived and looked at the rope—we weren’t there more than a minute, and you’d already worked out the force needed to lift the body, and who would be able to do it, and even an equivalent weight for comparison.” Flynn made a self-deprecating snort. “I would have needed a pen and paper to work that out. Or at least more than half a minute. How do you do that?”
Zoe shook her head, looking out at the road ahead but no longer seeing the historic buildings flashing by them. A flare of panic rose up inside her, even though she remained outwardly cool. “Do what? It was just basic math. I am good with crunching numbers, that is all. I took math as my major.”
“Really?” Flynn paused. “I can’t imagine you as a student. You look like one of those people who’s always been an adult, you know?”
Zoe wondered if he meant that to be an insult. It felt like one. For her whole life, people had been picking up on the ways in which she was different. They told her she was too quiet, too anti-social. Too serious, mostly because she found it difficult to pick up on the social cues and cultural references that meant someone was joking. And she had been too gifted, too, the numbers making her stand out from the moment she entered school, even when she tried to hide them.
“I emancipated myself from my parents as a teenager,” she said, instead of telling him the rest of the truth, not even knowing really why she was giving him this much. Flynn didn’t need to know about the mental torture her mother had put her through, the long nights of enforced praying to be different. The way she had told her daughter she was cursed by the devil, all because of the numbers in her head. She had told Shelley everything, but Flynn was nothing at all like Shelley. He didn’t make Zoe want to open up to him, to tell him the truth because she knew he would be accepting. But here she was anyway, telling him a little piece of herself, something she almost always kept private. “I suppose I had to grow up fast.”
“Oh.” There was a beat, during which Flynn was perhaps figuring out what to say to that. “Well, uh, sorry. That was probably hard.”
Zoe shrugged. “I have no other upbringing to compare it to.”
“Yeah,” Flynn said, slowly. “I guess you wouldn’t.”
Silence grew between them again, comforting and familiar. Without his attention, Zoe could relax a little and let her mind run over the case. She didn’t need to control her expression, since he was looking at the road, so she could let it go blank. She didn’t need to say anything—or, if she did, she had missed the cue, so it didn’t matter.
She was almost back over a full analysis of all of the numbers that had come to her so far, particularly in relation to the bodies and their placements on the town map (which didn’t seem to be giving her any kind of clue) when Flynn shifted awkwardly in his seat next to her.
“Still,” he said, taking a left turn past an ominously spreading leafless tree that dominated the corner behind a cast-iron fence. “I mean, I’m not bad at math myself. But I’ve seen you do those ridiculous kinds of calculations before. Not just now, but in other cases. You always seem to just know how stuff works or who we’re looking for. You’d have to be… not just good at math. Like, a math prodigy. How do you do it?”
“Maybe I am a math prodigy,” Zoe said, hoping that would shut him up. The “maybe” could be enough to throw him off. Detectives, especially inexperienced ones, could get lost in a rabbit hole with a “maybe.” They’d know it didn’t mean yes, and start second-guessing whether it was a bluff or a double-bluff, an admission or a deflection, and by the time they had stopped running through all the possibilities your partnership would probably be over already. At least, that’s how it went in Zoe’s experience.
The phone in her pocket chimed out, leaving her to dig in her pocket, glad about there being a second distraction. Perhaps it was Morrison with some news about the person they were going to see next.
But when she looked at the screen, Zoe realized it wasn’t work-related at all. It was a message from John, asking her if she’d been able to get home safely or if she’d been sent on assignment somewhere.
Christ. Zoe realized that she had forgotten about going back inside to let him know what the call was about. She’d just left the bar while she was talking to Maitland, and driven straight to the J. Edgar Hoover Building without a moment of thought. She hadn’t called or texted John afterward, either. Not even to tell him not to wait for her, because she wasn’t going back inside.
She sighed to herself and closed her eyes for a moment. She’d really messed up now. There was no way that John was going to want to see her again after this. Her one last chance to redeem herself, and she had treated him like he didn’t matter yet again.
“What is it?” Flynn asked. “Has there been another body?”
“Not yet,” Zoe said grimly, trying to figure out how to compose an apology. “Just drive. We need to get this done as quickly as possible.”
CHAPTER NINE
Zoe examined the house as they pulled up to the curb, analyzing it as quickly as she could. Three bedrooms, two baths, standard footprint: small yard out front, small yard out back. Much as expected from the general architectural style of this part of the city. The married couple, one room for their daughter, one room as a guest bed or study. It looked like it had been built around twenty-five to thirty years ago. Perhaps bought new for the Richards couple to move into when they knew they were expecting.
The street was dark and almost silent as Zoe got out of the car, beating Flynn to the front door. She knocked, perhaps a little timidly compared to how she would knock in the middle of the day, suddenly all too conscious of the decibel level of every noise she made.
The door opened almost immediately. “Are you the FBI?” the woman on the other side of it asked, though she glanced down at Zoe’s logo-emblazoned jacket and no doubt knew the answer immediately.