Zoe nodded, repeating the same pattern she had seen the doctor perform. One, two, three, four, stop. “I will make an appointment this week.”
Dr. Monk hesitated, biting her bottom lip. She tapped a pen against the skin there, the scrip in her hand, not yet filled out. “How much are you drinking?” she asked.
Zoe shrugged again. “Until the numbers get quiet.”
Zoe watched the circumference of Dr. Monk’s eyes increase in size, the skin lifting up with her eyelids, the angles of the crow’s feet just visible at the corners of her eyes changing. “All right.” She filled out the scrip with a quick flourish of her pen, then walked around her desk to rummage in a drawer. “Now, I do want you to get this prescription filled, but in the meantime, I think it’s important that you start to manage this now. This will tide you over until then.”
She came up with a sheet of tabs in one hand, the silver foil across the top catching the light from the large windows. She stretched out her hand, holding it toward Zoe, and Zoe took it mechanically.
“Start taking them tonight,” Dr. Monk continued. “One with every mealtime—morning, afternoon, and night. Make sure you take them with food. And no more alcohol, okay? These should make the numbers quiet as well. Don’t mix alcohol with them. Is that all right?”
Zoe nodded. “I will start to take them tonight,” she said.
Dr. Monk took a hesitant breath. “What are you doing now? Do you have time for a session?”
“I am going to work,” Zoe said.
“You’re back on duty?” Dr. Monk sounded alarmed.
“No. My suspension ended yesterday but I did not go in.” Zoe took a breath. “I have to talk to the Special Agent in Charge.”
Dr. Monk nodded. “All right. Go do that. But I want to see you as soon as possible.”
“I understand.” Zoe headed for the door, the blister pack still firmly clutched in her hand. She didn’t dare look back at Dr. Monk as she left. The numbers were crawling over her face like ants, and Dr. Monk couldn’t even feel that they were there.
Zoe stopped in the car for a moment, grabbing a bottle of water from the side compartment and swigging one of the pills down. She couldn’t wait. She needed their help now, if she was going to make it through a conversation with Maitland.
***
The J. Edgar Hoover Building was reassuringly squat and geometric, all straight lines in dull gray concrete. Zoe enjoyed that, and the way that it was laid out: symmetrically, with repeated designs on each floor, so that you could always guess where you were going. That was a small comfort. While she waited for the pill to work on the numbers, at least she could deal with some that weren’t quite as distracting.
She expected to wait a while, but when she knocked three times on the door that was marked with SAIC Leo Maitland’s name, he called out the command to enter immediately.
Zoe had no time to be nervous as she reached for the door handle and turned it, stepping forward. That was better, she thought. She was used to standing in the corridor outside with a twitchy anxiety, wondering what she was going to get disciplined for this time, but now she could simply walk in and let the conversation begin.
“Agent Prime.” Maitland sat up with some surprise, laying the paperwork he had been looking over down on his desk and peering at her. “I wasn’t expecting you so soon.”
Zoe nodded, since she didn’t know what else to say to that. “I looked over the case file.”
“And?” Maitland placed his hands on the desk in front of himself, one folded neatly over the other, expectant. Zoe looked down at them for a moment and saw all the intersecting angles, and wrenched her gaze away.
“I was curious,” she said. “It is not that I am accepting the case. I just wanted to know why you gave me this file.”
Maitland stared at her for a long moment, his expression unreadable beneath the angles of his nose and cheekbones, and how they intersected with the lines of his skull against the line of his brow. “You’ve… always been the best, with this particular type of case,” he began, his voice gruff yet quiet. “Don’t think that I haven’t noticed your ability to deal with cases that aren’t the usual run of the mill serial killer. You’re good when things get strange. When we need to see things in a way that doesn’t conform to the box. Intelligent killers. People who think in different ways.”
Zoe thought that over. It was true, what he said. She just couldn’t decide whether she liked it. whether he was calling her odd. “I have worked on a number of cases like this,” she conceded, which wasn’t the same as admitting to anything or saying that she would take the case.
“I don’t want to push you, Agent,” Maitland said. “If you return to work and you’re not ready, things could go bad. For both of us. But I also think I know you well enough to see that you’re best when you have a puzzle in front of you to work on. I’ll be frank. I want you on this case. In fact, I don’t trust anyone else to get it done the same way that you will.”
Zoe waited, her thoughts tumbling over one another. It was hard enough to hear them under the numbers telling her the decibels and word length and syllables and the dimensions of the desk and everything on it, and when she did hear them, she wasn’t sure. It would be good to sink her teeth into something new, something that stopped the same old things from rattling around inside her skull. The numbers could be put to use for a change, like she did before, putting them to work on suspects and entry points and all of the rest.
It would be good to make a difference. Maybe save a life or two.
So long as she didn’t have to drag anyone else into danger with her.
“I will take it,” she said slowly. Maitland’s face lit up, if not into a smile then certainly into something more lively than his usual stone-faced expression. She plowed on, not wanting him to miss the most important part. “Alone. I do not want to be assigned another partner. I will go solo on this one.”
Maitland tilted his head at a further ten-degree angle than previously, and his eyes narrowed by fifteen percent. “You know I can’t do that, Agent.”
“I have worked alone before,” Zoe pointed out. It was true. Before Shelley, when she had been between partners because they couldn’t handle her oddness, she had seen plenty of cases where she’d been forced to go into the field alone. There wasn’t anyone who would partner up with her, until a new rookie came along. Then the cycle would repeat itself.
“Not on a case of this magnitude,” Maitland said. “Only on simpler crimes. And not right after the death of your former partner. I’m sorry, Zoe. I am not suggesting that Shelley is going to be replaced. That she ever could be. But you will need to work alongside another agent on this one.”
Zoe lowered her eyes to the floor, where there were fewer numbers. “I would really rather not work with someone new.”
“Well, I’m afraid I already have someone lined up. He’ll be perfect, I promise.” Maitland raised his voice to bellow in the direction of the door. “If you’re out there, Agent Flynn, come on in. It’s time for you two to meet.”
CHAPTER FIVE