Zoe could not quite figure out how Shelley, with a young child at home and no particular advantage in distance from her home, could beat her to the HQ. Not only that, but how she could be neatly dressed in a suit that fit her curvy yet slim frame, accentuating the angles between her hips and waist and breasts, without a speck of the normal dirt one would expect to accumulate around an infant. Even how she could be perfectly made up, with a slight hint of pink lipstick on her lips, and her blonde hair tied just-so into a chic chignon. But there it was.
Their superior, Special Agent in Charge Leo Maitland, stood at the front of the room, waiting with the coiled impatience of a jaguar on the hunt. He was an Army vet with a soldier’s bearing, and after a successful career through the ranks he had come home to switch to law enforcement. That had all been fifteen years ago, but the graying hair at his temples gave no indication that he was any less the fighter he had once been. He stood at six foot three, with a forty-five-inch chest and fifteen-inch biceps that still strained at the hems of his uniform.
“Ah, Special Agent Prime,” he said. “Welcome. I’ve handed out the briefing notes to your partner. Please take a seat and go over them.”
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.