Zoe’s head swiveled to the side in time to see the door open, as a younger man in a dark suit stepped through. He was six three, slim but with the suit tailored well to show that he had muscles underneath, dark hair swept up off his forehead, a clean Hollywood grin full of straight white teeth. Twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Zoe instantly disliked him.
“Agent Aiden Flynn,” he said, sticking out his hand in front of him, that grin still eating at his face.
Zoe took his hand and shook it dispassionately, taking in the measurements of his face and the angles of his high cheekbones. He looked like trouble, from head to toe. That suit was well fitted, outside of standard sizing; not off the rack, but custom tailored. He came from money. His hand was soft, and Zoe didn’t need the numbers to tell her that his shoes looked brand new.
Zoe swept an accusing eye to Maitland. “This is his first assignment,” she said.
“Fresh out of the Academy,” Maitland replied. He stretched, putting his arms behind his head as he leaned back in his chair. His back remained perfectly straight, only the degree of the angle at his hips changing.
“I do not want to babysit,” Zoe snapped, perhaps more harshly than she had meant to. Maitland could still decide not to give her the case. “This is a serious killer. He needs to be caught quickly.”
“I can keep up,” Agent Flynn cut in quickly. “I was top of my class. I can hit the ground running, easy.”
“How old are you?” Zoe asked. “Twenty-three?”
“Yeah,” Agent Flynn replied, his voice quizzical. “How did you—”
“He is a baby,” Zoe said, turning back to Maitland.
The corners of Maitland’s mouth had twisted up, raising by half a centimeter and changing the angles of his face. “Agent Prime, I’m giving you two options,” he said. “You either work with Agent Flynn on this case, or you don’t work on this case. What’s it going to be?”
Zoe looked over at Flynn, numbers swarming her eyes. He was too new. There was too much to see. He was all acute angles, his bones strong and sharp, his suit cut just so. At least with the people she knew well, she could tune out the numbers that were all the same. Working with him would be impossible.
And yet, she had never told anyone at work—except Shelley—about the numbers. They already looked at her like she was a freak, and she didn’t want to give them more of a reason to think it. All of which meant that she couldn’t use them as an excuse now. Couldn’t tell Maitland that all she could see were numbers everywhere, crowding the surface of his desk, and that was distraction enough.
Zoe was self-aware enough to know that such an admission would not only make her look like a freak, but also probably force Maitland to put her on sick leave and require her to attend sessions with a mental health professional provided by the agency—maybe even have her sectioned. She wasn’t going to risk that.
“You are not giving me any choice?” she said, instead, wanting to know if there was any remote possibility that she could get around this new partner.
“Of course, there’s a choice,” Maitland said. “You get on the plane, or you go home. I can have you out there in a matter of hours. What’s it to be?”
Zoe sighed. It was obvious what the answer had to be. She couldn’t work with this new idiot, with his shiny shoes and his rich-boy smile. And yet, there was no way she could go back home now, not to just sit on the couch with her cats, staring into the distance, stalking Shelley’s family by night. She had a duty, not just to her dead partner but to the victims who needed justice. The victims who would die over the next days and weeks if the killer wasn’t caught.
The cats would be fine without her. Her slow-release feeding system would take care of them. And there was no one else in the whole world that needed her. Not like this case did.
She was going to have to swallow down the objections that clogged her throat and push through it. She knew that it was what Shelley would have wanted her to do.
She opened her mouth to tell them, begrudging every word.
***
Zoe glanced over the files again, familiarizing herself with the case. It was a short flight, but she had enough time to memorize the details and start to think about the next steps to take when they landed. They would want to see the latest crime scene and both bodies, for a start.
“Can you read it out to me?” Flynn, sitting next to her, had been trying to peer over at the paper the whole time she had been leafing through the pages. His long legs were set at an awkward angle in the cramped plane seat, his elbows sharp edges that kept threatening to impinge on her space. “I want to be prepared.”
Zoe sighed mentally, wanting nothing more than for him to leave her alone. But it was not an unreasonable request. He didn’t know that she was going to have to translate the whole thing in her head, take out the numbers that she saw everywhere, read it like a robot. No context, no inflection, only the words on the page. It was as difficult for her to see them like that as it would have been for an infant to read them at all.
“The first body was found north of Syracuse, and the second in Syracuse itself,” she said. “First victim was a forty-one-year-old female named Olive Hanson, strangled and left at the curve of the Oneida River where she was apparently hiking.”
Zoe handed over crime scene photographs, images that she had already studied. The woman sprawled on the bank, her neck purpled while the rest of her was pale and filmy, her eyes staring up empty. Then the final image: her exposed stomach, shirt lifted out of the way with no other indication of tampering with her clothing, and the symbol carved into already dead flesh. It stood out starkly, as these things always did. A wound through pasty white skin to the red, the texture of corned beef, just visible for that thin sliver of less than half an inch.
Zoe kept her eyes on Flynn’s hands. She couldn’t focus on his face to read his expression, not with those new angles and calculations jumping out at her every time his muscles twitched. But she could watch for the shake. And she saw it, as he flicked to that last frame: a tremor in his hand which made the paper shake minutely, only just enough to be visible. He was rattled by it.
It was more or less a good thing. If he was spooked, maybe he would be easier to control. To shut up when she needed time and space to think. And if he was spooked, it meant he was human—had that empathy that Zoe was often accused of lacking. In a cynical way, it was good to have someone with empathy to speak to victims’ families. When they felt that someone understood their pain, they were more likely to tell the truth.
Zoe picked up the next couple of sheets, reading over the material they had been given for the other woman. “The second victim is also a female. An astronomer named Elara Vega who was found dead at the planetarium where she worked. Age fifty-nine. Time of death is estimated to be late the night before. She was drowned in a mop bucket.”
These images showed a similar story, if not precisely the same, to the first. The body left sprawled where it had dropped, her hair still wet from where her colleague had pulled her away from the bucket to check her vital signs. Her shirt, too, had been hiked up, the lower buttons undone, to allow the killer to carve that symbol into her skin. A sharp line across and then two lines down.