Zoe clocked her height at five foot six, shorter than herself by four inches. She weighed about a hundred fifty pounds, and she walked with a determined gait—though slightly hunched over, her back a curve rather than a line.
“Sheriff Danielle Petrovski,” she said, in a broad New York City accent, sticking out a hand in front of her. She directed it toward Zoe first, which was a nice surprise; in the majority of cases, people tended to assume the male was the superior.
“Special Agent Zoe Prime,” Zoe said, taking the offered hand and showing her badge with the other. She shook firmly, calculating the sheriff’s grip strength as she did so. “This is Special Agent Adrian Flynn.”
“Aiden,” he corrected her, taking his turn to shake hands. Zoe kept her face blank. It wouldn’t do to let him know she’d made the slip on purpose, to try to knock him down a peg or two.
“You’ll be wanting to get stuck in right away, or find a motel for the night?” Petrovski asked, looking between them expectantly.
“We will get stuck in,” Zoe said, talking over whatever Flynn had been trying to say. He was a rookie. He probably wanted to go to sleep. “If we could start by seeing the crime scene?”
“Of course.” The sheriff nodded. She patted her pocket, indicating the presence of keys. “I’ll drive you over, if you’re comfortable. It’s about ten minutes away.”
Zoe nodded easily, then lapsed into silence as they turned and walked back toward the entrance and the parking lot. She allowed Flynn to begin talking, asking questions. Nothing that he said, or the answers that he gained, gave them any further information than what had already been presented in the briefing notes. He was still green enough not to begin investigating immediately. He wanted to verify the information he had already been given, like he had been told to. He didn’t yet know how to dig.
Not that Zoe had ever been particularly good at getting the deeper truth out of people, either, but she found her answers in other places.
She was content to climb into the back seat of the sheriff’s car, even though it was a space usually reserved for criminals. It was nice to be sectioned off away from the front seat, with the excuse of distance allowing her to continue failing to take part in the conversation. She instead looked out the window, watching the scenery pass by: the trees swelling with orange and brown leaves, now falling readily to the ground and leaving behind bare and withered branches. The decaying leaves lay in broad drifts where they had been gathered up by some erstwhile volunteer who somehow lacked the mind-numbing and deadening realization that more leaves would fall tomorrow, and a stiff breeze could undo all of their work.
The streets were mostly empty; the biting cold was enough to keep most people indoors unless they needed to be out. Between buildings, the landscape was gray and bare, devoid of life at this time of year. Zoe rested her head on the glass, watching it all with disinterest.
By the time they arrived, the rookie’s words washing over her like so much white noise, she was almost on the verge of falling asleep herself—if it wasn’t for the numbers and their constant need to keep count.
They emerged from the car into a cold parking lot, this time in front of a dome-fronted building that stood on a dramatic swell in the town’s land. It had a sense of the theater in the oversized architecture, grand columns tall on either side of the entrance.
Zoe and Flynn trailed behind the sheriff as she unlocked the doors, passing crime scene tape pasted across each side of the double entrance. Inside, the space was wholly dark, until the sheriff fumbled alongside the door and found a switch that turned on the lights.
Zoe took a long inhale, the air rushing through her nose as she allowed herself to look around the auditorium and take it all in. All of the numbers, flooding her senses, telling her everything that she needed to know.
“All we did is take the body away,” Sheriff Petrovski was saying. “Everything else is untouched. We locked the place up as soon as we arrived. We have photographs back at the station of everything.”
Zoe moved toward the marked-off area in the middle of the room. With all of the chairs pointing toward it across the staggered-height seating tiers, it looked like it had been set out for an audience. The mop bucket, ominously still full of water, sat in front of everything, wheels locked into place.
“You said the death occurred late last night?” Flynn asked. “What was the victim doing here so late? I understand she worked here as an astronomer, but don’t they keep normal working hours?”
“No, it can vary here,” the sheriff said. “Ms. Vega was studying the path of a comet, monitoring it through the telescopes and making notes. We know that she completed her observations for the night—it was all written down in notebooks on her desk. One of her colleagues confirmed that for us. It seems she was simply done for the night and on her way home when it happened.”
Zoe stood just above the bucket, looking at everything. There wasn’t a whole lot of physical evidence to go on, but her keen eyes sought out the lens of a projector up in the air. Extrapolating from its position and the angle at which it was set, she could see that this whole area at the front of the room would have been caught in the projection—light beaming down right at the victim’s face, as well as the loud surround sound coming from the speakers at multiple points around the ceiling.
The angles made sense. She pictured a woman crossing the floor—on a direct, straight line path from the entrance to the offices over to the main exit. She was going home. The projector turned on, deadening her senses, making her blind and deaf for a moment. The bucket entered the room on wheels, and the killer pushed her head down into it until she was drowned. That wasn’t hard to interpret.
It didn’t tell her enough—not yet. She couldn’t see the height of the killer from this scene, because he only had to knock the victim down and get her head into the bucket to carry out the murder. Strength came into it somewhat—the force required to hold down an adult human while they fought for their life, which wasn’t nothing. The killer had to be sturdy enough to accomplish that.
Truthfully, although a violent crime almost always indicated a male offender, Zoe couldn’t even see evidence of whether this had been committed by a man or a woman. She tended to lean toward males, simply because that was the majority result—and statistics were always helpful.
But the scene was giving her nothing else.
Zoe looked up from the bucket and wandered back over to the sheriff, letting Flynn make his own observations. “Have you been able to retrieve any physical evidence?” she asked.
“Other than the body?” Sheriff Petrovski gave her an amused look. “No. No prints on anything, all looking to have been wiped clean. Or maybe the killer wore gloves—it’s hard to say, given that actual cleaning equipment was used. No fibers, hairs, anything that we could pick up. Actually, it was sparkling in here.”
“That is inconvenient.” Zoe sighed. It was always better when there was cold, hard evidence. When you could simply find the right person, get their prints, and wrap up the case to be home in time for dinner. Not that that was happening today. Dinnertime was already long since passed.
“Well,” Flynn said, rising from a squat that had allowed him to examine the bucket up close. “I think it’s clear what we have on our hands here.”