Face of Fury (Zoe Prime #5) - Blake Pierce Page 0,11

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