mark for himself.
Zoe straightened her back, feeling it complain at the lateness of the hour and the length of her day. After the past few weeks she’d had, she needed rest—but that would have to wait. The case was far more important.
“These marks were made by the same hand,” she said, realizing that Flynn and the coroner were no longer talking. “That means we can rule out a group of killers, or some kind of cult. The mark may still hold ritualistic significance for the killer, but it is the same person making them.”
Flynn shrugged. “Makes sense. It still doesn’t leave us with a lot to go on. Especially if the perpetrator is using the symbol to mislead us.”
Zoe shook her head. “I do not believe that. This is a deliberate act. The killer is being led by some kind of principle—logical to him, even if not to us. I believe that he is marking them with the symbol for pi.”
If she expected a grand dawning of understanding and applause after her statement, it could not have been further from what she actually got. “Pi?” Flynn snorted. “That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?”
Zoe blinked. She hadn’t expected him to disagree with her quite so strongly—especially not in front of another professional. “An upper bar with two equal legs coming down from it at angles—that looks like pi to me.”
Flynn leaned over the body closest to him, shaking his head at the carving. “I mean, it could be pi. But it could be anything. I mean, look how hasty and choppy the cuts are. The angles might not even be deliberate.”
Zoe’s mouth twitched with annoyance. This rookie—who did he think he was? She determinedly did not look over at the coroner, because she knew the flat anger in her eyes would give her away. She had never been good at hiding it. “What else could it signify?” she snapped.
Flynn gestured to the symbol, his fingers tracing invisible lines in the air above it. “It could be a set of initials. Two uppercase Ts, next to each other. The killer’s name, maybe—a literal signature. Or the name of something else. Or the legal shorthand for a plaintiff—maybe it’s someone who isn’t happy with the justice system and wants to make a point.”
Zoe felt her resolve beginning to crumble. If she was just seeing the mathematical connection because she wanted it to be there, then it wouldn’t be the first time. She had interpreted things incorrectly before. Wasted time and resources, allowed more deaths to slip through before they got on the right track and caught the killer.
But she had always been somewhere near to the truth. Her instincts were good, and she knew that. What was this rookie doing, trying to tell her that she was wrong? What experience in the field did he have to make that judgment call? Zoe curled her hands into fists at her sides, feeling her fingernails bite into her palms to release some of the anger before she unleashed it on him.
“I see pi,” she insisted. “I have worked cases like this before. Cases where people get obsessed with certain numbers and concepts. I helped to take down the Golden Ratio Killer.”
“That doesn’t mean every killer is the same,” Flynn argued. “Besides, what does it get us? Even if this is pi, how is that a lead? It doesn’t tell us where to look at all.”
“It could help us to narrow down the suspect list,” Zoe said. She knew he had a point in that, but she wasn’t about to let him think that he had won. Far from it. She would argue her case for as long as necessary—at least until he remembered who the superior agent here was. Who did he think he was, trying to take down her reasoning like this?
“We can’t just jump to conclusions,” Flynn said, with a certain amount of exasperation. He was gesturing with his hands, performing sweeping motions that Zoe’s eyes traced in the air, calculating speed and angle and pattern. “Look, pi can be used to represent certain stress tensors in fluid dynamics. Does that mean we should only be interviewing physicists as suspects?”
Zoe blinked. Stress tensors in fluid dynamics—that was not the kind of thing she had expected to hear come out of Aiden Flynn’s mouth. He was all talk and a sharp suit, but this time there was actually substance to what he was saying. Something that went deeper than cocky arrogance in