Face of Fury (Zoe Prime #5) - Blake Pierce Page 0,32

the connection. But then again, it wasn’t as though she expected great things from the rookie. “Just keep driving along this road,” she said, spotting a campus map illuminated by a light above the sign and quickly memorizing it as they drove by.

Campus security waved them through when Zoe showed her badge out the window, and then they were moving down a long row of large houses separated by strips of land: fraternities. Greek letters hung over the doorways of each one, two or three symbols indicating the identity of the group living inside.

The whole fraternity or sorority thing had never appealed to Zoe. She hadn’t joined when she was at college. She had no idea about which fraternities were the biggest, which ones had bad reputations, or anything like that. She had vague recollections of articles about hazing and the blazing hoops prospective members had to jump through in order to impress their older cohort.

“Are you serious with this?” Flynn muttered sullenly, slowing the car to more of a crawl as they eased past each house. Most of them were lit up with lights blazing through each window. Zoe guessed the penny had finally dropped for him. She ignored him, focusing on looking from side to side, examining the identity of each house.

Then she saw it. The house with only one letter above the doorway. Next to it was a blank space where the brickwork was a slightly different color, nails still visible in a discernible pattern. It should have been Sigma Pi. But the Sigma had fallen off.

“Pi House,” Flynn breathed. Without Zoe’s prompting, he had rolled the car to a stop right opposite the doorway. He was leaning forward, one arm crooked over the top of the steering wheel so that he could see it clearly.

“This is it,” Zoe said firmly. “That cannot be a coincidence.”

For a long, sweet moment, she thought that Flynn was going to agree with her. That she had finally won him around to her way of thinking, and he wasn’t going to argue with her anymore. That they could get on with the investigation the way she wanted.

And then he opened his mouth.

“It absolutely could be a coincidence,” he said. “And I’m sure it is.”

Zoe swung her head toward him. “What are you not seeing?” she demanded. “This is precisely the same symbol that was carved into the victims’ torsos. And you do not think it is worth checking out at all?”

Flynn snorted. “What are you going to do, interview every single member, every single student who walks by here, every single member of staff? It could be anyone who saw the sign and liked it.”

“It is much more likely to be someone inside the fraternity, who sees it as part of their identity,” Zoe argued.

“Okay, fine,” Flynn said, rolling his eyes. “So your theory is, what? New fraternity pledges are being given the task of murdering people and then carving the frat’s symbol into their skin to prove that they did it?”

“No,” Zoe said, feeling defensive at his disbelief. “Of course, that would be far-fetched. But I do think that someone inside knows more about this.”

“Are we going to go after the whole mathematics department, too?” Flynn said. “You’re acting crazy. This is too much of a leap.”

Zoe stared at him, seeing red for a moment. It faded a little before she could do anything stupid, like hit him. Maybe the antidepressants were working, after all. “I am not crazy. What I am is the senior agent on this case, and I say we need to go inside and talk to the frat members.”

Flynn hesitated, some of his cockiness disappearing. For all that he clearly thought he was the best thing since sliced bread, he was also fresh enough to give respect to rank. She had a lot of years on him, and he knew it. He was also probably thinking that getting in trouble with SAIC Maitland on his first case was a bad idea. Or so Zoe hoped.

He looked up at the building in front of them, angling his neck to get a good view through the car window. “But there’s clearly a party going on inside,” he said. Faint music was pumping out from the frat house, reaching them even inside the car—some kind of insipid pop song. There was a couple walking hand in hand up to the doors even as they watched, carrying red Solo cups, empty by the look of them. Maybe going in to