wanted, that Zoe never had to work with him again, but she didn’t want to let him have the wrong impression of her. She was a good agent. She wasn’t like this. But Shelley, and then the pills, and then a simple mistake…
“I did not mean for that to happen,” she said, wanting to explain herself. It was somehow important that he knew. That she could let him know he could still trust her, even as much as he had trusted her judgment so far—which was not very much. “It was not a trick. I did not know…”
Zoe cut herself off, hearing the familiar tone of her cell phone ringing out from the bedside table. She reached for it, feeling her head protest at the movement, and checked the number. It was local. She had to answer.
“Hello, Special Agent Zoe Prime speaking,” she said, closing her eyes momentarily against the throbbing in her temples.
“Agent, this is Sheriff Petrovski. We’ve just been alerted to a new body.”
Zoe swore under her breath, pinching the bridge of her nose to try to hold back the headache some. “Where?” she asked, grabbing the motel notepad and pen off the side table, ready to scrawl down the address.
Making excuses, recovering from last night, even showering—it was all going to have to wait. Zoe took down what the sheriff told her and terminated the call, tossing the pad across the room to Flynn.
“We better get moving,” she said. “He has struck again.”
***
Zoe got out of the car, grateful beyond words that the car journey was over. She bent over a little as she breathed in fresh air deeply, trying not to throw up. Flynn’s driving was getting more and more erratic, and she could swear he was doing it on purpose because he knew her head was killing her.
The movement of bending over sent a fresh wave of pain through her skull, and Zoe cursed out loud, straightening up and closing her eyes for a moment until the spinning stopped. When she opened them again, Flynn was already striding away ahead of her toward Sheriff Petrovski and her men, arrayed in a general cluster around what had to be their crime scene just past the edge of the trees.
Zoe took advantage of that moment, with no attention on her, to reach into the pocket of her jacket. Maybe one of Dr. Monk’s pills would make her feel better. She went to insert her thumbnail into the foil to pop out one of the pills, but to her dismay, it went right through: the hollow behind it was already empty.
In a panic, Zoe turned the blister pack over, looking at the side without the foil. She could see it clearly now: all of the little chambers were empty, every single one of them already opened and taken. She’d had the whole lot. How had she gone through them so quickly? They were supposed to last a lot longer, and now she had nothing.
Zoe swallowed down a lump of dismay and anxiety in her throat and thrust the empty packet back into her pocket, striding forward and trying to pretend her brain wasn’t swinging around inside her skull and ricocheting off every surface as she followed Flynn. She had to at least act professional. She already had the aloof act going for her—it wasn’t hard to maintain stony silence. She could do this.
Except that she wasn’t sure that she could, because the trees all around her were catching her attention with their numbers, their heights and girths, their probable ages, the number of branches they had below a certain level, the dimensions, angles, and depth of scratches left by angles. And then there was the sheriff and her men and all of their numbers and measurements and sizes and angles and all of the rest of it, and words floating up into the air like moths, syllable and rhythm and line length, all their own kind of free verse poem that Zoe couldn’t stop herself tracking.
Flynn was saying something, though Zoe could barely make out what, with the numbers and the pounding in her head. She gulped in cold morning air and headed directly for the body, needing to find something to focus on, something that would block out all the rest. At least she could be helpful there. Not only that, but it was what was expected of her. A good cover.
Zoe stood over her, looking down. The body was splayed out across a round tree stump;