like a coincidence.”
“She was in the pond?” Flynn clarified. It wasn’t a hard guess to make. Not only was the woman still streaming with water as the two divers climbed onto the banks on separate sides to rest, but she was also still tied to a couple of sandbags wrapped around her body.
“They just brought her out,” Zoe told him. “The neighbor came by and spotted her, floating at the bottom of the pond, after she did not answer the door.”
Flynn made a sharp intake of breath, shaking his head. “Any word on time or cause of death?”
“Not yet,” Zoe said. She eyed him sideways; he hadn’t said anything yet about the fact that she wasn’t supposed to be there. Maybe he didn’t want to discuss it in front of the others. “We should take a look.”
The smell worsened considerably as they moved closer to the body. Not just the usual smell of rotten meat, but something fishy, too. Flynn grabbed hold of his tie and held it over his nose and mouth, but Zoe simply refocused her mind on the numbers. As Sheriff Petrovski joined them, Zoe snapped on a pair of gloves from inside her coat pocket, preparing to make a preliminary examination.
“There is an impact site on the back of the head,” Zoe said, pointing to a small lump visible through the woman’s hair. It surrounded an open wound, which the fish had got into, their small mouths biting away the raw flesh from inside. It would have attracted them more than the rest of the body, but the evidence was still there. “It looks as though the killer hit her over the head, then drowned her. Just like our victim in the planetarium, though a much larger body of water.”
“Why do you think he had to weight her down? So we wouldn’t find her?” Flynn asked, his voice muffled by the tie and strained by the effort of not reacting to the smell.
“So she would not wake up and swim,” Zoe said. It helped to be matter-of-fact in these examinations. Trying to simulate the kind of emotions others expected her to have was exhausting, and if accused of being callous, she could explain that compartmentalization was the only way to survive in this job. People usually expected that. “But I do not think she did wake. Her wrists do not show any sign of having fought against the ropes.”
Petrovski let out a low whistle and took a step back. “I wouldn’t have thought I’d say it, but I’m glad you agents are here,” she said. “I don’t even want to touch this one, and I mean that both literally and figuratively. Is it him?”
Zoe knew what she was asking. “Only one way to be sure,” she said. She reached for the victim’s wet shirt, clinging to the bloated skin, and moved it up gradually, taking care not to damage anything. This was all evidence.
And there it was: the pi symbol, carved into the skin with the same precision and cold confidence as all the others.
The same killer had struck again—or, at least, had struck; looking at the body and the signs that it could give her, Zoe could see this wasn’t exactly a fresh kill. The limbs were floppy when she tried to move them, with whiter areas of skin around pressure points and darker areas pooling in the back, where the woman had lain on the bottom of the pond. There was no waxy texture to the skin yet, a tell-tale sign of an older body, and though the water may have changed the rate of breakdown somewhat, Zoe could be confident in her analysis.
“This is his first victim,” she said. “At least, that we know of.”
“Are you sure?” Flynn asked, looking slightly green behind his tie. Petrovski had taken a step away and was looking resolutely up into the sky, as if she couldn’t bear to look at the body anymore.
“The coroner will be able to confirm, but I believe this body is three or four days old,” Zoe said, stepping back and snapping her gloves back off. She rolled them inside out, careful not to touch the outer surface with her bare skin, and held them that way until she could find somewhere to dispose of them. “Certainly not as old as a week, but she still predates Olive Hanson. Do we know yet who she is?”
“Yes,” Petrovski said. Zoe hadn’t been sure she was paying attention. Even now, she kept her eyes