roaming the clouds as she spoke. “Lara Brownlee. She’s the homeowner here. Her neighbor was able to provide a preliminary ID from the water, but we’ll get a family member in to confirm that as soon as possible.”
Zoe squinted down at the corpse, calculations whizzing in front of her eyes. It was so much harder, after the water. “She was in her early thirties? Late twenties?”
Petrovski snapped to action, rummaging in her pocket and drawing out a battered notebook. “She’s thirty-one,” she confirmed, leafing through a few pages back and forth, obviously reviewing what the neighbor had told her. “No immediate family in the area, which is why we’re going to have to wait a little. Also why no one had yet raised the alarm. I guess she wasn’t in a regular enough habit of contacting family for anyone to notice she wasn’t responding until now.”
“And this is her own property?” Flynn was clarifying, but Zoe’s mind was racing in another direction. Something was sparking, she knew it. This newest piece of information—the age of the victim—it was important, so important, and if she could just grasp…
And she did, everything becoming clear all at once. Zoe’s eyes snapped open wide, turning shocked to both Petrovski and Flynn. She looked between them with excitement, at the blank expressions they returned to her. They hadn’t yet figured it out. They hadn’t made the connection, not like she had.
“I see it,” Zoe said.
“See what?” Flynn asked, frowning.
Zoe laughed out loud, causing the divers—who had been slowly preparing to get back into the water and check for any more relevant evidence—to turn and stare. It wasn’t the most appropriate reaction at a crime scene, Zoe knew, but she couldn’t help herself. How could she react any other way?
“I see it now,” she repeated, looking at Flynn with a grin she couldn’t keep off her face. It wasn’t over. She hadn’t lost her touch, or her mind. She had him now, and they would get this case solved sooner rather than later. “The proof. The pattern. Can you not see it? I was right all along.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Zoe wanted to laugh at the expression on Flynn’s face. Her headache was all but forgotten, the pain ignored in the face of euphoria. The rookie was clearly so confused—and he thought he’d be able to solve the case without her! Well, he wasn’t the one laughing now.
“I don’t get it,” Flynn said, impatiently. “You’re going to have to explain.”
“Look at the ages of the victims,” Zoe said.
“We already checked that out,” Flynn frowned, shaking his head. “None of them seem to be connected. There’s no common factor. With this body at thirty-one, that leaves us even less connected than before. He seems not to be targeting a particular demographic at all.”
“But put them together in a sequence,” Zoe prompted.
Flynn screwed up his face, pulling a notebook out of his pocket to begin leafing through it. “I don’t remember the exact figures,” he said.
“I do,” Zoe told him. She was still grinning; she couldn’t help it, even though she knew that she probably looked like a maniac. She had never been great at controlling her facial expressions. And everything had been so dark for so long, this one slice of victory was almost overwhelming. “I will tell you them. In order from the first chronological victim, the body here, to the most recent, at the state park, they run as follows: thirty-one, forty-one, fifty-nine, twenty-six.”
Flynn screwed up his face even further, and when Zoe glanced at Sheriff Petrovski, she saw that the older woman seemed only to be waiting for the answer. “We can’t all be math geniuses,” Flynn said, scraping his hair back over the top of his head with an impatient gesture. “Just tell us the punch line.”
Zoe couldn’t even find her enthusiasm dampened by his sullenness. It was just too good to be the one to get to tell him that he had been wrong—and she had been right, even all the while he scoffed at her and called her crazy. “Do you recognize this number? 3.1415926…”
It took a moment for the penny to drop. “Isn’t that pi?” Flynn asked. Then his expression changed, his eye widening, his jaw falling slack, everything giving way to shock. “Wait—that’s the exact sequence of the ages?”
“It is,” Zoe told him cheerfully.
“It’s pi,” Flynn stated flatly. He looked none too pleased about it. “Jesus Christ… you were right.”
It wasn’t exactly an admiring statement, an admission that she was good at