Face of Fury (Zoe Prime #5) - Blake Pierce Page 0,56

that is the problem. The next victim, all we know is her age. It could be any of dozens of women. We do not have the time to track them all down one by one and ascertain their safety. Not the manpower, either. By the time we get there she could be dead, and he could already be on to the next one, and we will still be behind.”

There was a pause on the end of the line as Dr. Applewhite considered the facts. “What do you think Shelley would say?”

Zoe was left speechless at those words, unexpected and unlooked for. When she had recovered enough to find her own tongue, she was resolute. “I cannot answer that,” she said, swallowing against a suddenly dry throat. “Not yet. I cannot go there. Put myself in her head. I am not ready.”

“All right. I understand,” Dr. Applewhite said, and paused. “Let’s try it this way. Do you remember the case where I was a suspect?”

Zoe almost wanted to laugh. Remember? Not only had Dr. Applewhite cause enough to remember it clearly for the rest of her life, but it had been tense and traumatic for Zoe as well. Having to put her own mentor into a questioning room during a murder case had felt like betrayal.

“Well, you remember how you got back then?” Dr. Applewhite pressed on. “You twisted yourself up into a knot over those fragmentary equations. Trying to solve them. Trying to figure out if it was a secret code or a message about the killer’s identity. You began to see things that weren’t really there. You got too close. In the end, it wasn’t the equation itself that solved it at all. It was figuring out the one tic that set the killer apart from anyone else, the one clue to his identity.”

Zoe nodded to herself. The missing piece of the puzzle had been the cognitive dissonance causing the killer to make mistakes in his equations. Matthias Kranz had almost taken another victim, with how long it took Zoe to get to the bottom of it. When she did finally catch up to him and get him in handcuffs, it wasn’t about math at all. It was about a psychotic murderer, a twisted sense of justice and right and wrong, a petty young man with a traumatic brain injury who couldn’t see the world straight anymore.

“It was the murderer that we caught, not the next victim,” Zoe said. She was nodding more rapidly now. Seeing it. What Dr. Applewhite wanted her to see.

“Keep it simple,” Dr. Applewhite said. “Don’t retreat too far back into your own head, into the equations and symbols and numbers. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be anything more than a person obsessed with something. In this case, a number. Start with that.”

“You are right,” Zoe said. She felt clearer now, more focused. As always, Dr. Applewhite had opened her eyes to what she really needed to see. “This is about pi. Everything else is extraneous.”

And when they ended the call, Zoe finally had clarity. She knew what she needed to do next.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

“Hello?” Zoe said, trying to do her best impression of a mature and reasonable adult talking on the phone. At least it was easier than doing it in person, where facial expression had to be involved. “Is this the head of the math department?”

“Yes, speaking. Professor Brown,” a male voice returned over the line. “Who am I talking to?”

“This is Agent Zoe Prime with the FBI,” Zoe said, trying her best not to sound impatient. She had already explained this to his receptionist, or secretary, or whatever she was, and the woman hadn’t sounded as though she had taken it all in. “I am investigating a local murder case and need to request some information that I think you will be able to give.”

“A murder?” The man sounded far more interested now. “Of course, of course, I will help as much as I can. What is it?”

“It may sound like an odd question,” Zoe began. “Actually, I am sure it will sound like a very strange question indeed. But I need to know if you remember any colleague, past or present, or even a student, who was working with pi. They may even have come to the point of obsession, perhaps trying to work out more digits or prove a theory about it.”

“Pi?” Professor Brown hummed a little under his breath. “Well, we don’t have anyone like that around currently. Since