then shower. She looked over at the coffee table as she leaned back on the counter to drink, and saw the file. She ignored it. Now wasn’t the time, dream or no dream. She looked away pointedly, wishing Maitland hadn’t left it at all.
Zoe looked down at her body: mismatched sweatshirt and joggers, both from her university days, tired and faded. She hadn’t washed her hair for a few days. That, at least, was something she could do to fill in the time.
In the bathroom, she paused, hit with the image of her own face in the mirror. She had been avoiding looking at it for a long time, but something—probably the dream—had made her look up. Now she saw herself as Maitland must have seen her. Dark circles under her eyes, greasy and unkempt hair, pale skin. She looked a mess.
She deserved to look a mess. She’d let her partner die, hadn’t she? Zoe closed her eyes for a moment to ward off the pain, wishing it would stop.
Maitland’s words came back to her. The idea that throwing herself back into a case might make it easier for her to leave all of this in the past. To not feel the pain so harshly anymore.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to just take a look. At least then Maitland wouldn’t come around again, and maybe her dead partner would stop haunting her dreams. If nothing else, at least she would be able to tell herself that she had tried.
Zoe walked over to the table before her resolve could fail her and grabbed the file. There were four sheets of paper inside it, two each for the two victims. She felt sick just holding them in her hands, and nearly put them down again—but the image of Shelley’s face from her dream lingered in her mind’s eye, and Zoe started to read.
She scanned the information quickly, words and phrases jumping out at her. Bodies found in upstate New York. It would be cold up there at this time of year. It looked as though the methods were different for both women, as well as all of their particulars. Zoe saw no correlation in their ages, their weights and heights, their home addresses, the way that they had been killed.
But there was one thing that connected them, one reason why these two cases had been placed into the same folder and then left for her to see. Each of them had a symbol carved into their stomachs postmortem, with what looked to be the tip of a knife: a flat line that joined two perpendicular legs, coming down from it like supports. Zoe recognized it instantly as resembling the symbol for pi, if with a little stiffness compared to the customary curve.
That was interesting. She understood now why Maitland had left her the file. It was exactly the kind of case she would have worked on before. The kind of case that Shelley would have heard about and put their names in for, if Maitland hadn’t thought of it before. Signs and symbols, equations, strange clues that seemed to elude the understanding of the average agent. It was exactly her kind of thing.
And it was almost refreshing, in a way. Having the numbers work on something that actually mattered—the thing that she had made her life’s work. Looking for connections and clues, solving a murder. It felt good that they were crowding her with information about a case, not just the dimensions of her apartment and everything in it. A relief.
That didn’t mean she was going to work on it—but she was intrigued. Intrigued enough to want to know more, even if that meant going to see Maitland herself. Maybe she could stave off the numbers a little while longer, give them something else to focus on. Maybe just for five minutes she could feel like herself again.
First, there was something even more important she was going to have to do—otherwise she would not be able to make it to the J. Edgar Hoover Building at all.
CHAPTER FOUR
Zoe kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on the back of the car in front of her. The drive had so far been difficult. It was hard to concentrate on keeping the vehicle on the road when you couldn’t stop analyzing license plates, exhaust fumes, keeping track of the number of cars you’d seen of each color, make, and model, getting glimpses of people in the seats with all their different measurements and calculations. Somehow, she’d