Face of Murder

The only sound in the interrogation room was the ticking of the clock above the door and a slight shuffle of papers now and then, as Zoe and Wardenford both studied copies of the photographs in silence. The equation was just as before: seeming to make sense up to a point, then disintegrating into nonsense. There was a mismatch somewhere, something that did not fit.

“It’s wrong,” Wardenford eventually declared, planting his hands firmly onto the tabletop to hide their shaking. “Just the same as the other two. The last part is broken.”

Zoe had already reached the same conclusion, but there was something about what he said that drew her attention. “The last part?”

“Yes, the final three lines. Look at them—they’re totally unbalanced against the rest of it. This one even switches to different symbols. Where is N in those lines? The first section seems weighted towards using N as a crucial part of the equations, where it does not appear at all in the end part.”

Zoe cast her eyes over the equation again, though her memory had already told her he was right. The last three lines… was there something in that?

Seized by a sudden inspiration, she flipped back through her notebook to where she had written out the first two equations. “There must be a connection between all three,” she said.

“That’s a false equivalency,” Wardenford shook his head. “Just because the same person wrote the three equations on bodies in the same way, does not necessarily mean that they are part of the same overarching equation or connected in a further way.”

Zoe could not listen to him. How could she? If he was right, then there was no way to solve the equations. And if there was no way to solve them, then there was no extra clue hiding in there which would help her to link the three victims and trace the link back to the killer.

There had to be some kind of connection.

There just had to be.

“You’re wasting your time,” Wardenford insisted, but Zoe was no longer hearing him. She started to scribble out the last three lines of each of the equations on the back of one of the photographs, in order. Just the last three lines, the three that didn’t make any sense in each of the cases.

When she was done, she stopped and looked at it. It made a full equation in itself, and now the signs were starting to make sense. This was something that she could understand, at last. This was something—somehow—familiar?

Wardenford reached for the paper and spun it around so that he could read it, his eyes flashing from left to right over and over. It was beginning to dawn on Zoe exactly why that equation looked familiar, something rushing through the synapses in her brain to tell her just where she had seen it before—

And, oh. Oh no.

“I’ve seen this before,” Wardenford said, even as Zoe’s mouth opened to cut him off, to tell him to stop. “It’s a theoretical equation that a local mathematician came up with. It made quite a stir, actually. Her name was something—what was it now? Apple… Applewhite. Dr. Applewhite, that was it. This is her equation, in full.”

Zoe knew now what she had done. It was clear. She had been desperate for a way to make sense of it all, and so she had fallen back on something that she recognized. Just like how other people supposedly saw a face on the moon, instead of measurable craters and hills and valleys. There was no face on the moon.

In just the same sense, there was no way that Dr. Applewhite really had anything to do with this.

It couldn’t be right—it was all just a coincidence. Maybe Zoe had even copied out the equations incorrectly. She flipped back in her notebook, checking and rechecking.

“That’s your culprit, then,” Wardenford pronounced, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms at ninety-degree angles across a puffed-up chest. “Dr. Applewhite. She’s got offices somewhere nearby, does studies on people with abilities like yours. Hang on, you probably know her, don’t you? She must have finally cracked.”

Zoe’s mind was racing, trying to find a possibility which explained all of this. Coincidences happened, even if they were not statistically likely. In fact, that’s all they were: the collision of things that were somewhat likely, happening in an order which was less likely and yet still possible. In an infinite universe, everything that was possible to happen would happen. That was the theory, wasn’t it?

“This cannot be anything to do with Dr. Applewhite,” Zoe blurted out abruptly, pushing all of the photographs together into a messy pile that she could scoop up into her arms. “You are no longer a suspect, Mr. Wardenford. You are free to go. See them at the front desk about getting a taxi.”

She rushed out of the room, opening the door awkwardly with one hand holding the bundle of images against her chest, and almost collided with Shelley in the corridor.