Face of Murder

Zoe was about to offer a verbal rebuttal alongside the one on the game board, but her hand hovered in midair. That was a striking thought. Law enforcement. What if she could use her pattern recognition, her calculations, all of it, to identify suspects and stop crime sprees?

What if she could stop murders?

“Like the police?”

Dr. Applewhite nodded. “Police, FBI, whatever you want. There are a lot of options around here, and you could move to another state, too. Go be a small-town sheriff if you wanted, or head up a specialist investigation unit. There’s even the forensics department, CSI. It seems like it’s worth considering.”

Zoe did consider it. She considered it long and hard. So long that their time together was up before the chess game was finished.

Zoe’s mother had always called her evil. Said the devil’s blood must run in her veins in order for her to do the things she did. Zoe knew that was stupid, because her father was just a man, and her mother was human too—for all her shortcomings. But if she could help people, really help people… if she could put the real bad guys behind bars, wouldn’t that change things?

Wouldn’t that redeem her, just a little?

The irony stung. Redeem herself? Ha! Not only had she failed to protect an innocent person in this case, but it was the very person who had suggested she make a career out of it in the first place.

The case was a mess. Zoe had had no leads before she implicated Dr. Applewhite, and she had none now. In fact, the only lead that could really be called credible in the whole case was the DNA evidence—and that was what had gotten Dr. Applewhite pulled in.

Zoe felt useless. There was nowhere for her to go on the case, no lead to follow. She had no idea where to start looking for this killer, now that the equations hadn’t panned out the way she thought they would. It was clearly a frame, but Dr. Applewhite came across hundreds of people on a weekly basis. How could they narrow down thousands of people to just one suspect, when Dr. Applewhite wasn’t the type to make enemies?

It wasn’t like she had anyone else who could help either. Besides Shelley, no one knew about the numbers that she could see. Until the forensics people finally caught on to what she already knew—the height of the perpetrator—there was nothing at all to say that Dr. Applewhite wasn’t guilty. And Shelley just had to be the person that Zoe, in her infinite wisdom, had pushed away tonight.

Not only had she made a mess in the first place, but now it was messed up even more.

Zoe felt something wet drip down from her chin, and was startled to realize that she was crying. It was not often that she engaged in such an outward show of emotion like this, least of all a negative one. She tried to remember the last time that she had cried, and couldn’t. The shock of it caught her breath in her throat, froze the water in her eyes. She wiped her face dry with her sleeve, biting her lip until the impulse went away entirely.

There was something she could do here. There had to be. There was something she had missed, somewhere, and all she had to do was find it.

She ran through all three of the equations, by now learned by heart. They still didn’t make sense, but what if she inverted them? Reversed them? What if she substituted the letters so that all of the equations matched? What if she tried numbers one by one, looked for a solution?

Maybe solving them at last would spell something out, like geographical coordinates. Of course, for that she would need to have the inputs, and she had no idea what c or d or f was supposed to represent.

Something to do with the college maybe?