Face of Murder

Next to her, Shelley had her arms folded across her chest, and she was leaning forward to get the screen in clearer focus. She had not bothered to neatly redo her chignon this time, opting for a simple ponytail. It made her look more youthful.

“All right, we’re loaded up,” the tech said, flexing his fingers over the keyboard. “Where are we looking?”

“First, they should be a student who took a class with Professor Ralph Henderson in the last semester,” Shelley said.

“Two semesters, just to be sure,” Zoe interjected. “Also include any extracurricular activities he led, if there are any.”

The tech ran his fingers over the keyboard and made a few clicks, and the names on the screen flashed a few times before reloading in a new order.

“We have one hundred and fifty results. Anything else to refine it by?”

“Yes—males only.”

Another couple of clicks and the list flashed, reloaded. A much smaller selection. “Down to ninety.”

“Now cross-reference with students that have also taken any kind of class with the mathematics department,” Zoe said.

“Would he have been majoring in math?” Shelley asked.

“Hard to say.” Zoe chewed her bottom lip. “It is possible, but then again perhaps he had not yet chosen a major at all before the accident. We should stick to any kind of math class.”

Flash; reload. They didn’t need the tech to announce the results this time. They all fit on a single view—fifty-three students.

“Move over so we can read them,” Zoe said, peering over his head. The font size was small, too small for easy viewing.

The tech leaned back to look at her face, to see if she was being serious. When he saw that she was, he sighed, and scooted his chair to one side.

Zoe and Shelley stepped forward in unison, each leaning one hand on the desk so that they could make out the names more easily. Adam, Alex, Alexander, Alexei… Even with the knowledge they were looking for something “exotic,” there were still too many options. It was a tough variable to define—what would Dr. Applewhite even define as exotic? Did Alexei fit the bill or was it too common? What about Govinder, lower on the list? Could it be him?

“We need to narrow it down more,” Shelley said, as if reading Zoe’s mind. “This is going to take too long.”

“There’s one thing we can do. We’re thinking that this student would have to have been brilliant—someone who would have been trusted by Wardenford to look at his equations. That means he has to have been getting good grades.”

“Where do I click?” Shelley asked, looking to the tech for instructions. He leaned over to point out the sorting areas on the screen, helping her to select anyone who was getting either perfect scores or almost perfect on tests and papers, the ones in the class with the best grades.

There were still twenty-two students on the list. It was a good school, after all.

Shelley blew out a sigh, rubbing her eyes. “Marco, can you print this out for us? Just the ones we noted, please.”

Marco rolled his chair back across as they stepped out of the way, getting to work.

“Should we start going to their houses?” Zoe suggested. It was the middle of the night, but that didn’t mean they had to stand on ceremony. They were looking for a serial killer in the middle of a spree, after all.

“We could,” Shelley said, then rubbed her eyes again. “It’s a shame. This is going to take us all night.”

Zoe looked over the list. Something was nagging at her memory, snagging her eye as she ran down the names.

The letters—the capital letters. Could that be it?

“The equations—there was something odd about them,” she said, opening her notebook to the page where she had copied them out. “Look here—see? The ‘M’ is a capital. But here—on Dr. Applewhite’s version of the equation, before it was jumbled by the killer: the ‘m’ is lowercase. It indicates magnetic quantum value. The lowercase from is correct.”

“Assigning significance to a letter.” Shelley nodded. “It’s very likely to be a letter that he writes as a capital often. One of his initials. Zoe, that’s brilliant!”

“Two Matthews and one Matthias,” Zoe read, checking the list.

“That’s all of them. No, wait—the surnames. There’s a Matthew there as well.”

“Only Matthias is what I would call exotic,” Zoe noted. “And—look at this. He has not been attending class for a while. His grades sharply dropped, then disappeared altogether.”

“This must be our guy!” Shelley was enthusiastic, her eyes gleaming.

Zoe nodded. “But what about his medical records? He didn’t show up on Dr. North’s list. Can we be sure he has a connection to him?”

Shelley was tapping a pen against her lower lip, her eyes glazed with that particular look that accompanies deep thought. “You know,” she said, slowly, as if she was still figuring it out while she said it. “I’ve been thinking about something the administrator at the hospital said. He told us he could only check one site, as if he was expecting us to look at records for other hospitals as well. Specialist doctors don’t always just have one hospital where they work.”

“What?”