Shelley had been tossing and turningfrom the moment she got into bed. She couldn’t get the sight of Zoe’s face outof her mind. That look in her eyes, determined yet somehow manic. Too wide, toobright. Shelley was good at reading people, and she felt like she’d seen thatlook with Zoe before. It was the kind of look she had in her eyes before sheaccidentally shot an innocent man, because she was so convinced that the killerthey were hunting down would be in a particular place at a particular time.
Of course, she had been right back then.That was what stopped Shelley from doing something drastic, like reporting into SAIC Maitland back in DC and asking him to reassign them. The idea that Zoemight actually be onto something.
But this time, Shelley wasn’t so sure.She trusted Zoe, trusted her deeply—the past had proven time and time againthat Zoe had a gift, and she knew how to use it. Almost always, she was rightabout whatever it was she was convinced about.
Almost always—and that was the problem.
Shelley worried that Zoe had latchedonto an obsession, a piece of meaning taken out of nothing. A red herring thatwas leading her further away from the killer, not closer toward them. Not onlythat, but she was going to extremes in order to prove it. Staying up withoutsleep. Poring through fact after fact. Analyzing everything closely. It was thekind of behavior that could drive a good agent to distraction, and even if Zoehad one of the brightest minds Shelley had ever witnessed in action, she wasn’timmune.
Still, what could Shelley do? One ofthem needed to get some rest. Zoe was right about that. And so she went aroundand around in her head, trying to think of some form of intervention that wouldallow her to keep Zoe on the right path without damaging their investigation insome way.
This new thing about the numbertwenty-three was disturbing. Even Shelley knew, in her own limited knowledge ofthis sphere, that it was a bit of a magic number as far as numerology wasconcerned. That people did get obsessed with it for no good reason. She’d evenseen a film about it years before which she dimly remembered, though she couldn’trecall whether the main character’s obsession had been justified or not.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it? IfZoe was right, she was gifted and brilliant. If she was wrong, she wasobsessive, distracted, chaotic. Pushed under by the stress.
How was Shelley supposed to tell?
She rolled back to the other side andchecked the time on her cell, her gaze lingering on the photograph of herdaughter on the background of the device.
Shelley knew what she had to do. She hadprobably always known. She rubbed at her eyes to clear them and sat up,unplugging her cell from her charger and picking up her wedding ring frombeside it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It had been a lot of work, but Zoethought she had something. Two somethings, actually. It was just past midnight,though she had only known that from checking the time purposefully on herwatch.
It wasn’t in the victims’ physicalcharacteristics—not their height, their weight. It wasn’t in their homeaddresses. It wasn’t in their social security numbers.
There was one connection between themall, however. A big one, at least where Zoe’s theory was concerned.
They all had the digits 2-3, in thatorder, in their credit card numbers.
She had started the thread with NaomiKarling’s card, which had those digits as the final two. That had been a stringshe needed to pull, and so she had, letting it lead her onward. For JohnDowling and Callie Everard, the digits were lost in the middle of the number,not so obvious to the casual observer.
But if there was one thing that could besaid about Zoe, it was that she was not a casual observer.
That had led her down a new path. If thecredit cards were the link and the way that the killer identified theirvictims, then there had to be a way in which this information had beenrevealed. When did one reveal one’s credit card number? When making a purchase,of course.
There hadn’t been time to get a warrantand ask for the victims’ credit card records or bank statements, so Zoe had hadto get creative in other ways. She started looking through their social mediaaccounts, trying to match up the places they tagged with points on a city map,figuring out if there was any particular street or neighborhood they had incommon.
That would have been enough of a startto make her feel encouraged, but what she had discovered had been much betterthan that. It was hard to get there: at every post there seemed to be somethingmore to drag her attention, to make her wonder. Stripes and repeating patternson wallpaper or clothing, the number of people in the background of a shot in apublic place, the number of comments under posts, the number of likes,hashtags…
But she had persevered. It was easier tokeep going when she wrote things down instead of focusing and lingering onthem, able to move on when they were safely recorded. At times she saw so manynumbers and clues at once that she had to close her eyes, count her breaths fora short time, and try to remember what Dr. Monk had said. How to calm down.
It wasn’t working. Not really. At least,not in the way that she wanted it to. But right now, shutting off her abilityto see the numbers would have been the worst possible thing. No, she needed asmuch information as she could get if she was going to see this through.
That was when she saw it. From adistance, an overview, the posts didn’t seem to have much in common at all. Thephotographs were taken at different angles, the frame mostly filled by thefaces of the victims and their friends. But it wasn’t the background thatcaught Zoe’s attention, not at first.
It was the location tag.
Bar 23 West, a local nighttime hotspotthat
