When Zoe searched John Dowling’s number,she came up with his ancestor, the chic and elegant woman whose photograph theyhad seen at his sister’s house. Zoe felt a little lump in her throat as shelooked at the woman’s face once again. It was her, and there was no mistakingit. Almost all of her details were filled in—her name, date, and place of birthand of death, her husband’s name, the related numbers of her family members,the fates of those who had not even lived long enough to be given a prisonernumber. She was remembered. Loved.
Naomi Karling’s number also threw up anexpected result, a man with the last name Karling who was clearly hergreat-grandfather. There was no picture here, but enough details about his life—andthe place of his death, only fifteen years ago—that she was sure. He was theone.
As it all stood, Evgeny was the odd oneout. The serial numbers otherwise brought up real connections, survivors, peoplewith living descendants. Evgeny was none of those things. It had not even beenpossible to pin down the exact month of his death.
So, if she went with the real serialnumbers that were connected to each of the victims, the story remained thesame. All relatives of survivors, people who were trying to honor familymembers in the ink they placed on their bodies. People who might be targeted bya white supremacist with a hankering to wipe out anyone who might remotely beconsidered a Jew.
But if she went with the incorrectnumber…
There had to be a connection betweenthem, something that she was not yet seeing. Her eyes flew back and forth overthem, analyzing them, over and over again. They had digits in common—threes andfives, in particular. Except that there was no three in John Dowling’s tattoo.Another outlier.
Could that have something to do with it?It seemed too general. In a numbering system that already went as high up as159,225, there were a huge proportion that already included the digit five. Itwas too wide a net to cast, and so many of the others that had booked in for atattoo with Jasper would also have qualified.
She had to narrow it down again. Therehad to be something else—something that actually made sense, and wasn’t thisvague mess of thoughts. She knew already that twenty-three was out,particularly since the additional digit on John Dowling’s tattoo brought histotal to twenty-four.
She tried multiplying the numberstogether instead of adding them, the numbers flashing so clearly in her headthat she had no need to write them down, but the results were wildly different.Not even different in a way that she could see a connection, like them allbeing prime numbers or all multiples of another number. Again, it was tootenuous.
Zoe turned the digits over and over inher head, coming back again to the fact that they had those few common digits.Maybe it wasn’t the digits themselves, but what they did for the equation, howthey added up to make the right fit for the killer’s delusion.
Adding up… delusion…
She had been down this road before.Manipulating the numbers in order to see twenty-three. But there was anotherway to see them. A way that might jump out, if you were superstitious, orlooking for some kind of sign.
She looked down at the list of serialnumbers and did the math again, wondering if she could really be right. Afterall, she had been working in her head, and she was not infallible. But therethey were again, as plain as day.
The first three digits of Callie’sincorrect number, 355. Add them up and they came to a total of thirteen.
In the middle of John’s number, there itwas again. 922, adding up as individual digits to come to a total of thirteen.
And there again, one last time, forNaomi Karling. Her tattoo ended in 535, the same digits in a different order fromCallie’s, making the same total. Thirteen.
It wasn’t crazy, was it?
Thirteen had connotations. The same waythat a Chinese audience might recoil from the number four, Westerners weresuperstitious about thirteen. It was the number of people who had sat down atthe Last Supper, and when Jesus stood up first (so the story went), he was thefirst to die. Of course, Zoe didn’t believe in all of that, but other peopledid.
There were other things that had comedown through history. They said that Friday the thirteenth was unlucky becauseof Julius Caesar, killed on the Ides of March in a year when that happened toland on a Friday. Of course, those people were idiots, too. Zoe had learnedback in high school that the Ides landed on a fifteenth in March, not thethirteenth. It was just a common misconception. But that was all it took toreinforce a superstition. Like a myth hunter seeing a ripple on the surface ofa lake and convincing themselves it proved the existence of the Loch NessMonster, it was easy to believe in so many portents and omens that spoke of thenumber thirteen being nothing but bad luck.
You didn’t need to have a good educationor the ability to see numbers all around you in order to make a connection tothe number thirteen. If you were already looking for it, then—just as she hadbeen fooled by twenty-three—you would see it everywhere. Your brain would startlooking for it on purpose, manipulating numbers any which way would fit. Onceyou latched onto that first combination of three digits, you would be able tofind them again and again.
And if you were already borderlinepsychotic, ready to snap, you might think that that was a sign in itself. Thatyou were looking at people who had tattooed themselves with the mark of evil.Zoe felt a shiver run down her spine, a thought of the way her mother wouldhave viewed all of this. She hadn’t been able to understand how a child couldbe preternaturally good with numbers, didn’t have enough knowledge to realize itcould simply be a condition of the brain. She had seen the devil’s workinstead.
As she looked at the numbers one lasttime, Zoe knew. There was someone
