Zoe sighed mentally, wantingnothing more than for him to leave her alone. But it was not an unreasonablerequest. He didn’t know that she was going to have to translate the whole thingin her head, take out the numbers that she saw everywhere, read it like arobot. No context, no inflection, only the words on the page. It was asdifficult for her to see them like that as it would have been for an infant toread them at all.
“The first body was found north ofSyracuse, and the second in Syracuse itself,” she said. “First victim was aforty-one-year-old female named Olive Hanson, strangled and left at the curveof the Oneida River where she was apparently hiking.”
Zoe handed over crime scenephotographs, images that she had already studied. The woman sprawled on thebank, her neck purpled while the rest of her was pale and filmy, her eyesstaring up empty. Then the final image: her exposed stomach, shirt lifted outof the way with no other indication of tampering with her clothing, and thesymbol carved into already dead flesh. It stood out starkly, as these thingsalways did. A wound through pasty white skin to the red, the texture of cornedbeef, just visible for that thin sliver of less than half an inch.
Zoe kept her eyes on Flynn’shands. She couldn’t focus on his face to read his expression, not with thosenew angles and calculations jumping out at her every time his muscles twitched.But she could watch for the shake. And she saw it, as he flicked to that lastframe: a tremor in his hand which made the paper shake minutely, only justenough to be visible. He was rattled by it.
It was more or less a good thing.If he was spooked, maybe he would be easier to control. To shut up when sheneeded time and space to think. And if he was spooked, it meant he was human—hadthat empathy that Zoe was often accused of lacking. In a cynical way, it wasgood to have someone with empathy to speak to victims’ families. When they feltthat someone understood their pain, they were more likely to tell the truth.
Zoe picked up the next couple ofsheets, reading over the material they had been given for the other woman. “Thesecond victim is also a female. An astronomer named Elara Vega who was founddead at the planetarium where she worked. Age fifty-nine. Time of death isestimated to be late the night before. She was drowned in a mop bucket.”
These images showed a similarstory, if not precisely the same, to the first. The body left sprawled where ithad dropped, her hair still wet from where her colleague had pulled her awayfrom the bucket to check her vital signs. Her shirt, too, had been hiked up,the lower buttons undone, to allow the killer to carve that symbol into herskin. A sharp line across and then two lines down.
“So, there’s no real correlationbetween them except for the symbol,” Flynn said. He was looking back and forthbetween the images closely, comparing them. “No match for location, method,type of woman—except that they’re both older. But the cops on the ground thinkthe cases are linked.”
“Clearly, they are,” Zoe statedcalmly, trying not to snap at him. “The symbol is a calling card. It marks themas being done by the same hand.”
“Hmm.” Flynn passed thephotographs back, watching her tuck them away into the folder. “Hey, I heardyou’ve been an agent for a long time.”
“I have ten years on you,” Zoereplied. She turned her head to look out her window. It would be excellent ifFlynn would shut up. So long as she looked out there, and managed to ignore theglass of the window itself, she could focus on the white, fluffy nothingness ofclouds. There were no numbers out there.
“You’ve had a lot of partners,too, right?” Flynn asked. “They told me about you when I was getting assigned.”
Zoe stiffened. If he asked herabout Shelley, she would get up and walk to the front of the plane and pretendshe was using the bathroom. She didn’t want to—such a tight space would becrowded with numbers, the tiny dimensions of a room shrunk down to the size ofa cupboard—but it would be better than talking about that. No one ever wantedto discuss their biggest failures. Not when they were so recent and weighed soheavily.
“They said you were one of thebest agents at solving these kind of complicated cases,” he said. He hadshifted closer to her, almost imperceptibly. Almost, but not—not when you werecounting the millimeters. “You’re some kind of savant, or something.”
“Am I?” Zoe asked flatly, notwilling to rise to his bait.
“Seriously. They told me I’lllearn a lot from you.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Zoe asked,turning around to meet his gaze with sharp eyes. She wanted to know who hadbeen talking about her behind her back—not that it would make much difference. Thecocky smile on Flynn’s face faded and faltered, the muscles around his mouthtwitching down by turns.
“Uh, just, everyone,” Flynn said,his voice uncertain now. He shifted back in the other direction again,returning to his original position. “So, I mean, we’ll probably solve the casereally quick, right? You and me, working together? Maybe I can take lead andyou can let me know if I miss anything.”
Zoe continued to stare at him fora moment, letting out only one small blink, and then turned back to stare outthe window again.
She didn’t like him, this AidenFlynn. He was cocky, maybe even more so than most of the new recruits. A rookiewho hadn’t yet found his limitations. His background likely had something to dowith it. It was doubtful that anyone had ever told him no.
She wasn’t interested in sharinganything with him, and especially not her abilities. Whether it was a blessingor a curse was something she had yet to square away within her own mind, butwhatever it was, she wasn’t about to let this stranger hear about it. Not onlywas
