Everything about this one wasdifferent. She was taller and heavier, more of a substantial woman than theother two, and far younger—by two decades at least. Not only that, but she wasblack, which meant that the killer was now crossing racial lines. A whitewoman, a Latina, and a black woman. That was rare. Serial killers normallystuck to one race, one type of person. When they mixed things up and targetedjust about anybody, it made them that much harder to track down.
Zoe breathed out through her nose,trying to hold it together. She moved around toward the head, examining it witha clinical eye. Most people would have had a hard time even looking at thepulpy, beaten-in mess that hardly bore any resemblance to a face anymore. Itwas all shattered bone and red, sticky insides, but all Zoe could see were the numbers.The sheer number of blows it would have taken to reduce the face to this,making it difficult to even guess the dimensions of the murder weapon, each ofthe impact sites overlapping so many times that it was hard to see where oneended and another began.
Hard even for her meant almostimpossible for anyone else. Zoe doubted even the coroner would be able to tellthem what was used, except that it was large and heavy enough to inflictserious damage. The girl’s face was just gone. This would have to be a closedcasket.
Zoe moved back around. The groundwas scattered with dead leaves; it was hard to see footprints, but she knew sheno longer needed them. She’d seen enough at the riverbank to begin to build apicture of the killer in her head. What was important was the one piece ofevidence he had left them to conclusively point to his identity. His callingcard. His symbol.
Zoe tried to focus. There wassomething nagging at the back of her head, like an itch that wouldn’t letitself be scratched. She was missing something here, she knew it. Somethingthat would connect it all, unlock some grand secret that the killer didn’t wanther to know. What was it…? Her head was thumping.
Zoe leaned forward, closer,getting a more intimate view of that slashed symbol, the way the skin partedbefore each cut. What was it that he was trying to say? Her head pounded inprotest at the pressure of leaning forward, pulsing like the beat of a drum,steady and strong, one, two, three… There was something here… A bird called outthree times fast and then one longer, trilling note… the sheriff said somethingin five syllables… Zoe’s head pounded harder and harder…
The face was gone. For a momentwhen Zoe looked up at it she saw Shelley’s face, her eyes open in shock, her mouthopen, blood spatter from the wound at her neck cast in a delicate spray acrossher pale skin.
Zoe straightened just in time andrushed away, far enough from the crime scene to avoid disturbing the evidence,and vomited at the base of a tree, hoping it would hide her from view.
She panted, wiping the back of herhand across her mouth, groaning and hoping there was nothing more to come out.The dimensions of her own vomit crawled across her vision, telling her thevolume she had lost and recalculating the probable amount of alcohol andanti-depressant left in her system.
“Agent Prime.”
Zoe looked up to see Flynnblocking out what little light managed to filter down amongst the trees to thefloor. “I, ah,” she said, trying to come up with an excuse. “I guess I am notas good at dealing with these violent ones as I thought I was.” It was notsomething she wanted him to think, exactly, but then again, didn’t the mosthuman and empathetic people often vomit at crime scenes?
“Or at handling your booze,” Flynnsaid flatly. He didn’t offer her a hand to get up from her crouch, but justwatched as she pushed herself back to her feet with the tree as support,putting her other hand to grip her forehead as she did so. “If you can’t doyour job, Agent, I need to request someone who will.”
“You are being hasty,” Zoe said,waiting for the world to stop spinning around her again. “I can do my jobbetter than you can.”
“No, you know what? I’m done,”Flynn snapped. “These killings seem to be totally random and irrational, and ifwe’re going to catch him, we both need to have absolutely clear heads. It’sgoing to be hard enough as it is, without you losing control.”
“Wait,” Zoe said. Something hadcut through all the spinning, all the noise and the numbers, the thumping painand the nausea. Something as sharp as an arrow had flown right into the target,making her realize something that she should have seen all along.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“We are missing something,” Zoesaid, really meaning “I am missing something,” because she didn’t expect thatFlynn would be able to follow. “There is a bigger picture here. Just like pi.”
“Just like pi…?” Flynn shook hishead. “This again?”
Zoe’s mind was racing. Random andirrational: something about the way that Flynn said it had set off a siren inher mind. It sparked off what she had already been thinking about: pi.
Pi, as a number, appeared to be along string of random digits that followed no pattern or logic. It was randomand irrational. Just as the murders seemed to be.
But the thing about pi was thatthis random and irrational sequence was only random and irrational to the humanmind. It did follow a formula, a pattern—just not one that humans had yet beenable to grasp. Mathematicians could calculate it to a long sequence, eventrillions and quadrillions of digits long—so many that it was impossible toread them all in one lifetime, let alone to begin to do anything with them.
The very existence of pi implied agreater design, some kind of bigger picture that humans were not yet able tograsp. It was a perfect ratio that was always present in every circle: theratio of the circumference to the diameter. Insert
