Blake Pierce - Face of Murder

“Or anything else, too,” Zoe prompted. “If someone finds a mistake, or a sign that something is missing. We were not able to fully check the first body to see if anything was missed by the photographer. Bear in mind that we also do not know whether this is intended to be one equation or two separate problems.”

“Understood.” Dr. Applewhite placed the photographs down on the desk in front of her, two inches off to the right, closer to her laptop. A gesture that reassured Zoe of her intention to begin work as soon as she had the chance. “Now, what about Dr. Monk’s recommendations? Have you thought anymore about—”

Zoe’s ringtone blasted out from her pocket, accompanied by strong buzzing. Saved by the bell, she thought, as she made an apologetic face and answered the call.

“Special Agent Prime.”

“Z, it’s me. I got a hit in the professor’s emails.”

“I am on my way,” Zoe told her, ending the call and jumping out of her seat with a nod to her mentor. Whatever it was, it had to be more promising than the nothing that they had.

Zoe pulled the car into the campus parking lot. At this time of night, the evening drawing down rapidly, it was fairly full—the cars belonging to students who lived in the various dorms and apartments scattered around. Each of them bore a university permit stuck to their front windshield. Zoe’s car had something better—an FBI sticker.

“Read it to me again?” Zoe asked. She was still unsure about Shelley’s theory. Being angry about a dropped grade was one thing, but angry enough to kill?

Shelley brought up the email on her phone without even a sigh of frustration, to her credit. She had saved the screenshot and brought it along as proof—proof they would need if they were going to confront the student who had sent it.

“‘Professor,’” she read. “‘I can’t believe you flunked me. Like, are you serious? I tried really goddamn hard on his paper and you just decided to kick me off the course! Teachers are supposed to help and support. Thanks a whole fucking bunch. You’re the worst professor I ever had. I hope you get fired. I’m not the only one who hates your guts. You’re going to get hauled over the coals if the dean listens to our complaints. Try sleeping well tonight, asshole.’”

Zoe had already zoned out by the time Shelley was done. She had heard it a couple of times before, and this time had not changed her opinion. It was student bluster, that was all. Threats made to his career, not to his life.

Not to mention that the student in question was studying English, not math. It was not a close enough connection. How could this barely literate student have known to write out complex equations? Complex enough to stump experts?

And besides, even if this kid was angry with the professor, it didn’t at all explain why he would have gone after the first victim—the student.

“Well?” Shelley prompted.

Zoe realized that she had been sitting in silence, failing to respond to Shelley’s reading. She shrugged her shoulders now. “It sounds like nothing.”

“Come on, he’s directly threatening the professor, Z,” Shelley said. “And this allusion to other disgruntled students—what if he knows others who might have done it? At the very least, we need to bring him in for questioning.”

Zoe stared out across the dark campus, her arms folded across her chest in front of the steering wheel. “If you say so.”

It clearly was not the answer that Shelley had been hoping for, as she made an annoyed sound in the back of her throat and turned away.

Her phone buzzed at almost precisely the same moment, and she looked down to read the incoming message. “I’ve just had an email from a secretary in the admissions department. She sent over Jones’s schedule.”

“Jones?” Zoe interrupted.

This time, Shelley did sigh and roll her eyes. “Jensen Jones, the student we’re here to see. I know you don’t think it’s much of a lead, but I thought you were at least paying attention.”

Zoe shrugged again, offering no apology. She had better, more important things to focus on. The equations. The fact that she still wasn’t any closer to solving them. Waiting around for Dr. Applewhite’s contacts to look at them and get back to her was like agony.

“Anyway, this is important. Jones was also taking a physics class. And guess who happened to be the student instructor for that class?”

Zoe stared back at her, unflinching. She wasn’t about to play this game.

Shelley pushed on, undeterred. “Cole Davidson. As in, victim number one. Jones has a personal connection to both of the victims.”

“But he does not take math.” Zoe couldn’t hold it back any longer. She refused to believe that there was any way the equations were random, just scrawling meant to distract them. They had a key part to play in this case. They had to.

Because if they didn’t, then Zoe wasn’t as useful to this case as she thought she was, and it was all just a boring, run of the mill murder. Why it bothered her so much that that might be the case, she couldn’t fully say. All she knew was that she needed to solve the equations, and for them to be the key.

“Look, I know you could pull rank if you wanted to. You’re the senior agent. But I don’t want to end up with an unsolved case and not be able to say that we left no stone unturned. I’m going in to question him,” Shelley said decisively, opening her door and getting out of the car.

Zoe sat for a moment, then sighed and opened her own door. At the end of the day, they were partners. They worked together. Even if Zoe had no belief at all that this was a viable need, she was still supposed to support her partner.

So, she would.

She caught up with Shelley, who was striding as fast as her legs could take her across the campus, some minutes later. There was a crackling energy coming from the other woman, an anger that bristled from her like the spines on a porcupine. Zoe was familiar with that kind of sensation. She was always provoking anger in others, often at times when she couldn’t work out what she had done wrong.

At least this time, she knew.

“I will take your lead,” Zoe said. “If you feel that this kid will give us something, I will back you up.”

Shelley’s steps faltered a little, before she resumed her course. “Thank you,” she said, a little too primly. Zoe gathered that she was still upset, but why? She had given Shelley what she wanted, hadn’t she?

Such questions would have to be left for later, or preferably never at all, because they had arrived outside an apartment building just off the side of the campus. Shelley had closed the map application on her phone, by which Zoe understood that they must have arrived. She also knew just standing there in the street that the music booming out of the windows, even though they were closed, was above city regulations for the volume of noise audible in public at night.

A college student, looking to be nineteen years old at most, was stumbling out of the doorway as they approached. He had a red cup in his hand, and his hands were fumbling with a cigarette. When he looked up and saw the two women coming toward him, his eyes widened to almost a comical degree. The one fluid ounce of liquid in the cup was thrown over his shoulder to land on some bushes, and he walked away quickly, clutching the now-empty plastic receptacle as if his life depended on keeping it out of their hands.

“Party,” Zoe said, recognizing enough of the signs.

Zoe pulled her phone out again and brought up a photograph of Jensen Jones from his college registration. He was young, fairly clean-cut. Brown hair, a wide nose, brown eyes. Nothing at all special.