“Zoe,” Dr. Applewhite exclaimed breathlessly down the phone.
Zoe was instantly on alert, her body tensing. “Have you discovered something?” she asked.
“No. Well, yes.” Dr. Applewhite hesitated. Zoe got the impression of movement from the noise in the background of the call: rustling papers and fabrics, footsteps pacing, the unusual cadence of Dr. Applewhite’s voice. She was pacing backward and forward. “I’ve heard back from most of the contacts I reached out to. You know what mathematicians are like; can’t resist a challenge. Most of them had a bit of a sleepless night.”
Zoe refrained from admitting that she had had the same experience. The less small talk the better; she wanted the answer, and she wanted it now. “Go on.”
“Well, here’s the thing. They, almost all of them, said the same thing. All agreed they couldn’t solve it—couldn’t make any real headway. But these are some of the best minds in the world, Zoe—really, the sharpest. If they can’t solve it… anyway, they tell me the equations are impossible. A few of them even asked me if it was possible that a practical joke had been played on me. Because, you see—what they think is—the equations are wrong.”
There was a beat. Zoe retraced the conversation mentally, Dr. Applewhite’s last word hanging in her ears. Had she really heard it correctly? “Wrong?”
“Precisely. Whoever wrote them down—well, they’re either writing gibberish, or they don’t understand what they’re writing. Several parts of it are just garbled, just absolute nonsense. There’s no wonder you couldn’t get anywhere with it. No one can.”
Zoe started pacing up and down, mirroring the frantic actions of her mentor, who was clearly just as excited about all of this as Zoe herself. Except that now something was wrong, something heavy sitting inside her chest and threatening to choke her. Wrong? Could that really be the case?
“I do not understand,” Zoe admitted, glancing up as the door opened to admit Shelley.
“I just don’t think your killer even knows what they’re writing on the bodies. This really widens things up, don’t you think? Realistically, if they’re so hard that not even our best and brightest can solve them, you would be looking for the best mathematician in the world. The odds of that happening are very low, you must admit.”
“Astronomically low,” Zoe muttered in reply, closing her eyes briefly against the deluge of calculations that instantly appeared in her mind, zeroes spiraling off into the distance.
Shelley was giving her a questioning frown as she settled her handbag down on a chair and removed her jacket, watching her carefully. Zoe turned away so that she didn’t have to meet her gaze. There was too much to explain, and unlike others who could seemingly multitask, Zoe had never been good at carrying on two conversations at once.
“It seems the most logical explanation would be that this person is simply, well, damaged. Psychologically speaking. A schizophrenic with paranoid delusions, or so forth. Perhaps they think they are writing down something of great importance. Maybe they believe it is a message from God, even. The point is, they have some kind of mental problem. There’s no math in it at all.”
That heavy stone of disappointment had settled firmly in Zoe’s stomach. It didn’t feel right. None of it felt right. But how much of that was her own desire to be right about the importance of the writing? She couldn’t be sure. “Right,” she said, hearing her own voice distantly. “I will take that into account as we investigate further.”
There was a pause on the other end, before Dr. Applewhite spoke again, softer and soothingly. “Zoe, I know it must be difficult to take in. I understand that you wanted the equations to mean something. The thing is, they simply don’t.”
“I hear you,” Zoe said. It was the only truth she could offer just then. “Thank you for going to all of this trouble for me.”
Dr. Applewhite was making overtures of kindness, suggesting that she would do anything Zoe needed, but Zoe had already begun to tune her out. She was looking at the blown-up photographs of the equations, printed in a scrawling hand across the torsos of two dead men.
“I will talk to you again soon,” she said, hanging up the call. She did not have enough presence of mind to know whether Dr. Applewhite had been in mid-sentence when she interrupted.
“Is it bad news?” Shelley asked, quietly.
Zoe had almost forgotten she was in the room. “My contact, for the math professors. They do not feel that there is any lead in the equations. Apparently, they are impossible to solve. The word used was ‘gibberish.’”
Shelley took a breath, blew out a whistle. “Wow. Are we sure about that?”
Zoe searched within herself, trying to find the answer. Did she really believe it? “I do not know,” she said, at last. “It does not feel right. I thought these equations were the key to solving it all. I—I still do. How can they be meaningless?”
Shelley circled their desks to stand next to Zoe, looking down at the pictures. She patted Zoe’s hand lightly, then tapped one of the images. “They aren’t meaningless. Not to us. Even if the equations have no solution, these were written by our perpetrator. That means they have a lot of clues for us. State of mind, handwriting, even the pen he used. That’s forensic evidence. We can still use these to put him behind bars.”
“Or her,” Zoe said automatically, though it was true that the physical evidence suggested the strength of a male. Still, she had been caught out by that once in the past. A woman who had trained as a wrestler, the musculature on her arms far above that of the average female—or male, for that matter. Her strength had been enough to snuff out a life without need for any tools other than her own body.
“All hope is not lost, is what I’m saying.”
Zoe continued to stare down at the images. If Dr. Applewhite was right, Zoe had just wasted some of the most crucial hours of the case fixating on something that meant nothing. And she had been so sure. Could this really be meaningless? Really?
“You aren’t the only one who had trouble sleeping,” Shelley said, giving Zoe a sympathetic smile. Zoe briefly wondered how Shelley could tell, but then, she hadn’t looked in a mirror that morning. The bags under her eyes were probably deeper and darker than ever. “I spent a few hours searching online. Take a look at these.”
She had a sheath of papers that she was distributing across the desk, covering over the crime scene photographs. Zoe wanted to protest, but she held herself back. She would sound petty. Like she couldn’t let the equation theory go.
She didn’t want to let it go, but that was beside the point. When people wanted her to forget something, and she didn’t, there were often arguments and interventions set to follow. Zoe didn’t want that. She could at least pretend she was getting over it, in front of others.
“These two are from local papers, and those are from scientific journals,” Shelley was explaining, pointing at the various printouts. Each of them bore a photograph of the same man, some from different angles; the headlines were all inflammatory. “See here? Professor loses post over controversy. It sounds like this guy got into a pretty public showdown. He was a fairly well-respected theoretical physicist, until he got into an argument with another professor. Things escalated, words turned to blows. The police intervened, and it turns out our guy was drunk on the job. He lost his position, and his reputation hit the rocks. Students and colleagues started coming out of the woodwork, accusing him of inappropriate conduct because of his alcoholism.”