CHAPTER TWENTY
Zoe watched a streetlight flickering up ahead at the end of the block, at the intersection with the next road along. On, off, on, off, on. The pattern appeared random, but of course, it wasn’t. It was defined by the dying bulb inside it, or perhaps the flow of electricity in some damaged part of the light, or some other factor that Zoe was not aware of. If she had been an electrical engineer, perhaps she would even have been able to tell just by looking at it.
Of course, she was not an electrical engineer. As she walked an unfamiliar part of her neighborhood, her hands stuffed deep in the pockets of her coat and her breath clouding misty in the air, Zoe mused that it would have been an easier job. Fewer people to deal with.
She was not sure exactly where she was going, except for the fact that it had to be somewhere. Within half an hour of sitting at home, during which time she had managed only half a meal before starting to feel queasy, Zoe had become restless. Staying there was perhaps not as uncomfortable as staying at Shelley’s, but it still didn’t feel right. She had put on her coat and walked out the door, with no destination in mind.
The only thing she could focus on was Dr. Applewhite. Scenes played out in her mind, the two of them together. All of the many memories that they had shared over the years. Never once had Dr. Applewhite let her down or made her feel judged.
She was the one who had helped Zoe start to see her abilities as something useful, rather than an evil curse. Even if Zoe had never yet really been able to embrace them, much less be proud of them, they had become something that she was able to use. She saved lives now. She stopped people from killing, minimized risk, foiled escape plans. She stopped innocent people from being targeted for crimes that they did not commit.
Usually, anyway.
The worst part of all of this was that Dr. Applewhite had been the very person to set her on this path, to help her settle on law enforcement as a career. To encourage her to develop and nurture those skills, make use of them. How wrong of her it had been to think that this was the ideal solution! She was likely regretting it now, Zoe figured. Sitting alone in that cell at the J. Edgar Hoover building. Maybe she was awake like Zoe, unable to get comfortable in an unfamiliar place.
Zoe remembered being young and isolated, a college student with no idea of what to do with her life or where to go. Studying almost aimlessly, just picking up credits wherever she could with no real thought of what they would mean to her future life. She remembered taking a meeting with Dr. Applewhite, when everything had changed.
“Have you thought about what career you want to pursue?” Dr. Applewhite asked, as she moved a pawn across the chessboard between them.
Zoe studied the board intently. She had no real interest in the game, but the challenge was to try and identify possible strategies. The numbers she could see on the board told her where each of Dr. Applewhite’s pieces could go next, how many moves it would take her to get close to the queen. How many of them were mathematically placed for a check, and how she could avoid those moves.
“No,” Zoe said bluntly. She had been even more blunt back then, though no one who knew her now would likely believe it.
Dr. Applewhite moved another pawn, though Zoe sensed her mind wasn’t fully in it. If it was, then she would not have made such an obvious move. “I think it’s important for you to find a sense of purpose in what you do. Have you considered a career where you might help people?”
Zoe glanced up, frowning. “Like medicine? I don’t know. I think you need to have more compassion for that.”
Dr. Applewhite’s lips quirked at the edges, a trait that Zoe found annoying. What did it even mean? “I don’t know about that. I’ve met plenty of nurses who don’t seem to care about much of anything,” Dr. Applewhite said. “And you’re plenty compassionate. But there are other options. What about law enforcement?”
Zoe was about to offer a verbal rebuttal alongside the one on the game board, but her hand hovered in midair. That was a striking thought. Law enforcement. What if she could use her pattern recognition, her calculations, all of it, to identify suspects and stop crime sprees?
What if she could stop murders?
“Like the police?”
Dr. Applewhite nodded. “Police, FBI, whatever you want. There are a lot of options around here, and you could move to another state, too. Go be a small-town sheriff if you wanted, or head up a specialist investigation unit. There’s even the forensics department, CSI. It seems like it’s worth considering.”
Zoe did consider it. She considered it long and hard. So long that their time together was up before the chess game was finished.
Zoe’s mother had always called her evil. Said the devil’s blood must run in her veins in order for her to do the things she did. Zoe knew that was stupid, because her father was just a man, and her mother was human too—for all her shortcomings. But if she could help people, really help people… if she could put the real bad guys behind bars, wouldn’t that change things?
Wouldn’t that redeem her, just a little?
The irony stung. Redeem herself? Ha! Not only had she failed to protect an innocent person in this case, but it was the very person who had suggested she make a career out of it in the first place.
The case was a mess. Zoe had had no leads before she implicated Dr. Applewhite, and she had none now. In fact, the only lead that could really be called credible in the whole case was the DNA evidence—and that was what had gotten Dr. Applewhite pulled in.
Zoe felt useless. There was nowhere for her to go on the case, no lead to follow. She had no idea where to start looking for this killer, now that the equations hadn’t panned out the way she thought they would. It was clearly a frame, but Dr. Applewhite came across hundreds of people on a weekly basis. How could they narrow down thousands of people to just one suspect, when Dr. Applewhite wasn’t the type to make enemies?
It wasn’t like she had anyone else who could help either. Besides Shelley, no one knew about the numbers that she could see. Until the forensics people finally caught on to what she already knew—the height of the perpetrator—there was nothing at all to say that Dr. Applewhite wasn’t guilty. And Shelley just had to be the person that Zoe, in her infinite wisdom, had pushed away tonight.
Not only had she made a mess in the first place, but now it was messed up even more.
Zoe felt something wet drip down from her chin, and was startled to realize that she was crying. It was not often that she engaged in such an outward show of emotion like this, least of all a negative one. She tried to remember the last time that she had cried, and couldn’t. The shock of it caught her breath in her throat, froze the water in her eyes. She wiped her face dry with her sleeve, biting her lip until the impulse went away entirely.
There was something she could do here. There had to be. There was something she had missed, somewhere, and all she had to do was find it.
She ran through all three of the equations, by now learned by heart. They still didn’t make sense, but what if she inverted them? Reversed them? What if she substituted the letters so that all of the equations matched? What if she tried numbers one by one, looked for a solution?
Maybe solving them at last would spell something out, like geographical coordinates. Of course, for that she would need to have the inputs, and she had no idea what c or d or f was supposed to represent.