Face of Death

“No, it doesn’t,” Zoe said impatiently. “Come on. Where was he attacked?”

“On the grounds of the farm.” Shelley stepped forward, placing her finger on the map. “Here. It looks like he ran.”

Zoe moved the red pin, just a small degree. But when she had done that, the spiral was neater, more composed, more aligned with what she might have expected. It turned out that they had been looking at it wrong from the very beginning. It was not the sites where bodies were recovered that mattered. It was where the attacks took place—the specific and precise locations where the killer wanted them to be.

The phone rang again, somewhere distantly at the range of Zoe’s attention. She ignored it, letting Shelley take care of it. That was not important right now. What was important was the pattern.

He had not waited for the gas station attendant to round a corner because he wanted to distract her, or give her false hope, or because it was all a game. It had been there because it had to be there, otherwise his spiral would not work.

In fact, looking at it now, Zoe would call it a perfect spiral. Nothing was a mistake, and there was no deviation. This was a perfect spiral of the kind that was seen everywhere in nature, a Fibonacci spiral, the spacing decreasing in precise ratios until it reached an end point.

That meant two things. The first was heartening: it was that there was going to be an end to the murders.

The second was less so.

It was that there were three more murders to come before the spiral was complete.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Zoe waited for Shelley to finish her call, tying up loose ends, discussing the latest body. All kinds of thoughts raced through Zoe’s mind, calculations and flashes of the prior crime scenes, things linking up and making so much more sense. She saw distances between scenes, diminishing in distance each time, painting the picture that she should have seen all along.

Shelley put the phone back in its cradle and moved back to the fax machine, seemingly unaware of the epiphany that had overwhelmed Zoe for the long minutes since she had seen it.

“I have it,” Zoe breathed at last to get her attention, staring at the map in a mixture of wonder and horror. “I know where he is going to strike next.”

“What?” Shelley looked up, abandoning her attempt to marshal all of the pieces of paper that had finally stopped coming through the fax machine. “But I didn’t even tell you the rest of the details yet. What if this isn’t one of his?”

“It is his,” Zoe said.

“But it’s a man—that breaks his profile. Most killers don’t break gender or race lines. They target one thing and one thing only.”

“Shelley.” Zoe turned, gestured to the chairs. “I know they tell you all of that stuff in training. The statistics, the general rules that killers move by. But believe me—this is his. I can see his pattern now. Let me explain it.”

Shelley sat, her eyes wide, her arms folded on the desk in front of her. She looked totally nonplussed, though whether at the fact that Zoe finally had the answers or at the way she had spoken to her, Zoe couldn’t tell.

“We are dealing with a schizophrenic,” Zoe began, standing in front of her, presentation-style. “I believe he will have a precise form of schizophrenia known as apophenia.”

Shelley opened her notebook and wrote that down. “What does apophenia mean?”

“An apophenic is someone who is obsessed with patterns. When they are suffering from a delusional episode, they may feel that the patterns are speaking to them or that they are a sign left by a higher power. They see two things and create a connection between them, when there really is nothing there to see.”

“So, for example…” Shelley chewed on the end of her pen, frowning as she thought. “If I was saying out loud that I didn’t know what to do with my life, and I saw an advertising billboard immediately afterward that said ‘Visit Nashville,’ I would think that God was telling me to go to Nashville.”

“Good example. Except that with schizophrenics, this can go much further. They latch onto signs and patterns, and they become truly obsessed. Their lives become dedicated to these patterns. They might stand on a train track and wait for an encroaching train because the pattern told them to.”

“Or they might kill someone.” Shelley’s voice was soft and quiet.

Zoe paused, giving Shelley a moment’s respectful silence as she had noted others doing in serious situations, then nodded. “We thought for all of this time that he was cleaning up his crime scenes to prevent us from tracing him, that he was an accomplished and educated killer, someone who had enough knowhow to stop us from catching him. If I am right, that may well have been simply a lucky side effect of his need to keep the pattern intact. He erases himself, any marks left behind that could distort the pattern. That is all.”

“So, you know what his pattern is?”