“‘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.
Which was bad news, because of what Shelley said next. “We’ll have to keep an eye out for him. I guess most of them will scatter and run as soon as we get there. We kind of obviously look like FBI, or at least cops. Might have to catch him as he tries to get away.”
“Having a party right after murdering two people?” Zoe asked. “Is that really considered a normal reaction?”
“Not normal, no, but it has happened,” Shelley said. “I could cite a couple of cases, but it’s probably more efficient for us to grab him and find out for sure.”
“After you,” Zoe suggested, gesturing toward the door.
Shelley drew a deep breath as if she were steeling herself, then nodded. “Let’s go.”
Beyond the door of the apartment building, the noise was much louder. To complicate their search, there were three open doors on the ground floor alone—the residents of each of the apartments opening their own spaces up to be a new area of the party. It had spilled across the corridor, up the stairs, and—judging at least by the sheer number of teenagers moving in all directions—through every apartment in the building.
The appearance of Zoe and Shelley was not immediately noted. A couple of students saw them and ducked past them out the door, no doubt wanting to get themselves as far away from trouble as possible.
But then the worst possible thing happened: one of the kids, a jock standing at six feet with the build of a quarterback, yelled out in panic. “The cops are here!”
The call went through the building like wildfire, and panic started to set in. There was no use in trying to stay incognito. Zoe reached into her inner jacket pocket for her badge and brandished it in the air. “FBI. This party is breaking up. Now!”
The effect was immediate and palpable. Thirty students ran past her in quick succession, all of them from down in the lower apartment rooms. The word was spreading up the stairs, too, and people were clattering down, sloshing their beers onto the carpet as they tripped and stumbled.
Zoe waited in the downstairs lobby while Shelley went into all three of the ground floor rooms in turn, scattering more students out through them as she did so. Even from where she stood, making no attempt to catch any of the students who continued to run by her, Zoe could see that the place was a mess. Crumpled red cups, spilled food and drink, and no doubt the occasional patch of vomit covered every surface in sight. It had been a big one—the legendary kind of party that kids talk about for months. Too bad they had ended it.