“They knew,” Matthias said, sneering and jabbing a finger toward his own head. “They knew.”
Shelley’s eyes narrowed momentarily before she spoke again. Watching her, Zoe understood intuitively that she was reading, interpreting. That she was waiting for the pattern to clear up in her head, the way that Zoe would stare at a complex equation or series of numbers and wait for them to make sense in the context of the case.
“You believe that someone targeted you because of your gift with mathematics?” Shelley asked.
Matthias nodded vigorously. Perhaps he did not trust himself to get the right words.
“Okay. And after the accident, what changed?” Shelley’s agreement was light, uncomplicated. Not exactly a statement that she believed him, but not a judgment either. Something that could be taken as reassurance for a person who needed to hear it.
“Everything. The, um. The, um. The—the snakes.”
“Snakes?”
Matthias gestured toward his head again, bowing his neck, his gaze back to the table. “The snakes. I can’t—get there.”
There was a pause while Shelley watched him. “There’s something wrong in your head now, isn’t there, Matthias?”
He slammed a hand down on the table with loud and sudden force, enough to make Zoe—in her tired state—jump. His voice was strained when he spoke, and she was more than a little surprised to see tears escaping down his cheeks. “Everything’s wrong. Everything I had—all I worked for—the snakes ate it all up.”
“Talk us through what happened, in your own words.”
“There was a—a—a paper. Physics with the new guy. Professor Wardenford was gone. Cole was the SI. I—didn’t—I f—I…”
“You failed the paper.” Shelley was leaning forward in her seat, paying close attention. There was some kind of synergy between them now, some kind of wavelength that was working. She was understanding him.
“Yes.” Matthias hung his head. “I got my words mixed up. Had to explain a—known theory and I got my words mixed up. Then the numbers. He told the other one. Professor Henderson.”
“So, Cole Davidson was the first person who noticed you were having difficulties. That was why you killed him?”
Matthias’s eyes had hardened like flint. “Henderson, he had me take these—exams. Not exams, but…”
“Tests,” Shelley supplied.
“Tests. He came back and said I probably had dyslexia. But the numbers were off too and he thought that was strange. Then he told—then he told Cole.”
“Did Cole bring it up in class?”
“He offered help. Said I might need more—hours for my work. Get extra time on my deadlines.”
“What happened next?” Shelley leaned her head on steepled fingers, listening carefully.
“Sent me to Dr. North.” Matthias’s anger flared up again, and he kicked the metal table legs to either side of him. “Snakes—saw the snakes. He found the snakes all knotted up and he showed me. Showed me how I was changed.”
The picture was emerging. Every single victim, someone who had simply known about Matthias’s problems. Someone who had been instrumental in diagnosing them. Even though the injury was not the fault of any one of them, Matthias had latched his anger—which had no other outlet—onto them. One by one.
“The doctor was one of the people who tried to help you. Why kill him?”
Matthias scoffed, his hands bunched into tight fists on the table. “Help me? He said the snakes were—were there to stay. No way to kill them. Just have to live with them. Take pill this or pill that, make it better. Happy snakes. But always still the snakes.”
Shelley moved down her notes, to the final line. “What about your Professor Wardenford? We’ve heard that you looked up to him, even considered him a mentor. Why did you go to kill him?”
“He didn’t know.” There was real regret in Matthias’s eyes, at least as far as Zoe knew what it looked like in order to diagnose it. Another tear slipped down his cheek. His emotions were swinging wildly out of control. “I just wanted to talk. He didn’t know about the snakes like everyone else did. But then he knew. I saw it. I told him the time and I knew the snakes spat it out all wrong.”
“So you attacked him as well.” There was a little reproach in Shelley’s voice, creeping in as if she couldn’t help it.
“Is he…?”
Shelley met his eyes directly, eschewing a smile. “James Wardenford is in the hospital being treated for a fractured skull. They say he will pull through just fine.”
Matthias sighed, another flood of tears escaping from his eyes.
“There’s one thing I don’t yet understand,” Shelley said, flicking to another page of her notes. Here was a blown-up image of each of the equations, along with Dr. Applewhite’s theoretical calculations below. “You deliberately implicated Dr. Francesca Applewhite. You planted her hairs at Dr. North’s home, am I correct?”
He nodded.
“For the tape,” Zoe said, quietly, “the suspect nodded.” She wanted to make sure the records were absolutely clear on that part.
“You must have had to do some very creative work to get hold of those hairs, and to place them so carefully,” Shelley continued.
Matthias smiled faintly at the praise. “Got from her office chair. People’s head—head—hair falls out. They just leave it there. Easy to take.”
“What I don’t understand is why it had to be her. This was a focused decision, but as far as I can see, Dr. Applewhite has no involvement in your medical history. She hadn’t even met you.”
Matthias scoffed, his facing turning into a mask of disgust. “I didn’t need to meet her. She went and published that faulty equation for everyone to see, hasn’t she? She will ask for help from others. Couldn’t even get it right herself.”
Zoe’s head hurt. It was hard enough keeping up with the way normal people spoke. Matthias was a nightmare—tenses changing, words out of order, misused. She was thinking that she would probably have to ask Shelley for a full translation once this was over. Matthias clearly tried to talk as little as possible to hide his defects, but he could not help himself—he wasn’t yet used to staying quiet. He had to explain himself.
“So, this was about the equation—the one that you included in your own equations?” Shelley prompted.
“You figured it out, huh? Well, I’m impressed.” Matthias leaned back in his chair, looking off to the side as he thought. “Mind you, you did have Professor Wardenford’s help. But anyway, I solved it. I—found it. I had it all ready, just needed to write something up so that I could publish it. In a real journal. My first one.”
Zoe noticed that he seemed to be clearer when he talked about the things he cared about the most. It was as if the anger was driving his focus, allowing him to get closer to the issue, find the right words.
“That must have been disappointing.”
Zoe almost missed it—Shelley’s words came out of left field for her. Disappointing, how? But she looked at Mattias and how he seemed to agree in every line of his downcast posture and expression, and it dawned on her. Ah. He couldn’t publish a paper if he couldn’t write one. Not only that, but even if he managed it, his debut publication would be his last. His bright future, extinguished in a single crash.
“I wanted that—dog to know. I wanted her to know someone else had solved it. I wanted her to know that I was smarter than her. And then I wanted her to pay for publishing something like that without getting it right. I knew you’d let—Teacher Wardenford go if you thought it was her.”
“You included yourself in the equation too, didn’t you?”
He looked up, almost with shock. “You saw that?”
“The capital ‘M.’ It was hard to miss.”
He looked down at the table, his eyes moving over invisible patterns there. Trapped by his own hubris. His need to leave a signature. Perhaps he had never imagined that law enforcement would be smart enough to spot it.