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Face of Death
CHAPTER FOUR
The gas station was eerily quiet when Zoe pulled up, alone, at the crime scene. There was tape everywhere, holding off would-be spectators, and a single officer stationed at the front door to keep watch for rebellious teenagers.
“Morning,” Zoe said, flashing her badge. “I am going to take a look around.”
The man nodded his consent, not that she required it, and she passed him, ducking under the tape to head inside.
Shelley had known the best way to deploy their unique and particular skills. Without prior discussion, she had suggested that she would go and interview the family, dispatching Zoe to the scene of the latest murder after a drop-off at the home. That was only right. Zoe could find the patterns here, and Shelley would know how to read emotions and lies there. Zoe had to give her that.
So, she had agreed, and given only the pretense of being in charge. It was only Shelley’s warm nature—and Zoe’s overall lack of care for the command structure’s correct adherence, so long as the case was solved—that made it feel all right. Shelley had even seemed almost apologetic, so keen to show that she knew the ropes that she was overstepping her bounds by accident.
She hesitated at the door of the gas station, knowing things must have started there. There were faint marks left on the ground, footprints marked by small flags and plastic triangles. The woman—the older woman with sensible shoes and a short stride—had led the way. This gas station was so isolated that she couldn’t have had more than a few customers that day, and the marks were clear of any confusion only a few paces away from the door.
The woman had been followed, though perhaps she had not known it. The numbers appeared before Zoe’s eyes, telling her everything she needed to know: the distance between them indicated an unhurried stride. There were no other footsteps to indicate whether the perpetrator had come from inside the gas station or somewhere in the parking lot. The woman had walked calmly, at a steady pace, toward the corner. There was a mess here, but Zoe passed it, seeing the steps continuing and knowing she would be back again eventually.
First, the footsteps continued at a slightly faster pace. Was the woman aware now that she was followed?
Here—right by a few scattered pieces of candy that littered the ground, perhaps from a botched delivery or a clumsy child—they had stopped. The woman had turned to look at the man, before spinning on her heel and rushing onward toward a door at the back of the building.
There was a key still hanging from the lock, swinging slightly every now and then in the breeze. The ground was slightly scuffed here, where the victim had stopped to turn it in the lock and then hurried away.
Her retreating steps showed a much longer stride, a quicker pace. She had been almost running, trying to get away and back to the store she tended. Was she afraid? Cold in the dark? Just wanting to get back to her desk?
The man had followed her. Not immediately; there was an indentation here, a scuff of raised dirt at the edge of a heel print where he had slowly turned to watch her. Then he had loped after her with what was likely an easy, light gait, directly approaching her, cutting inside her path to reach her at the corner.
Ah, the mess again. Zoe squatted on her heels, examining it closer. The ground was more profoundly disturbed here, scuff marks clearly visible where the victim had kicked for purchase for perhaps a few seconds or less. More noticeable was the heavier imprint of the man’s shoes here, where he must have taken some of her weight on the garrote.
The body had already been taken away, but the blood spoke for itself.
It must have been fast; she would not have struggled for long.
Zoe peered down for a closer look at the footprints she had seen, those of the male culprit. What was interesting was their appearance. While she could make out a faint pattern in the marks left by the victim—enough to give an idea of brand and the comfortable style of shoe—his footprints were a vague outline only, an impression of a heel for the most part.
Zoe retraced her steps, checking as she went. There were only two places where she could make out his steps: near the door, where he had waited, and here, at the moment of death. In both cases, all identifying marks—including the length and width of the shoe—had been erased.
In other words, he had cleaned up after himself.
“There was no physical evidence left other than the body?” Zoe asked the guard, who had not yet moved from his position by the door.
He had his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, his eyes squinting up and down the road in either direction. “No, ma’am,” he said.
“No hair follicles? Tire tracks?”
“Nothing that we can pinpoint to a perpetrator. Looks like all of the tire tracks in the parking lot were erased, not just his.”
Zoe chewed her lip, thinking. He might have been choosing his victims at random, but he was far from being a crazed madman. Just like Shelley had said—he was in control. More than that, he was patient and meticulous. Even killers who planned their attacks weren’t usually this good.
Zoe’s ringtone blazed out across the quiet of the empty road, making the guard jump in his boots. “Special Agent Prime,” she answered automatically, without even checking the caller display.
“Z, I’ve got a lead. Abusive ex-husband,” Shelley said. No standing on ceremony for her. Her tone was rushed, excited. That thrill of the first hint. “Looks like the divorce was just being finalized. You want to come pick me up and check it out?”
“Not much to see here,” Zoe replied. There was no sense in both of them walking the scene, if there were other leads to be followed. Besides, she got the feeling that Shelley very much did not want to see the place where a woman had lost her life. She was still a little green in many ways. “I will be with you in twenty minutes.”
***
“So, where were you last night?” Shelley pressed, leaning in to make the guy feel as though it was their little secret.
“I was at a bar,” he grunted. “Lucky’s, over on the east side of town.”
Zoe was listening, but only just. She had known from the moment they walked in that this was not their murderer. The ex-husband might have liked to throw his weight around when they were married, but that was exactly the problem: his weight. He was at least a hundred pounds too heavy to have left those imprints, and too short, besides. He had the height to take out his wife—a smaller woman who had no doubt been subjected to his fists many times over—but not the tallest victim. He was five foot seven, six and three-quarters at a better guess. It would have been too much of a reach.
“Can anyone verify you were there?” Shelley asked.
Zoe wanted to stop her, prevent any more wasted time. But she didn’t say a thing. She didn’t want to try to explain something that was as obvious to her as the sky being blue.
“I was passed out,” he said, throwing his hand in the air in a gesture of frustration. “Check the cameras. Ask the bartender. He kicked me out well after midnight.”
“The bartender has a name?” Zoe asked, flipping out a pad to make a note. At least it would be something they could easily verify. She noted down what he told her.
“When did you last see your ex-wife?” Shelley asked.
He shrugged, his eyes moving sideways as he thought. “I don’t know. Bitch was always getting in my way. Guess a few months ago. She was getting all het up about alimony. I missed a few payments.”
Shelley visibly bristled at the way he spoke. There were some emotions that Zoe found hard to read, elusive things that didn’t quite have names or that came from sources she couldn’t identify with. But anger was easy. Anger might as well have been a red flashing sign, and it was going off over Shelley’s head at that moment.
“Do you consider all women to be inconveniences, or just the ones who divorced you after a violent assault?”
The man’s eyes practically bulged out of his head. “Hey, look, you can’t—”
Shelley interrupted him before he could finish. “You have a history of harming Linda, don’t you? We have several arrests for various domestic violence complaints on your record. Seems you made a habit of beating her black and blue.”
“I…” The man shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “I never hurt her like that. Like, bad. I wouldn’t kill her.”
“Why not? Surely you’d want to be rid of those alimony payments?” Shelley pressed.
Zoe tensed, her hands making fists. Any longer, and she was going to have to intervene. Shelley was getting carried away, her voice rising in pitch and volume at the same time.
“I ain’t been paying them anyway,” he pointed out. His arms were crossed defensively over his chest.
“So, maybe you just saw red one last time, is that it? You wanted to hurt her, and it went further than ever before?”
“Stop it!” he yelled out, his composure breaking. He put his hands over his face unexpectedly, then dropped them to reveal moisture smeared from his eyes down his cheeks. “I stopped paying the alimony so she would come see me. I missed her, all right? Stupid bitch had a hold on me. I go out and get drunk every night ’cause I’m all alone. Is that what you want to hear? Is it?”
They were done—that much was clear. Still, Shelley thanked the man stiffly and handed over a card, asking him to give them a call if anything else came to mind. The things that Zoe might have done, if she had thought it would do any good. Most people didn’t call Zoe back.
On this occasion, she very much doubted that Shelley would get a call either.
Shelley blew out a heavy breath as they were walking away. “Dead end. Sorry, no pun intended. I buy his story. What are you thinking we should do next?”
“I would like to see the body,” Zoe replied. “If there are any more clues to be found, they are with the victim.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The coroner’s office was a squat building beside the precinct, along with just about everything else in this tiny town. There was just one road that swept right through, stores and a small elementary school and everything a town needed to survive placed either to the left or the right.
It made Zoe uncomfortable. Too much like home.
The coroner was waiting for them downstairs, the victim already laid out on the table for them like a grisly presentation. The man, an older fellow just a few years from retirement with a certain amount of waffle and bumble about him, began a long and winding explanation of his findings, but Zoe filtered him out.
She could see the things he would tell them laid out before her. The slash wound at the neck told her the precise gauge of wire they were looking for. The woman weighed just over 170 pounds despite her smaller stature, though a fair amount of that had gushed out of her along with almost three liters of her blood.
The angle of the incision and the force applied to it told her two things. First, that the killer was between five foot ten and six foot nothing. Secondly, that he was not relying on strength to commit the crimes. The victim’s weight did not hang on the wire for long. When she collapsed, he let her go down. That, combined with the choice of wire as a weapon in the first place, likely meant that he was not very strong.
Not very strong combined with tall enough likely meant that he was neither muscular nor heavy. If he had been either, his own body weight would have served as a counterbalance. That meant he likely had a slim build, quite in line with what one would normally picture when thinking of an average man, of average height.
There was only one thing that she could say for certain was not average, and that was his act of murder.
As for the rest, there was nothing much to go on. His hair color, his name, what city he came from, why he was doing this—none of that was written in the empty and abandoned shell of the thing that used to be a woman in front of them.
“So, what we can tell from this,” the coroner was saying slowly, his voice querulous and long-winded. “Is that the killer was likely of an average male height, perhaps between five feet nine and just above six feet tall.”
Zoe only just restrained herself from shaking her head. That was far too wide an estimate.
“Has the victim’s family been in touch?” Shelley asked.
“Nothing since the ex-husband came to identify.” The coroner shrugged.
Shelley clasped a small pendant at her throat, tugging it back and forward on a slim gold chain. “That’s so sad,” she sighed. “Poor Linda. She deserved better than this.”
“How did they seem when you interviewed them?” Zoe asked. Any lead was a lead, although she had by now become firmly sure that the selection of this Linda as a victim was nothing more than the random act of a stranger.
Shelley shrugged helplessly. “Surprised by the news. Not heartbroken. I don’t think they were close.”
Zoe fought back wondering who would care about her or come to see her body if she died, and replaced that thought instead with frustration. It was not difficult to find it. This was yet another dead end—literally. Linda had no more secrets left to tell them.
Standing around here commiserating with the dead was very nice, but it was not getting them any closer to the answers they were looking for.
Zoe closed her eyes momentarily and turned away, to the other side of the room and the door they had entered through. They needed to be on the move, but Shelley was still conversing with the coroner in low, respectful tones, discussing who the woman had been in life.
None of it mattered. Didn’t Shelley see that? Linda’s cause of death was very simple: she had been in an isolated gas station, by herself, when the killer came through. There was nothing else of note about her entire life.
Shelley seemed to pick up on Zoe’s desire to go, drifting over to her side and politely distancing herself from the coroner. “What should we do next?” she asked.
Zoe wished she could say more in response to that question, but she couldn’t. There was only one thing left to do at this point, and it was not the direct action that she wanted. “We will create a profile of the killer,” she said. “Put out a broadcast over the neighboring states to warn local law enforcement to be on the watch. Then we will go over the files for the previous murders.”
Shelley nodded, falling easily into step as Zoe headed for the door. It was not like they had far to go.
Up the stairs and out through the doors of the office, Zoe looked around and caught sight of the horizon line again, easily visible past the small collection of residences and facilities that made up the town. She sighed, folding her arms against her chest and whipping her head around to the precinct and where they were headed. The less time she spent looking at this place, the better.
“You don’t like this little town, do you?” Shelley asked by her side.
Zoe felt a moment of surprise, but then again, Shelley had already proven herself to be both perceptive and attuned to others’ emotions. Truth be told, Zoe was probably being obvious about it. She couldn’t shake the foul mood that settled over her whenever she ended up somewhere like this. “I do not like small towns in general,” she said.
“You just a city girl, or?” Shelley asked.
Zoe bit back a sigh. This was what happened when you had partners: they always wanted to try to get to know you. To dig up all of the tiny little pieces of the puzzle that was your past, and mash them together until they fit in a way that suited them. “They remind me of the place where I grew up.”
“Ahhh.” Shelley nodded, as if she saw and understood. She did not see. Zoe knew that for a fact.
There was a break in their conversation as they passed through the doors of the precinct, heading back toward a small meeting room that the locals had allowed them to use for their base of operations. Seeing that they were alone in there, Zoe placed a new pile of papers onto the table, starting to spread out the coroner’s report along with photographs and a few other reports from officers who had been first on the scene.
“You didn’t have a great childhood, then?” Shelley asked.
Ah. Maybe she did see, more than Zoe had given her credit for.
Perhaps she should not have been surprised. Why shouldn’t Shelley be able to read emotions and thoughts the same way that Zoe could read angles, measurements, and patterns?
“It was not the best,” Zoe said, tossing her hair out of her eyes and focusing on the papers. “And not the worst. I survived.”
There was an echo in her head, a yell that came to her across time and distance. Devil child. Freak of nature. Look what you’ve made us do now! Zoe shut it out, ignoring the memory of a day locked in her bedroom as punishment for her sins, ignoring the long and hard loneliness of isolation as a child.
Shelley moved quickly opposite her, spreading out some of the photographs they already had, then lifting the files from the other cases.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said, softly. “I’m sorry. You don’t know me yet.”
That yet was ominous: it implied a time, even if it was in the distant future, when Zoe would be expected to trust her enough. When she would be able to spill all of the secrets locked inside of her since she was just a child. What Shelley did not know, could not guess from her gentle probing, was that Zoe was not going to tell anyone what had happened in her childhood—ever.
Except maybe that therapist that Dr. Applewhite had been trying to get her to see.
Zoe pushed it all away to give her partner a tight smile and nod, then took one of the files from her hands. “We should go over the previous cases. I will read this one, and you can read the other.”
Shelley retreated to a chair on the opposite side of the table, looking at the images in the first file as they spread across the table, while chewing on one of her fingernails. Zoe tore her gaze away and focused on the pages in front of her.
“The first victim, killed in an empty parking lot outside a diner which had closed half an hour before,” Zoe read aloud, summarizing the contents of the report. “She was a waitress there, a mother of two with no college education who had apparently stayed in the same area for her whole life. There was no sign of any forensic evidence of value at the scene; the methodology was the same, death by the wire and then the careful sweeping away of footprints and marks.”
“Nothing to help us track him down, yet again,” Shelley sighed.
“She had been locking up the place after cleaning up, on her way home after a long shift. The alarm was raised fairly swiftly when she did not arrive home as usual.” Zoe flicked ahead to the next page, scanning the contents for value. “Her husband was the one to find her—driving out to look after she failed to answer her phone. There is a strong possibility that he contaminated evidence by grasping hold of his wife’s body upon the discovery.”
Zoe looked up, satisfied that this case was as empty of clues as the other. Shelley was still concentrating, playing with that pendant on her chain again. It was swallowed by her thumb and finger, small enough to disappear completely behind them.
“Is that a cross?” Zoe asked, when her new partner finally looked up. It was something to chat about, she thought. Fairly natural for an agent to speak to her partner about the jewelry she habitually wore, as it seemed she did. Right?
Shelley looked down at her chest, as if she had not realized what her hands were doing. “Oh, this? No. It was a gift from my grandmother.” She moved her fingers away, holding it out so that Zoe could see the arrow-shaped gold pendant, complete with a tiny diamond set into the pointed head. “Lucky thing that my grandfather had good taste. It used to be hers.”
“Oh,” Zoe said, feeling a little relief wash over her. She had not realized how much tension she had been holding since she had first noticed Shelley pull out the chain and play with it. “An arrow for true love?”
“That’s it.” Shelley smiled. Then she furrowed her brow slightly, obviously having picked up on the shift in Zoe’s mood. “Were you worried about me being overly religious or something?”
Zoe cleared her throat slightly. She had barely even recognized in herself that that was her reason behind asking. But of course it was. It had been a long time since she was that shy little girl with an overzealous God-fearing mother, but she still carried a fair amount of caution around people who considered the church to be the most important thing in their lives.
“I was just curious,” Zoe said, but her voice was tight, and she knew it.
Shelley frowned, leaning over to pick up the next file from the table. “You know, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time working together if we stay partners,” she said. “Maybe it will go a little smoother if we don’t keep things from each other. You don’t have to tell me why you were worried about it, but I would appreciate the honesty.”
Zoe swallowed, looking down at the file she had already finished reading. She gathered her pride, closing her eyes momentarily to shut off the voice telling her no, not matching, one is approximately five millimeters thicker, and met Shelley’s gaze. “I do not have a good history with it,” she said.
“Religion, or honesty?” Shelley asked with a playful smirk, opening her file. After a moment, during which time Zoe struggled with wondering what to answer, Shelley added: “That was a joke.”
Zoe flashed her a weak smile.
Then she turned to the new case file and started examining the crime scene photographs, knowing this was the only thing that would take away the burning sensation traveling across her cheeks and neck and the awkwardness in the room.
“The second victim is another version of the same story,” Shelley said, shaking her head. “A woman found murdered at the side of a road which wound along the edge of a small town. The kind of road you might walk alongside if you were heading home after a late night at work, which she was. She was a teacher… a bundle of marked papers spread around her where she had dropped them after her throat was cut by the wire garrote.”
Shelley paused to scan through the photographs, finding the one with the papers. She held it up for a second, biting her lip and shaking her head. She passed it over to Zoe, who tried to feel the same level of pity and found that she could not. The papers made it no more poignant than any other death, in her mind. Indeed, she had seen far more brutal slayings that seemed more worthy of pity.
“She was found by a cyclist early the next morning. His eye caught the papers moving in the wind, trailing across the sidewalk and over to the body slumped half in long grass,” Shelley summarized, recapping the notes in her file. “It looks as though she stepped to one side, as if helping someone. She was lured over there somehow. Damn… she was a good woman.”
A number of scenarios flitted through Zoe’s head: a fictitious lost dog, a stranger asking for directions, a bicycle with a loose chain, a request for the time.
“No footprints on the hard ground, no fibers or hairs on the body, no DNA under her fingernails. Just as clean as the other crime scenes,” Shelley said, putting the file down in front of her with another sigh.
Whatever it had been that left her vulnerable—perhaps even just the element of surprise and a step off the sidewalk as she struggled against the wire around her throat—that was all they had to go on.
Zoe let her eyes rove over the paper aimlessly, trying to connect dots in ways that would fit all three cases.
Two happily married, one divorced. Two mothers, one who was childless. Different jobs for each of them. Different locations. One with a college degree, two without. No particular pattern to their names or connections through the companies they worked for.
“I don’t see a link,” Shelley said, breaking the silence between them.
Zoe sighed and closed the file. She had to admit it. “I do not either.”
“So, we’re back where we started. Random victims.” Shelley blew out a breath. “Which means random next target, too.”
“And a much lower chance that we can stop it,” Zoe added. “Unless we can get enough of a working profile together to track this man down and catch him before he has a chance.”
“So let’s work on that,” Shelley said, with a determination in the set of her face that actually gave Zoe a modicum of hope.
They set up a sheet of blank paper on an easel pad in the corner of the room and started going through what they knew.
“We can see his path,” Zoe said; something she had already submitted out loud, and easy enough for anyone to work out. “He is on the move for some reason. What could that be?”
“Could be that he travels for work,” Shelley suggested. “A trucker, a salesman or rep, something like that. Or he might be traveling just because he wants to. He could be homeless, too.”
“Too many options for us to make a clear decision there.” Zoe wrote traveling on the board, then tried to follow the implications. “He must sleep on the road. Motels, hotels, or perhaps in his car.”
“If it’s in his car, we don’t have a lot of hope of tracking him down,” Shelley pointed out, a downturn pushing the edges of her mouth. “He could be using fake names at the hotels, too.”
“Not much to go on there. But he must travel in some way. By vehicle, judging on the distances between the kill sites and the time elapsed.”
Shelley scrambled to tap on her cell phone, bringing up maps and checking the locations. “I don’t think there’s a clear train route. Maybe bus or car.”
“That narrows it down somewhat,” Zoe said, adding those possibilities to the list. “He could be a hitchhiker, though it is less common nowadays. What about his physical characteristics?”
“Traditionally, the garrote is used by those who are not physically muscular. So we could perhaps surmise that he is of a more average build.”
Zoe was glad that Shelley had spotted it; one less thing for her to raise suspicions with. “Average, but not perhaps too small or petite. I feel that we have already become certain this is the work of a man. With too little strength, or height, the victims may have been able to overpower him and struggle free.”
“And if he was too short, he wouldn’t be able to reach well,” Shelley added. “The victims were likely all killed while standing, which means he had to be able to easily reach their necks.”
Zoe had to admit that she was impressed—even if only inside her own head. She wrote average or above average height—five foot seven to six foot one, based on the coroner’s report, and average or skinny build on the board.
“Now, let us talk psychology,” Zoe said. “There is something that is driving him to kill, even if it is not something that we would consider logical. If there is no real link between the victims, we have to look at that driving force as coming from within.”
“They seem like crimes of opportunity to me. He only goes after women, perhaps because they are weaker. They are alone, defenseless, in an area not covered by working CCTV, and with a low possibility of being interrupted.”
“I see two possibilities. The first is that he is driven to kill, and therefore seeks out these victims who fit the perfect profile for him to avoid being caught. For some reason, he is doing this now and all at once—so we would be looking at a trigger event,” Zoe said, tapping the end of the pen against her chin. “The other possibility is that he is triggered specifically by these victims. In that event, he does not even know that he will kill them until it comes to the moment.”
“In other words, he’s either seeking out women to kill deliberately, or he is killing purely based on opportunity and something about the women themselves that sets him off,” Shelley said, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
“Think about it.” Zoe shook her head, pacing in front of the easel pad. “It is too perfect to be that random. One a night—that signifies a compulsion. If he was only driven to kill by trigger moments, we would see time between the attacks. He would be at home some nights, or just would not meet someone who set him off. No, this is deliberate and calculated. There is some reason why he has to kill each one, some message or ritual here.”
She stepped forward again and wrote one murder a day—ritual on the board.
“What about the locations?” Shelley asked. “Maybe there’s something there.”
There was a map on the wall already, marked with three red pushpins where the three bodies had been found. Zoe regarded it for a moment, then used the edge of a piece of paper to line them up. It was a straight line between the first and the third. The second had deviated a little, but it was still on the overall path.
“What are those towns?” Shelley pointed toward the end of the piece of paper, after the last pin, at the settlements lying along the same path.
Zoe rattled off a list, reading them off the map, with a little deviation to either side in case he strayed off as he had before. “We should call the authorities in each of these towns. Make sure that they are all aware of what could be coming. Tightened security, and law enforcement with their eyes open, might help to catch him.”
They both regarded their profile together in silence, thinking their own thoughts. On Zoe’s part, she was trying to see the pattern. There were only three things that made sense to her: the fact that all were women, the timeline, or something to do with the locations. But what was it?
She thought back to the scattered, colorful candy that had been all over the ground at the gas station. Scattered not far from Linda’s body, across the parking lot, across the path she must have taken to the rear of the building and back. It was so strange. It was altogether possible that some kid had dropped it earlier that day after stopping by with their parents, but… something about it was nagging at her.
Maybe it was simply the incongruity of it. Bright and cheerful candy at the scene of a brutal nighttime murder. Spots of color across a ground that was otherwise stained red. Maybe it didn’t mean a thing at all.
