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Face of Death
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Zoe emptied her first coffee of the day and threw the Styrofoam cup into the trash can. It bounced against the back edge with a satisfying finality, dropping out of sight to rest alongside many of its brothers and sisters.
“The coffee here is dreadful,” Shelley remarked, staring miserably into her own cup.
Zoe could not help but agree.
She rubbed at her eyes, willing them to open wider. Early morning starts were always rough after late night finishes, but she had grown used to them over the years. The routine was simple: pump your body full of enough caffeine to get you moving, and your brain will follow.
Still, watching the security camera footage they had pulled from everywhere within a five-mile radius of the gas station—which amounted to very few files, given its location—was a challenge of even her early bird mentality. Her eyes either picked up all kinds of numbers that were irrelevant and distracting, or wanted to droop shut at the sheer boredom of seeing nothing for minutes on end.
She darted her vision between the timestamp at the bottom of the screen and the main view incessantly, watching time creep on closer to the murder. No vehicles had yet entered or left the field of view of the truck stop. It was a more populated place than the gas station, even at night, but the trucks in the parking lot had mostly settled in for a sleep. Nothing moved.
A blue car flashed by, on the small portion of road that was visible to the side of the parking lot. It moved fast, and even with her finger on the pause button, Zoe only managed to hit it once it was gone.
She tracked back, frame by frame, until it was contained within the small section of the screen that held the road. She checked the timestamp. It was perfectly within the window. The driver would have had time to get to the gas station, commit the murder, and be gone in line with the timeframe they had narrowed it down to.
She played it forward again, watching the time flash by. Minutes turned into hours. Nothing else traveled the lane that she could see on the camera.
She went back, returned to the precise moment when the car could be fully seen. Zoe squinted, peering so closely that her nose almost bumped the screen, trying to take down the license plate. Was that an O or a D? She flicked back and forth between the frames, trying to make it out.
“I have got something,” she said, pulling Shelley’s attention. “There was a car caught on the security camera on the approach to the gas station. It works for the timing, and no other vehicles appear to pass by for at least an hour. I have the plate. I just need to run it through the database.”
Shelley’s face brightened with excitement, as she hurried around to look over Zoe’s shoulder at the frozen image. “That could be him, Z,” she breathed.
“I will bring up the details,” Zoe said, stopping the video playback file and opening up a program that would allow her to run the plates through the national database. Her first try, with the D, gave them nothing. The O turned up a hit.
“Jimmy Sikes,” Shelley read out loud. She returned to her own computer, where the FBI software was already waiting for input of names. “Got him. Let’s see… oh, wow, Z, he has a record. He just got released on probation a few months ago.”
“What for?” Zoe asked.
“Assault,” Shelley read, turning wide eyes to her. “Violent past. You think this could be the guy?”
Zoe raised her eyebrows, thinking about it. “Could be. He was in the area, and having a criminal record certainly makes it more likely. We need to talk to him immediately.”
“His probation address is listed as his sister’s residence. Should I call her?”
Zoe nodded her assent, watching how Shelley fumbled breathlessly for the desk phone and input the numbers before taking a calming breath. She was excited. She was still green, still exhilarated by the prospect of a solve. Zoe enjoyed closing a case as much as the next person, but she had also been in the game long enough to know that identifying a suspect was nowhere close at all to putting it to bed.
“Hello, am I speaking to Manda Sikes?” Shelley said into the receiver, her eyes darting away from Shelley and down to a blank page of her notebook in concentration. “Hello, Manda. My name is Special Agent Shelley Rose with the FBI. I’m calling in regards to your brother, Jimmy.”
There was a pause as Manda spoke. Shelley nodded, even though the other woman could not see her, opening and closing her mouth several times as she waited for a moment to cut in.
“No, I understand. This is not in regards to his assault conviction. We’re actually looking to speak with him about another case.”
Another pause. Longer, this time. Shelley glanced up at Zoe in alarm at whatever Manda was saying.
“So you haven’t seen him since then? And that was—right, five days ago. He hasn’t made contact of any kind? You’ve tried calling him? Okay. Right. Could you tell me his cell number?”
Shelley made notes on the pad, scratching out a number in quick strokes of her pen. She exchanged a few more words with Manda before hanging up, then gave Zoe a raised eyebrow.
“Jimmy Sikes has not returned home for a number of days?” Zoe asked.
“Not since before our first murder. Manda says that she’s tried calling him over and over again, but his cell is switched off. She thought we were his probation worker trying to track him down at first.”
“So, it is looking more and more likely that Jimmy may be involved with our case. I will liaise with the team back at HQ to get a trace on his cell, and search for flags for his license plate.”
Shelley nodded, putting her pen down. “I’ll finish going through the security footage we have. It might not show us anything else, but at least we’ll know for sure that that part is ticked off.”
Zoe moved quickly, placing the necessary calls and entering data into her computer, logged into the FBI’s databases. This was a high-priority case, and with a judge already on standby to sign off on search warrants, things were going to go fast for them. Still, it took a number of hours, impatient tapping of pens and jiggling of knees, before they had the information they needed.
“Here we go,” Zoe said, printing off the map and dragging it out of the machine almost before it had finished. “These are our points of interest. Every location where we have been able to track Jimmy Sikes over the last few days.”
Shelley crowded next to her, shoulder to shoulder, and they both stared down at the dropped pins across a map littered with notes on time and precise location. A cell tower ping that made its way through several areas, which the techs had narrowed down to following a particular highway from town to town. All of the points marking locations close by to where bodies had been found. A casino, a diner, a truck stop here and there with license plate recognition from the parking lot, painting a vague shape with long and large gaps between where the technology was not advanced enough.
Zoe searched the pins, willing the pattern to come into focus. She saw the lines, almost completely straight, allowing for the divergence of highways and curves around hills and water. It might as well have been drawn with a ruler if you ignored the roads and only looked at the stops. Though cell tower pings were not completely accurate, but rather gave a wider circle through which the cell must have passed, it was at least indicative of a deliberate movement across the country.
Not only that, but there were casinos at every waypoint. Zoe traced patterns and grids and curves between all of them, analyzing what the data told her until she could be absolutely sure that there was no other option.
There was only one direction in which Jimmy Sikes would go—that much was clear. Following it, Zoe saw a line as clear as day, cutting across the map as the crow flies, until she landed on the only place that made any sense.
He didn’t know they were onto him, not yet. He wouldn’t be looking to change his pattern in order to throw them off. They had him. She was willing to bet her career on the certainty that she knew where Jimmy Sikes was driving to.
“There,” she said, placing her finger on the spot. “If we move now, then that is where we will find him.”
Shelley peered down at the map. “The casino? How can you be sure?”
Zoe fought internally with the need to give her a plausible explanation, versus the need to keep all of that inside her own head. Now was hardly the time to reveal that she could read the numbers and patterns, even if she was intending to reveal that at all—which she was not.
“He likes to gamble,” she said, at last. “Look, see? His first pickup point, just about five days ago, was at this casino, local to his sister’s home. This was where it all began. He also passed by another casino at this point, here—though we are still waiting on the security footage from the interior, it seems likely that he went in, given his car’s appearance in the parking lot. This is the next casino on his route. They are evenly spaced out—different counties, different owners. He goes to each one that he can reach without the fear of being recognized and thrown out. I would not be surprised if he is playing the house to earn money for his trip.”
Shelley studied the three markers Zoe had pointed out, holding her blonde hair back over her shoulder so it wouldn’t fall and obscure her view. She darted up a questioning glance, but seemed to think better of it from the determination on Zoe’s face. After a pause, she nodded and straightened. “Okay, you’re the boss. You’ve been doing this longer than me, so I guess you would know better than I can guess.”
Zoe did not like the uncertainty in Shelley’s tone, but there was nothing to be done about it now. They had to move. “Come on,” she said. “We will head over now. Place a call to the casino management while we drive and tell them to be on the lookout for his vehicle and a man of his description. With any luck, we can catch him before he leaves.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The casino was over the Missouri border, just a stone’s throw into Kansas. Not for the first time, Zoe was glad that FBI agents were not restricted by state lines.
Zoe watched as Shelley tapped on her phone screen, bringing up the vehicle’s details again. A blue car, with the license plate that Zoe had spotted on the footage. Easy enough to spot—except for the fact that it was a popular and busy casino, and the parking lot was almost full.
They pulled up into a spot of their own, Zoe mentally cursing the inevitable draw of human behavior which left only the very furthest spaces still available. Then again, maybe it was a good thing, if it meant they could find the car on the way into the casino.
“I hope he’s still here,” Shelley muttered. She was fidgeting from foot to foot, fiddling with her necklace on its chain. Zoe sensed her nervous energy, a need to get moving that she also felt. The second car pulled up a few spots away, their backup pulled from the sheriff’s crew.
They still hadn’t heard about any bodies found overnight. Either he had been thrown off from his pattern for some reason, or he had made his kill such a successful one that the victim was still out there. Waiting. Zoe did not relish the thought, because every hour that passed meant further possible degradation of the crime scene and any evidence he may have mistakenly left behind.
Zoe did not share Shelley’s hopes, for the simple reason that she had no doubts. He would be here. The records of his past few days had told her everything she needed to know. Jimmy Sikes was in that casino, and they were going to find him.
Not only that, but the security staff had called them back and told them of the car’s presence. She had told them to watch the exit, make sure he was not allowed to leave. That should have meant that he was still inside.
Except for the call she had received only a couple of moments earlier, telling her that the security guard had been called over to a disturbance—and had lost sight of their man on the cameras. They were on alert to call as soon as they spotted him again, but in the meantime, they had to be sure that he was even still there.
They got out of the car, and Zoe nodded over at the other team. They had their orders already; silently, they fanned out, moving in pairs across the rows of vehicles, scanning plates and vehicle types. They were all armed, ready just in case the man resisted arrest, and on edge with the knowledge that it could go in that direction.
Zoe and Shelley moved down their row together, walking quickly, though not quickly enough to lose concentration. Time was of the essence. The quicker they brought him in, the less chance there was that he might somehow get away.
Zoe’s eyes picked up different state plates, more Missouri and Kansas than any other. The tally ran on in her head without her bidding, the numbers appearing next to each vehicle. None of them the right one.
There was a crackle on the radio in Zoe’s hand, and she lifted it to hear the message. “We’ve got it. Far left row, mid-level. Vehicle is unoccupied.”
Zoe and Shelley looked up, the heads of the two other teams swinging in unison toward the furthest row in the lot. One hand waved in the air briefly, indicating the position of the car.
Zoe lifted the radio to her mouth. “We go in,” she said. “You two stay with the vehicle in case of his return. If that happens, communicate with us immediately. The rest, with us.”
They met at the entrance in a rush, all on the alert, wide eyes and stiff postures. There was a tension in the group, the kind of nervous energy triggered by the knowledge that the confrontation was soon to come.
“What do we do?” Shelley asked, yielding to Zoe’s superior experience and knowledge. Moments like these reminded Zoe that her partner was not as seasoned as she sometimes came across.
“Two groups,” Zoe said, looking around to check that everyone was listening. “Half with me, half with Special Agent Rose. I will go in the front entrance, the other team in the back. From there, we fan out. Leave one person behind at each exit. You all have your printouts?”
There were nods from all four of the local cops, and from Shelley.
“Take one last moment to study his face again before we enter,” Zoe instructed them. “As soon as you see him, get on the radio and let us know his precise location. We will converge on him for arrest.”
There were murmurs of assent and understanding all around as they each opened their phone screens or pulled out folded pieces of paper from their pockets to check Jimmy Sikes’s image.
As they did, Zoe approached a member of the security staff belonging to the casino, flashing him her badge quickly in a way that concealed it from the view of passersby. After a few exchanged mutters, he took a spare radio from her hands and rushed it to his own control center.
Then they parted ways, three bodies in each direction, Shelley looking back at Zoe for a brief moment as if for reassurance. Zoe nodded to her, and Shelley turned to carry on.
Zoe steeled herself with a deep breath as she approached the entrance. The other team would need more time to get to the back of the building. They did not need to rush, not yet.
But that was not why she hesitated. She hesitated because she had been inside a casino before, and she knew what it did to her. What was about to happen to her mind.
She glanced quickly at the two cops beside her to check they were ready, and walked forward, pushing through the wide wooden doors and into noise and dim chaos.
The lighting was low, deliberately murky to hide the stains and to trick customers into losing track of the time of day. The room was wide and long, set up in different divisions, some beyond her view. The slot machines, some of them tall and showy, blocked almost everything on the right side. To the left were card tables and other games, and a bar stretching along it all that allowed patrons to walk up and get a drink whenever they wanted.
And, of course, the old casino classic: a meandering path which only ever led straight to the next gambling opportunity, rather than giving them a clear direction across the room.
Zoe took a breath, trying to keep her bearings. Trying not to let the numbers, the noise of machines and people and low lounge music, and the heady atmosphere of evening that almost immediately overwhelmed memories of the bright morning outside, get the better of her. They were everywhere she turned. She strode past a blackjack table, calculations appearing in her head as she saw all five sets of cards on public display and knew that the player seated to the right should hit, because there was an eighty percent chance of him getting the low-value card he needed to top up his score of sixteen.
On her other side, the glowing numbers above a slot machine declared a jumbo jackpot available across an interstate network, almost up to a record figure. The woman sitting there, playing a dollar at a time with resolute determination, must have known just as Zoe did that the machine was ripe to pop.
She looked ahead at the layout of the room, saw which slots were the ones that would pay out more often, placed in strategic locations to excite and encourage other gamblers. The harsh grating noise of a roulette ball rolling across the spinning wheel caught her attention, and she knew without having to wait for the result that the man with all of his chips on black fourteen was not going to get a win.
Zoe knew she would be able to clean up in a place like this. At the blackjack tables alone she could make a fortune, but the poker tables—to her left, four serious men in suits staring intently as the dealer flipped over an ace of clubs, giving the second player from the right around a seventy-five-point-five percent chance of getting a flush—there, she could take the lot of them.
Once, she almost had. Years ago, before she even entered the Bureau. She had been invited to a casino with a group of people she had known from work; acquaintances, really, since she had never been close enough to many people to call them friends. She had hit a few different games, always walking away with her chips at least doubled.
The first time, they laughed and clapped her on the back and congratulated her on her luck. The second time, she was apparently on a lucky streak.
By the fourth, they were giving her strange looks.
It was after her sixth game that she walked away, cashing in the chips so that she could leave and never have to spend leisure time with those people again. She had burned her bridges well enough. Once they looked at her like she was a freak, and even began to accuse her in whispers of cheating, she knew it was done.
There were things that she could not do, things that drew too much attention to her and the skills that she was trying to hide. Gambling was one of them. She had gone home after that and donated the money to a hospital, hoping that the benefit it gave the children’s ward would stop the guilt she felt at using her power for something like that. It was wrong to cheat, and she had most definitely been cheating.
It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have liked to play again. It had been a fun night—very fun, until it started going sour. No, it was the risk and the guilt that stopped her. She had vowed that night never to gamble again, and she was not going to break that vow today.
Not that there was any time for something like that, when you were a special agent tasked with tracking down a mass murderer.
That knowledge did not mean that she could turn the numbers off. She tried to focus on faces and bodies, not cards and bets. There was no point in knowing that there was going to be a payout on the next spin of the roulette wheel, or which of the poker players was a shark and which genuinely had no idea how to bet. None of that would save the killer’s next target.
Zoe followed the twists and turns of the path, alone now, her two shadows having slipped away—one to remain at the entrance and the other to her right, stalking through the maze of slots. She wound through the card tables, trying to look less like an agent and more like a seasoned gambler seeking the right game, though she hardly knew how to make the difference. So long as she looked at the faces, it was all right. But when she let her gaze dip to the tables to keep up appearances, the numbers flooded in, almost to the point of distracting her from her mission.
A movement caught her eye up ahead, and her gaze was drawn to another roulette table, this one served by an attractive blonde croupier. The woman was scraping chips toward winners, scooping the losing bets toward her, announcing the next game. A number of people were gathered around her, four—no, five—all with their attention on the betting grid.
And there, in the middle of them, with the side of his face toward her—Jimmy Sikes.
Zoe reached for her radio, lifting it to her face, but he was sharing a joke with another gambler and happened to look to the side and smile as Zoe moved toward him. He clocked the radio in her hand, her eyes fixed on him, and the laughter died in his throat. After a brief moment, perhaps half a second, he turned on his heel and pushed off at a dead run.
Zoe swore under her breath, pressing the call button. “Suspect identified. He is on foot, attempting escape from the card tables. Keep control of the exits.” She trusted her own men, and the casino’s own security staff, to handle that. So long as they were all in position, there was no chance he was getting away.
She dashed after him, seeing the cop out of the corner of her eye, moving out of the machines in her direction and beginning to speed up. Sikes was only a table ahead, but he had the advantage of the crowd, pushing through them and sending people scattering in surprise, resistant and forming new barriers when Zoe arrived a moment later.
He chanced a look behind him and saw how close she was, his eyes wide and wild. “Stop! FBI!” Zoe called out, giving him a chance to do the right thing.
They never did the right thing.
She was fumbling to unholster her gun while she ran, getting it into her hand, steadying it with the radio in the other. If he was armed, there was no telling what kind of move he might make. There was no way to know if he would resist them with violence.
“Stop and put your hands above your head!” she called out again, people scattering in front of her in response to her calls. Sikes zigged and zagged amongst the tables, looking over his shoulder with ragged gasps, panic written clear on his face.
He ran into a blackjack table, almost taking out the croupier as he body-slammed it, pushing with his arms until it flipped over and through the air, spending chips and cards flying. There was a crescendo so close in front of Zoe that she almost fell into it, and only the briefest pause before people were flooding forward, scrambling to pick up as many chips as they could hold, blocking her path.
“FBI! Get out of the way!” Zoe shouted desperately, but it had done the trick for Sikes. He was getting away, pulling out distance as she fought her way through the crowd. He had enough of an advantage now that she could see him getting away—and for good, if he managed to slip past their man at the door.
But he was running in a particular way, she could see now. He had been here for hours, most likely, making his way from station to station, playing different games, having a great time. He knew the layout of the room, at least better than she did. And there was a kind of method to his madness, a series of acute angles that jerked back and forth across the casino floor, ignoring the path entirely in favor of the fastest route toward the back of the room.
Zoe stopped moving and watched him. There was no sense in trying to shoot, not with this many civilians in the way. There was no way she could catch up with him now. But there were at least three other people in this casino who had a chance to stop him, and she could help with that.
She saw his path, traced like a line with a ruler in her mind’s eye, a zigzag which was anything but random. He struck out left and right and skirted every other table, finding the clearest path to the door, even if it didn’t seem to make sense to those who couldn’t see it. The lines continued clearly right the way to the back of the room, which Zoe could now see as they entered the farthest part of the casino. Laid out in front of her from left to right, Zoe saw the lines overlaid on her view of the room in a literal sense, pointing her in the right direction.
And she could see Shelley, making her way toward him.
“Shelley,” Zoe barked into the radio. “The end of the bar, to your left. Intercept him beside the third column.”
Zoe watched Shelley hear the message, her head snapping around toward the bar. She noticed the column and headed toward it at a run, even as Zoe herself started moving again, following with her feet as well as her eyes.
One last row of tables to clear—
Jimmy Sikes dashed to the side, away from the cop that was approaching him, and skewed toward the bar, his feet taking around the fourth column in a row of them and beyond.
“Stop!” Shelley’s voice, calling out, and then a crunching noise, like a body colliding with the floor.
Zoe’s view was blocked by the third column—she could not see Shelley or Jimmy—but he had not emerged, and neither had Shelley. Zoe rounded the corner, opening up her view, and breathed a deep gasp of air in relief to see Shelley snapping handcuffs onto Jimmy’s wrists with trained precision.
She arrived, a little out of breath and feeling the effects of the adrenaline that had flooded her system during the chase, as Shelley finished reading Jimmy his rights. The other cops converged upon them, taking Jimmy by the shoulders to march him back to the parking lot. Zoe breathed again, exchanging a grin and a secret fist-bump of success with Shelley.
“We got him, Z,” Shelley said, laughing.
And Zoe wondered why she didn’t quite feel so confident as she had a short while ago that they really did have their man.
