Face of Death

“Should we go for dinner?” Shelley asked. “Or set up the room first?”

“We should put our bags in, at least,” Zoe said, sighing. She rubbed the back of her neck, stiff and sore from the long day and the driving they had done. “Then food.”

“So much for getting on a plane before the day was out,” Shelley remarked, hefting the key and examining it for the room number. She led them across the lot to a door much like all of the others in the long, low building, unlocking it with a swipe.

“It looks like this was more of a complex case than expected,” Zoe agreed. The mild words hid the anger she was harboring toward herself. She should have been able to solve this one, read the numbers and taken him down. Not leave him the chance to kill again. If someone died tonight, it would be on her.

The room was small, two single beds placed less than a foot apart with old-fashioned floral bedspreads. The kind that had probably been purchased in the eighties, or even earlier, and washed over and over again until they were thin and scratchy. At least, Zoe hoped they had been washed.

She kicked one leg of the bedframe, eyeing it warily to see how much it shifted. It felt good, but not good enough. Zoe could probably have kicked the whole place until her leg hurt, and it still wouldn’t work out the frustration she felt. She should have been home by now, not sitting in a motel and waiting for a killer to claim another victim that she could do nothing to prevent.

She thought of Euler and Pythagoras, and hoped they were all right. She had a delayed-release feeder set up for nights like these, but the cats were too clever for their own good. Once before, they had broken into it and eaten half a week’s supply in one night. She’d come home a few hours later to find them lying bloated and happy, so full they could only wave their tails in response to her voice.

“Ready?” Shelley asked, her voice quiet. Perhaps feeling that Zoe was not in the mood for this, for any of this.

Zoe nodded and allowed her partner to lead the way. It was with no great joy that she approached the diner, seeing the lights an oasis in the darkness of the rural area, already mostly shut down for the night. Only a few cars were parked outside in the small lot, and the large windows on all sides of the building allowed them to see just a few patrons sitting to eat or drink coffee. It made her catch her breath in her throat, memories flooding in unbidden of diner meals from her childhood.

Zoe stifled a groan of complaint as they walked inside. It was your typical small-town diner. Wipe-clean tables and green-covered seats and booths, an attempt at kitsch 1950s stylings that contrasted against the modern appliances and images of local sports teams on a bulletin board. The two tired-looking waitresses, both middle-aged women, wore nondescript uniforms that were neither stylish nor well-fitting. Her eyes told her that one was wearing one size exactly too small, the other one size too large. She blinked, shooing the numbers away. She just wanted to eat and go to bed.

Zoe slid into a booth and examined the menu. At times it could be soothing to see a familiar list of items and know what you wanted to order, but here it was grating. It was a standard, generic offering of diner fare, the kind of all-day pancakes and burgers you could get at any similar spot in the country. It could easily have been the precise menu offered by the diner in Zoe’s own hometown, where she had slunk sullenly after church, following her parents for their weekly celebratory meal.

Not that it had ever been a real celebration, for her.

She stared at the menu without reading it, feeling her mother’s hot gaze on the top of her head, the glare she would always look up to find. Silently, as she always did when faced with a menu, she let the numbers fill her head—telling her the predicted cost per weight of each meal, the number of calories to expect, which held more fat and which more sugar. A pointless exercise, because Zoe never used any of that to choose her meals. She had learned long ago just to pick something she liked and put the numbers away.

“Can I get you some coffee?” their waitress asked, pausing at their table with a jug in hand. Zoe held out her cup wordlessly to have it filled, while Shelley assented and gave her thanks. With a promise to come back for their food order soon, the waitress was gone again, heavy footsteps slapping the linoleum in flat shoes.

“What are you getting?” Shelley asked. “I can never choose. I’m so bad at picking what I want to eat. It all sounds good.”

Zoe shrugged. “Burger, probably.”

“With a side of fries?”

“Comes with it.”

Shelley scanned the menu again a few more times before nodding and closing it. “Sounds good enough.”

Zoe lifted her gaze to momentarily analyze the alcoholic, the long-distance trucker, and the family man with no desire to go home before deciding the other patrons of the diner were not worth looking at. She turned her eyes to the salt shaker, measuring the precise amount of salt left within it and comparing it with the sugar, before tuning out even that.

The numbers weren’t helping. The case was still unsolved, nothing left behind by the criminal that she could use even with her unique abilities. Now she was stuck in this two-horse town for at least another day, looking at things that reminded her of her childhood and all the things that her mother had been at pains to point out were wrong with her. All the while, somewhere, some woman might be fighting for her life, losing it in an empty parking lot or by the side of the road.

“If you don’t like it here, we’ll go somewhere else tomorrow,” Shelley said, offering Zoe an attempt at a bright smile. “Somewhere not so small-town. Maybe we can order takeout to the motel.”

Zoe glanced up. Once again, Shelley had surprised her with just how insightful she could be.

“This place is just fine. I apologize if I am being unpleasant. I was hoping we would solve this one quickly and go home. I do not want any more people to die.”

“Me, too.” Shelley shrugged. “We’ll get there. It’s all right, though. You don’t have to put on a customer service face with me. I can tell you’re not comfortable here.”

“I did not wish to distract us from the case by bringing up my own problems,” Zoe said, twisting her mouth. “I suppose I was not doing a great job of hiding it.”

Shelley laughed. “I’ve only been working with you for a little while, Z, but I’m starting to see the signs. There’s a difference between you being quiet because you’re, well, you, and then you being quiet because you’re not comfortable.”

Zoe looked down at her coffee, pouring exactly one teaspoon of sugar from the shaker without measurement and stirring it, careful not to clink her spoon against the side of the cup. “It’s too much like home here.”

“I’m not trying to push you. I meant what I said—you don’t need to tell me about it,” Shelley said, taking a sip of hers black. “But you can. If you want.”

Zoe shrugged. How much to tell? She had not changed her mind about reserving the details, except perhaps for the therapist. But her issues were affecting her work, and Shelley deserved to know why. At least a little bit of why. “My mother was manipulative,” she said, simply. Best to leave out the part where she accused her of being the devil’s spawn. “My father was a bystander, at best. I was legally emancipated as a teenager.”

Shelley let out a low whistle. “It must have been bad, if you had to go that far to get away from them.”

Zoe shrugged again. She sipped at her coffee, feeling the slight discomfort from the heat, setting it carefully back down on the table. She was never good at talking about herself. The few times she had tried as a child, her mother had made it clear that the things she felt and saw were not normal.

“I hope I’m never like that,” Shelley sighed. “Or even close to it. I want to be a good mother. Of course, I’m not going to be at home as often as I could be. But I still want to do well.”

Zoe took in Shelley’s face, pensive and distracted. “You have children?”

“One.” Shelley smiled, her face coming to life with warmth. “My daughter.”

“What is her name?”

“Amelia. It was hard, going into training and then coming to work. I decided to change careers after I went on maternity leave. As much as I think I’ve found my calling, it was tough to leave her at home.”

“Your partner is looking after her?” Zoe asked.

“My mother. During the day, at least. My husband works in an office job, nine to five. He’s always there for her on the weekends.” Shelley sighed. “We need both the money from working.”

Zoe considered her for a long moment. She ducked her eyes back down to her cup. “I do not think you could be a bad parent,” she said at last. “You will never be anything like my mother.”

“Thank you.” Shelley smiled. The relief in her expression was palpable. “I needed to hear that.”

Zoe thought about Shelley’s little girl, and the fact that each of the victims had a mother once, and fought the urge to go back out into the night to continue the search for their killer. She would be no help to anyone if she didn’t get enough sleep to think clearly, enough nutrition to keep her body going. That was what was important tonight, while they had no real leads to speak of.

Somehow, knowing that Shelley was a mother, and that she cared greatly about her little family—enough to worry about it so much—made her rise higher in Zoe’s estimation. The empathy that she had for victims and their families was not an act. Shelley had genuine compassion in her. It was something Zoe wished she had more of. Perhaps Shelley was exactly the kind of partner she needed.

Especially if, tomorrow morning, she was going to have to face the family of another victim, and explain to them why she had not caught the killer.

CHAPTER TEN

Rubie faded back into consciousness, the world coming into focus again. Soil underneath her face. Grass, short and sharp blades, uncomfortable under her cheek. She moved her eyes, seeing the lights of the town in the distance, and then around her, the trees, rising dark and tall, blocking her view to the left and right.

She must have stumbled into the woods. She barely remembered. All she had been able to focus on was the blood, falling hot and wet in pools down her body.

How long had she been out? It was still dark, still cold, and she was still alive. She pressed her hand to her neck with the smallest of movements and found it still liquid. Not long, then. If she had been bleeding for a long time, she would be dead.

Rubie’s ears pricked at a sound nearby, and she instinctively slowed her breathing, making a conscious effort not to exhale loudly. The slower she breathed, the less the blood pulsed out of her neck. It was so deep, the air rushed through. She pressed her hand harder against the red-hot line of pain, trying to keep it all in.

Footsteps. It was his footsteps. Slow, cautious, one foot after another. Not blundering through the woods but moving carefully. Searching. Searching for her.