Face of Death

Where did that come from, that certainty? There had been no patterns to speak of at the crime scenes so far, had there? Zoe pushed that thought aside for the moment, focusing on the body in front of her. She had to determine, first, if this was really their killer.

The blood pattern, the thin cut to the throat which could have been done with razor-sharp wire, the choice of victim and location, the timing—this was him, after all. But something had gone wrong. She had slipped out of his grasp and managed to run, albeit not very far. She had almost escaped. He was usually in more control than that.

Zoe thought of the few remaining footsteps at Linda’s crime scene, how the woman had been in sight of safety when he looped his wire around her throat and killed her. He was normally such a controlled killer. This was a break in his pattern, and it was not by design. The girl had fought him off. Zoe looked at her still, graying face with a rare burst of compassion, thinking of how hard she must have clung to life even to get this far.

The color told her something else: the time that had elapsed. He had attacked right within his normal window of time. When Zoe had been—what? Blurting out confessions about her difficult childhood, and feeling sorry for herself? Wasting those precious hours that could have saved this woman’s life?

The coroner moved in, and Zoe stepped aside, allowing him to begin an initial assessment. Out here there were not the full, white-suited crime scene investigation teams of the inner city. It was just the coroner and his briefcase, and they were lucky to have that. Zoe barely needed to wait for him to finish—she knew exactly what they would tell her.

“What are you thinking?” Shelley asked, as Zoe approached. She had been waiting a distance away from the body, a vantage point from where she did not have to look at it—or smell it.

“Did you get a good look?” Zoe answered with a question of her own. She was beginning to be concerned that Shelley was a little too delicate—that she did not have the stomach for a crime scene. Besides which, she did not want to explain exactly what she had seen. The coroner could do that, and save Zoe explaining how she had seen it.

“Briefly.” Shelley nodded. “It seems as though her throat was cut over there, on the access road, but she escaped and ran. She bled out here. I’m guessing, at least. I couldn’t see any other wounds.”

“Nor me. Everything was off for him this time. She nearly escaped, and though there appear to be some marks cleaned up near the body, he did not complete his usual total clean-up. I would imagine that forensics will be able to get more clues here than we ever have before.”

“The tire tracks, and footprints, maybe.”

Zoe nodded. “Not enough to identify his car or his person, not yet. But a step toward narrowing it down, evidence to present when we do catch him. It seems he is getting more desperate.”

The coroner approached, rolling up a pair of clinical gloves and stuffing them back into his pocket. “I have done an initial investigation. Preliminary, of course, until I should have the chance to move her back to my office and take a better look. There I will be able to carry out the requisite tests and begin a more thorough investigation which ought to reveal more details than I am able to provide at this moment.”

Zoe closed her eyes, fading the old man’s voice out. He was the kind of person who would not use ten words to say something if a hundred could be used instead. The precise opposite of the kind of person that Zoe enjoyed conversing with. Instead, she thought about the scene, the way everything was slightly off-kilter.

Mentally, Zoe moved the red pin in the map in her head to the new location, a short distance away but still relevant. The road was the point where he had attempted the kill, and it was that which was significant, not the point of death. It moved the pin a little closer to her straight line, but not enough to make a difference. It had to be a curve.

“Where was the bruising?” Shelley asked, snapping Zoe back to attention.

The coroner indicated an area on his own body, over the ribs and stomach of his left side. “As I say, the bruising would have been inflicted postmortem, as there was very little blood left at this stage. That is all I can say from an initial investigation. I would say…”

“Anger,” Zoe said, talking over him. “He was angry at her, for some reason.”

“Perhaps because she ran,” Shelley suggested.

“But she was dead already by the time he caught up with her,” Zoe said. “He got his goal. So why was he so angry?”

Shelley spread her hands in a wordless gesture, the coroner beginning again his rambling monologue as if there had been no interruption.

Zoe’s head was racing. There were more questions here than she had seen at any of the crime scenes—an irony, when what they needed desperately now were answers. Why had he chosen this road as his place, this random access road in the middle of a highway with nothing around it? Not a parking lot or a natural place to meet someone, like a footpath, as in his other crimes—why the change?

And why, if he had already achieved his goal of killing the woman, was he still angry enough to waste time kicking her—time that left him unable to finish covering his tracks?

Not only that, but something else kept catching at her mind. The Rorschach of the blood pools. The patterns. Why had that tugged at something in her mind, something that gave her a certainty that it was his work? If she could just figure out what it was that had linked that mental image with the other kill sites, she would have him.

The uncomfortable thought began to stir that maybe he, like her, could read the numbers. That maybe this was the work of someone with the devil’s ability to see things no one else could.

Find the pattern, find the killer, Zoe told herself. And find him now—before he kills again.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Zoe sat at the side of one of the desks, getting a bird’s-eye view of the investigation room. It was alive again, full of activity and of new sheets of paper joining the piles spread across the desks. There were so many files, now laid open to be read at a glance, something in them ready to give up their secrets if only she could look closely enough. The numbers she had already seen flashed before her eyes, just a distraction. They were not what mattered. It was the numbers Zoe had missed until now that she needed.

Zoe scanned over the reports in front of her, knowing that there was something here. Something they had all missed. If she could only get her teeth into it—

“We have a match for the tires,” Shelley said, putting down the phone with a clatter as she spun her wheeled desk chair over to towards Zoe. “Sedan. Probably an older model, they think, judging by the width. The tread was fairly well-worn, so he’s been on the road a bit. There’s a few different manufacturers with sedans that use those tires, but it’s a start.”

Zoe nodded, pulling a sheet of paper from the fax machine. It baffled her that, in this day and age, the sheriff’s team was still using a fax machine, but it was not for her to tell them how to renovate their office. “This is from the coroner. It is a photograph… what is that?”

She tilted her head, analyzing the image. A splotch of green color on a white background. There was a standard rule to one side, indicating that it was less than a centimeter in both width and length. Other than that, the coroner had sent no information.

“Let me see?” Shelley held out her hand, and tilted her own head in a similar way. “Oh! It’s a paint chip. I think. Let me call him and check.”

Zoe ignored Shelley’s call, filtering out her voice in the background. Paint chips and sedan models were good news for the investigation in general, but there was something else here. Something nagging at the back of her mind that she just hadn’t quite figured out yet. Whatever it was, it could save the life of another woman—because the killer had not stopped or slowed down, and his pattern demanded another body tonight.

“It’s a paint chip,” Shelley confirmed, rolling back over. “The coroner says it was underneath one of her fingernails. Chances are good that it came from the killer’s car.”

Zoe tore her attention from the case files and got up, heading to their easel pad. “New profile, then,” she said. “We are searching for an older model green sedan with out-of-state plates, driven by a male fitting the physical description we already worked up.”

Shelley’s face almost glowed with enthusiasm. “We’re narrowing it down.”

“It is still a wide net to cast,” Zoe said thoughtfully, tapping the board pen against her lower lip. What wasn’t she seeing here? “We should put out an APB on this description.”

“On it!” Shelley jumped out of her seat and almost ran from the room, heading for the sheriff’s office and his controls.

Her eagerness might have been annoying or off-putting, except for the fact that she was getting things done. Zoe had to admit to herself that she was happy to have another pair of hands and eyes on this. There were too many working parts, too many pieces of the puzzle missing, to do this by herself.

They were still heavily lacking in physical evidence, however. Identifying the car was one thing, and they had not truly been able to do that. There were still probably hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles matching the description they had. Going through databases and tracking each of them down was not an option. By the time they had worked through the list, there would be bodies piled up in every state across the whole country.

Except that he wasn’t targeting the whole country, was he? He was moving in a curve—a curve that only Zoe could figure out how to track. The numbers couldn’t let her down, not this close to some kind of clue. She just had to keep looking.

Zoe glanced over crime scene photographs from each of the women, glazed eyes and open throats staring back at her. She could read all kinds of numbers in the frames. A twelve-inch skirt against an outfit that hovered only an inch above the ground. A 34D bust, a 40F, a 32B. Seventeen dollars stuffed into a phone case for safety that had not been taken. They told her something about the victims, but nothing at all about the killer.

In her bones, Zoe knew that they were right about his choice of victims. That it was the locations and the opportunity that mattered, not getting the exact right person into his grasp. She needed to stop looking at the women, as hard as that was when a blood-soaked body rested gray in full-frame under camera flash. She needed to look beyond them, at the place. The scene.

What wasn’t she seeing?

Zoe began again, working through the photographs of the gas station. Frustratingly few of the images contained anything other than the body itself. In the background, she could catch the price of gas reflected in the windows, the three varieties of local newspapers on sale, count the yards between the victim and the front door. But there was nothing, nothing that told her who the killer was.

Something tugged at her memory, and Zoe frowned, shuffling through the photographs again. There was only one shot that contained a single, blue-colored piece of candy. But that wasn’t right, was it? There had been more candy—much more. She remembered the colors scattered around her as she walked the scene.

She got up and walked down the corridor, to the small room down the hall where the local police photographer had set up his equipment. He was sitting in front of a large-screened Mac, the most modern piece of equipment in the whole place, and jumped when she thrust open the door without knocking.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked nervously.

“The gas station crime scene,” Zoe said, cutting to the chase. She did not appreciate it when other people delayed matters with small talk, and given that no one else appeared to enjoy it either, she wasn’t sure why it was usually insisted upon. “Do you have any photographs of the candy that was scattered across the parking lot?”

The photographer stood, making his way to a filing cabinet at the side of the room and drawing out a slim plastic folder. He started to flip through printouts, each of them encased in a shiny plastic pouch for protection, until he found what he was looking for.