Face of Death

Zoe drew a circle around each of the last three locations needed to finish the job.

“He started wide to try and avoid running into suspicion for as long as possible,” Shelley guessed, her fingers tracing the first murder sites. “With Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri involved, it was going to take a while for the states to work together. And it did. Four murders before we even got here, and one since. He must have suspected that we would track him down quickly once we saw that the murders were all connected.”

“Even though he is careful to remove traces of himself, and even though the locations are free from surveillance, there was always a chance that he would be seen in some way,” Zoe agreed. “His car could have been identified on the road. Spreading wide at the beginning and then focusing down was the best way to give himself a chance of getting it all done.”

“But now he will be operating in a much smaller area. Which is good news for us.”

“And the locations will be even more precise. We will be able to narrow it down perfectly.”

Shelley pressed the tracing paper down, ensuring she could read through it. “The next kill site is a roadside attraction… what does that say? I think some kind of fair. Then we have a little town circled—oh, no, that one will be so much easier for him! And then it looks like the last one is just… open ground? Nothing there in particular.”

Zoe followed Shelley’s discoveries, thinking. “We only have to stop him once. We stake out the fair tonight. It is not about where the body will be left, but where the actual killing will be done. We have to catch him in the act.”

“That’s not going to be easy,” Shelley said, playing with her pendant, worrying it back and forth around her neck.

“We still have to try,” Zoe said. “Get him tonight, before he strikes the town. I will call the Kansas state police chief and organize a briefing. We have to mobilize now.”

***

Zoe watched the assembled twenty-four men and women with a twitchy feeling of anticipation. Her mind was working in overdrive, scanning them for details. The full two centimeters that one trooper’s moustache grew over the edge of his lips. The youngest trooper in the room, at twenty-one, and the oldest easily in his mid-forties. The way that societal hierarchy had granted the chief of police a chair at the front of the room in the very center, while those keen for promotions ensured to sit as close to him as possible.

“We believe that the killer will be targeting this location next: the Kansas Giant Dinosaur Fair,” Shelley announced, standing in front of the map they had blown up for the briefing. “I’m sure those of you who are local are familiar with it, but in summary, it’s a permanent roadside attraction with around twenty giant dinosaur statues. Around these are a number of carnival games, food stalls, memorabilia stands, and so forth.”

“The bad news,” Zoe said, taking over, “is that tonight is a special Family Night event. The fair will be running a number of special features, as well as a discounted entry fee for groups of three or more. This means there will likely be a high number of people in attendance, making our jobs that much harder.”

“Why don’t we shut down the fair?” one of the local troopers asked, raising his hand.

“We do not want to spook him,” Zoe replied. “Remember that he will not just be planning to strike tonight in this location, but also at other locations in the future, judging by his track record thus far. If we stop him from killing tonight, we save a life. But if we catch him tonight, we stop him from killing ever again.”

Shelley took over. “We have a little information to go on, which should make it easier to track down our man. We’ll focus on the parking lot, as we know what kind of car we’re looking for. It’s an older-model green sedan, with likely with out-of-state license plates. To be sure, we will be tracking all sedans fitting the description and watching the drivers. We are looking for a male suspect, likely traveling alone.”

“What if he’s changed his car?” This time from another trooper.

“We have no reason to believe he knows we have identified his car,” Shelley said. “Besides which, that’s our only lead. We don’t know what he looks like in any particular, even down to his race. We have no living witnesses. We have to focus on the car by dint of having nothing else to go on.”

“How do you want us deployed?” asked the chief of police.

“We will need to avoid suspicion,” Zoe said, moving the map aside to show a diagram of the attraction and its parking lot. “This man is a habitual killer, which means he will kill again if he is not stopped tonight. We cannot risk spooking him. If he runs, there is no guarantee that we will find him again. Myself, Special Agent Rose, and eight further state troopers will take the parking lot, in plain clothes. Ten of you will walk through the fair and blend with the rest of the attendees, looking for any suspicious behavior. The rest of you will wait in unmarked cars at these locations, here and here, further down the road. Your task will be to form a cordon if he manages to leave the parking lot.”

“Any questions?” Shelley scanned the assembled police, her gaze moving from face to face.

One arm shot up in the back.

“I went to the Giant Dinosaur Fair last year. It’s open all day long. How do we know he isn’t already there?”

Zoe looked at Shelley, who looked back.

“We had best get moving,” Zoe said, grabbing her jacket from the back of the briefing room. “Chief, please alert your contacts at the fair as we drive. Get them searching now. We will need to sweep the parking lot for existing cars when we arrive. He could already be there—may already have his victim. We move fast, and we move now.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The air was cold on Zoe’s face and hands, but not so chill that it had deterred the crowds. Judging by the full parking lot, it was obviously a popular event with locals.

Above the lines of cars already parked, haphazardly in spaces painted on the ground, the fence stretched, encircling the whole fair. No entry without a ticket, and only one single ticketing gate. Every man, woman, and child who attended had to enter through that space. That, at least, would make it a little easier to watch the flow of people through the parking lot.

Higher still, when Zoe tilted her head, she saw the dinosaurs. Crude yet imposing statues, their mouths perennially bared to the elements, exposing sharp teeth. A Tyrannosaurus Rex stood about a foot taller than a Velociraptor, which was patently ridiculous; in life the T. Rex ought to have been at least three and a half times larger in scale.

“Pair off,” Zoe said, nodding to the troopers arranged in a loose group around her. “We do not risk attracting attention. You two, stand by the entrance as if you are waiting for friends. Use your radios immediately if you see a green sedan entering the lot. Everyone else, stroll together, and check the plates in your assigned sections. Carefully.”

With her last word of warning, the troopers—along with Shelley—began to move out. They had divided the vast parking lot into segments, each of them checking plates on a set section of cars. Security at the fair was lax—the parking lot was free, and so they did not bother to hire security to cover it. There would be no assistance from the fair organizers unless there was evidence that their killer was inside the fair itself, past the fence and ticket gate.

The trooper assigned to pair up with Zoe, a six-foot-four-inch-tall man who had introduced himself as Max but insisted on calling her “ma’am,” surveyed their area. “Ready to walk?” he asked her.

Zoe nodded tersely and fell into step beside him. She felt smaller with him at her side, deliberately close together so that they seemed like a couple. Just a couple, walking down the rows back to their own car, or to meet friends, or any number of unsuspicious activities.

But if Max was intimidating, he had nothing on the giant sculptures in the fair. They loomed even from here, where on the flat ground they towered into the distance, rising many feet above the fence. Dusty and sun-cracked in places, they were painted with garish colors, reds and oranges and greens. Camouflage for giant beasts that had nowhere to hide.

At their feet, the stalls were thronging with people. A large part of the crowd was made up of children, excitedly gawping up at the statues and wielding their own dinosaur toys which now paled in comparison. Zoe estimated them in groups of tens and twenties, adding up beyond five hundred visitors—and those were the ones that she could see from this point.

The parking lot, which had seemed overly large on the map, was evidently used to its full capacity at these special events. There were spaces left, but not very many. Zoe saw only twenty percent left at a sweep.

Zoe watched everything around them on either side, numbers and calculations appearing before her eyes everywhere she looked. She saw plates from different states, but none of them on green sedans. There were so many cars in the lot, it was beginning to feel like a much bigger task than anticipated.

She was distracted, tense, on edge. Every muscle in her body felt strained, every part of her mind carefully tuned to look for him. He would be here, she was sure of that. The knowledge put the numbers into overdrive, telling her things she did not need to know. The exhaust pipe on one car, one inch longer than regulations. The tires on the old pickup truck with less than the legal requirement of 1/16

of an inch tread, coming in at 1/20

. The heavy footprints in the loose dirt where a man of at least two hundred pounds had stood for around ten minutes, the cigarette butt loose next to them explaining why.

“That’s it,” Max said, coming to a halt.

Zoe looked up and realized she had been about to step over the mental line she had drawn, dividing the parking lot into segments. They were done, and with no luck.

Zoe turned and look across the parking lot. The way she had split the teams, they had all moved from opposite sides of the lot across to the middle, and now stood in more or less a uniform line across the four double-parked rows of cars. All of them stood still, none reaching for a radio to inform the others of a big discovery.

He wasn’t here yet.

“Move to secondary positions,” Zoe ordered over the radio, hidden in the sleeve of her denim jacket so that she could hold it to her mouth discreetly. “Wait for alert from gate team.”

Zoe waited and watched, pretending to look back toward the entrance to the attraction, as Shelley and the troopers all moved off. They had predetermined posts to take up—some of them outside the gates, some of them throughout the parking lot.

“I cannot stand and wait,” Zoe said, tilting her head up at Max. “We should walk. We can go over our section again, slowly. Work our way around.”

With pauses here and there to make it less obvious that they were actively searching the parking lot, Zoe led Max up and down the rows of the cars, alert all the while. The darkness of night was already coming down, the cars arriving with their headlights on now. It was getting harder to make out the details of the cars, and harder to see license plates—harder to do anything at all.

Zoe admitted defeat when they reached the road entrance during their slow move through the rows, and stopped nearby, leaning on the fence to watch vehicles passing by. Every time she saw something that could pass for the vehicle they were looking for, her heart rate skyrocketed, her eyes catching on comparisons. Tire width, vehicle length, probable age of the driver, height, all played into her mind. But each time, the car drove by, or it was driven by a woman with her kids in the backseat, and couldn’t possibly be what they were looking for.

Hours passed. It was a strange feeling, to stand and watch almost in silence for so long, while just a short distance away the riotous noise of people having fun could not be ignored. Children screamed and laughed, carnival games played merry bursts of tune to lure people in, and others thronged from or to their cars while talking loudly. Those with younger children began to leave, bowing to the lateness of the hour. Then the older children, and then anyone at all, as the closing time edged closer and closer.