Face of Fear

KERI LOCKE MYSTERY SERIES

A TRACE OF DEATH (Book #1)

A TRACE OF MURDER (Book #2)

A TRACE OF VICE (Book #3)

A TRACE OF CRIME (Book #4)

A TRACE OF HOPE (Book #5)

CHAPTER ONE

Callie shoved her hands deeper into her pockets, hooking her elbow in such a way that it pressed the handbag over her shoulder further against her side. It was the kind of precaution that she always took when visiting Javier, a friend of hers with a serious talent for art.

They’d met at college, and while Callie had already been forced into an office job, Javier was at least taking a shot at his dreams. Of course, living as an artist with student debt meant he didn’t live in the best of neighborhoods. There were times when Callie, being an attractive young woman, didn’t feel safe here.

But that, she reminded herself as the backs of her fingers brushed against the cool exterior of the canister, was why she always carried pepper spray in her pocket.

She had an exit plan, too: spray and run, depending on where she had managed to get to. There was a little alleyway she had to cross through to get to Javi’s studio apartment, and it also represented the turning point. Before she reached it, she knew the quickest route was to run back on her footsteps, out to the main street where she could find safety in numbers. Past the halfway point, she would run to Javi’s door and scream into the intercom until he buzzed her in.

It wasn’t that she spent all of her time preoccupied with the potential dangers of the place she was walking toward. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Callie had come up with this plan the second time she had ever visited Javi there, and since then she was free to daydream on the way over to his place. To daydream about the tattoo he was drawing for her, and what it would look like.

They had been working on designs together for a couple of years, ever since she got her first. She’d loved it so much that she had begged him to make her another, and this would be the third time one of his designs decorated her body. There was something strangely intimate about it, though they had never been lovers. Something about the way his work trailed across her skin, the one gesture of rebellion against the corporate lifestyle she was no doubt going to have to endure for decades.

Or maybe not. Maybe she could find a way out, to do the things she really loved. Start her own business, even though she hadn’t figured out what it would be yet. Callie could still hope.

She stepped down into the alleyway, past an overturned garbage can and a mural of graffiti that had since been tagged over by kids with spray cans. Art, covered by the kind of inane scrawl that made cities want to crack down on graffiti in the first place. It was a shame. The California sun that had been shining down on her face disappeared, replaced with the cool shade between tall buildings, leaving her eyes to adjust to new gloom.

At the opposite end of the alley, a man entered, coming in her direction. Callie stiffened a little, taking him in while trying to pretend she was looking at the ground to his left. He had a hoodie pulled up over his head, his face in shadows, his hands deep into his pockets just like hers.

She couldn’t make out his identity. That could be bad news, in a place like this. It could mean that he didn’t want his identity known. A bad sign.

Callie’s fingers curled and wrapped around the pepper spray, her arm muscles tensing as she thought about using it. She would pull it out in one swift motion, aim it at his face—she used the tip of her index finger to find the nozzle so that it would be the right way around—and then spray. Spray and run.

She stepped up her pace, thinking that the quicker she passed him, the less chance he would have of getting the upper hand. She looked down the distance between them, trying to figure it out. A glance up at the sky. Was she halfway yet? Would it be quicker to run forward or back? Javi was expecting her. Maybe if she ran to him, he would let her in quicker. Yes, she would run to Javi.

She held her breath as the man came closer, trying to keep walking forward as if nothing was happening, but gripping the pepper spray harder than ever. She was primed, ready to go—

He passed by her without incident.

Callie breathed again, mentally telling herself off for being so paranoid. That was what happened to people who were overprepared. Who thought too much about getting attacked in alleyways.

Javi would laugh about this. She would tell him, even though it was embarrassing. He would laugh warmly and tell her he would protect her from the big scary men. It would be a bonding moment between them.

Unexpectedly, Callie was pulled off balance, just when she was breathing easy again. Something from behind. Him, she realized—it had to be. He had her around the shoulders, one of his arms pulled around her. Back toward him. Her shoulder blades collided with his chest, and something was pulling across her throat—something sharp—something—

She wanted to yell for help, yell for Javi, scream, but when she tried, the air only bubbled out through her throat, through the new opening he had made. He had cut her throat. Something hot was cascading across her chest—she knew what it was—her own blood.

With a moment of clarity unlike any she had ever felt, Callie Everard knew that she was going to die.

Dying, even. It was happening, right now, actively, and she was never going to see Javi to get that tattoo design and she was never going to follow her dream of being her own boss and she was never going to own that Mercedes she had set her eyes on when she read that a famous fashion editor drove one. Callie’s hands clutched at her throat, slipping on the blood, and she could only grasp at the edges of the new opening, the geography of which made no sense to her searching fingers.

Callie fell, unaware that she was doing it until she registered that she was looking up at the sky and therefore had to be on her back. She strained one last time to make a noise, desperately sucking in air through her open mouth and trying to expel it again in a shout. All she heard was another gush of blood from her wound, the oxygen bubbling out in it, not even reaching her lungs.

It was only another moment before Callie stopped seeing anything at all, and stopped breathing, and then it was only her body that lay abandoned in the alleyway. A shell. Her soul, or her consciousness, or whatever it was that was Callie, long gone.

CHAPTER TWO

Zoe set down her glass on the table, trying not to let herself calculate the volume of water still remaining inside it. It was a losing battle, of course. She was always going to see the numbers, whether she wanted to or not.

“What do you think?”

“Hmm?” Zoe looked up guiltily, meeting John’s waiting brown eyes.

She expected him to lose his patience, but she still had never managed to push him that far. Instead he gave her a gentle smile, one of those lopsided smiles of his that went higher on the right side of his face than the left. He always seemed to be giving her those smiles, forgiving her for something or other. Zoe didn’t really know that she deserved it.

“What’s on your mind?” John asked.

Zoe tried to mold her face into something that would convincingly tell him she was fine. “Oh, nothing,” she said, and then, feeling that perhaps this wasn’t the best answer: “Just work stuff.”

“You can tell me about it, you know,” John said, slipping his hand over hers on the table. She felt his calm heartbeat thumping slowly through his thumb where it pressed on her skin, slower than hers. Slower by a long shot.

Great. Zoe had made up a quick excuse, and now he was asking for details. Now what was she supposed to do? “It is an open case,” she said, shrugging, hoping he buy it. “I cannot really talk about the details until it goes to trial.”

John nodded, seeming to accept this. Zoe breathed an internal sigh of relief. She had to focus, not count the four times his head tipped forward at a thirty-degree angle and the shine on his well-kept brown hair appeared in the lights, or the six glasses going by on the tray held by the five-foot-six waitress or the—

Zoe blinked, trying to refocus her eyes on John and her ears on what he was saying.

“So, I had to say to him, ‘Sorry, Mike, but it’s such a shame I have to go out on a date tonight,’” he laughed.

Zoe frowned. “You could have rescheduled if the date is inconvenient to you,” she said. “I would not mind.”

“What? No!” John said, at first leaning back in alarm and then grasping her hand again. “God, no, Zoe. I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again. That was just—I was being sarcastic. Or ironic, or something. I always forget which is which. Honestly, I wouldn’t cancel our date just for a work thing.”

Zoe’s eyes flicked down to her plate, by now empty of the excellent salmon roulades with lemon beurre blanc that had been her main course. This was the most recommended date spot in Washington, D.C., for a meal, and she could barely remember eating it.

She wasn’t sure that she could say that she would always put John first. After all, she was an FBI agent. She was expected to drop her life in order to pursue a case, not the other way around. She reached up self-consciously to tuck a strand of her short brown hair behind her ear, feeling as she did that it was one centimeter longer than she liked to have it cut. Things had been hectic lately. No time for the daily tasks that kept life going.

“I mean, of course I get it that you might have to cancel sometimes,” John said, sipping at his wine nonchalantly as if he hadn’t just managed to read her mind. “You have to stop serial killers from going on murder sprees. Your job is important. No one’s going to be upset if I don’t stay at the office all night trying to figure out if there’s a common property line across three different surveys from the 1800s and whether they can be applied to my client’s case. Except maybe my client, and he will be benefitted by the excellent mood I’ll wake up in tomorrow knowing that I spent my evening with you.”

“You are too nice to me,” Zoe told him. “Always. I do not understand it.”

It was true; she didn’t. She had messed up their first date completely, and on their second, she had dragged him out to a hospital to try and trace the records of a potential killer. Then he’d waited for her in the cold, because she—unthinkingly—had not bothered to tell him that she could find her own way home. Not many men would have wanted to sign up for a third date—and this was their fifth.

“You don’t have to understand it,” John said, smoothing his tie for the eleventh time that night in a gesture that she was beginning to recognize. “You just have to accept my opinion that you deserve it. I’m not being too nice. I’m being just nice enough. In fact, I could be nicer.”

“You could not be nicer. It would be against the laws of physics and nature.”