Face of Death

It had been just a matter of minutes since the departure of the state cop when another sound caught his ears. The light laughter and conversation of two voices coming from a distance away, far enough at first that he could hear sounds only and not make out words. They were originating somewhere in the fair, and seemed to be coming closer.

Holding his breath to hear them more clearly, the man crept toward the entrance gates. He stuck close to the shadows at the edge of the parking lot, where the encroaching trees gave him some shade. With a rising pulse, he realized they were approaching closer—close enough that he could soon make out their conversation fully.

Two women, one older than the other. They were talking about their day, about visitors and their behavior and how busy it had been. One of them was jingling a set of keys as they walked. They sounded unhurried, calm, cheerful. Probably pleased at the prospect of another day of work done. He watched them come into view around one of the fence posts, moving toward and through the entrance to the fair.

“Let me just lock up,” one of them said, bending down slightly to look at the gate more closely. “God, it’s dark out here. I wish they would at least leave the lights on over here so we could see.”

“You know what Mark’s like,” the other laughed. “We’re lucky he even pays us to lock up. If he had his way, he’d pay us until the end of the shift and make us work for free.”

“Cutting every corner to save a bit of money,” the older woman agreed. The other turned on a bright flashlight on her cell phone, pointing it at the gate.

The man held his breath again, examining them in the new light as the older woman finally fit the key into the lock. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, perhaps, her brow furrowed in concentration as she attempted to complete the motion. The other was only a teen, maybe working her first ever part-time job. The perfect way to save up some money for college.

There was opportunity here. The man had never tried for two at once, but they were women, and both of them not expecting anyone else to be around. It was pitch dark in the parking lot without the lights from the fair, and they were on foot, moving toward cars perhaps parked down the road away from the customer area.

Not only that, but the bright glare of the flashlight was in their eyes. As the older woman finished her task at last and shoved the keys into her handbag, the man knew that this was his chance. Once the light was off, they would be functionally blind in this darkness. He would see them, and they would not see him.

This was his chance to keep the pattern going.

He waited until the light went out, and then leaped out from his hiding place to strike.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Zoe punched the pillow, trying to make it somehow comfortable even despite the fact that this felt like a futile effort. There was not much hope for the thin, almost brick-like pillow, if it could even be called that. It was as uncomfortable as anyone could possibly make it, exactly the kind of thing provided in these low-budget motels.

Zoe had not wanted to try to sleep, but Shelley had pointed out that they needed rest for what was likely another long day ahead. Zoe had been in favor of returning to the investigation room and working through the small hours of the night, but Shelley, driving their car, had pulled in outside the motel and insisted.

It was hard to sleep, knowing that you had failed. That you had had a killer in your grasp and still missed him. Just how she had done that, she still struggled to understand. Everything had been right—the car matching the tire tracks, the color the same as the paint under the dead girl’s fingernails, all the numbers adding up. The right suspect for the case.

But he had not been the right suspect, and there was no way now that Zoe could hold on to that futile hope.

She had failed, and when she closed her eyes, she saw those dead women staring back at her from the crime scene photos she had spent so long studying. Not enough, they seemed to be telling her. You didn’t do enough to stop him. She had followed up with the state trooper patrols, but no one reported seeing anything.

She rolled over, switching to her other side. The sheets were already tangled around her legs from over an hour of tossing and turning, unable to get comfortable or quiet the noise in her head. She kept going over and over it, the pattern, the numbers, the coordinates on the map. No matter how she looked at it, she felt right. Like there had been no possible way that she had made a mistake on any of it.

And yet the suspect had been the wrong man, all the same, and the real killer had gotten away. Maybe to kill someone else. Most likely, she had to admit to herself. You didn’t get this far and then stop because the cops were too close.

Zoe forced her eyes shut again, trying to find something Zen deep inside her that would allow her to relax and drift off. It was not easy. The faces of dead girls swam in her vision, taunting her with her failure. She had failed them. She had failed someone else, someone whose face would join them before long.

She couldn’t think about this. She rolled again and tried to crush herself into sleep, squeezing her eyes so tightly shut that her whole face wrinkled inward.

Sometime later, she must have slept. She must have, because her mother wasn’t here in Kansas, and therefore there was no way that she could have been standing over Zoe’s bed.

“Mom?” Zoe whispered, her voice coming out small and high, the voice of a child.

“Why didn’t you pray for forgiveness?” her mother asked, harsh and stinging. “I told you, devil child. You have to beg God to change you.”

“I did pray, Mom,” Zoe protested. She had. Every night, her knees raw with kneeling on the wooden floorboards by her bed, asking God to change her.

“Then what is this?”

Zoe felt the weight of something thrown down on the covers beside her and flinched. She knew what it was already. It was evidence—signs that she had still been using her power, still seeing the numbers. She should never have written anything down. She had just wanted to remember the calculations, use them to build something of her own maybe. Jenny was the only one in her class who could afford a toy robot, but Zoe had seen all the pieces inside and known how it worked. If she could just get the pieces together—

“You are a wicked child,” Zoe’s mother said, her breath hot on Zoe’s face. “Zoe, you get out of that bed right now and you pray with me. We’re going to pray all night long, do you hear me? We’ll pray for you not to shame and disgrace us again. Get down here on your knees.”

Zoe struggled out of the bed, feeling the hard wood on her tender skin with a whimper, and clasped her hands together.

And it was almost an unnoticeable change into another day when she began to pack her things, getting them all into two single cardboard boxes, everything she had in the world.

“You can’t just walk out like this,” her mother hissed, flinging words like vipers from the doorway. “We are your family, Zoe. Who ever heard of a child doing this to her poor mother?”

“You are not my mother anymore,” Zoe said, taking a dress down from a hanger in her wardrobe. “At least, not legally. I can do what I want.”

“I bought that dress,” her mother said, stepping forward and snatching it out of her hands. “That is mine. You can’t have it, devil!”

“There is no devil,” Zoe said, tired of this conversation, tired of the same thing over and over again. “There is just me.”

“You are the demon.” Her mother pointed into her face, stepping forward, broaching her personal space. “You are the devil, you are the evil thing. There never was a child of mine. You were birthed from me a demon. And demon, you will steal from me no more!”

Zoe’s mother swiped the box from her hands, sending it crashing to the floor. Clothes and books spilled out, the small number of items Zoe had gathered herself over the years and actually liked. Small, bright pieces of candy scattered in a Fibonacci spiral around everything. Photographs of dead girls spilled out from the pages of books. She itched to reach and pick them up, to turn them over and see what might be written on the back, but they were part of her mother’s household now. And this was no longer Zoe’s home.

She stared at them for a moment, knowing her mother was going to have to win at least a part of this fight. Legally emancipated or not, Zoe was not going to resort to physical violence. So long as she was away from here, that was enough.

“Okay,” she said, and turned and walked out, and that was all.

And she woke sweating, feeling the weight of her mother’s hand across the back of her head, reeling for a moment before she realized she was still in a motel in Kansas.

***

The buzz of a text alert lifted Zoe out of her fitful nap for a second time, forcing her eyes open. Her face was pointing toward the digital clock, and she read the display with a sense of dull inevitability. Of course, she had not made it all the way through to the morning. It was only a little after five a.m., just a short few hours since she had put her head on this rock-hard pillow.

Zoe reached out and lifted her cell phone. She was not properly sleeping anyway, not really, and on a case like this an agent didn’t ignore a message. Whatever it was could be crucial, timely. The kind of information you needed to know right away.

She read the message, and felt her heart sinking even lower than she had thought it was possible for it to go.

“No,” she said, out loud. “No, no, no!”

Shelley stirred on the other bed, her eyes flickering open. “What is it?” she asked, the drowsiness of sleep disappearing as she kicked herself into awareness.

“State troopers,” Zoe said, holding back a lump of something in her throat that threatened to overwhelm her. “Two of the fair’s employees have been reported missing by their families. They woke up this morning and realized that they never made it home last night. They’re putting out an APB for their description and launching a manhunt. Looks like all hands on deck.”

“He took them, didn’t he?” Shelley asked. She sat up in the bed, her blonde hair falling messily down over her shoulders, mussed with sleep. “Our killer.”

Zoe did not have to tell her yes. They both knew.

They had failed to stop him, and now two more women would pay with their lives.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO