Face of Death

It was sheer luck that it did not go off—good or bad—perhaps it might have hit him if it did. But he was pulling resolutely, hard, with the same determination that had dispatched all of his victims so far. Zoe heard herself cry out involuntarily as the fabric of her jacket gave way, the wire cutting through into the flesh of her arm.

She could not go down like this. She could not allow the three-centimeter wound to grow larger, could not allow the wire closer to her neck. The killer had a strong grip, but he was off balance, his usual stance thrown off by the interference of her arm.

She threw the other elbow back, connecting fully with his lower chest, hearing him wheeze as some of the air was knocked out of him. He stumbled back but took the wire with him, making Zoe cry out again as the wire bit deeper into her skin. She could feel hot blood running down her arm already inside her sleeve, pooling inside the material where it bent.

He was standing just an inch or an inch and a half outside of her elbow range now, still pulling hard, the wire so sharp Zoe feared it might go through her arm before she could defend herself. He was bent forward slightly in her peripheral vision as she turned her head, his neck bent at thirty degrees, his hips at sixty. Top-heavy. Unbalanced. Humans had been designed with finesse, but they had weak points.

Zoe dropped to her knees, going down without any safety net, knowing it would likely hurt. Her kneecaps collided with the tiled floor with a dull thud that echoed through her body, shaking more blood from the wound of her arm, splattering it across the tiles in front of her. A clue for investigators in the future. The killer held on tight, but as the wire dipped under the weight of Zoe’s body dropping, he was pulled further off balance, tumbling down with her.

His body struck hers with a heavy weight, shoulder colliding against spine, head glancing off shoulder. They were on the floor and Zoe was free of the wire at least for a moment, falling loose like a halo around her, but her arm was gushing blood and the gun was out of her reach on the other side of the bathroom…

He saw it at the same moment that she realized it, and then they were both lunging for it, fighting to get their hands on it first. Zoe undercut him at a leaner angle and knocked him out of the way, down again, as she struggled to her feet. The wire forgotten behind her, she had not a moment to hesitate as she saw him lunging forward again. She had not succeeded in winding him a second time. He would reach it first.

She had to do something. In desperation, Zoe whirled, seeking something that would provide a moment of advantage. Distraction. There! Flinging out her elbow, using the arm that had already been damaged, she struck a mirror and shattered it into pieces.

“Look!” she shouted, her voice underpinned by the tinkling of shattered glass falling down. “The pattern!”

The killer glanced back toward her, startled. She saw his eyes change, widen, in recognition and surprise at the understanding. His gaze darted then toward the floor, as if unable to resist. The glass was settling, some of it fallen into the sink, some in a semicircle around it on the floor. The empty space within, the curved shape, the spray of errant pieces—it was irresistible to him.

Zoe leaped forward and got her hands on the gun as she slid along the floor. Her shoulder hit the back wall, and she ignored the pain racing through not just that spot but her whole arm as she rolled to raise the gun. She got it up in front of her, waiting for the world to stabilize just long enough to see him lunging for her again, and she pulled the trigger.

Point blank range, almost. Only a millisecond more and he would have been on her. Even if she hadn’t known how to aim, she almost certainly would not have hit him.

He slumped to the floor, taken back a few inches by the impact of the bullet, and raised a hand to his chest to examine the hole that had suddenly appeared there.

Zoe panted for breath, adrenaline washing over her in waves. She felt faint, light-headed. Looking at the blood smattered around the disordered bathroom, she thought she knew why. Things were getting fuzzy as the world cleared and settled, the ringing of falling glass in her ears, the mad dash for the gun and for breath, the hot wet slick of her right arm.

The silence might have been a second or an hour; Zoe watched dully as the killer’s hand fell back down against his own leg, energy draining from him as quickly as the lifeblood surging from his chest. He had a strange look on his face, unreadable to Zoe. She had shot well. She knew she must have been close to the heart, if not a direct hit.

The bathroom door burst open, simultaneous with a familiar shout of, “FBI! Put your hands in the air and drop your weapon!”

Shelley appeared in the empty frame, stepping forward with her gun trained on the killer as she assessed the scene in a few glances. “Zoe?”

Behind her, Zoe dimly heard other cops shouting orders to civilians, evacuating the diner. Shots fired. That must have caused a panic.

“Where is she?” Zoe asked. She needed to know. Aisha Sparks was not here—he had not brought her to the diner after all. He had been looking for someone new. So where was the girl?

The killer was laughing, Zoe realized, his mouth gaping open and his chest shaking even though barely any noise escaped his lips. He did not answer her. His mouth was twisted into a rictus grin, his eyes fixed on Zoe’s with a spark that said they shared a secret. Something she should have understood.

And in a flash, she did understand.

Zoe knew why he laughed. Why he was happy at the moment of death.

He needed someone to die here. And now, with a last wheeze that emptied his whole body and stilled the manic joy in his eyes, someone did.

“Where is she?” Zoe yelled, throwing herself across to him, grabbing the front of his shirt to shake him. There was no response. There was never going to be a response again. It was over. Zoe slumped back, raising her eyes to the ceiling and letting out a groan of impossible frustration.

“Talk to me, Z!”

Zoe returned her attention to Shelley, nodding briefly. “I am okay,” she said, impatiently. She did not want to bother with formalities and niceties, nor was she concerned at all about her own health. Aisha Sparks was still out there, and he had given them no clue at all as to where.

“Bleeding?” Shelley said, pointing as she crouched to get level with Zoe.

Zoe glanced down at her own arm, as if she was surprised to see the saturated red fabric of her jacket. “Oh, yes,” she admitted, feeling detached and foggy, her mind’s eye still fixed on that laughing grin. “He did get me with the wire.”

Shelley swore, barking orders through the doorway at the cops piling into the room after her. “Get me an ambulance, now! I have an agent heavily losing blood!”

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

“I do not need to go to the hospital,” Zoe repeated, for the third time.

She sat in the middle of chaos, on the tailgate of an ambulance, as law enforcement buzzed around her. They had already carted away the body of the killer, taken him to a local morgue to be analyzed and prodded into giving up his secrets.

“Are you sure?” Shelley asked, exchanging a glance with the EMT. “I really think it would be better if you went to get stitched up. It’s over now. You can go.”

“It is not over,” Zoe refuted, raising her arm and holding it toward the EMT. “Finish patching me up. We still have to find the teenage girl.”

Shelley sighed and folded her arms, but she did not object again as the EMT started to wind a white bandage around the quick job he had done on Zoe’s arm.

“This is a temporary solution,” he warned, finishing it off. “I do advise you to make your way to the hospital for stitches at the earliest possible opportunity. And no exerting yourself, especially not with this arm. You could end up causing further damage.”

“I will go in as soon as we find her,” Zoe said, hopping up off the trailer and making her way over to Shelley. She eschewed the jacket that was now altogether ruined with blood, grabbing a windbreaker someone from the state troopers had left for her to cover her similarly bloodied shirt.

She stood next to Shelley, watching the crime scene team swarm the whole diner as well as the killer’s car in the parking lot. The car: a red Ford Taurus, seemingly a repaint of a vehicle that had once been green. At the very rim of the hood, a few chips of paint had flaked loose, revealing the original finish underneath. It was here that another chip was missing, the green gone to show just the metal frame; the chip that had turned up under Rubie’s fingernail.

The hive of activity was centered on two things: collecting traces of evidence to back up Zoe’s claim of self-defense against the man who was surely their serial killer, and looking for any insight on what he had done with his hostage.

“He finished it.”

“What?” Shelley asked, looking around at Zoe with surprise.

“He finished the pattern. That is why he looked so pleased with himself as he died.”

It had been playing on her mind since the moment she shot him. She had expected despair, not just at his impending death but also at his failure. For the killer, the pattern had been everything. He would not have been happy to leave it incomplete.

He had been laughing because, to him, the whole thing really was funny. The pattern was complete, and he himself was a part of it. Now, in a flash of inspiration as the fog of pain and shock from her confrontation cleared, she understood what that meant. He would not have been happy to die if he had not finished everything—including the last point on the spiral.

How had she not realized it sooner? Cursing blood loss and the emotional reeling from killing a man, Zoe knew that action was needed—and now.

“He took Aisha Sparks somewhere,” Zoe asserted. “He set her up somewhere to die. And I know where.”

“The last point of the spiral,” Shelley said. She might not have been able to see the patterns like Zoe could, but she wasn’t dumb. She understood the concept. “You think he set something up so that she will die tomorrow night.”

“He must have known that we were getting closer. We were almost upon him at the fair, and he was seen by the patrolman—he must have known there was a good chance that he would not make it through this night.”

“Only one more death needed to complete the pattern. So you think she is already there?”

Zoe nodded. “We have to search it. Gather a team from the state troopers and call the sheriff to send men. I will go to program the GPS.”