Face of Death

“Hello? Yes, this is she… yes… and that’s where?” Shelley made quick notes on her pad, scrawling out addresses next to the times. She showed them to Zoe, the locations of each of the trains that were due to head through the area.

Several were held in a rail yard a three-hour drive away, ready to depart soon in order to get here by their scheduled time. Only one was nearer—the first of the day, scheduled for around four in the morning when the rails began working again.

A twenty-minute drive, and just under three hours before it would leave the rail yard.

Zoe tapped the pad hurriedly, and Shelley started giving orders down the phone. “Is anyone there now? It’s locked? Right, get us the person with the key. You have them? Excellent. Meet us there. Go in and start searching as soon as you arrive. We’re looking for a teenage girl. But be cautious. Look through windows—don’t open the car doors. We have reason to believe there may be traps in place.”

“We are moving out,” Zoe shouted, getting the attention of the troopers. “You six, stay here to man the roadblock and watch this area in case we do not find her. The rest of you, get in your cars and follow us.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Zoe had already been strapped into her seat and was impatiently tapping her foot when Shelley ended the call. Their vehicle had roared into life, and they headed off down the road, their GPS calculating the fastest route and directing Shelley to turn at the end of the street with a robotic tone.

“I told him not to let the train depart,” Shelley said. “It will never come through here.”

“It does not matter,” Zoe replied, clutching tightly to her seatbelt. “He set something up. She will die at the time that the train was scheduled to pass through here, even if it never leaves the rail yard. The tracks have not been tampered with, we know that now. There is something on the train itself.”

Shelley’s lips were a hard, thin line, pressed together so tightly that the edges were turning white. “I know,” she said. “We’ll have a little under two and a half hours to find her, figure out what the trap is, and get her out of it.”

Zoe lifted her cell out of her pocket. “I will call for reinforcements. Bomb squad, and other specialists who will know more than we do.”

The tires of the car ate the miles away, Shelley always keeping the speedometer over 100 no matter what type of road they turned onto. It was blissfully quiet, nearing half past one in the morning, the roads almost entirely empty. The one truck they did overtake at high speed blasted a horn at them, the sound trailing off into bemused silence as the two state police cars followed.

Zoe held onto her seatbelt and the door handle with white-knuckled fingers. Her stomach was roiling, but she would rather die than tell Shelley to slow down. Aisha’s life depended on them getting there fast.

Shelley skidded to a stop at an entirely incorrect angle in the rail yard parking lot, and Zoe half-stumbled out of the door as she took a deep breath of fresh air to settle herself. She was a few steps behind as Shelley ran for the huge depot building, with massive openings where tracks allowed multiple trains in and out.

There was a five-foot-five man with wiry hair and a potbelly standing near an open entrance, a wad of papers in his hands that he was hurriedly leafing through. By the fact that he was wearing a winter jacket thrown on over what appeared to be pajamas, Zoe knew he was the man they had woken to come there.

“Smith?” Shelley shouted as they drew nearer.

He looked up in acknowledgment, then waved his papers. “I’m trying to identify the train. Says here that it should be in the sixth bay.”

Zoe’s eyes went up, taking in the scale of the place as they entered. Tracks and trains stretched into the distance. She counted nine bays across the front of the depot, and from this far corner she could see that they stretched back at least sixty cars deep. Multiple trains in each bay.

“Take us there,” Shelley told him simply, and he turned and hurried along in front of them, still consulting the notes as he went.

The sixth bay was far enough away that precious minutes were gone, and then he had to double-check and cross-reference the plans before he was sure they were looking at the right engine.

“It’s this one, all right,” he said. “Freight service. Thirty-six boxcars. Each one is sealed with an individual door, but this is for cargo. Most of them don’t have windows.”

Zoe swore, looking down the length of the train. Thirty-six cars without windows. No way to see inside without endangering themselves.

“Which ones do?” Shelley asked.

“Eh, let’s see… Driver car, sixth, sixteenth, and the last one.”

Zoe turned to the troopers who had followed them in, panting with their run across the rail yard. “Go check those first. If you see something, report immediately.”

They nodded and set off at a run again, each of them understanding fully that this was a matter of life and death. One trooper for each car. Somehow, they had managed to find the right ratio of people to bring.

Ratio—that made Zoe think. The cars with windows—that was significant, wasn’t it? One, six, sixteen, thirty-six. A difference that doubled each time. Five, then ten, then twenty cars between them.

This was the correct train, all right.

“ETA on the specialists?” Zoe asked.

“Maybe thirty minutes, maybe a little more,” Shelley said, holding onto the gold arrow pendant around her neck so hard that when she let go Zoe glimpsed the imprint on her palm. “I’ll chase them up. And call an ambulance, in case we need them.”

How long was it going to take them to search every car? When the specialists got here, they would have just a couple of hours to analyze and check the thirty-two that did not have windows. Two hours to be thorough enough that they could have confidence no agents or troopers would die on opening the door.

Not long enough.

Zoe racked her brains, pacing forward and back between their train and the one beside it. Her mind raced amongst the possibilities. She knew in her gut that the cars they were able to search now would not be the right ones. He wouldn’t have made it so easy for them. He wouldn’t have risked someone glancing through a window and seeing something that was not cargo at all.

There had to be something here that told him which car to pick. There was no way he would have chosen one at random—not their killer. Not an apophenic.

The central car? It seemed too obvious, and besides, with an even number of carriages there was no dead center. It would fall between two cars. There were thirty-six, so perhaps a multiple of six? But what did six mean to the killer? The number had not come up before. It wasn’t in the Fibonacci sequence, and neither was thirty-six, for that matter. What was running through his head?

“Tell me everything you can about the train,” Zoe said, turning on the depot manager again.

He stuttered for a moment, leafing through his papers. “Uh, well, it was manufactured in 2008,” he said. “Came here in 2013.”

Eight—thirteen. Those numbers caught on the edges of Zoe’s mind, but she motioned for him to continue.

“Heavy-duty, heavy loads. It’s rated for carrying some low-risk toxic materials. Takes between two and six journeys a day, based on load times and what it’s booked for. Passes through an average of forty stations without stopping each journey, though sometimes deliveries can be more local or can even be split across different stations.”

Zoe held up a hand to him to stop. He was just talking now, just meaningless noise. There were no numbers, no patterns in what he was saying. Averages held no weight. She needed the real data. Specifics.

But if the data was not in the system that was used to plan train schedules, then who would have had access to it? Certainly not a civilian. Not an outsider who had to pick a train despite not being an expert on them. There was something simpler here, some pattern that was visible from the outside. It would have caught the killer’s eye.

Eight, thirteen—Zoe knew why they had stood out to her. They were numbers from the Fibonacci sequence. One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four…

Those numbers dictated the Fibonacci spiral’s dimensions and points. And that was how many victims he had taken. Thirty-four, the man outside his farm. Twenty-one, the woman walking beside the road. Thirteen, the parking lot. Eight, Linda the gas station attendant. Five, Rubie in the woods. Three, the worker at the fair. Two, himself, lying in a pool of blood at the diner. And one, Aisha Sparks, trapped in the train car.

Taking the fact that the first and second point of the spiral were both the same number, and thus the same location, he would only have needed to kill there once. Meaning—what? The victim should be in the first car?

The trooper assigned to check there had already made a thorough search and moved on. There was nothing in the driver’s cabin, and if the killer started his count from the first cargo car instead, he would have shortened that neat pattern of windowed cars. Ruined it, even, because the cabin had to count. The windows there could not be ignored.

The first car wasn’t it. She had to think further, think past the sequence—

No. Not past it.

She just had to turn it upside down.

There was no time to explain.

She had to run.