Face of Death

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

The girl would be in the thirty-fourth carriage, to symbolize the completion of the spiral.

Shelley was yelling after her, but Zoe kept going at a headlong pace, rushing past a pair of stunned cops who were on their way down from their cars toward the rear of the train. They caught on and began to follow. Behind her, Zoe could count three pairs of footsteps and knew that everyone was on her tail. To the side the cars flashed by, counted so easily they may as well have had their numbers painted on the side.

Thirty-four cars was a long distance. Long enough that she had not quite been able to make out the right car from the front of the train, the rules of perspective slimming it down and hiding it from her perception. But now she was closer and she could see it, her goal. A car just like all of the others. No particular color or markings. But it was the one.

Zoe skidded to a stop, her heart thudding in her throat as she tried to catch her breath. Her eyes scanned every particular of the car from the side, searching for wires that did not belong, scrapes of missing paint, anything out of the ordinary. She hopped over connectors that were higher than her knees to check the other side, circling around it with determination.

“It’s this one?” Shelley asked, breathlessly.

Zoe nodded sharply. “She’s in here. It’s the sequence.”

Shelley seemed to understand that, even if she had been given no real explanation, and dropped to her knees to peer under the car. “I can’t see anything suspicious.”

The troopers had fanned out instinctively, rearranging themselves to all four points of the car, making their own kind of pattern. Zoe appreciated their efforts, but they were only hampering her. There was nothing here that would be obvious. That was not his style.

She approached the door of the car and banged on it, pressing her ear to the metal to listen for a response. “Aisha? Can you hear me?”

There was nothing, even though she strained to hear it. She held still for long seconds, barely even breathing, hoping to hear at last a murmur of sound.

The girl was not conscious, whatever had been done to her. Zoe pictured a razor-sharp wire tightening slowly and inexorably around a sleeping girl’s neck and shuddered, pushing away from the door.

But what was that? She leaned in again, taking another deep inhalation through her nose. There was—something—some kind of faint smell in the air…

Gas. It was gas.

“He is poisoning her air supply,” Zoe gasped out, the second she realized what it meant. “The car is filling with gas.”

Shelley moved up next to her and pressed her own nose to the hair-thin gap at the seal of the door, and nodded. “I smell it.”

“We should wait for the other team to get here,” one of the troopers said nervously. “It could explode.”

“Only if we introduce a spark,” Zoe replied, shaking her head. She could barely breathe, thinking of Aisha in there, the gas slowly choking her lungs. “He was not an expert at using this kind of material, as far as we know. There is every possibility that he set it up wrong. She could be dying even now.”

“Or suffering irreparable damage, even if they do get her out of there alive,” Shelley agreed, tilting her head to turn wide eyes sideways on Zoe. “What are you thinking?”

Zoe was not thinking at all. The decision had already been made. It was the obvious one to make. “Everybody get back,” she said. “Way back. I am going to open the door.”

“We should wait for the specialists,” one of the troopers said.

“I am not waiting anymore,” Zoe insisted. “Her life hangs in the balance. I outrank you. Go.”

The troopers scuttled away without a further word of argument. They must have seen the determination in her face, and known that she would not take no for an answer.

“You, too,” Zoe added, turning to Shelley. “Get behind cover. Just in case it does blow.”

“I’m not leaving you. We started this together.”

“You have a daughter.” Zoe tried to keep her voice firm and level, but she was running out of patience. “Shelley, I need to open this door now. Go back with the others.”

Shelley bit her lip and ducked her head. If there was light shining in her eyes when she looked up, it surely must have been a trick of the depot’s overhead strips, and not gathering tears. “I’ll stand here,” she said. “Back you up.”

Much as the troopers had been forced to cede under Zoe’s determination, Zoe now found herself faced with Shelley’s unwavering will. She could have argued, but the clock was ticking. “Stay by the side of the door. You will be protected from some of the blast. Be ready to move as soon as I come out.”

Zoe took a steadying breath and waited for the sound of footsteps to recede into the distance. Then, raising her eyes to the ceiling in silent supplication to a God she was not sure existed, she set her hand on the door handle and twisted.

It came open easily, the electronic locks turned off with the train itself dormant. The sibilant hiss of gas leaking out into the air became apparent as soon as she stepped inside, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom beyond the square of light afforded by the door.

Then she saw her.

Zoe leapt forward and touched her hands to Aisha Spark’s neck, feeling a faint pulse beating under her fingertips with relief. In the far corner by the door the gas canister stood, marked with angry red symbols that told Zoe it would be better for her to get out as quickly as she could. It was big, enough that she could calculate a very dense concentration of it in the air of the car by the time it was emptied.

She approached it, searching for a valve or something that could be switched off. Her fingers encountered a small hole on the side of the tank, and the sound of the gas stopped as she pressed over it. A temporary solution at best. Casting around for something that would stick over it, Zoe felt herself already becoming a little light-headed and abandoned it. The gas tank could be dealt with by the professionals. She did not have the tools to plug the gap, and with that small of an opening, it would not yet have even emptied half out.

Zoe noted the presence of ropes at Aisha’s ankles and wrists as she moved to lift the teenager into her arms. The girl weighed only one hundred and three pounds with her clothes, and was completely out cold, not even stirring as Zoe picked her up from the ground and stood.

She stepped outside, awkwardly maneuvering her load to swing the door shut with an elbow and contain the gas for now. Then she called out, her voice echoing across the lofty ceilings of the depot. “I have her! Where is that ambulance?”

EPILOGUE

Zoe took in gray skies and cool weather, not at all a surprise as they arrived home. The plane touched down with a rattle of the wheels, the passengers giving that little collective gasp of surprise and then relief that it bounced down onto the runway safely. Zoe left off looking out the window and started to gather her things, grabbing a notebook out of the pocket on the chair in front.

“Wait a moment,” Shelley said beside her, stilling her with a gesture. She reached out and grasped one of Zoe’s hands, facing her bodily. “I just wanted to say something.”

Zoe tensed momentarily, but then relaxed. With anyone else, she would have been waiting for the speech: the one about how they weren’t going to work as partners after this and should go their separate ways. But not from Shelley.

Zoe had long since stopped thinking of Shelley as a temporary inconvenience who would go away any day now. She had proven that she was in it for the long haul. Zoe had a feeling that their partnership was going to go very well indeed.

“No one is going to find out about your abilities, not from me,” Shelley continued, squeezing Zoe’s hand. “Not until you’re ready, if that ever even happens. I’ll keep your secret.”

“Thank you,” Zoe said, plain and simple. She might have faltered from time to time in polite conversation, but she knew the facts of this. She was grateful, deeply and sincerely. Shelley needed to know that. That was all that mattered.

And, for the first time, as she walked away from her partner at the airport, Zoe found herself actually looking forward to working with her again.

***

Zoe came in through the door with a sigh of relief. A loud mewing from the kitchen, and the appearance of Euler with his tail held high in the air, told her that she was not the only one happy that she was home.

She dropped her overnight bag in the hall, promising herself that she would deal with it later. The first thing was to feed the cats, then herself, then shower. And possibly sleep for the next twenty-four hours.

After pouring out the cat food into bowls, Zoe scratched Pythagoras behind the ear until he batted her hand away with an impatient paw, eager to eat uninterrupted. She rested back on her heels, watching them for a moment.

Even if her cats only wanted her for her ability to provide food, at least she was not still persona non grata elsewhere. Far from being the failure her superiors had warned her against, Zoe’s methods had been vindicated. Aisha Sparks had experienced mild symptoms from both the sedative she was given and the gas leak, but she had only needed to stay overnight in the hospital for observation. She had been discharged before Shelley and Zoe had finished tying up loose ends and gotten themselves back on a plane.

With the evidence that the killer really had targeted the fair, and it was only the forensic mistake of assuming the color of his car that got in the way, it was now clear to everyone that Zoe had been on the right path. The latest call from the Chief had been quite the opposite from the last—high praise and congratulations. She was being described as a brilliant agent with deductive powers beyond that of the norm in internal conversations, and the press was already having a field day with the killer’s mental problems. The rumors would go away, as would the praise. There was always another case.

But something had been different this time. Something had changed inside her, something seismic. She had never before compared herself directly to a serial killer, found so many things in common. Zoe had emerged from that stronger, her own belief in herself having survived the storm. She was a good person. Even her mother’s voice still screaming in the back of her head could not change that.