Face of Fear

***

Zoe wrinkled her nose, then modulated her breathing. It was all about focus. She breathed in through her mouth, thus avoiding the worst of the smell, and out through her nose. Shelley was struggling not to gag, but Zoe tried not to let it put her off.

“It’s a bad one, all right,” the coroner said. She was a tall young woman with bronzed blonde hair and a tan, and altogether too much eyeshadow for someone working in a medical office—even if it was only the dead she was working with.

Zoe ignored her, too, and kept her attention on the body. If it even fit under the definition of a body anymore; charcoal was a more fitting description. The man, the one Shelley had named as John Dowling, was no longer a man. There was a certain shape—legs twisted together and to one side, arms close in across the body, a round jut where the head had been—but it would have been just as easy to imagine that it was a bit of scrap, part of the belly of a ship or an ancient piece of machinery that had burned in the ruins of Pompeii.

The second body was more recognizable, though only just. Somehow, even though the burning had not taken hold so badly, the smell was worse with that one. Maybe because she had been left out in the heat of the California sun in the middle of the day. The young woman. The bits of ragged and scorched flesh that still clung to her seemed somehow obscene. Five inches of leg above the foot, two inches at each elbow, a chunk of hair from the back of the head that had been protected by contact with the damp ground. Any longer in the flames, and she would have been just as much ash as he was.

“Ante-immolation wounds?” Zoe asked, without looking up.

The coroner hesitated for a second.

“Before they were burned,” Zoe added for clarification.

“I know what immolation means,” the coroner replied, a hint of tension for the first time in her calm, beachy voice. Everything about her was irritating to Zoe. “As far as I can tell, with the state the bodies are in, there was only the single cut to the throat. Enough to kill on its own. Besides being set on fire, nothing else was done to them.”

Zoe leaned closer, examining the throat. The girl’s hands had been up at hers, and the fingers had fused together and melted against the next when she burned. There was, however, still a distinct and visible wound behind them, gaping open where her head had tilted back.

“This was precise,” she said, more to herself than anything else.

“It was a quick attack,” the coroner agreed. “Whoever the killer was, they knew what they were doing. Straight in from behind, a single slash across the neck to open it fully, in both cases.”

Zoe straightened her back and looked at Shelley—to make it clear that this next observation was for her, not for the irritating presence in the room. “This was not a crime done on impulse. It was planned out, the location chosen carefully.”

“Do you think the victims were chosen on purpose?”

Zoe chewed her lip for a moment, casting her eyes back between them. What did they have in common, other than being burnt to a crisp?

“It is too early to say,” she decided. “We need to learn more about Callie Everard. If we can find a connection between them, good. If not, there may be a bigger message at play.”

“A serial killer?” Shelley groaned. “I hope they’re secret lovers or something. I had my fingers crossed we could get home for the weekend.”

“Good luck,” the coroner put in, a statement that was absolutely unnecessary.

Zoe turned a baleful glance in her direction, and was at least a little pacified by the way the woman shrank away and busied herself with a nearby metal tray of instruments instead of meeting her gaze again.

“We’ve got a room waiting for us at the local precinct,” Shelley said. “The cop I spoke to assured me that the coffee is awful, but also that the air conditioning is completely inefficient, so we have lots to look forward to.”

“Lead the way,” Zoe said, wishing she could at least find that funny to lessen the blow.

CHAPTER SIX

With a sigh, Zoe chose a chair and sank down into it, reaching for the first file that had been left for them.

“Thank you, Captain Warburton, we really appreciate your help,” Shelley was saying near the door, making good work of the small talk and pleasantries that Zoe had never enjoyed.

It felt good to be part of a team that worked. Where each of them had their own separate roles. Shelley was to understanding people what Zoe was to numbers, and though neither of them could really comprehend what the other did, at least it made everything flow easier.

After a good twenty minutes of studying the files, they were no closer to getting anywhere. Though the locals had managed to amass some family statements and get a lot more information than the initial files they had reviewed on the plane, none of it seemed to be helpful. Zoe threw her pages down on the table with a groan of frustration.

“Why can it not ever be a simple connection?”

“Because then the locals could do it, and we’d be out of a job,” Shelley said calmly. “Let’s go over what we know. Talk it out. Maybe something will click.”

“I doubt that very much. The two of them were such different people.”

“Well, let’s start with that. John was a healthy guy, right? A gym rat.”

“His housemate said that he spent almost all of his spare time at the gym. He was in good shape.”

“And a nice guy, too.”

Zoe made a face. “He donated money to charity and helped out at a soup kitchen on Sundays. That does not necessarily mean he was a nice guy. Lots of people do things like that because they are hiding a darkness.”

“You’re grasping at straws,” Shelley said, shaking her head. “We can’t read anything else into that. He had a clean lifestyle. No drugs, no convictions, not even any disciplinary record at work.”

“And she was the opposite.” Zoe directed this last statement at a photograph of a smiling Callie Everard, beaming at the camera and holding up a bottle of beer while an inebriated-looking young man held his arm around her shoulders.

“Well, maybe not. Yes, she had some trouble with drugs earlier in her life. But she went in and out of rehab when she was twenty-three, completed the course, kicked the habit. She had been clean for a couple of years. Back on track.”

Zoe considered this. “Maybe there could be something there. Both of them into clean living, even if only recently.”

“What, like a fitness cult or something?” Shelley asked.

Zoe gave her a dark look.

“Well, it’s possible,” Shelley said. “Just look at all that stuff with the exercise bikes. And that self-help cult, the one that was tricking women into sleeping with the founder and giving all their money away.”

“I suppose I have to concede that point.” Zoe wasn’t familiar with all of the ins and outs, but she had heard mention of the cases. Shelley was right, in a way. You never really knew what might be going on under the surface until you dug down far enough.

She lifted photographs of the pair of them, looking for similarities. It was always frustrating to come in on a case like this. With a single victim, you could analyze the evidence single-mindedly, fixate on every small detail of that one person. With three or more victims, you had enough data points to build a pattern. To recognize that the killer was travelling in a certain direction, or only targeting blondes under five foot ten, or that they revealed themselves in a certain tic that showed up at each scene.

With two, it was much harder. You couldn’t put things together in the same way. A similarity in numbers might just be a coincidence that would be broken by another body. You might notice that each of their ages were prime numbers only for that to turn out to be meaningless. You couldn’t tell what was important and what was just a red herring, thrown out by your own brain and holding no deliberate intentions.

“There is one thing they have in common,” Zoe said, tapping the pictures. “Tattoos. Dowling had a tiger on his left bicep. Everard had a rose on her right thigh, picked out in dotwork. She was on her way to see a friend about getting another one, too.”

Shelley shrugged. “Does that really warrant a connection? A lot of people have tattoos.”

Zoe was flipping through more photos, noticing more marks on areas of skin that were visible in different shots. They were almost all taken from the victims’ social media profiles, and it looked as though they were both proud of their tattoos. Of showing them off. Did that mean something? “It was not just one tattoo each. Look. Both of them were covered in them. Dowling had the whole of one leg done, right down to the foot. And Everard, here, on her back and stomach.”

“I still don’t know that it means anything. It’s just a cultural thing nowadays.”

Zoe wrinkled her nose. “A cultural thing?”

“Yeah. You haven’t noticed? A lot of people are getting inked in their early twenties now. Covering their whole bodies. Even faces and hands. There’ve been a lot of celebrities getting it done. Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, you know? Rappers and singers and sports players. It’s considered cool right now.”

“Face and hand tattoos sound like remarkably bad ideas,” Zoe said, making a face. “Imagine never being able to hide the mistake that you made at a young age, of choosing to get something stupid put onto your body forever.”