Face of Death

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.”

Shelley hesitated, glancing at Zoe’s arm. “I’m driving.”

Zoe rolled her eyes. An easy concession to make if it meant that they would get on the road. “Fine.”

She waited in the passenger’s seat with restless energy. The girl would be there. The maps, which Zoe had photographed with her cell so that they would always be able to check them on the move, indicated a new area for the final point of the spiral. With their new, more precise logarithm, it had been narrowed down significantly. It was a small area: a road, two houses on either side of it—each of them offering only their front rooms, with the back of the houses and their gardens out of the correct zone—and a small portion of a railway line.

It was precise, but it would still need searching. If she needed someone to die, where would she put them? Out of sight, certainly. A basement or an attic. Somewhere that they wouldn’t be found, much less suspected.

Shelley swung into the driver’s seat, still signaling with her hands to a group of men who were, in turn, dashing to patrol cars. She started up the engine, looking at Zoe.

“What are we looking for, do you think?” Shelley asked, moving the car away from the diner, taking it slow as she dodged people coming to and from official vehicles.

“I know as much as you,” Zoe sighed. “No special powers on this one, I am afraid. He needs her to die tomorrow, so we have at least until dawn.”

“Not after nightfall?”

Zoe shrugged, feeling a dull throb in her arm as she did so. “We know only that he attacked after dark to avoid raising suspicion. Maybe it was never about the time of day. Maybe it was. I do not know for sure, and we cannot ask him.”

Shelley sped up as they pulled away from the scene, and Zoe grabbed hold of the seatbelt, forcing it away from her neck. She fought down a wave of nausea. Car sickness was even stronger, it seemed, when you had lost enough blood to warrant a hospital visit.

“How are you doing, about that?” Shelley asked. Her eyes flicked between the rearview and side mirrors and the road, checking that the rest of their small team were keeping up.

“About what?”

“Killing a man,” Shelley said plainly, then bit her lip. “I’ve never had to fire my gun yet. You’ve done it twice in the last two days.”

Zoe sighed again, shutting her eyes momentarily. The motion was no less sickening without being able to tell where she was going. “I am fine. For the moment. Later, I am sure that one of the Bureau’s appointed psychologists will tell me how fine I am not.”

Shelley laughed at that, a kind of strangled, guilty noise. “You shouldn’t joke about that.”

“Who said it was a joke?”

Shelley smiled, settling back into her seat a little. Zoe saw her hands relax on the wheel, going from a stiff and straight position to a more casual crook in her elbows. “Still a few hours until dawn. We have a good chance.”

A good chance, except for the fact that they would be searching in the dark. Zoe knew that the percentage of success went down in such a situation. Vital clues could be missed. Still, she did not want to air such pessimism. “We have to find not just a hiding place, but a method of murder. We have to be careful. No blundering around. He may have set up a trap which will kill her when she is found.”

Shelley made a sympathetic noise. “I hope not. Poor doll must be terrified. She’s only a teenager.”

“She may well be sedated. He has to keep her in the same place, no chance of her escaping. He planned to not be there when she died. Maybe even if he got away tonight. Fleeing the state entirely would have been the best course of action.”

Shelley chewed her lip, barely slowing down as she took a corner at high speed. “Hidden, trapped, sedated, and primed to die. But how?”

“That is what we need to figure out. And quickly.” Zoe took a deep breath, winding down the passenger side window a little to get some fresh air. “Before his plan works.”

The journey was filled with useless speculation. Zoe tried to focus hard on her thoughts to ignore the pounding in her head, the throbbing of her arm, and the sick feeling trying to claw its way up her throat every time Shelley turned the wheel or put her foot down on the accelerator.

The site was not far from the diner, a route that took them only thirty-five minutes to drive. But the timer was still ticking down, as far as Zoe was concerned, and it was ticking down loudly in the back of her head. Sunrise: that was when she felt that all bets might be off. When he might have set it up so that Aisha Sparks would never see another one.

The troopers gathered for their instructions, Zoe’s eyes working over all of them. Their heights were mixed, their weights all within a healthy range. The kind of men and women who would be able to search for hours, with good physical fitness and the ability to look both high and low. There was every possibility that this was going to be a long night. They needed the best the state had to offer.

Working quickly, they marked out the boundaries of the search area on foot. Zoe disseminated the marked-out map zone to their cells, and they set up a roadblock at each end of their box with a trooper stationed there to man it. That left them with ten people in total, including Zoe and Shelley. Three each to wake the residents of the house and carefully peel through all of their rooms. Two on either side of the road, moving through the grass and empty land, combing for any sign.

For safety’s sake, they expanded their area to include the back rooms and gardens of the house, as well as the houses directly on their northern side should the search come up empty.

Zoe moved with Shelley to the southern zone on the east side of the road, carrying torches and moving close together as they walked in a grid pattern. Up, then across, then down, then across and up. Thorough and slow. They looked for disturbed ground, items that might have been discarded by either the killer or Aisha, any sign at all that an intruder had been here.

Zoe saw formations of weeds indicating the spread of seed in the wind, and she noted a worn-down path indicative of lazy feet shortcutting through the grass on their way to the road. She saw a deflated ball that told stories of local children playing in the area, but there was no dug-up and replaced soil. No dropped trinkets or items of clothing. No spatter of red blood standing stark against the green blades of grass in the beam of the torch’s light.

At last, they were done, and still none the wiser.

Zoe and Shelley waited in the middle of the road as the search team from the other side of the street joined them with shaking heads and rounded shoulders, and they moved up to the other houses.

“They are outside of the range,” Zoe said, chewing her lip.

“I know, but it’s better to check,” Shelley told her. “He was under stress. Maybe he made a mistake.”

And so they woke the startled homeowners, and made them stand shivering in their pajamas on the cold lawn while they searched through every room for any sign of something abnormal. There was nothing in the attic. The house didn’t even have a basement. No doors or windows had been forced, and no one had any relation whatsoever to the man they now knew was their killer.

There was no sign of her.

And when the other teams finished their searches without bringing up a single sign of Aisha Sparks either, Zoe knew that something was wrong.

“This does not make any sense,” she said, slumping into the passenger seat again to rest. No matter how she thought about it, they had to have made the right calculations. The logarithm was not affected by human error. It had been correct about the last location. And they knew already that the man would never have deviated from the pattern, from the precise calculations they had used. He could not. It was not within his range of abilities to do so.

Beside her, Shelley climbed back behind the wheel, shifting on the seat to face her. “We have to think about it, Z,” she said. “We’re missing something. She isn’t here yet.”

“What was that? Say that again.”

“She isn’t here yet?”

Zoe nodded furiously, her mind whirring. “She does not have to be here yet. Not now.” She checked the dashboard clock. “We still have six hours until dawn. She is not here now. But she will be tomorrow.”

“How is that possible? The killer is dead. He can’t bring anyone anywhere.”

“Then there has to be some kind of outside force that we have not yet considered.”

Shelley sunk her head into her hands in a momentary fit of despair, before raising bloodshot eyes again. “You sure the numbers are right?”

Zoe nodded once. “I have checked everything. We inputted the correct data, and the map stands up. A perfect Fibonacci spiral. There is nowhere else he could possibly go.”

“All right.” Shelley thought for a few minutes more, both of them aware of the unrelenting and callous tick on of the clock. “Maybe he has an accomplice. Someone who helped him get this far.”

Zoe thought back. “But there was no evidence of another person at the crime scenes.”

“There was barely any evidence of him at the crime scenes,” Shelley pointed out. “What if this person stayed in the car every time? If their feet never touched the ground then they couldn’t leave footprints. Maybe it’s a woman, someone who would help him lure in his victims.”

“He came in alone at the diner. A time when he needed a cover more than ever.”

“Because she was already with the teenage girl, taking her away. Hiding her. Getting ready for tomorrow.”

Zoe cocked her head. She had to admit, it held some water. “It would be peculiar for someone to maintain the same level of delusion. The apophenia. I have to admit, it would surprise me.”

“Me, too,” Shelley replied. “I don’t like the idea of something coming out of left field at the last minute, something that we never saw coming, never had any clues about. But it’s a possibility.”

Zoe’s mind was already moving forward, running toward other options. The idea of other people being involved opened doors. “Her family may be involved somehow,” she said.

“Her family?”

“Maybe he threatens them. Forces them to report her missing so that we will be looking in all of the wrong places.”

“I’m sure the troopers knew to check her house first,” Shelley protested.

“Maybe not, if they already knew we were dealing with a serial killer.” Zoe paused, chewing a fingernail. “He tells them they have to send Aisha out here at a certain time. They do not know that he is dead. They follow through.”

“What threat could he possibly offer that would be a worse prospect than sending their daughter out alone and vulnerable?”

Zoe shrugged. She had no answer for that.

“It’s a thought, anyway.” Shelley opened the door again and swung out of the car, leaning back in to talk. “You sit here and rest. You shouldn’t be running around like this. I’ll talk to the troopers that interviewed her parents, and organize another search party for her house.”

It was something. Then again, it could be nothing. Zoe sat back, closing her eyes against the patterns of lights and the low voices outside, trying to block everything out but the pattern. She had to concentrate. There had to be something else, an answer to this. Six hours, maybe less. Aisha waiting for rescue, maybe scared, maybe alone. The last person they could possibly save. If they didn’t get this one, they would have lost them all.

Then Zoe thought about the expanse of grass beside the houses. The reason they had had to search empty ground, and not more buildings. This was the middle of a town; the developers would have built more housing there, unless they had a very specific reason not to.

And they had a reason not to. The train track that ran through the lower edge of the grass on the west side, the side that Zoe and Shelley had not personally searched. It ran at an angle to the road, cutting on through the land with the quickest possible route toward the nearest major town.

Tracks held trains, and trains held people. Trains moved people and things on a set schedule.

It was possible, in fact, to know when the first train would pass through any given area for the first time in a new day.

And she knew that she had him.

Zoe scrambled out of the car, nearly tripping over her seatbelt as it tangled in the ache of her arm and dangled below the edge of her seat. She jogged after Shelley, catching up with her as she left off talking to a cluster of troopers, all of whom were now turned away and talking on cells and radios.

“Train schedule,” she said, the cold air biting off her words in a white cloud.

Shelley gave her a baffled look. “What?”

Zoe bit back exasperation. It wasn’t Shelley’s fault that she had not been inside Zoe’s head, listening as she worked it all out. “I need the train schedule for those tracks. We need to know when the next trains will be coming through.”

Zoe saw the moment that understanding flashed through Shelley’s eyes, even in the gloom and contrast provided by the flashlights around them in the darkness. Shelley fumbled for her phone and searched up local contacts before making a call, stalking away from the group so that she could hear herself talk.

Zoe watched her grab a notebook from her pocket and lean it on the hood of their car, using the illumination from the interior light as she jotted down a series of notes. One, two, three, four—seven lines on the paper. Zoe crept closer, watching with bated breath until Shelley hung up the call and lifted the pad in the air.

“The first train passes through before dawn,” Shelley said. “Four a.m., a freight train. They continue at half-hour intervals, until the single passenger train at a few minutes past seven a.m. I’ve ordered them to stop all trains leaving the rail yard and passenger depot, but we still need to find her.”

Zoe thought it over. “Cross out the passenger train,” she said. “It is too risky. There is no way he would be able to hide Aisha there, as well as some means of killing her. The trains are checked and cleaned before setting off in the morning. She would be found.”

Shelley was looking something else up on her phone. “Sunrise is six fifty-two a.m. this morning.”

Zoe looked up and shouted to the troopers who were standing, waiting for further instructions. “Check the tracks,” she said. “Within our zone and for thirty feet in each direction. You are looking for wires, broken tracks, anything that might disrupt a train. Be careful. We may be dealing with explosives.”