Face of Death

They broke and ran toward their new task, the urgency of the situation lost on no one. Lights danced across the road and grass, swaying up and down with the bobbing motion of a human run. They clustered like fireflies, then spread out as the troopers moved into a standard search formation, moving themselves at intervals across the area in question.

“What do you think?” Shelley asked. Her pendant glinted in the reflected light from Zoe’s flashlight as she fidgeted, drawing it back and forth across the chain around her neck. “Would he wait for dawn? Or go for the first train?”

There were arguments to be made for each. Wait for an official new day to dawn, breaking the darkness and ensuring that no two kills were committed during the same period of darkness. Or go for the very first opportunity, ensuring that there was as little a chance as possible that Aisha would be found and saved in time.

They needed more data.

“Where do the trains originate from?” Zoe asked, a sudden thought striking her. “He had to have gone to the rail yard, snuck on board, set something up to keep Aisha in place at the very least, and then made it back to the diner.”

“I’ll make some calls,” Shelley said, digging through her call list to find the last number she had dialed. “Hopefully the central rail yard can give me more information, or at least tell me who can.”

Zoe watched the lights of the searchers at the tracks as Shelley spoke into the phone, all politeness but firm urgency. Her skin was crawling with the lack of action. It felt wrong, whiling away the hours of the night while the teen waited for them. She wanted to be running, digging, tearing up the ground around the tracks. Anything to ensure that there was nothing there, nothing that would disrupt the train’s journey and send Aisha Sparks to her doom.

“Aha… yes, right… I see. Well, can you give me their number? Yes, I have a pen. All right… yes…”

The fireflies were moving further toward the edge of the area that Zoe had told them to search. Some of them had stopped moving entirely, having finished checking their area. It was not looking good.

“The good news is that I have the starting stations for each of the routes,” Shelley said, putting her cell in front of her face as she copied another number from the notes she had written. “The bad news is that some of them will be held and loaded at an external freight yard, then moved to the starting station afterwards. Some were already loaded last night and moved to wait for the start of the day. I need to call someone else to track down which is which.”

Zoe nodded absently, moving toward the searchers a few short steps at a time. She felt torn. Where was she better used? Over where the searchers already had their grids covered, or here, where only Shelley could make the calls?

If only she could think her way through this—figure out which train he would target by timing alone. It was not good enough just to stop them all, though Shelley had already done that. They still needed to figure out where Aisha was. They couldn’t leave her there, locked inside a compartment somewhere, and hope that she would be spotted sooner or later. She had been away for over a day. God only knew what had been done to her.

“No answer,” Shelley said, swearing quietly and moving her stiff, cold fingers over the screen again. “I’ll try another. Middle of the damn night. No one is at their desks.”

Zoe drifted away. “I will go help check the tracks,” she said, having made up her mind that doing something was better than standing still.

She joined the grid of searchers, going back over ground that had already been checked in order to be extra thorough. Though the tracks themselves were uniform—each rail a set distance apart, with boards at set intervals between them, nuts and bolts and everything else laid out in predetermined pattern—their surroundings were anything but. Lumps of rock and tufts of grass, the tiny skeleton of a bird, items of trash that had blown across the empty land. It made searching harder work, trying to see an irregularity in a field of irregularities. So many patterns overlaid one over the other.

Forty minutes passed before Zoe was sure they had searched the tracks as thoroughly as they could. She looked up and saw Shelley sitting inside the car with the light on, still with her phone pressed to her ear. No luck there yet either, then.

Zoe paced, marking out distances with her feet as a way to distract herself. There was so much pent-up energy inside her, waiting to burst out. She wanted, needed, to do something. The troopers gathered in knots on the grass, all of them watched by the wary homeowners who stood now at their windows.

There was nothing on the tracks. Nothing that would have killed Aisha. So then, how would he do it?

The train. It had to be something on the train itself.

Zoe approached the car just in time to hear Shelley snap uncharacteristically, “Then wake him up!”

Shelley was pinching the bridge of her nose, a frown furrowing deep lines into her forehead. She took the cell from her ear and jabbed at the screen, ending yet another call.

“Nothing?” Zoe asked.

“I’m trying to get hold of the man who knows all the answers,” Shelley said, shaking her head. “We’ve got to wait for someone to wake him up.”

Zoe was about to comment on how ridiculous the whole situation was when Shelley’s cell buzzed to life again, and Shelley grabbed it up.

“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.

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.