Face of Murder (A Zoe Prime Mystery—Book 2)

by Blake Pierce

  He stood up, a gesture that was clearly designed to show Matthias it was time to leave.

  Could he leave?

  Matthias didn’t want to do it but the head snakes, they needed it. They couldn’t stop with the blood and the headbox couldn’t contain them—not his headbox, not Wardenford’s headbox. They had to come out. There was an ache in Matthias’s chest, in his—his chestbox—his ven—ca—what was it, the thing in the chestbox—the thing… oh, it ached with the thought of ending him. The snakes were wrapping around it and squeezing their tails tight, but what could he do?

  He couldn’t spare him. If it wasn’t for all of the others—but the snakes were on his hands, written in letters so big Wardenford could read them now, and he knew. He would tell. Even if Matthias begged him not to, he would tell. He had to be stopped.

  It was a mistake, coming here. He had wanted comfort, the words of an old mentor. Now Wardenford would pay in blood snakes, would pay for them like all the others. It was his fault. He shouldn’t have come. But there was no going back. Matthias had to do it. He had to do it now.

  The—buzzing box on the table rang, a fun happy tune ringing out across the space, lighting up the display. In a flash, Matthias had to think: think, think. If he answered, Wardenford could tell them. Could bring the flashing lights and men with guns and put him away forever. That couldn’t happen.

  That couldn’t be.

  He saw an empty wine bottle sitting beside the sofa, down right by the edge, where Wardenford missed it when he was cleaning. He saw it clearly. Everything was aligned.

  Matthias took the bottle and lunged forward and smashed the full force of it over Wardenford’s headbox, and the man fell to the floor with a startled groan, and it was done.

  The buzzingbox rang again on the table, into the silence now of the room. Matthias stood above him, catching his breath, feeling the snakes writhe around in his own headbox in anticipation of the blood to come.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Zoe remembered the way from their last visit. She raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, then counted doors the flashed by until she was at the right one. Behind it she could hear nothing, as she paused in the corridor and waited for that long second.

  Shelley caught up, panting, as Zoe pressed the call button on her cell again. They both heard the ringtone faintly on the other side, going unanswered. They exchanged a look.

  The situation was precarious. If the killer was inside, they did not want to give him time to get away—or to take Wardenford hostage with a weapon. But if he had already made his attack, then time was of the essence. Knocking on the door and shouting their presence seemed to be off the table.

  Breaking the door down, then?

  Zoe squared her shoulders, thinking about where she would need to kick it for the maximum chance of the wood around the lock splintering and giving way, but Shelley reached out for the door handle and turned it.

  It opened.

  Another glance exchanged. In unison, Zoe and Shelley drew their guns out of their holsters and held them ready at their sides.

  Shelley pushed the door open slowly. It did not creak. They could hear the ringtone louder now. A good distraction which would cover the sound of their footsteps.

  For a brief moment, Zoe entertained a fantasy in which Wardenford answered the phone in a drunken stupor, having forgotten to lock the door, and they discovered that he was totally alone.

  Then the moment was gone, because she knew it could only be a fantasy.

  Together they moved down the hall toward the area where Wardenford had led them before, where the phone was ringing. Zoe took the lead, bringing her firearm up to a more ready position as she approached the junction where everything would become clear. She took a single steadying breath, then sprang forward, pointing her gun into the room.

  “Freeze! FBI!” The words came out automatically, a gut reaction to seeing someone standing in the room. Even before her brain had deduced who it was, she knew she had to shout it.

  But she didn’t need any kind of specialist training to know who was standing in the room. He was five foot nine, one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, and he matched the photograph she had seen on his student ID. More telling than that, he was standing over the prone body of James Wardenford, with a heavy lamp in his hands.

  They all froze for a moment, Matthias apparently assessing his options while Zoe took the scene in. Her eyes were drawn to something dark and glittering on the floor—something like dark shards—the shards of a wine bottle, she realized, before the second realization: that she had allowed herself to be distracted too far, her eyes dropping down too low, and she had not seen the telltale bunching of muscles before it was too late.

  The only thing that she could do was to catch the lamp that Matthias had thrown at her, before it hit her and knocked her down. She fumbled with her gun, trying desperately not to drop either of them. With the safety off and Wardenford at her feet, both could be catastrophic.

  She steadied herself and reversed the momentum to throw the lamp to bounce harmlessly on the sofa cushions, but Matthias was gone—leaping over to the far windows, and then rattling onto the fire escape, his feet making clanging drums of the metal structure.

  “Check on him,” Zoe shouted to Shelley, who was behind her and unable to make good the pursuit, as she herself launched after Matthias. They couldn’t leave an injured and possibly dying victim alone. She dived through the window and onto the fire escape, registering even as she did so that she would now be going after a deadly killer—alone.

  ***

  Shelley bent swiftly to fit two fingers to James Wardenford’s neck, relieved to find a pulse beating there and the warmth of a body. She was even more relieved to hear him groan softly, his eyelids fluttering open and shut as he attempted to fight through the pain and confusion.

  His shoulders started to move. Shelley crouched beside him, doing her best to avoid crunching shards of glass and a thin trail of blood that was coming from his head, and placed her hand firmly on top of his back. “Stay still,” she said. “Don’t try to move. I’ll call for help.”

  Being in law enforcement had one key advantage that Shelley had always loved: the ability to get directly in touch with other life-saving services and get them to someone who needed them as soon as possible. She dialed quickly and relayed the information about where she was and how Wardenford had been injured, then cut the call and focused on soothing him.

  Somewhere out there, Zoe was chasing a killer. Shelley strained her ears, listening for any sound outside the window. After their rattling footsteps on the fire escape faded away, there was nothing. No gunshots, which was good.

  No sound of any kind that she could identify, over the sound of traffic and people talking and general life in the city, which might be very bad indeed.

  She was distracted for too long. Thinking, wondering about Zoe. She was supposed to be paying attention to him. His eyes were closing, and he was going ashy pale.

  Shelley swore, kneeling down by Wardenford’s head, wincing as an errant piece of glass found its way through her trousers to nick her skin. “Don’t do this,” she begged, touching his face, shaking his shoulder gently. “Come on, James. Stay with me. The ambulance is nearly here. You just have to stay awake for a few minutes. You can do this.”

  The sound of a siren in the road outside made Shelley catch her breath. But Wardenford’s eyes remained closed, and she could barely detect his breathing.

  “No, come on!” she shouted, pinching the skin on his neck to give him a sharp shock and get his attention. “Come on, James. Don’t go to sleep. They’re here. They’re coming to save you. Don’t give up!”

  ***

  Zoe reached inside her lungs for extra breath, reached inside her legs for more power to leap and run faster. It was no use. Matthias was young and fit, and he had a head start. Maybe if he stumbled, fell, got stuck behind a slow-moving pedestrian or hit by a vehicle, she could catch up. It w
as a long shot maybe.

  Where was he going? He was not familiar enough with the neighborhood, surely, to know shortcuts and quick switches—he was moving down roads and between houses at a seemingly random rate, glancing over his shoulder when he made turns to see that she was still there behind him.

  She was getting further and further away.

  Almost far enough that if he took two turns in quick succession, she wouldn’t be able to figure out where he had gone.

  No—it couldn’t end like this. Zoe couldn’t let him get away, out there to potentially harm someone else or to even end up disappearing forever. The kid might have had neurological problems, but underneath that he was still smart. Unfortunately, thanks to the growing need for kids at good schools to have extracurricular activities under their belt in order to compete with the other perfect grades, he was also fast.

  He’d been given a perfect bill of health in his medical report, except for that TBI.

  Dammit! Zoe cursed as she stumbled on a loose paving slab. This part of the city was not as well-maintained as the areas she was used to, apartment blocks with overgrown yards and weeds springing up to disrupt the pavement. The roads were wide, telegraph poles leaning at odd angles where cars had hit their bases and papered-over cracks in the tarmac, but they were also interrupted by tress planted along their edges in happier times. Cars, trees, garbage spilling out of homes, abandoned furniture—it made for a mismatched and staccato pattern that dashed the advantage her abilities gave her, in the way that only human-made chaos could.

  “FBI! Stop!” Zoe shouted, then decided it was better to save her breath in the future. There was no way that he was going to stop just because she told him to, and with the way he tore from one side of the sidewalk to the other, crossing empty road, there was no chance of keeping him in her sights for long enough to fire.

  Then there was the fact that she was still in a bit of trouble for shooting at an unarmed suspect in their last case, who turned out to be innocent. She couldn’t risk making that mistake again. For all she knew, this could turn out to be a comedy of errors in which a concerned neighbor stepped through and lifted a lamp that had been used to bludgeon Wardenford already.

  That wasn’t it. Matthias was the killer. But Zoe knew she couldn’t dare stop running to risk getting off a shot.

  There was barely anyone around at this time; those going to work had gone, those staying at home were staying in. A few elderly residents sitting on porches or out front of dilapidated single-family homes stared at her with narrowed eyes as she flew by, but Zoe couldn’t spare the time to yell to them or take them in. They couldn’t help her. With no way of knowing if he had a hidden knife or a hammer for bludgeoning, she could hardly ask a civilian to tackle him, either.

  But Matthias had made a mistake. A set of cast-iron gates up ahead were closed, the only conclusion to the road they were on. He cast a wide-eyed look over his shoulder before speeding up toward them and then vaulting, one hand on the brick posts holding the gates in place as his body flew through the air above them.

  Zoe cursed again, this time only in her head to save oxygen. The gates were five feet tall, easy enough for him to get over. She hadn’t tried her vaulting skills in a while. This could be a costly delay.

  But, there! A footpath to the side with a gate swinging open in the breeze, only a moment’s diversion. Zoe took it, reading the sign with a glance as she sped through: it was a cemetery.

  That should have sent a shiver up her spine, but instead it sent a thrill.

  A cemetery was wide, open-plan. Paths were laid out but could be ignored.

  A cemetery had patterns.

  She had him now.

  Zoe couldn’t afford to stop or slow down, but she caught a glimpse of the map as she ran past and then tried to examine it in her mind. She had just enough of an outline—just enough to know how the cemetery was laid out, paths squirming through graves like the branches of a tree.

  And over to the left, the church.

  Zoe thought quickly. At his current speed, he was outpacing her to the extent that he would be out of the graveyard before she caught up with him. Sticking on the current route, of chasing straight after him, was not a viable option.

  Just like back at the campus, she was going to have to find a way to cut him off.

  He was looking back over his shoulder every minute or so, continuing to find new bursts of speed every time that he saw she was still in pursuit. How he was doing it, she had no idea. Her own legs were beginning to tire, and she wasn’t sure how much she had left in the tank.

  She was going to have to take a risk.

  She was going to have to give it everything she had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Now that they were both among the eerily tranquil atmosphere of the grave sites, Zoe knew that her timing was going to be the most important thing. The road path curved slightly ahead, and Matthias was running straight down the path. It was as though, even though he had so far proven himself to be an able and ruthless killer, he still felt squeamish about running over the homes of the dead.

  Zoe had no such problem. The dead were dead and gone. They couldn’t feel her shoes disturbing their peace.

  She waited, waited, wanting to time it perfectly. The window of opportunity was closing. He had to turn, had to turn now and—

  Yes! There! He turned to check that she was following, and then looked ahead again. She had time now, maybe thirty seconds that she could guarantee before he would look for her. She darted to the left, just managing to make it down a crooked path that followed the side of the old church building, yanking off her jacket and throwing it over a slanted gravestone by the path as she went.

  It was a small enough church, and that was the good news. If it had been some kind of gothic monster, sprawling and gigantic, she would have never made it in time. But it must have been built in a time when the church was short on funding, or else the community itself was still much smaller, and there was no need for a grand building.

  She forced her feet to move faster along the twisted paving slabs, right along the side of the church and then a sharp right turn to cross the back of it. She was counting the seconds in her head, imagining him. Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five—now she pictured him, swinging his head around to look. Not seeing her. Stumbling, faltering. Scanning the horizon, the paths off to the side. Confused. Seeing the jacket. Wondering if she had fallen. Squinting his eyes to try to make out if that was a body, or just a jacket.

  Slow.

  Zoe put all her faith and her belief into this one moment. It was a bitter irony to call on faith in a churchyard when she had never believed in God—not the kind of God that could abandon a small child with a mother like hers—but it was not that kind of faith she drew on.

  This faith was in herself.

  The final push had to be as she came around this next corner, swung around to the right again to bring herself back into full view of the graveyard. The meandering path that Matthias had chosen swung close to the church right at the exact moment that her path emerged from it, and this was her only chance. If she missed him now, it was over. She knew it. The burning in her lungs knew it. The strain in her calves knew it.

  Zoe turned the corner, and he was gone.

  She had been right in her calculations, both in the distance required and the pattern of his behavior. The speed he put on when he saw her had been matched by the speed that he lost when he could no longer see her. Out in the middle of the path, back there, the church would not have seemed like a threat. It was far away. Disconnected from the red herring clue she had left behind for him.

  So where was he?

  Zoe stopped dead, her momentum dissipating. She knew she had been right. From here, she could see across the graveyard and the paths they had followed. He was not there. He hadn’t gone back.

  So, where?

  She scanned the headstones, trying to think. There was only a certain radius of
distance where he could be, where he could have gone while she was out of sight. Narrow the field down to that. Focus.

  He was hiding—he had to be. He had worked out her gambit and tried to use it against her. He was moving slower, must have come almost to a stop when he realized. That narrowed it down more. Think, Zoe. Where?

  Some of the grave markers were thin—crosses or single slabs of stone. Nothing to hide behind. There were three larger structures within the field of her view. Could he be lying down directly behind them?

  None of this made sense. Not really. Why stop like that…?

  Unless he was expecting her to run past and carry on, bypassing him completely. If he wanted to use the time to get away, he would have run back the way they came, leaving her scrambling to catch up again. He wasn’t on the path or in the distance. He must have thought he would have an advantage of some kind.

  There was a rectangular structure not far from the path, coming up on the side. Long but low, an approximation of a coffin in stone. A carving of an angel sat on top of it at the head.

  If she was him, if she was determined to fight and end the chase, she would hide there. She would crouch behind the tallest part, the angel, and wait. She could see it playing out in her head. Zoe would run by, somewhat startled, her momentum cut, looking for him. He would wait for her to pass and spring up, perhaps hit her over the head. Knock her out against the stone. Perhaps not stop until she wasn’t going to be chasing anyone, ever again.

  He meant to kill her.

  Zoe’s breath caught in her chest, but this was no time to hesitate. No one else was coming—not in enough time that she could rely on their help. If she waited, he might decide to run and get away from her again. She wouldn’t be fast enough. They were both still, not yet moving. He would have the advantage from a dead start.