Face of Fear

by Blake Pierce

  They all had the digits 2-3, in that order, in their credit card numbers.

  She had started the thread with Naomi Karling’s card, which had those digits as the final two. That had been a string she needed to pull, and so she had, letting it lead her onward. For John Dowling and Callie Everard, the digits were lost in the middle of the number, not so obvious to the casual observer.

  But if there was one thing that could be said about Zoe, it was that she was not a casual observer.

  That had led her down a new path. If the credit cards were the link and the way that the killer identified their victims, then there had to be a way in which this information had been revealed. When did one reveal one’s credit card number? When making a purchase, of course.

  There hadn’t been time to get a warrant and ask for the victims’ credit card records or bank statements, so Zoe had had to get creative in other ways. She started looking through their social media accounts, trying to match up the places they tagged with points on a city map, figuring out if there was any particular street or neighborhood they had in common.

  That would have been enough of a start to make her feel encouraged, but what she had discovered had been much better than that. It was hard to get there: at every post there seemed to be something more to drag her attention, to make her wonder. Stripes and repeating patterns on wallpaper or clothing, the number of people in the background of a shot in a public place, the number of comments under posts, the number of likes, hashtags…

  But she had persevered. It was easier to keep going when she wrote things down instead of focusing and lingering on them, able to move on when they were safely recorded. At times she saw so many numbers and clues at once that she had to close her eyes, count her breaths for a short time, and try to remember what Dr. Monk had said. How to calm down.

  It wasn’t working. Not really. At least, not in the way that she wanted it to. But right now, shutting off her ability to see the numbers would have been the worst possible thing. No, she needed as much information as she could get if she was going to see this through.

  That was when she saw it. From a distance, an overview, the posts didn’t seem to have much in common at all. The photographs were taken at different angles, the frame mostly filled by the faces of the victims and their friends. But it wasn’t the background that caught Zoe’s attention, not at first.

  It was the location tag.

  Bar 23 West, a local nighttime hotspot that was apparently named for its location.

  If the killer was suffering from an obsession with the number, with the so-called 23 enigma, then he would not be able to resist a place like that. It was too tempting, too tantalizing.

  The connections were easy to make. The killer would have to be a member of the staff, maybe a bartender. Maybe just a customer who would stand habitually at the bar, where they could secretively read notes and screens by leaning forward whenever the staff weren’t paying attention. They would wait for customers to enter this fatefully named bar and take payment for their drinks. They would then be able to check the credit card details, see the numbers, find the name of anyone who had a card that fit their requirements. After that, it wouldn’t take much sleuthing to find an address—or even just to keep an eye on the victim and follow them home.

  Their name would allow tracking of their social media. Then the killer would see their images, the tattoos. Draw the same conclusions that Zoe had drawn. Count the stripes on a tiger and decide that it was fate, that this person with all their twenty-threes had to die.

  It was easy to see it. Laid out like that, Zoe was sure. She had found their method, their reason for choosing victims. This had to be it.

  Zoe navigated to the bar’s own social media page, easily found via the location tag. Their feed was full of images of people drinking, laughing, having a good time. Shots of artisan craft ales and small plates of bar food. The kind of thing you would expect.

  They had made nine hundred and seventy-seven posts on their account. Take each part of the number as single digits and add them up, and it made twenty-three.

  Everything was matching up, aligned as if by fate. Every sign was telling her that she was on the right path. How the hell she was going to explain this to her superiors, and even to the local LAPD, without revealing her secret was a problem for another time. Right now, she had to go with her gut.

  All of this stress, all the tension of keeping her secret, had to be worth something. There had to be a reason behind it, a reward that made it all justified. Catching and stopping killers was that reward. She had to be right. There was no other choice.

  Zoe read the opening hours listed for Bar 23 West. It was open late most nights, and that included tonight. It was still open now, in fact, even as the hour ticked on further toward one a.m., no doubt full of drunken revelers who didn’t want the night to end.

  She could go there.

  She could find him.

  Zoe made a decision and got up, grabbing her coat from the back of her chair. There were plenty of officers still on duty, and plenty of cars in the parking lot. One of them could take her—undercover—maybe drop her off around the corner to avoid suspicion.

  She wouldn’t tell them where she was going yet. She didn’t want to have to explain it, or put up with demands that she take backup. She would tell them she needed to blow off a little steam, that was all, and would someone be so kind as to drop her off?

  One way or another, she would get to that bar. And she would find their killer—and make sure they didn’t have the chance to strike again.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Zoe fumbled her way toward the wall, needing a minute to catch her breath and orient herself.

  As soon as she had entered the doors of Bar 23 West, she had been plunged into chaos. Exactly the kind of chaos that was bad for her, with her mind being the way it was. Loud music was pounding through the space at double speed, sixteen different speakers in the main bar area alone driving it through her ears at different angles. It was all around her, suffocating and heavy, like a physical cloak pressing in on her from all sides.

  It was dim inside, but not dim enough that she couldn’t see the writhing bodies dancing in the center of the room, count their limbs and calculate their relative heights, the angles at which legs and arms disjointed from bodies to hit marks on the beat. Neither did it hide the fourteen tables on this side of the room, with more booths against the back wall that she could not yet fully see, or the twenty-nine people sitting around them.

  The fifty-four bottles and glasses and assorted drinks containers on the tables, some of which were empty and had not yet been cleared away. The fifteen dollars someone was handing over the bar to a man with three facial piercings and a one-inch buzz cut on his head. The posters grouped on the walls, five here, three there, six on the other side. The three payment machines attached to the bar. The—

  Zoe tried to focus, tried to catch her breath. It was too much. If she couldn’t find a way to focus in, pay attention only to what mattered, she wasn’t going to learn anything at all here.

  The average age in the room was about twenty-three, she reasoned as she looked around. Plenty of young people here. Plenty who might be within the right kind of victim pool that their suspect was looking for. They would love this place, love all the signs pointing toward it being right. Just about everything could be made to fit. Wait for the moment that there were twenty-three people left sitting at the seats around the tables and there—you’d have another sign.

  The movement, the intersection of people—it was constant. Changing and rearranging themselves, filling the space and then clearing it, over and over again. They moved to the beat of the music, that was clear; but they also moved to another set of rules, something unspoken that Zoe did not pretend to understand. All of this was alien to her.

  She had to move if she was going to make any progress. Get to the bar. The person who was doing all of this would have to be at the bar, if they were going to be a
ble to see credit cards. Which side would they be on, though? Staff or customer?

  Zoe took a breath of the heavy, unpleasant air, laced with the smells of alcohol and body sweat and distant smoke from the street, and pushed away from the wall. She was not oblivious to the angled looks people were shooting her way, after she came in only to rest at the edge of the room. She was still wearing her usual day suit, too. She probably looked more like a fed than if she had been waving her badge around.

  Too late to fix that now. She shrugged off her jacket, at least, carrying it over the crook of her arm to try to make herself look more casual. She pushed through the crowd of people coming and going, dancing and turning, trying not to let herself get distracted. Not by the four beers going by on a tray. Not by the three inches of liquid left in a bottle that someone swung perilously close to her as they danced. Not by the fifteen bodies she passed, each of them with their own unique measurements, their own number of straps and laces and buttons and stripes and dots and—

  Zoe gasped for a breath, pushing the final distance to the bar by knocking someone else aside. They turned with an annoyed “Hey!” but backed off, something about Zoe’s appearance causing them to reconsider. She didn’t know whether they were scared because they knew she was law enforcement, or pitied her for the panic she was feeling. She didn’t know if they could tell.

  She rested her palm flat on the cool marble surface of the bar, feeling it ground her. It was hot in here. Three degrees more than comfortable, the combined temperature of all that body heat making it necessary to drink constantly to stay hydrated. No small irony that most chose alcoholic beverages, which would only speed the dehydration up.

  “… set the bodies on fire.”

  What was that? Zoe’s senses flared, her mind working fast to identify the source of what she had heard. A group standing behind her. She resisted the urge to turn and look at them, staring down at her own hand on the bar as she tried to listen.

  “Seriously? That’s messed up. Right in the middle of the day?”

  “Yeah. There’s been two of them already. I heard on the news before we came out, there might be another one.”

  Zoe shook her head slightly, mentally dismissing them. They were talking about the killings, all right, but they were talking about them as bystanders. Members of a worried community. They weren’t planning an attack.

  Although it would make sense that the killer would try to initiate conversations about their own work, without letting on it was them. To enjoy the fame and notoriety they were receiving, to see how others were reacting. Maybe looking for a bit of validation. She should carry on listening, just in case.

  “So sick. Better stay safe tonight. We can all get a cab together.”

  “Yeah, dude. Especially the girls. Can’t let them walk—”

  “—get you something?”

  Zoe looked up, realized that one of the bartenders was looking at her with an odd expression. Maybe he had already spoken to her before, while she was off in her own world, listening. She wet her lips, trying to tune back in on what he was saying.

  “Sure,” she said, her eyes scanning over the options on the shelf behind him. All alcoholic. That wouldn’t do. She was on duty. “… A sparkling water?”

  The bartender raised an eyebrow, then shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”

  It was probably an odd request, for a bar. At this time of night. Especially looking like she did. She had probably just marked herself out even more, a sore thumb that stuck out so loudly everyone would know.

  The music changed, another pounding beat with a different singer, and Zoe could no longer pick out the voices of the group she had been listening to. Just kids, really. She was on the wrong track there. If she was going to eavesdrop on everyone talking about the murders, it would be a long night. Who wouldn’t be talking about something so shocking, and so close to home?

  The bartender put a glass of water down in front of her, five bubbles escaping and bursting on the surface layer as it hit the bar. Zoe thanked him and gave him her card, watching him take the payment before handing it back.

  The barman—that had been her first thought. Standing here now, at the crowded bar full of people talking loudly over the music, she couldn’t see another option. The tills were set down low, underneath an overhanging ledge. To look at something on the screen would be exceedingly obvious, and the cards and receipts were being passed back and forth so rapidly that no one would be able to simply observe them.

  No, it had to be someone who worked behind the bar. The more Zoe thought about it, the more it made sense. A bartender would see the card, and more than that. They might ask to check ID if someone looked young. Someone like twenty-three-year-old Naomi Karling, who would have been marked as a target immediately.

  Zoe looked around again at the other customers along the bar. They were scantily clad as a rule, women in dresses and tight shirts, men in tank tops and muscle vests that allowed them to flex and show off. Skin everywhere. On some of those surfaces, ink climbed and rolled with movement, flashes of illustrations and words that only really stilled at the bar, where the dancers waited for refreshment.

  While handing over her card, Callie Everard would have extended her arm. Shown the serial number printed there. Anyone could have seen it—read it in a second, done the math. Handed the card back and marked her face.

  Not only her, but John Dowling, too. That tiger on his left bicep would have been visible if he was dressed like most of the people here. The stripes easy to count. Maybe even deliberately angled, a prized piece of art to be given as much exposure as possible.

  And the bartender would have seen birthdays. Oh, god, it was so simple. See the tattoo, count it up, know what it added up to. Look at the credit card and make the same connection. Ask to see ID, even if you didn’t think you really needed to, because you wanted to see the numbers written there. Find them. John’s birthday. Naomi’s age.

  It all added up.

  Their killer, the one with the obsession with the number twenty-three, was a bartender.

  They had to be.

  Zoe looked ahead and studied the three working the bar tonight with renewed attention. Two men and a woman. The woman was still a possibility, really, because cutting a throat did not require as much strength as other feats of killing might, even if it was more of a traditionally masculine method. Nate King, their only witness so far, had only seen a person in a coat. With her short hair, Zoe thought it entirely possible that she herself might be mistaken for a male in such a brief flash.

  Still, the woman was small: five foot three, a hundred and five pounds. She wasn’t capable of physical attack, not on this scale.

  If it had been just the first two murders, Zoe might have been able to entertain it. The element of surprise. But Naomi Karling had fought back and lost. Their killer had to have enough strength for that.

  So that left two. Both male, both in good physical condition. One five foot nine, the other an even six feet. Both bearing the evidence of gym time in biceps that were corded and bulging. Probably an aesthetic choice on the part of the bar’s owner. Eye candy, so they called it.

  There had to be something that set them apart—something different than height, because both of them seemed to be within the right ballpark. There was much unknown about the attacks. A taller man seemed likely, particularly for John Dowling’s attack—but even a short woman would have been able to jump, cling onto his shoulder for a split second while drawing the knife, then drop back down. Angle did not tell her enough, not this time, not with the confusion of Naomi Karling’s diagonal slash.

  Something about them, then. Something personal. Zoe watched the man who had served her, observing him as closely as she could. He turned to face the back wall for a moment, taking down a bright blue liquor bottle, and Zoe saw a tattoo peeking out of the back of his vest.

  Did that make him more likely to be the killer? Or less?

  Zoe tried to think how their killer th
ought, tried to reason it out. If you were attacking people with tattoos, it could be assumed that you didn’t like them very much. But then again, maybe it was familiarity with the culture and the significance of tattoos that would make them an obvious target.

  There were so many factors. So many things to think about.

  Zoe knew she needed to narrow it down. But how?

  Could it be that the bartender she was looking for wasn’t even on duty—that he worked another shift?

  But even as that feeling of potential defeat washed over her, the other bartender moved closer and something about him caught her eye. A beaded tribal necklace, the kind that had been popular amongst men in the nineties but had seemed to go out of style.

  The beads were an alternating pattern of long red beads and short black ones, all painted wood. He moved even closer, passing right by Zoe in search of something from the other end of the bar, before returning.

  On his passage through, she focused. On his passage back, she was sure. She double-checked, and again.

  There were twenty-three of each type of bead on the necklace.

  That was it, wasn’t it? It had to be. That was the sign that she was looking for.

  Of course, their killer would be attracted to a piece of jewelry like that—something that proclaimed their identity in a secret way, allowed them to be who they were without anyone else knowing about it. It was a badge of honor, a trophy. Something from a bygone era that was no longer fashionable, but worn still for a purpose. The purpose of standing out.

  It was him. Zoe was sure now. It had to be him.

  She could make the arrest, right here and now. She could take him down—go to the side of the bar to block his exit, then move in, holding up her badge. She had a set of handcuffs sealed inside the pocket of her jacket. She could get them out, caution him and have him in cuffs before he had a chance to react or try to run.

  She stepped forward, ready to make a move—

  And spun around at the touch of a hand on her shoulder, make her heart thump faster than the music.