Face of Fear (A Zoe Prime Mystery—Book 3)

by Blake Pierce

  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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “How did you find me?” Zoe asked.

  Shelley quirked a smile at the edges of her lips and pointed to a free table. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Let’s sit?”

  Zoe shook her head. “No. I found him. The killer. I was just about to make an arrest.”

  Shelley’s eyes widened in alarm, her head whipping around from side to side. “Where?”

  “Behind the bar.” Zoe tried to keep her voice down so he wouldn’t overhear.

  Shelley frowned slightly, biting her lip. “Just come and talk for a minute, will you? I can help. Let’s go somewhere a bit quieter so we can hear each other.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside. Just for a minute.”

  Zoe reluctantly allowed herself to be led out of the bar’s crowded interior, bumping against people across the room until they reached the exit. A blast of cool night air hit her as they stepped outside, and when the door shut behind them, it was sweet relief. The pounding music was finally faint and quiet, replaced by the sound of cars in the distance swooshing by on damp tarmac. It had rained while she had been inside.

  “Over here,” Shelley said, gesturing to the side of the building. They walked under the watchful gaze of the bouncers, until they were finally in a semi-sheltered alcove, away from prying ears.

  “What’s going on?” Shelley asked, turning an intense gaze on Zoe along with her full attention.

  Where to begin? There was so much to explain, she barely knew how to get started. “The bartender is the killer. I have to go back and arrest him.”

  “How do you know?”

  Zoe frowned. There were so many stages to the process, so many steps that she had taken to get there. “He is wearing a necklace with twenty-three of each bead,” she said.

  Shelley opened her mouth and closed it again before she next spoke. “Do you maybe want to walk me through how you got there?”

  Zoe sighed. This wasn’t going to be a quick minute. She pulled her jacket back on against the cold, and then her coat. “I found out that all three of the victims so far came here for a drink, at least once.”

  “So far, so expected,” Shelley said. “You haven’t heard about this place? It’s one of the most popular spots in LA this year. A big hit with millennials. I bet at least half the city have been here at some point or another, even just to try it out.”

  “This place?” Zoe frowned up at the exterior, which seemed innocuous enough. “Why? There was not even a line to get in.”

  Shelley shrugged. “Trends move on. They pioneered this blend of craft ales and signature cocktails which are unique to the songs being played over the… and I can see I’m losing you, so let’s just keep going. So, they all came here.”

  “Right.” Zoe nodded, tossing the information about the bar out of her head. “They all posted about it on social media. And it’s called Bar 23 West, you see?”

  Shelley paused, cocking her head at an angle of ten degrees. “No, not really.”

  Zoe could almost growl with irritation. How could Shelley be so dense? “Twenty-three,” she repeated, with heavy emphasis.

  “... Like the tattoos?” Shelley said. She bit her lip again, making a pained expression. “Zoe, that’s a bit of a leap.”

  “No, it is not,” Zoe insisted. She dug her notebook out of her coat pocket and thrust it at Shelley, with the right page open. “Look. See? All of these numbers. They all add up. And the bar staff that work here, they would be able to see credit card numbers. ID for dates of birth and ages. The tattoos. All of it.”

  Shelley read over the list, her head slowly shaking. That wasn’t the reaction that Zoe had been looking for. She seethed with irritation, itching to get back inside and finish the job.

  “Zoe, this is all happenstance. This isn’t proof of anything. And no judge would give you an arrest warrant based on this. This isn’t how we do things.”

  “What are you talking about?” Zoe wanted to rip her own hair out. “It is him. It has to be.”

  “Even if you’re right, we don’t approach it like this. You don’t just walk into a crowded bar without backup—without even transport to get you back to the precinct—and arrest someone. You have to do your due diligence, the background work. Have you done any of that? Do you even know what his name is?”

  Zoe deflated a little. She hadn’t thought it through fully, that much was true. But she was still right.

  “Look, just wait here, all right?” Shelley suggested. “I’ll be a minute, maybe less. Will you give me that?”

  Reluctantly, Zoe nodded. What else could she do? It wasn’t as though her partner was being unreasonable. As much as she wanted to ignore her and go right ahead, she had to cede to common sense.

  She stood miserably, waiting for Shelley to do whatever she was doing and come back. The distant noises of the city, and those closer at hand, washed over her. It was a strange kind of sudden silence, in comparison to the din of the bar and then Shelley’s conversation. She felt isolated, vulnerable.

  True to Shelley’s word, she was not gone long. She came back and laid a hand on Zoe’s upper arm before speaking, obviously feeling some concern. “I just spoke to the door staff. Everyone who is behind the bar tonight was working when Naomi Karling was killed. None of them could be the murderer.”

  Zoe stared at her. The words all made sense in English, but their meaning eluded her.

  “I know you were really convinced about this,” Shelley continued. “I just think you need some rest, Z. You’re tired.”

  “How did you know I was here?” Zoe asked.

  “What?” Shelley blinked, struggling to react to the sudden change in direction.

  “How did you find me? I did not tell anyone I was coming here.”

  Shelley paused again, rubbed the back of her neck. Zoe was beginning to be irritated by those pauses. She was recognizing that they indicated Shelley deciding whether or not to say something—whether or not to protect her from the truth. “Don’t be mad,” she said, which was not the best start. “When you were distracted earlier, I turned on location sharing on your phone. I thought it might be handy, just in case we got separated.”

  “You betrayed my privacy,” Zoe said flatly.

  Shelley shook her head, blowing out a heavy breath. Her eyes had narrowed by ten percent, forced up by the twisting of Shelley’s mouth. “No, Zoe, I didn’t mean to. I just—I was worried about you. Sometimes, when you have these ideas, you go off by yourself. I thought if you were right, and you did manage to track down the killer—well, you might be in danger.”

  Zoe opened her mouth to object, but then shut it again. Actually, what Shelley said made a lot of sense. Moreover, Zoe could hardly argue that it didn’t—when going off alone in search of a killer was exactly what she had done.

  “You should have asked me,” she said.

  “Would you have allowed me to do it?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why I didn’t ask.” Shelley swept a hand over her own brow, pushing her blonde hair back. “Look, Z, I’m sorry. I am. I just wanted to make sure you stayed safe.”

  Zoe tried to regain the righteous anger that had burned through her only a moment before, but found that it was gone. Shelley was right. She had predicted that Zoe might go off alone and need help, and that was exactly what had happened. She had even shown up in time to prevent Zoe from publicly arresting an innocent man without due cause.

  “We s
hould go back to the motel,” Shelley said. “Get some sleep.”

  At last, Zoe nodded. She couldn’t argue with that. Maybe if she did finally get some rest, she would wake up without the number twenty-three ringing in her head. Maybe she could get some clarity and actually find a real lead that might help them solve the case, instead of chasing wild geese.

  Anything, so long as they could stop the real killer from striking again.

  ***

  Zoe rearranged the thin pillows on the bed, trying to find some way forward. To sleep, to rest. Why was it that the harder you tried to fall asleep, the harder it was to do?

  The journey back to the motel had been one of reflection, and now, wrapped in the scratchy over-washed sheets, she knew that Shelley had made a very good point. She knew because the numbers were still itching away at her, well past the point of rawness. Everywhere she looked, even when she closed her eyes. They were still gnawing at her—and one in particular, even though she now tried to refuse to acknowledge it.

  Maybe if she ignored it for long enough, it would go away.

  No, this was stupid. What was it that Dr. Monk had told her? To focus on her breathing. To try the meditation, even.

  All right. She was going to feel like an idiot, but she had to at least try it.

  Zoe shut her eyes again, starting to count. One. A slow breath, rising in through her chest and evenly out. Two. Her chest inflated, her diaphragm pushed up and then down, deflating like a bellows. Three. She felt the texture of the sheets under her hands, the weight of her body on the bed, pressing down into the mattress.

  Four. A flash of Callie Everard’s burnt face.

  No—that was wrong. Zoe fought back control, trying to stop that hitch in her breathing, trying to flatten it out and keep thoughts of work down. Five. She imagined her breath coming out in a cloud of white, disappearing toward the ceiling. Six. The number of stripes on the—no, forget the tiger. Forget about all of it. None of that was for right now.

  Seven. The palm trees were calling to her. She wasn’t there, not yet, but Zoe was anticipating the moment. The way she would see them. The picture building up in her head, the feeling of the imagined breeze on her skin. Yes, she would be there soon, and she was somewhat surprised to find that she was looking forward to it. Eight. Her breath came evenly now, just perfect. In and out. And just like that, with the attention turned on it, it became awkward: how long to breathe in for? How long out? How quickly did she normally breathe? Was this it?

  Nine. At least she was thinking about something other than the case. Dammit, and there was the case again. Naomi Karling in a pool of blood. No, push it away. Ten. Ten and done. She could go there now. The wait was over.

  The island beckoned to her. Zoe stayed perfectly still, constructing the vision from her own body outward. She started with a bikini, the kind of thing she would never normally wear but—she was intrigued to discover—her island alter ego felt very comfortable in. The sun came down to gently warm her skin. She had an even tan, the result of many days of sunbathing.

  The water lapped in next. She was lying on a raft, she decided, or a floating platform, tethered to one of the trees so that she could not float away. The soft bobbing of the waves rocked her gently, more like a lullaby than cause for alarm. Gentle, gentle, to and fro.

  She opened her eyes, at least inside the meditation, and looked up. There was the island, just as she had seen it last time. She made out thirty-four individual trees, the rest faded into the background. Eight feet tall. No, stop counting—stop seeing the numbers—shut them out.

  Zoe looked elsewhere, to the sand. What was that, lying there? … A knife. A knife in the sand, the right dimensions to be the one that killed Naomi Karling and Callie Everard and John Dowling. Seven inches long. The blade was smooth and long and wickedly sharp.

  Zoe wrenched her eyes away. That wasn’t supposed to be here. She wasn’t supposed to think about the case. The whole point of this was to give her enough time away from the case to get some rest.

  She needed something, something to focus on. Something that would allow her to feel calm and relaxed. To put her thoughts of work away in a box that she could access again in the morning, when she’d had enough sleep to feel sane and make good decisions. Until then, she needed it all to stop.

  She looked up at the hammock swinging from the tree. What she saw both surprised her and struck her as obvious; an integral part of the vision that she should have realized from the start.

  John.

  Not John Dowling, the dead man burnt into a blackened mess. No, her John. He was lying there in the hammock, his eyes closed, sleeping peacefully. His arms lying comfortably across his chest, the shade of the tree keeping the sun off him.

  Zoe looked at him, and she felt two things. The first was safe. Safe, because all that John had shown her so far was that he was willing to look after her—to go above and beyond for her—to take her where she needed to go.

  The second was calm.

  Because, she realized as she looked at his sleeping form, she did feel calmer when he was around. Even when she was being a terrible date and ignoring him in favor of counting the orders the waiters carried by, she was at least able to go into a place like that and function. Hold some semblance of conversation without getting lost in her own world, however thin that conversation might have seemed.

  Zoe wasn’t sure yet about her relationship with John, and what it would become. She couldn’t say whether his was an avatar she could cling to, like an anchor, or whether it was a temporary Band-Aid over a problem that would take longer to fix.

  But if he could lie there and sleep so peacefully in his hammock, then just for tonight, maybe Zoe could do the same. Her eyes closed slowly as she observed him, taking in the peace and calm that he exuded from his very being, until she drifted off into very real sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Some part of Zoe had to know that she was dreaming. None of what she was seeing made any sense, and therefore it could not be real. That didn’t mean that it didn’t scare her, in the moment.

  She was adult-sized, her own shape, the way she was at the present moment. But even so, she was there as she had been when she was a young teen, cowering at a desk in the library. Glancing furtively over her shoulder every few minutes, as if there was any risk that her mother might somehow be there behind her.

  It would not have been the first time that she thought she was safe, only to turn to see that disapproving frown, her mother’s face etched in sharp straight lines that were already beginning to settle permanently on her forehead and around her mouth.

  The face of a woman who was not given to smiling often. And Zoe knew why: because she was a bad person. She had disappointed her mother, right from the beginning. She had always misbehaved. She had the devil’s blood inside her, and she wouldn’t stop letting it control her.

  That was why she had come to the library. In the hazy edges of the dream, the people around her faded away, and even the books, leaving her floating at a table with only her own research. But it was not just a dream. It was real, her real past. She had sat at that table for hours, weeks, months.

  It had started as a desire to control herself. To learn how to stop the devil’s magic from working through her eyes, to turn off the numbers and see the world like everyone else. Zoe wanted to be a normal girl. She wanted to giggle with her friends at the back of the room, stupidly, and know their cues and how to react, and understand their odd slang and their quirky facial expressions. She wanted her mother to smile again and stop yelling at her, stop preaching about the devil, stop forcing her to pray all night long and go to church for long hours every week.

  She opened the book, the fateful book. The medical textbook she had dragged out from its heavy place on the shelf and plopped down onto the table with a thud, enough to make others around her look up in surprise. She wanted to shrink down small to avoid their vision. In the dream she did, her hands in front of her face becoming miniature
, until she had to stand on the tabletop and crawl over each gargantuan page of the book to read it.

  And there she found it, for the very first time: the word synesthesia.

  It grew in the dream, grew so big that it took up the whole page, swelling in importance and meaning until she had to scramble back and heft the next page up and over to read on. The words were still carved into her memory, even now:

  It has been observed that some individuals are able to see the world in different ways. As this relates to mathematics, there are multiple ways in which it is possible to experience numbers with sensory perception. A subject may regard the number five to be represented by a shiny yellow color, for example, or perhaps even a set of physical and personal characteristics reminiscent of a real person.

  Spatial number forms can also occur, in which a subject is able to map out numbers in a certain pattern—this may lead to a greater grasp of mental mathematics, as the subject is able to follow said pattern or form to logical points which give the answers to mathematic problems in a very quick time.

  Synesthetes may also be able to understand dimensions and other numerical aspects of the world around them with a seemingly preternatural grasp. They may, for example, be able to determine the dimensions of a room without measurement, know a person’s precise height, or be able to count the number of marbles spilled out from a jar before they hit the ground.

  She had read it over and over again, the last paragraph in particular. As she dreamt, the pages of the book curled up and over, encompassing the tiny Zoe in their shape, wrapping around her like gentle blankets, then tighter down until she could not move.

  A blaring cut through the peaceful scene, a ringing noise that must have been the fire alarm of the library. Zoe fought to get free of the pages, to run, to get away on her tiny feet from the oncoming blaze that surely had to move quicker than she could—