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

by Blake Pierce

  “Hell of a coincidence if it is not,” Zoe said. “You have two past customers show up dead, and the third body belongs to someone with the same name and initial as one of your customers—but is not the same person?”

  “I think we have her phone,” Shelley said, heading over to another box of evidence—one that the techs had left with them after going through everything. They hadn’t reported any cyber threats or mysterious activity on Naomi Karling’s phone. Maybe they just hadn’t known what to look for.

  Shelley pressed numbers on the screen, logging in with the passcode that the LAPD tech team had chosen after decrypting it in the first place. 9-1-1-1. Probably their idea of something funny. After a few quick taps, she turned the screen to show Zoe.

  “It’s him,” she said, grinning. “Look. She has it on her calendar, too. “Gramps tattoo.” She was getting another memorial.”

  Zoe thought back. “46535. That must be the Holocaust prisoner number. I saw it on her arm.”

  Shelley hesitated. “But she hasn’t had the tattoo yet.”

  Zoe shook her head. “No. The vine with the flowers. Four petals, then six, then five, then three, then five. In sequence along the vine, from her wrist up to her elbow. It must have been intended as an initial tribute. Perhaps she decided it was too subtle.”

  “This is what we’ve been looking for,” Shelley said. She was happy, laughter catching at the edge of her words, her eyes lit up with a new spark. “We have him dead to rights, Z. We just need to force a confession. Maybe get some witness statements from neighbors who saw him going out, in the meantime. But we’ve got him. He’s not going to kill again.”

  Zoe bit her lip, feeling a rough piece of skin there where she had absentmindedly bitten it earlier. What Shelley was saying made sense. It did. And people lied—they lied all the time, about all kinds of things, and definitely about alibis that couldn’t possibly be backed up.

  Zoe knew all of that.

  So why did something feel just a little bit off?

  “You are better at this than me,” she said. “I am no help in there. See what you can get out of him. I will go through a few of the things here, try to find more evidence.”

  Shelley nodded, accepting the excuse. Because it was just an excuse. Zoe didn’t know why she didn’t want to argue with her partner about the man they’d arrested. Well, no: she knew why. It was because it all added up. No matter which way you looked at it, it seemed like they had their man.

  Except for one nagging feeling, which kept tugging on Zoe’s nerves. It was something to do with the fact that his collection of historical artefacts contained, as far as she could see, memorabilia from both sides of the war. From multiple armies and nations. Even prisoner artifacts, personal belongings that could not be returned to wholly extinct families. Would a true Nazi want all of those? Or was his story of being a collector in general the truth?

  There was something else, too. The feeling of an equation left unfinished. One sum that was left to be done, which had not been done.

  “I’ll come find you if I crack him,” Shelley said, breezing out of the room. “Or come find me if you get something. Just try not to interrupt if I’m leaning forward. That means I think I’m breaking him down. Got it?”

  Zoe nodded, barely listening, her eyes skimming over the appointment book again.

  There was something here. There had to be.

  She first flicked back to the beginning, scanning all of the entries made across the months encompassed in those pages. It was dull reading. Other agents might have deferred the work to a local, put their own brain to use in something more active. Most of it meant nothing at all to her. Strings of names coupled with short descriptions and times: “Chris Smith—Bee and sunflower—10:45am”; “Angela Peters—Pet dog—4:30pm.”

  The numbers were a distraction that caught on the raw edges of her mind, already overwrought from all the overthinking and the spiraling obsession she had only just managed to pull herself back from. It was hard not to catch on them again, hard to remind herself that they were just times, not part of some deeper code or meaning.

  It was hard going, even when she managed to stay focused. She gave a frustrated sigh and flipped back to the present day, looking over the past few weeks.

  There were more numbers here. More five- or six-digit strings after customer names. One or two a week, going back for the last two months. Around one a week before that. Back when the diary had started, there was barely one a month. Shelley had been right: it was certainly a growing trend. It looked like more and more people were getting themselves booked in for Holocaust memorial tattoos, and Franks had managed to gain a reputation for doing them.

  Zoe blinked. That was it. The last unfinished part of the equation that had been bothering her.

  If Franks had only tattooed Holocaust numbers on three people over his whole career as a tattoo artist, then it made sense. He snapped recently, decided to carry out his own violent neo-Nazi revolution, perhaps spurred on by his friends at the Aryan Brotherhood. There could even be a wider conspiracy, with other members of the gang also carrying out killings on his behalf to avoid suspicion. That was all exceedingly plausible, and as an experienced FBI agent, Zoe had no doubt whatsoever in her ability to bring that case to trial and secure a conviction.

  But that wasn’t the case they were dealing with. No, Franks had not just tattooed three memorial numbers. Zoe flicked through the pages again, quicker this time, only counting. He was right about his estimate—there were more than fifty serial numbers listed next to bookings throughout the book, and that didn’t include any hidden messages that she might have missed—like John Dowling’s tiger cover-up, or Naomi Karling’s flowers and vines.

  Jasper Franks was known for his work with symbols and signs. With controversial elements. There was no real way of knowing how many tattoos he had given to descendants of the Holocaust. How many of them might have talked about their heritage in the chair, explaining the symbolism of the design they had chosen. Then there were other tattoos he had done: one was noted down as “Star of David,” another as “Shofar.”

  So why, out of all of these names, had Jasper Franks seemingly selected three of them at random? One he had known about for years, one for months, and one who had not yet even managed to get her tattoo done yet?

  And why would he willingly tattoo pro-Jewish symbols onto other clients, who did not seem to have been targeted in any way?

  It didn’t make any sense—and that alone was enough to fill Zoe with a growing sense of horror.

  Whoever their murderer was, it wasn’t Jasper Franks.

  Which meant he was still out there—free to kill again, while both the FBI and the LAPD relaxed, thinking they had finished the job.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  The watcher was waiting again. Three were down, and now he had another in his sights. Another who had to be taken out of this world, to protect everyone else that was in it.

  A woman again, this time. She was older than the others, but she lived alone. She would be an easy target. He had taken to seeking out these easier targets, pursuing them in sequence, because the harder it got, the more chance there was that he would fail. Just look at that last girl. If she had managed to get away, or if the police had come quicker, he might have been caught.

  If he was caught, or stopped in some other way, he would not be able to complete his mission. It didn’t take a genius to understand that that would mean the world was still at risk. So he was starting with the easier ones, reserving the others for later.

  If there was a later.

  He had seen himself on the news earlier. Not his face or name, of course. But they were talking about him. About the two bodies that had burned, and about the third that had not. Everyone had put it together, even though he had not finished the job. That was bad news. It meant the clock was ticking. That he might not have as long as he thought before the net tightened.

  He would do what he could. Every single one
of them cleansed from the world in fire, or at least removed from existence, was one more shot at safety. Perhaps after he was stopped, someone else would take up his mantle. He had to at least do what he could.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket, distracting him from his view of the front of the house. He shifted in the seat of the car, digging it out and opening it up to read the message he had received.

  He read it several times, trying to think it over. It was not good news. It was a friend of his, someone who worked at Dead Eye Dave’s and had seen a police raid go down earlier. They had arrested Octopus Artistica. Taken him away in cuffs, screaming and shouting about his rights.

  That wasn’t good either. It meant that there was attention on it. Media would soon report on the latest development.

  The man was torn. It was perhaps good that the police had some kind of suspect to focus on that wasn’t him. It meant that there might be some time, still, before they realized that they were wrong and carried on looking elsewhere.

  On the other hand, this was close to home. Very close to home. He knew Octopus—knew him well. They hung around in the same circles. All of which meant to say that perhaps the cops already had an inkling of the motive for the murders.

  But he had been careful—so careful. Burning the flesh from the bones, taking away the evidence of the ink marked so deeply into their skin that fire was the only way to cleanse it. And he had made good choices. John Dowling as his first target: the one who had covered himself up, taken away the numbers, even though they still lurked there beneath the surface. Even though their mark would stain him forever, irrevocably, without any hope of redemption.

  Callie Everard had been obvious, maybe. But the gang connection he had found when he looked into her life had been, he thought, a good distraction. Something that might lead the cops in the wrong direction.

  Of course, he was reading now in the news bulletins that it wasn’t the LAPD anymore. That it was the FBI now. Maybe he had gone too big, too soon. But what else could he have done?

  And, oh, his third choice: Naomi Karling, the sweet little thing who turned out to be more of a tiger than John Dowling, had turned out to be more of a threat. She hadn’t even had the tattoo yet. They weren’t supposed to make that link, not so quickly.

  They weren’t supposed to find him.

  It was inevitable, most likely. He was not vain or egotistical enough to ignore that. One day, they were always going to track him down and make him stop, one way or another. But he had just hoped, or imagined, that it would take them longer than this. That he would hit more of them, take them out.

  Maybe it was time to speed up. To go quicker. All of his careful planning and stalking, and they were already coming down the trail after him. Maybe it was time to throw caution away and start making moves.

  It was a relief to know that tonight, at least, they had the Octopus in their grasp. They thought he was the one behind all of it, and they would waste time and resources investigating him. While they were looking at the Octopus, they wouldn’t be looking for anyone else.

  Killing tonight would mean they realized they had the wrong man in custody. Of course it would. No way the Octopus could be the killer if he was in a jail cell. But they would find out soon enough that it wasn’t him, and by then, the window of opportunity might be gone.

  There was a voice in the back of his head, as he watched an upstairs curtain sway in the breeze caused by a passing body, that told him he should stop now. Give up and go underground, somehow, or look for a way to put them off his scent.

  But if that didn’t work—and it might not, because he was no FBI agent himself, and didn’t know quite how to outsmart all the tests and checks and measures they could do—then they would catch him anyway. His task would be left unfinished. Just three paltry souls freed from this earth, prevented from causing future harm. It was not a great many at all.

  If he pushed on tonight, he could get one more. At least one more. And that was the point, wasn’t it? Every single one of them he managed to eradicate from existence was a great win for his side. If he managed a single one more, at least that was something.

  Yes: his mind was made up. There was no stopping now. He had the next one in his sights, and that was where she was going to stay until the job was done. He couldn’t let all of this other nonsense distract him.

  She came out of the front door, a handbag swinging on her shoulder, her keys a flash of metal in her hands as she locked it behind her. She was in a rush as always, balancing a bundle of makeup in her hands, to be applied to her face on the way in to work. She was always running behind. He had seen her more than a few times over these last weeks, in between checking out the others. She worked a later shift, and that made it convenient to follow her movements, see what she was doing when the others were already out at work.

  Her twisting, curled hair blew around her face in the temporary puff of a spring breeze. She made it to her car, got in, and dropped everything onto the passenger seat. She adjusted her mirrors as he sunk into his seat, making sure he would not be seen. She pulled out and shot away, her foot heavy on the accelerator pedal as always.

  Like all of them, she was a creature of habit. Like all humans. She got up at the same time, went out at the same time, took the same route. He smiled at that. She was like everyone else, at the surface. It was only him who could see the great evil that lurked inside of her.

  And it was her humanity—her shroud of pretense, her cloak of normalcy—that made her such a good target. She was the same every day. And he would be back later on, when she came home, which she did always at the same time. He would be there when she entered the house where she lived on her own, and kicked off her shoes at the door as she did every day, and bustled her way into the kitchen to cook a meal. He would be there when the light went on, as it did every night. He would be there when she drew the curtains and shut out the view.

  He didn’t know what she did after she closed the curtains. He had never been able to see. But that didn’t matter. Because tonight would not be like all the other nights.

  Tonight, she would do something that she had never done before, a break in a routine habit that had made up all of the pieces of her life.

  Tonight, she would die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  “It is not him,” Zoe said, ignoring the pained look that Shelley shot her way. “I am telling you.”

  “Why not?” Shelley groaned, shaking her head. “Look, Z, I know you’re a perfectionist. You like to tie everything up in a neat little bow. But just give me time. I’m going to crack him. And even if I don’t, we have enough evidence to at least put it before a judge.”

  “You need more,” Zoe argued. “This is all circumstantial. The fact that he knew the three victims and also members of the Aryan Brotherhood does not at all mean that he did it. A judge will not let this go to trial.”

  “The forensics teams are working on that, and we’ve got LAPD officers talking to any and all possible witnesses, going door to door. We’ll find the evidence.”

  Zoe looked at Shelley’s face and understood that she was not going to convince her otherwise. It was hard to blame her. It wasn’t just Shelley. Captain Warburton had stuck his head into the investigation room earlier, while Shelley was in interrogation, and congratulated her on a case solved. The fact that Franks hadn’t relented and confessed yet didn’t prove anything, not to them.

  For Zoe, it was making her more and more convinced that she was right. He wasn’t the right man. Not only because there were so many questions that didn’t add up, but also because she had complete faith in Shelley’s ability. She would crack him, if he had really done it. She was so good, she might even be able to convince him he did do it and get a false confession.

  Which was a worrying thought.

  “I’m going back in,” Shelley said, throwing the remnants of a cup of coffee down her throat. “See you in a bit. Keep digging, maybe you’ll find the evidence that proves it before
I get the confession.”

  Zoe waited until she was gone and then got up and shut the door behind her. Alone again for a brief period of time, in a room now full of boxes of evidence and loose paper files, she lifted her cell to her ear and dialed.

  “Hello, Zoe.”

  Zoe almost sighed with relief at the sound of the familiar voice. “Dr. Applewhite, do you have a minute?”

  “For you, my dear, of course.” There was a faint rustling sound in the background, perhaps Dr. Applewhite putting away a file. Zoe dimly wondered whether her mentor was looking over notes from her research group, all people with synesthesia like her. Well, not exactly like her. It was different for almost everyone. “What’s wrong?”

  “What is always wrong?” Zoe sighed. “I have a case. I am stuck. I cannot tell if I have a good gut feeling, or if I am just distracting myself. Talking myself into making things too complicated.”

  “Tell me what I need to know to help,” Dr. Applewhite replied. She was smart enough to know that Zoe couldn’t tell her absolutely everything, or her job would be on the line. Actually, she was the smartest person that Zoe knew. It didn’t hurt that she was also the closest thing to a real mother figure she had ever had—the person to support her after her diagnosis, mentor her through college, and even encourage her to join the FBI.

  “In general terms,” Zoe began, knowing that summarizing the case would also help her to understand it better in her own way. “We have victims who are tattooed with, or were about to be tattooed with, genuine prisoner numbers from Holocaust survivors. The survivors are all older relatives of the deceased. Their throats are cut, then they are set alight—one of them in broad daylight, in the middle of the city.”

  Dr. Applewhite made a thinking, humming sound. “Your instinct is that this is a hate crime. A neo-Nazi trying to finish what the first movement started.”