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

by Blake Pierce

  “Don’t come any closer,” the killer said.

  “I am not,” Zoe told him immediately. She held her hands out to her sides, showing that there was nothing in them. Her gun remained on her hip. “Do not do anything stupid. We can all stay calm and talk for a second.”

  Chrissie wasn’t staying calm. Her face was pale, and fat, round tears were falling down her checks, leaving shiny snail-tracks behind them. She was sobbing, drawing in shaken breaths that juddered out of her audibly.

  “It’s not stupid,” the killer said. He was six feet tall, with dark, close-cropped hair across the top of his head. Just the way their witness had described. There could be no doubt that it was him, even beyond the knife he was holding in his hand.

  Zoe’s eyes locked on that knife for a second. That knife—it could be the key to the whole case. Even if it had been washed, there was a chance that DNA still lingered. The DNA of John Dowling, Callie Everard, and Naomi Karling. Just one more reason not to have it covered with Chrissie Rosenhart’s before Zoe and Shelley could get it into an evidence bag.

  “What isn’t stupid?” Shelley piped up, from behind Zoe. Zoe felt relief wash over her. Yes—let Shelley do the talking. In the meantime, she could think. Figure out what to do.

  “What I’m doing,” the killer said. “I just wanted to tell you that before I do it. I know you have me now. There’s no way I’ll get away. But you have to listen to me before I do it.”

  “You don’t need to do it,” Shelley said. “We have snipers around the building. We knew you were coming here. They’re ready to fire right now.”

  “That’s a lie.” The killer spoke softly but confidently. His eyes flashed constantly between Zoe and Shelley, his feet shifted to keep up with the shaking running through Chrissie’s body, but he was calm. He knew what he was doing. He was going to cut her throat open, and they wouldn’t even have time to blink.

  “It’s not a lie,” Shelley said, her words measured and careful, matching his tone. “They have their sights on you right now. Look at your chest. You’ll see the red dot.”

  The killer hesitated, mulling her words over, and then he glanced down.

  In a shot, Zoe’s hand flew to her hip, drawing the gun and getting it raised in his direction. In her peripheral vision, she saw Shelley’s gun rise in the air at the same time.

  “Oh,” the killer said, looking back up and taking in the new reality. “Very clever.”

  “Thank you,” Shelley said. “See how nice it is when we’re all being civil? You hurt her now and you’ll be dead before she is.”

  Chrissie made a strangled noise, but the killer’s composure did not seem to waver.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “you can’t shoot me until I make a move. She’s right in front of me. You can’t risk it.”

  He was right. There was only a sliver of his face visible behind Chrissie, who must have been just an inch shy of six feet herself. She could have been a model, Zoe thought with a momentary flash of envy.

  “What do you propose we do, then?” Shelley asked. She was giving him the power. Seeing if he would help them come to a peaceful resolution on his own.

  “I think what we’ll do is this,” he said. His words were slow, as if he was figuring it out as he went along. “I’m going to walk backward down this hall and go into the kitchen. You’ll follow me, I suppose. And we’re going to go right to the back door and outside, and you won’t stop me. When I’m out, I’ll let her go.”

  “Why should we believe that?” Shelley asked.

  Zoe didn’t believe it. Didn’t believe it for a second. He was focused on one thing, and one thing only. His mission. For whatever reason his twisted mind had invented, he thought that Chrissie Rosenhart needed to die.

  He was right when he said that they had him. There was no way out from here. Even if he ran, they could shoot him dead. And if he escaped that, there would always be a manhunt, and no one escaped those for long.

  “She doesn’t have the mark yet,” the killer said, his eyes sliding momentarily along the side of Chrissie’s exposed neck. “I can let her go. Just like you can let me go. We all give our word.”

  “The mark?” Shelley asked. Playing for time. They all knew what he was talking about.

  “The numbers,” the killer hissed, his voice low and hateful. “She’s carrying a curse. But if she agrees not to get the mark, maybe we can all just go our separate ways.”

  “I won’t,” Chrissie choked out, her voice restricted by tears. “I promise I won’t!”

  “There you go,” Shelley said. “She won’t. Why don’t you put the knife down and let Chrissie come over to us? Then we can talk without anyone getting scared.”

  The killer smiled at that, dark and twisted. There was something wrong with him. Even if she hadn’t known that, Zoe would have seen it now. It was the look of an obsessive. Someone who would put that obsession in front of anything—even his own life.

  Their threats weren’t working. He wasn’t scared of dying. He was scared of not finishing the job. He was stalling for time, waiting for the moment when he was sure he could get the blade all the way across her throat. She needed to be dead—really dead. Not just cut enough that the FBI could keep her alive until the ambulance came.

  There was no clean shot. If Zoe took aim now, she would only hurt Chrissie. There had to be something she could do, something that would save the girl’s life instead of ending it.

  Her eyes flashed along the corridor. There was a photograph on the wall, printed onto shiny metal, an interesting print technique that made the beach scene dreamy and unrealistic. The metal was thick. She did a quick calculation in her mind. It was thick enough that the bullet wouldn’t just tear right through. From this position, it would likely ping off at a shallow twenty-degree angle.

  The angle would have to be right, or the shot would end in disaster. As they all stood, it wasn’t going to work. That shot would bury itself in the wall on the opposite side, missing the killer entirely. Zoe knew she was going to have to bide her time. The killer took another step backward, dragging Chrissie with him, and every muscle in her body tensed.

  Calculations were whirring through her mind. It was not just about his position relative to the metal plate, but also her own position. She tried to figure it all out without staring at the wall, giving her intentions away. She kept her eyes fixed on him and used her peripheral vision only, thinking as fast as she could. He had stepped back too far. Now the twenty-degree angle for the shot would land a bullet in Chrissie, not him.

  What if she took a step backward? That would create an even shallower angle for the bullet’s approach from the gun, resulting in a shallower exit, too. She could bring it down to ten degrees. But then the demarcation wasn’t clear enough. The bullet might still hit Chrissie before it went on through to him. In her mind’s eye the lines flew between them, straight trajectories that showed her where the bullet was most likely to go.

  Most likely. Because when all was said and done, she knew she could not control for unknown factors. Perhaps the metal had a particularly shock-absorbent quality, or the opposite, that might slow the bullet down or ping it off in a different direction at high speed.

  She could end up shooting herself in the arm, or Shelley, if the angle was completely wrong.

  “Just think about this,” Shelley was entreating him again, trying to persuade him. Even Zoe could hear the faint touch of desperation creeping in at the edges of her words. They all knew he wasn’t going to let her go. Even Chrissie, weeping and staggering backward, her hands fluttering around her neck but not quite daring to grab hold of his arm. He was going to take her to the door, cut her throat, and take his chances with a run.

  Zoe had to do something. There was no other option. Even if it backfired, Chrissie was dead if she did not try. She had to try. She took a step forward, a gentle and subtle one, just enough to move her in to a more direct angle. A thirty-degree approach with a much shorter trajectory—or back t
o twenty degrees if she aimed toward the far edge of the metal. She would need to get the shot right. If she missed and hit the wall, he would kill Chrissie and run.

  The killer took one more step backward, and she saw her shot.

  She did not risk distracting him. What if he stumbled backward or moved his body, twisted to look at something? No, and there was no time to hesitate. It had to be now.

  Quick as a flash, Zoe moved her gun, pointed at the metal plate. She aimed for the dead center of it, or as close as she could manage at this slanted angle, and turned off her doubts. She fired a single shot, the sharp report of the gun followed immediately by a high-pitched ring as it struck the metal.

  For a long second, there was no way of knowing if it had worked. Maybe the longest second in Zoe’s life.

  And then, with a groan, the killer slipped to the floor, his hand sliding downward and narrowly grazing Chrissie’s arm with the knife as he fell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  Zoe rubbed a hand over her face, then splashed it with cold water before drying off and moving to the hall. She had been asleep for five hours and twenty-four minutes before her alarm woke her, driving her to get up and dress and prepare to go back to the precinct.

  It would be the last time. This was a debrief only, before she and Shelley would get on a flight and return to D.C., ready to make a report to SAIC Maitland. She could already recite to herself what he would say: reckless endangerment, tempered with the fact that it had worked, and she should be careful about taking risks in future because her luck would run out one day. The same spiel he always gave her when she did something that looked stupid.

  Looked stupid to others, of course. Because she had known all along that the shot was almost guaranteed to ricochet exactly where she wanted it to: deep into the flesh of the killer. It had penetrated diagonally from under his arm, the one that was raised to hold the blade. It passed through several major organs before coming to a stop. He had bled out there in the corridor, but not before the catastrophic damage to his organs resulted in cardiac arrest and ended his life. Zoe and Shelley had been able to do nothing to save his life—not that anyone was racing to pick them up on it.

  Chrissie Rosenhart, on the other hand, had been effusively grateful. She knew that Zoe had saved her life through her quick actions. The three of them who had been in the room knew the truth. There was no way that she would have survived without that intervention.

  Zoe and Shelley arrived at the precinct to find Captain Warburton directing his staff through a cataloguing of all the pieces of evidence that had been picked up on a raid of Lee Thomas’s home. Lee Thomas—that was his name: a piercer who worked part-time at Dead Eye Dave’s, coming in one or two days a week, which explained completely how he had been able to access the appointment book only some of the time.

  “Talk us through it,” Zoe said, offering Captain Warburton a tired smile. She was rested, but not rested enough. They had insisted she go to the motel and sleep after the shooting incident, to recover from a long day on the case as well as the shock, but she barely felt that it had touched the exhaustion at all.

  Captain Warburton nodded, which was a good sign. Sometimes, when she was tired and tried to smile or offer other emotive expressions, all she would get was an odd look in return. Perhaps she was getting better at being “normal,” after all. “There wasn’t much that gave him away, although we’ve taken in clothing and outerwear to check for DNA evidence. But one of my detectives found a journal hidden behind his bedside table. It makes for… interesting reading.”

  Zoe accepted a pair of gloves and slipped them on before removing the journal from its plastic evidence bag. It was a small, plain, unassuming notebook, the kind you might imagine to contain boring business notations or accounts. Inside, however, was a different story.

  It started off simple enough. A record of some things that Thomas had found interesting, some accounts of his day. Zoe flipped ahead a few pages, Shelley watching over her shoulder, and watched as the handwriting began to slowly change. It went from neat and orderly, if sharply angled, to large and spidery, some words falling off their lines or taking up double space. As it did, Zoe started to pick up words as she scanned the text. The number thirteen, written over and over again in different places. Other key standouts that told her of a psychotic brain: Danger. Must. Devil. Lord. Die. Evil. Following me. Chosen.

  Shelley offered a low whistle by Zoe’s ear. “He was nutso.” There was a pause, and then she added: “I mean, he obviously had issues. I mean that in the most respectful of ways.”

  Captain Warburton stifled a laugh. “No disciplinary committee here, Agent Rose. I don’t think anyone in this precinct would argue with you. Three, almost four victims. The bastard was a psychopath.”

  “He was suffering from psychosis,” Zoe said. “I am sure that any psychologist will agree, after analyzing this journal. An obsession with the number thirteen combined with a religious zeal, perhaps preexisting, which mutated into something dangerous when combined with the symbolic introduction of the Holocaust.”

  Now Captain Warburton was giving her an odd look. “Right. Sounds like you’re a bit of an expert.”

  Zoe gave a brief smile, this one perhaps less convincing. “Only a backseat driver. I have a friend who works in the field. She gives me pointers from time to time. Quite useful, when you are trying to track down someone with a mental illness.”

  “It’s a shame no one spotted it. He could have been treated, and all these lives could have been saved. Including his own,” Shelley sighed, shaking her head.

  “We’ve been gathering statements from colleagues, family, and so on,” Captain Warburton said. “It doesn’t seem as though anyone knew, or even suspected. He kept it well hidden. There were a couple of people at the tattoo parlor who suspected he might be a closet anti-Semite from his reaction to some of the tattoos, but that was all. They didn’t even think to mention it when Jasper Franks was getting arrested, which was irritating, to say the least.”

  “We got him in the end,” Zoe said, putting the journal back into the evidence bag and leaving it on the table. “That is all that matters.”

  “We’ll be heading out to the airport soon,” Shelley added. “Any paperwork you need us to sign before we go?”

  Captain Warburton steered her toward a stack of papers, and Zoe groaned to herself. Paperwork—that was all that was awaiting them on their return home. Days of it, most likely, and more enforced therapy for herself to deal with the ramifications of shooting a suspect dead. She wondered whether telling SAIC Maitland she was already seeing a therapist would get her out of the mandated sessions, but she knew deep down it would not. Rules were rules. That, after all, was what she liked about being in the FBI: not needing to color outside of the lines.

  Even if it did seem that, since she had been partnered up with Shelley, she was coloring outside of the lines of her own previously neat and closed-off life more and more.

  ***

  Zoe sat at the table, trying to compose herself. She remembered Dr. Monk’s words, like a mantra now in her mind. Count your breaths. Focus on that instead of the other numbers.

  She breathed in and out, one, and allowed her eyes to drift up from the tabletop. It was a busy restaurant, full of people all around her. All of them different ages, heights, weights, ordering quantities and values of food and drink that went past her on loaded trays. The music played on the piano at the other side of the bar had a slightly unconventional rhythm of six beats per bar, a fact that would normally grate on her.

  In, out, four. Zoe let it all wash over her. She had arrived early on purpose, to try to use the techniques that Dr. Monk had taught her. She wanted to be able to do this. She wanted to be calm and measured, to deal with the information the world was throwing at her rather than being overwhelmed by it. She wanted to be present.

  In, out, nine. Her cell buzzed on the table and she snatched it up, just in case it was John, canceling their date after al
l. No, with relief: it was Shelley, checking in that she was feeling all right.

  I am fine. I am about to meet John for dinner.

  The response came almost immediately. Shelley must have been watching her phone.

  Have you thought about what we said on the plane?

  Zoe sighed to herself. Their conversation on the plane had been a rehashing of old themes: Shelley wondering aloud why Zoe still wanted to keep the numbers a secret, when they had helped her to save a life in this case. Zoe had promised that she would think about it, reassess how things stood. She had. But even though things seemed to slowly be changing for the better, she wasn’t quite over the top of the hill yet.

  I still want to keep it a secret. For now. I am working on what Dr. Monk told me. Maybe if I can keep everything under control, I can admit it then.

  I’m here for you, Z. If you need help, just ask.

  Zoe smiled. Shelley was kind and supportive to a fault, and she never let Zoe forget that she had a friend. That was something. For a person who had spent her whole life feeling isolated, and most of it alone, that was really something. With Shelley on her side, perhaps the future was going to be as bright as she insisted it could be.

  “Hey!” John arrived by her side, leaning down to plant a brief kiss on her forehead. “Am I late?”

  “Not at all,” Zoe said. She felt a rush of joy to see him again. In spite of herself, she realized, she was really beginning to feel something for John—to look forward to the moments they could share together. He brightened her day every time they met. “I was early.”

  “How unusual,” John joked, taking his seat. He was right: Zoe was normally the one to arrive last, delaying as much as possible so that she did not have to spend time in a busy environment on her own. Things were changing. She wasn’t going to live in fear of her abilities anymore. She controlled them. They would no longer be allowed to control her.

  “I think I might get a glass of wine,” Zoe said, throwing caution to the wind. Alcohol normally made the numbers feel worse, disorienting and warped, but she could handle that, couldn’t she? Just one glass of wine? She took in the twelve-millimeter dots repeated in subtle light blue on his dark blue shirt, and breathed in instead of counting them. One. Two.