Face of Fury (A Zoe Prime Mystery--Book 5)

by Blake Pierce

  Flynn stared at her for a long moment, Zoe counting the seconds as she refused to look back: six, seven, eight, nine. When he started the car, Zoe dared to look at him. His face was red, a vein pulsing ominously at the side of his forehead. Zoe counted his heartbeats in it, saw how elevated the rate was. He was probably too furious to speak, which was a blessing. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to win any further argument.

  As they drove away, the car jerking violently around a corner as Flynn viciously attacked it, Zoe couldn’t help her thoughts from straying to just how very different he was from her previous partner. Shelley had been softness and light, and an excellent interrogator. Flynn couldn’t even tell when he was being told the truth. It was going to be an uphill battle from here to work this case into something that could actually be solved, and all the while Zoe knew the clock was ticking—every second he was free, the killer had the chance to strike again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Shacora looked down at her uniform, brushing imaginary bits of fluff or dust from the front and making sure that her name badge was straight. It held her full name, Shacora Maxwell, right under the embroidery designating her as an official park patrol officer.

  Officer. Huh! That was putting a shine on something that needn’t have been polished. She was a glorified security guard, with not even that level of power. Not that she really needed it. Nothing happened around here—nothing that required anything more than yelling and shining her flashlight at whichever kids or drunkards were trying to get into the park after dark. Usually a combination of both. Teenagers trying to have a party somewhere their parents wouldn’t catch them.

  “All right.” Tony, the park ranger who always did her handover, nodded to her. “I’m off. You good?”

  “All good, T,” Shacora told him, flashing him her trademark toothy smile. She enjoyed flirting with Tony a little when they did their handovers. He was older than her, maybe by ten years, and married, but it was still fun to watch him squirm a little. He didn’t know what to do with the attention.

  “All right, then.” Tony gave her a final nod, hesitated as if he wanted to say something else, then set off walking toward his car in the parking lot.

  Shacora watched him go with a smirk. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t at all bad-looking for a white guy. He had that hot daddy vibe going for him. If he did decide to take her up on that flirting, she wasn’t going to say no, even though she’d seen the gold ring on his finger.

  Not that she had time for any kind of love life right now. What with teacher training classes during the day and working the overnight park patrol by night, she barely had time to sleep, let alone anything else. It was all going to pay off when she was qualified. She was going to get herself a job in a low-income housing area where she could really make a difference to the kids.

  Like she wished someone had done for her. At twenty-six, she’d already been through school twice: once the first time, when she’d barely paid attention in class and dropped out at sixteen, and then again five years later when she’d realized that not having any education wasn’t good for your job prospects. It had been night school first, then a switch to a more intensive course load when she was able to get the job at the state park. Now she was so close to getting that certificate and getting a real job. Something that paid enough to actually cover the rent.

  No point jeopardizing all that for a married man, Shacora thought to herself, turning toward the office with a self-deprecating chuckle.

  She grabbed the truck keys from the shelf, signing her name on the sheet beside them, and glanced around the rest of the office. No cupcakes—that was a shame. Sometimes, if it was someone’s birthday, the rangers had a celebration during the day and there would be cupcakes left over. Never mind, Shacora thought. Good to watch her waistline, too. No sense giving the kids something to tease her over. Kids would go for any weakness.

  “Why are you training to be a teacher again, Shacora?” she said out loud to herself, shaking her head with a smile. The nights got long and lonely on patrol. Hardly anything ever happened. It was boring and easy, and she’d kind of fallen into the habit of talking out loud just to fill the silence. At least it was something to do.

  Shacora headed back out into the lot and jumped into the patrol van, switching on the ignition and warming her hands in front of the vent while she waited for the temperature inside to equalize a little. It was cold out tonight, the bite of real winter in the air. Wouldn’t be long now before the snow. Shacora hated when the snow came. Everything white, all your landmarks covered, so easy to get lost out there. To stray off the path and then get reprimanded for accidentally crashing the truck into a two-hundred-year-old tree trunk. Well, it wasn’t her fault. All the damn animals put on their white coats, and then she couldn’t see them until they darted right out in front of her.

  Shacora rolled out onto the familiar route, which at least for now was still easy to follow. The floor was carpeted in orange and brown, but she could still make out the road. It had a nice feeling to it, she thought. The last bit of beauty before everything was dead and white for a few months. If it wasn’t so damn cold, she could actually have enjoyed it.

  Shacora’s eyes caught something off to the side of the road: a flash of movement, so quick and so vague that she could have imagined it. It wasn’t a good idea to assume, though. It could easily be an animal. But more than once, she’d ignored something only to have a major trespassing problem on her next circuit around. She wasn’t about to let that happen again.

  She stopped the vehicle, leaving the engine on as she peered ahead. Nothing. But she needed to be sure. With a sigh of annoyance, Shacora took the keys out of the ignition and pocketed them—another memorable lesson she had once learned about leaving the truck running with trespassers around—and grabbed her flashlight before climbing out to the ground.

  She shone the light into the trees, narrowing her eyes as she strained to see. The trees were all straight lines and shadows, a confusing mass that was difficult to interpret in the harsh beam of the flashlight. She swung it back and forth where she thought she’d seen the movement, searching.

  She was about to give up when an unusual shape caught her eye—human shaped, not tree shaped. After a closer squint she realized what she was looking at: a person with their back to her, a coat over a hooded jacket, the hood up over their hair.

  “Excuse me?” she shouted out. “Sir? Or ma’am?”

  There was no response. Frowning, Shacora stepped closer, into the trees. Maybe whoever it was thought that she wouldn’t be able to see them if they stood still and stayed silent. But she saw them, all right. Getting closer, she came around at an angle to see the face beneath the hood: a man, his lips moving, murmuring something.

  “Sir, did you hear me?” she said, her voice lower now that she was in close proximity. “I called out to you.”

  The man muttered something in return. What was he saying? Impatiently, Shacora stepped right to his side. “Sir, do you hear me? You can’t be here. You need to leave the park.”

  “The rings,” the man said, not turning to look at her. His attention was fixed on something in front of him. “The rings, they’re near-perfect. Perfect circles. Near perfect rings.”

  Shacora swung the beam of the flashlight down. He was staring at the stump of a tree that had recently been cut down, something they did whenever the trees were struck by lightning. It was often dangerous to leave them up, the way the lightning would crack them, and they were dead anyway. This one bore no scorch marks or obvious splits; the damage must have been further up the trunk.

  “Yeah, that’s a real nice tree stump,” Shacora said, trying to play along with him. He was most likely either drunk or high. “Now, we’d better get going.”

  The man chuckled. There was something eerie about him, the way he stood over the stump staring at it. How much had he even been able to see in the dark? Definitely high, Shacora decided. He was acting way too creepy to just be dru
nk.

  “That’s part of the mystery, you know,” he said. His eyes still hadn’t moved from where they were fixed, but it felt like he was talking directly to her now. “They’re always perfect. Even when they’re not perfect. Isn’t that something?”

  “It’s something, all right,” Shacora muttered. She lifted her voice again, keeping it light and friendly, like how you would talk to a child. He wasn’t going to listen to warnings, she could sense that. She needed to coax him out. “Sir, why don’t you come back with me to the ranger station? Okay?”

  The man didn’t say anything, but he did finally move. His head swung slowly around until he was looking right at her, slow and still, his expression blank. But even as she watched, she felt something coming over his face. Not something that she could identify. Not one clear emotion. But even so, it made a shiver go through her. This guy, whatever he was on, it was something serious. She wondered if she was out of her depth.

  “That’s right,” she said, encouragingly, thinking that maybe she was finally getting through to him in some way. “Come along with me. We’ll get you back to the station now. Let’s go.”

  She thought he was going to turn to come with her. His body tensed like he was going to move the way he had before, slowly around, coming with her. Maybe it would take a while, but she thought she could get him in the car and drop him off outside the gates and maybe call the police to come deal with him. As long as she could make him someone else’s problem as soon as possible, she could get back to her easy, boring job. Had she called it boring? She shouldn’t have complained. This was what you got. The crazies.

  But he wasn’t turning to follow her. Shacora blinked and he was turning, all right, but rapidly, quicker than she had thought he could, like he released all his pent-up energy at once, barreling toward her. There was something in his hand. It happened so fast that she couldn’t make it out, only that it was dark and long and clasped in his hand tightly. And that thing, whatever it was, smashed against the side of her head, so heavy and sudden that she only had the time to draw in a single breath before she realized she was breathing in dry, dead leaves, and something wasn’t right, and there was a desperate cold spreading through her, and Shacora shivered just once before blinking out.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Zoe didn’t mind the silence so much. Silence was fine by her. Fewer words meant fewer distractions.

  But it was the tension that was irritating. The way the rookie took corners and changed lanes with an aggressive anger, screaming to a stop at red lights and only just barely making it because he was driving far too fast. He was fuming, she could tell that much. This wasn’t his usual careless, fast driving. There was another layer to it: the sharp, choppy movements of his hands and feet, the way his head jerked around quicker and at more extreme angles. The numbers showed her what was wrong, even when she only saw them from her peripheral vision, refusing to turn to look at him.

  She was regretting taking this case on at all. Flynn had been far from apologetic about his interrogation technique, and he didn’t look set to cool down any time soon. Zoe almost began to wish for some music or a radio station to dispel the hostility in the air. Almost. But not enough to want to risk inviting the numbers crowding into her head.

  She reached into her pocket instead and took one of Dr. Monk’s pills. She swallowed it down, waiting for it to take hold. At least then she might be able to ignore Flynn more successfully. She closed her eyes and tried to count her in-breaths to ten, but before she even got to three, she found she was counting the revolutions of the tires against the asphalt (calculated by a particular noise that a slightly balder spot on the front left made every time it touched the road) instead and gave up.

  No, she shouldn’t have taken this case. She shouldn’t have been tempted to read the file, and even after doing that, she shouldn’t have given in when SAIC Maitland insisted on her taking a partner. Partner. Zoe spat on the word. It meant nothing. Especially not with this excuse for an agent, who was so green he might as well have been grass. He wasn’t gifted like Shelley had been. He had nothing to offer Zoe. No skills that would solve the case quicker. She would have been better on her own.

  Zoe opened her eyes again and looked out the window, staring dully out, letting the dimensions of structures flash in front of her eyes as she kept mental track of the street number. She counted mentally how far they were from the station, from the point where she could get out of the car and be away from him. The residential buildings fell away and opened up to the gaping mouth of a larger complex. Raising her eyes just in time to catch the sign outside, Zoe realized it was a university campus.

  A university campus…

  “Wait,” she said, the word firing out of her with the explosive suddenness of a bullet. “Stop!”

  “What?” Flynn said, automatically putting his foot on the brake while glancing in the rearview mirror. They were in light traffic, but Zoe realized immediately he couldn’t stop immediately for fear of causing an accident. “Why?”

  “Just go around the block,” Zoe said. “We have to go back. I just thought of something.”

  Flynn breathed out through his nose, a frustrated sound, as he took the next turn and began heading back in a square pattern. “You could at least tell me what.”

  “You could at least trust your senior agent,” Zoe shot back. She was still annoyed at him, and didn’t feel like explaining. Maybe it would have smoothed over their relationship a little if she’d given in and explained. On the other hand, maybe he would have refused to go investigate her “silly pi theory” any further. She couldn’t risk the second.

  “Here,” Zoe said, sitting upright in her seat, pointing eagerly as they drove toward the campus again. “Turn here.”

  “A campus?” Flynn frowned. “What are we doing here?”

  Zoe shook her head, amazed that he hadn’t yet seen the connection. But then again, it wasn’t as though she expected great things from the rookie. “Just keep driving along this road,” she said, spotting a campus map illuminated by a light above the sign and quickly memorizing it as they drove by.

  Campus security waved them through when Zoe showed her badge out the window, and then they were moving down a long row of large houses separated by strips of land: fraternities. Greek letters hung over the doorways of each one, two or three symbols indicating the identity of the group living inside.

  The whole fraternity or sorority thing had never appealed to Zoe. She hadn’t joined when she was at college. She had no idea about which fraternities were the biggest, which ones had bad reputations, or anything like that. She had vague recollections of articles about hazing and the blazing hoops prospective members had to jump through in order to impress their older cohort.

  “Are you serious with this?” Flynn muttered sullenly, slowing the car to more of a crawl as they eased past each house. Most of them were lit up with lights blazing through each window. Zoe guessed the penny had finally dropped for him. She ignored him, focusing on looking from side to side, examining the identity of each house.

  Then she saw it. The house with only one letter above the doorway. Next to it was a blank space where the brickwork was a slightly different color, nails still visible in a discernible pattern. It should have been Sigma Pi. But the Sigma had fallen off.

  “Pi House,” Flynn breathed. Without Zoe’s prompting, he had rolled the car to a stop right opposite the doorway. He was leaning forward, one arm crooked over the top of the steering wheel so that he could see it clearly.

  “This is it,” Zoe said firmly. “That cannot be a coincidence.”

  For a long, sweet moment, she thought that Flynn was going to agree with her. That she had finally won him around to her way of thinking, and he wasn’t going to argue with her anymore. That they could get on with the investigation the way she wanted.

  And then he opened his mouth.

  “It absolutely could be a coincidence,” he said. “And I’m sure it is.”

&nb
sp; Zoe swung her head toward him. “What are you not seeing?” she demanded. “This is precisely the same symbol that was carved into the victims’ torsos. And you do not think it is worth checking out at all?”

  Flynn snorted. “What are you going to do, interview every single member, every single student who walks by here, every single member of staff? It could be anyone who saw the sign and liked it.”

  “It is much more likely to be someone inside the fraternity, who sees it as part of their identity,” Zoe argued.

  “Okay, fine,” Flynn said, rolling his eyes. “So your theory is, what? New fraternity pledges are being given the task of murdering people and then carving the frat’s symbol into their skin to prove that they did it?”

  “No,” Zoe said, feeling defensive at his disbelief. “Of course, that would be far-fetched. But I do think that someone inside knows more about this.”

  “Are we going to go after the whole mathematics department, too?” Flynn said. “You’re acting crazy. This is too much of a leap.”

  Zoe stared at him, seeing red for a moment. It faded a little before she could do anything stupid, like hit him. Maybe the antidepressants were working, after all. “I am not crazy. What I am is the senior agent on this case, and I say we need to go inside and talk to the frat members.”

  Flynn hesitated, some of his cockiness disappearing. For all that he clearly thought he was the best thing since sliced bread, he was also fresh enough to give respect to rank. She had a lot of years on him, and he knew it. He was also probably thinking that getting in trouble with SAIC Maitland on his first case was a bad idea. Or so Zoe hoped.