Face of Darkness (A Zoe Prime Mystery—Book 6)

by Blake Pierce

  “Good,” Zoe said. She was somewhat aware, in the back of her mind, that she was probably a little too harsh with Flynn. She held him up to an impossible standard, always assumed that he had fallen short, and gave him very little credit even when he managed to meet her expectations—which, if she was honest, was pretty often. But he wasn’t Shelley. No matter how much he tried to impress her, he was never going to be Shelley.

  A lingering doubt flickered through her mind: the thing that he had told her during their first case together. That he had been through something, just like she had. She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened to him, and she hadn’t looked it up. That would have been prying. But she also hadn’t asked him directly.

  Maybe she should. She was curious, that was for sure. She just had no idea how to broach the subject. She opened her mouth, but the voice that she heard was not her own.

  “Now boarding Flight 1875 to Logan, Massachusetts. Please have your tickets ready for inspection before you reach the checkpoint.”

  Zoe shut her mouth again, following Flynn to the front of the line. Now was not the time to talk about his trauma, and besides, she hadn’t really had an idea of how to even form the question.

  She found her seat beside him as the rest of the plane filled up, and gestured at his carry-on bag. “I want to review the files.”

  “All right,” Flynn said, pulling them out. “I should as well. Here, we’ll split them.”

  Zoe bit her tongue on the comment that she would rather study them alone. She was making it harder for them to work together, and she knew that. She had to stop it. If they were going to solve this case, cooperation was key. She couldn’t have Flynn second-guessing her or ignoring her instructions. “Fine. Give me yesterday’s.”

  Flynn handed over the slim piece of paper that held all the known details of the case so far, as well as a few photographs. It was too early for a full coroner’s report, but it hardly seemed necessary; Zoe could see from the images alone that the cause of death was straightforward. The victim had been hanged by the neck with a thick rope, his skin graying and his eyes almost bulging out of his head. It wasn’t a pretty sight. You never forgot your first hanging victim, and they didn’t get much easier from there.

  “We need to hit the ground running on this,” she said. “This killer is moving quickly, so we need to be quicker. They may strike again tonight.”

  “So, tell me what you’ve got,” Flynn said, gesturing to her paper.

  Zoe cleared her throat. “The victim was a local business owner in Salem. He owned Judge’s Hardware.”

  “His last name was Judge?”

  “No.” Zoe frowned. “Harry Stout. Nothing at all to do with judges. Maybe it is a reference.”

  “To what?”

  Zoe shrugged. Pop culture references often went over her head, and she had no idea whether she was looking at one or not. Only that it didn’t make sense to her. “I do not know. Anyway, he was six-two, a hundred eighty pounds, fifty-five years old.”

  “You always go straight for the numbers,” Flynn said. “What about his family? Any problems with the business?”

  Zoe stifled a sigh. Of course she always went for the numbers. That was where the answers usually were. But Flynn didn’t know about her ability, so she gritted her teeth and answered him. “Unmarried and no children. It looks as though the business was going fine until this happened. We can initiate a more thorough forensic finance report when we arrive.”

  “Hmm.” Flynn was looking through his own file, probably checking for similarities. “Nothing rings any bells here. I’ve got Frank Richards, owner of another local business—West Street Goods. He was forty-eight years old. Don’t worry, I’ve got your stats. Five-eight and a hundred and sixty-three pounds.”

  “So, the only point of comparison is that they were both business owners.” Zoe chewed her lip. “What does West Street Goods specialize in?”

  Flynn dug his phone out of his pocket and did a quick search using the plane’s Wi-Fi. “Looks like a general store. Seasonal goods, dry food and snacks, bottled drinks. Miscellaneous items. I think I can see pet toys and cleaning supplies in the stands visible through the windows.” He showed her a photograph of the outside of the store, with a smiling and very much alive Frank Richards standing outside of it.

  “Well, I doubt they have any conflicting business with a hardware store,” Zoe mused. “And it does not seem likely that a competitor would be trying to take out rival business owners. Even if it was not a farfetched idea, it would be hard to find someone who felt both were in the same field.”

  “Maybe someone has a grudge against them for another reason.” Flynn shrugged. “Whatever it is, it seems local. Both of the stores are in the same kind of area, though not so close that they would see each other every day or anything. Anyway, it seems confined to the city.”

  “So far,” Zoe said darkly. If there was one thing she had learned from years of working these kinds of complex cases, it was the third murder that would be the most illuminating. It told you whether parallels between the first two were deliberate or coincidence.

  Not that she wanted there to be a third murder. If they could stop this killer before he got there, that would be the better option. It wasn’t about solving riddles and putting things together, no matter how much her mind always strayed most to that part of the case. It was about stopping the killer. If needs be, those answers could come out in interrogations and during the trial—so long as no more people lost their lives.

  “There’s half an hour until we land,” Flynn said, handing the papers over to Zoe. “I’m going to take a nap.” He rolled his shoulder away from her without waiting for a response, resting his head against the seat near the window, and then drifted off into silence—and presumably into sleep.

  Zoe envied him. There was no way she was going to be able to quiet down her brain to get some sleep now, not before they landed. The words on the pages in front of her almost crawled, alive with the numbers that analyzed them uselessly: tracking patterns of word length and sentence structure, the slightly irregular spacing between one of the lines where someone had messed up the formatting. She didn’t need to see these things. She was just having a hard time shutting it off.

  She stared down at the photograph of Harry Stout, hanging by the neck from the overpass. It was a grim image. Night had already fallen, and the killer was on target to strike again. Glancing past Flynn’s shoulder to the dark sky outside the window, Zoe hoped they would be on time to stop him—before there was a third body to analyze.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “You must be our escort,” Zoe said, holding out a hand for the man to shake.

  “Detective Morrison.” The man, dressed in a suit but with his police badge clearly visible around his neck, shook her hand. He’d been the most obvious member of law enforcement in the crowd waiting for passengers to get off the plane: straight-backed and vigilant, eyes scanning the people around him as well as those emerging, hawk-like in his observations. When a fellow passenger peeled off to the side and stopped blocking her view of the badge, Zoe had made a beeline for him, figuring it unlikely there were two cops waiting to escort people today. “You must be Agent… Prime, was it?”

  “Agent Zoe Prime,” she confirmed. “This is my partner, Agent Aiden Flynn.”

  She waited for the two to shake, then started walking for the exit, already impatient to be off. “How far off are we?”

  “About a half hour drive at this time of night,” Morrison said, falling into step beside her after a first distracted moment. He was in his early forties, she calculated, and his five-nine frame was starting to put on weight—something he wasn’t yet used to carrying. “You guys want to head to the motel first, get settled in?”

  “No,” Zoe said, cutting off whatever Flynn had been about to say. “There is no time. We will go straight to the most recent crime scene. We can leave our bags in the car until we get a chance to find somewhere to stay.”


  They stepped out into chilly February air, hitting them all like a slap in the face after the heated interior of the airport. “You sure you guys don’t want to drop your bags off first?” Morrison asked. “It’s gone ten thirty. We leave it too late, there might not be anywhere still checking in.”

  “Your killer has operated at night so far, correct?” Zoe said, snapping her eyes to the detective. He was walking too slowly for her taste, and she didn’t know where the car was parked. When he hit a button on his key and a nearby unmarked vehicle made an answering beep, she set off faster toward it.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Morrison said, hurrying to keep up with her.

  “Then why would we want to rest?” Zoe opened the passenger door, a reluctant motion since she always hated being a passenger, and slid into the seat. She didn’t wait to see whether Flynn wanted to ride up front. Where you sat wasn’t important—they needed to get on the road.

  Morrison made some kind of grumbling noise as he got into the car and fastened his seatbelt, making Zoe’s fingers twitch with the desire to somehow make him go faster. He didn’t refuse to drive them where they wanted, however, and Zoe held tight to her own belt to stop it from touching her neck in an attempt to lessen the travel sickness as they set off.

  “Any developments in the last couple of hours?” Flynn asked from the back seat. “We’ve been in the air since we got our briefing.”

  “Nothing much,” Morrison said, his eyes moving across the road. “Both bodies are with the coroner. Captain’s been going crazy, trying to get answers on this one. He strikes again tonight, we’re going to have a lot of media on our shoulders.”

  Zoe’s jaw clenched. Exactly what she didn’t need to deal with. She hated doing media briefings, hated having to push her way through crowds of reporters to get to a crime scene. They only made it more likely that she was going to get picked up as being weird and off-kilter, because under stress she was even less able to mimic the socially acceptable behaviors she had spent her life trying to learn. Things like smiling in the right places. If you smile when describing a murder because you’re panicking and confused about how your face is supposed to look, the public doesn’t take kindly to it.

  “Has the integrity of the crime scene been maintained?” Zoe asked, checking her watch. It was going on fifteen hours since the body had been found. Dealing with cops in different jurisdictions always introduced a lot of uncertainty about what kind of procedures they did or didn’t follow—and that was before human fallibility was brought into the equation.

  “Yeah, we’ve got guys posted there,” Morrison said lazily, reaching for a cigarette from a slot in the car’s central console. He put it into his mouth and started reaching for the in-car lighter, making Zoe’s eyebrows shoot up.

  “You are not going to smoke that, are you?” she asked pointedly.

  Morrison shot her a sideways glance, his hand hesitating over the lighter. “No,” he said, tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure it was the right answer. A moment later, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it back in the packet.

  Zoe glanced into the side mirror and caught a glimpse of Flynn in the seat directly behind her. He was looking out the window and grinning. That, she thought, was very odd behavior.

  “We want details about the victims’ businesses,” she said. “Financial reports, things like that. Were they doing well, did they have any disputes lately, had they taken out loans—anything that might stand out.”

  Morrison nodded. “I can leave you at the scene and go find out. Someone else can take you on to the motel. Should be plenty of guys with cars there.”

  Zoe gritted her teeth to refrain from reminding him again that there was no rush to get to the motel, and stared out the window at the dark buildings flashing by. A hotel in black wooden architecture caught her eye, like something out of a gothic novel. Or, well, something out of Salem. They passed by a colonial brick house covered almost entirely in ivy, and an old stone church with a red, gothic door. A gray-boarded museum flashed by, and then stores that seemed to carry a certain theme throughout: the Witch’s Cauldron Diner, the Sand Witch Shoppe, a clothing store in which the mannequins wore witch’s hats.

  They pulled up outside an alleyway that was thronged with vehicles already. Some were marked police cars, while others were white vans that clearly held news crews. For the moment, though, the scene was largely quiet. Zoe guessed that with it being so late, most of them assumed there wasn’t going to be any more movement in the case for a while. They were wrong. She had every intention of getting to the bottom of this tonight, if she could.

  “Is your captain here?” Zoe asked, glancing around the assembled personnel who were variously guarding the alleyway or examining it.

  Morrison finished parking the car and pointed. “There. Captain Lee.”

  Zoe followed his gesture and spotted a short, balding Asian man wearing a dress uniform. She nodded and leapt out of the car, eager to hit the ground running and get this case sorted out.

  Flynn was close behind her as Zoe ducked under the police tape at the entrance to the alley, flashing her badge as she went, and approached the captain. “Special Agents Zoe Prime and Aiden Flynn,” she said, wanting to get the introductions out of the way fast. “Anything you can tell us about the case?”

  Captain Lee reached to shake both of their hands, giving them a regretful look. “Not a lot so far. Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to retrieve a lot of evidence. Couldn’t find any usable fingerprints and there doesn’t appear to be any DNA evidence—we’re surmising the killer wore gloves to prevent both DNA and print transfer to the rope.”

  Zoe examined the scene as he spoke. The body was gone, just as Morrison had told them, but the rope was still there—hanging in the air, only the noose cut, a grisly reminder of what had taken place. It swayed softly in the breeze, standing out starkly against the yellow glow of the lights the police had set up. Without them, Zoe noted, there were no streetlights in range whose trajectory would serve to illuminate the alley.

  “No sign of a struggle?” Flynn asked.

  “Not that we can see,” Lee told him. “There was a blow to the back of the head, same for both victims. We think this might have subdued them enough to stop them from fighting the rope until it was too late.”

  “He was conscious, or unconscious?” Zoe asked.

  “Hard to say until the coroner releases the report.”

  “What about the location?” Zoe glanced back and forth, not seeing anything special about the alleyway or the street on their side of it. “Why was the victim here?”

  “This is a route that would take him directly from his store, on the other side, to his home, which is about a five-minute walk in that direction.” Lee pointed back the way that Zoe and Flynn had just come. “He had just locked up the store before being targeted last night. It’s not a heavily trafficked area after dark—stores are closed and the rest is residential. No one saw him until this morning.”

  Zoe nodded, taking it all in. Her eyes were seeing trajectories, routes, probabilities. “The location was nothing special. So, this was probably a moment of opportunity for the killer—the one spot in the victim’s regular route home where he would be out of view, and fumbling in the dark.”

  “The killer knew his route,” Flynn said, confirming what Zoe was already thinking. “Either he knew the victim personally, or he followed him on prior occasions to find out what his routine was.”

  “He had to be lying in wait at the scene,” Zoe said, realizing she had picked up on Flynn’s habit of assuming male pronouns before she corrected herself. “Or she.”

  “He,” Flynn argued. “He had to have the strength to string up an adult male. Richards was… what was it?”

  “A hundred and sixty-three pounds,” Zoe supplied automatically, from her mental bank of information.

  “Right. Had to have been a male perpetrator, to have that kind of arm strength. I mean, he probably looks like SAIC Maitland,
too.”

  Zoe almost wanted to smile at the image of their commander and his bulging muscles, but Flynn was wrong. She shook her head. “Look at the angle of the rope.”

  “The angle?” Flynn looked confused, staring at the rope but clearly not seeing anything. It was strung in a very particular way, looped up over the pole and then hanging down on the other side again. It had been tied up to a bike rack set into the concrete, so the body wouldn’t drop back down to the ground.

  Zoe pointed, illustrating the actions with her fingers in the air. “The killer used the height of the pole and length of the rope to their advantage. Look, over there. She could use the struts off the top of the telephone pole as a first pulley, and the bike rack itself as a second pulley, reducing the force needed to lift the body into the air by half.”

  The captain and Flynn both turned, squinting, to where Zoe had pointed. Stepping closer to the bike rack—a simple yet sturdy metal hoop set into the ground at the entrance of the alley—they contemplated it in silence for a moment.

  “Looks like it would work,” Captain Lee admitted.

  “So, what we’re saying is that the killer could be just about anybody,” Flynn said, blowing out a heavy breath as he brushed his perfectly styled dark hair back off his forehead. It fell immediately back into place, just so.

  “Anyone who could lift eighty-nine pounds,” Zoe agreed. “And in the adrenaline-fueled situation of tackling a target, that could be a lot more people than you might think. We could be looking for any man or woman of average or even below average strength. If they could lift an average eight-year-old child, they could easily do this.”

  “Just about the only thing we could say is that it isn’t someone with exceptional strength, since they wouldn’t need this set-up,” Flynn said glumly. “Unless that’s just to throw us off the scent, too.”