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

by Blake Pierce

  “You expect us to believe that?” Flynn asked, his voice dangerous and low. “You think we don’t know how you stalked them? How you learned about their every move, so you knew where you would be able to find them? How you lay in wait for them every night, so you could string them up as punishment, make a spectacle out of them like they did to you?”

  Dean looked like he wanted to jump out of his seat; he was practically vibrating with fear now. “Wh-what are you… I never…”

  “We know you’ve been taking them down one by one, Mr. Dean,” Flynn continued inexorably. “The game is up. Last night was your last kill. We came here looking for you, and you weren’t home. We know what you were doing. We found Ezekiel Sewall. And when the tests come back, we’ll have your DNA on file, too. We’ll have you.”

  Zoe had no idea what Flynn was talking about with the tests and DNA; she figured he was trying to bluff, trying to make Dean think that he might as well confess. But whatever he was doing, it didn’t look as though it was working. Dean was still staring at them both with wide eyes, visibly shaking with fear.

  She remembered what Angelina Orren had said. She’d called Gerry Dean a coward. It looked as though she might have been right.

  “Last night…?” Dean said, his voice filled with tremors. “I was on a plane.”

  Zoe stared at him. That was not what she had expected to hear. “What?” she demanded, needing a follow-up, needing to know if he was serious.

  “I was visiting my parents in Orlando,” Dean said. He lifted a shaking finger to gesture out through the window at his car. “My bags are still in the trunk. I was at the airport and then flying over here until five this morning. The flight got delayed, and we were all sitting on the plane waiting to leave, and then I couldn’t get a taxi on this side…”

  Zoe snapped her attention to one of the police officers standing behind Dean and made a gesture. Immediately, the man stepped away and started talking quietly into his radio, asking for confirmational checks to be run. It was going to be easy enough to check everything that Dean had claimed. If there was any room in his schedule for him to have come back and murdered Ezekiel Sewall—which sounded unlikely, if he was still in Florida at ten p.m.—then the police would spot it.

  “We need to move on,” Zoe said to Flynn. “It was not him.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying!” Gerry Dean burst out. Zoe ignored him. He was no longer relevant to their investigation.

  Flynn nodded sharply. “Agreed,” he said. “Meet you out there. I’ll finish up here.”

  Zoe nodded gratefully and moved outside, heading straight for the car. There was no suspect here anymore, which left them right back where they had started. Still with no ideas as to who the killer was, how they were operating.

  There were roads they could retrace. They hadn’t conducted completely thorough interviews with Sewall’s mother, or looked at factors beyond the business links with the other two victims. They would have to go back to the drawing board now, to look for another connection that they had overlooked before. They’d allowed themselves to become blinkered, fixating on one possibility only. It couldn’t have been avoided, not with the time pressures in place. But now they had to do better. They had to find the right thread and pull on it until it came undone.

  Zoe sat in the car staring at her phone, and realized there was one more message she had to send—something she’d forgotten about last night. She fired off a quick apology to John, forcing herself not to overanalyze each word but to just press send.

  If there was one lingering message that stayed with her from her nightmare, it was that she didn’t want him to walk away. She needed him, and people like him, to help her rebuild her life. To forge a new one.

  And if there was another message, it was that she had to find this killer before he took another life. No matter how many wrong turns or dead ends they took, she was going to keep fighting to find him.

  They had about ten hours before the killer was likely to strike again.

  Zoe wasn’t going to waste a single second of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  She’d had a long and busy night. It was no wonder that all she wanted to do was fall into bed and rest, and let sleep wash away the aches in her limbs.

  First, there had been the Sewall boy. His timing had put her off, made her fumble. She hadn’t had everything quite in place. The plan had been for him to walk home as normal, so she could strike before he managed to get inside. But that hadn’t worked out. He’d caught the bus, of all things—a deviation from his normal routine that infuriated her.

  But she remembered what the witch said: that people always persecuted her kind, made them stumble, tried to throw roadblocks in the way. Life for a woman was not straightforward. Men would always try to stop you from being successful, beat you down, claim that you’d had supernatural (or otherwise distasteful) help in getting to where you were.

  But you had to stay strong. Had to simply divert course around them and continue to your destination. You could never let them stop you, just as the witch had never been stopped. She might have been killed, hung from a rope like she was nothing, but that had not ended her fight. No, she had persisted on, gaining power little by little over the years, until finally she was strong enough to visit her distant relative, track her down and enter her dreams.

  And now she, as that fated relative, was able to carry out the witch’s wishes. Even in death, the witch was more powerful than any of the men who had persecuted her. She had outlived them all. Her will was being done now, generations later, while those old men had died and seen their legacies crumble into dust.

  She knew what she would see when she closed her eyes. Knew it already. It would be the same as every night. So, it was no surprise when it came; when she realized she was asleep, and what she was seeing could only be a dream.

  Because it looked just like the room that she had fallen asleep in: here was the bed, the door, the carpet, the rest of the furniture. But she knew it was a dream, because the witch was there, sitting daintily on a chair against the dressing table, preening as if she wasn’t dead at all.

  “You did so well,” the witch said. She flicked a hand into the air and a bubble appeared, beginning to float toward the bed. “You remember, don’t you?”

  She did remember—remembered everything. She wanted to scream that, to tell the witch that she didn’t need to see again, but it was too late. The bubble was on her, and she was sucked inside, and then she was no longer in her room at all.

  She was standing in a cell, a caged room, and it was dark and dripping and the smell was awful. She looked down at her own body, clothed in a gray dress made of rough fabric that was not her own, and she knew.

  She was the witch now.

  She saw them in the next cell over through the bars. Torturing the black woman, the one who looked after the children. She was screaming something awful. The witch looked down at her own hands and the marks left where they had hurt her, too, and she knew. She knew what it was like. She knew none of them could hold on for very long.

  How many times could they say it, over and over again? No matter how many times they protested that they were not witches, the men never believed them. The poor women—most of them were not witches, not actually witches at all. It was only her, as far as she knew. But confessing wouldn’t help. Two of them had confessed already, and they were still held, awaiting trial.

  The witch had decided to confess as well, if they came for her again. If they dunked her and roped her and burned her like they had before. She would do it. At least the ones who had been confessed were no longer being hurt. Not after they had spilled everything: names and names, and more names, and people were being dragged into the cells almost by the hour. Before long, there would be nowhere left to keep them all.

  The witch found herself in another place, though she had not moved. She was standing on a platform in an austere black dress—her best. Her mother must have picked it out, brought it
to her. Her mother, with those same scars on her arms, and a defeated look in her eyes, because even though she had tried so hard and everyone had cleared her own name, she had not been able to clear that of her daughter.

  The witch straightened her back, because it would not do for them to see her cowed. She had confessed and repented, and it had done nothing at all. She had watched the others hang: in batches, because there were so many of them now awaiting the sentence, and the small gallows here could not manage it all at once. They had cried and begged mercy, and not a thing had been done to save them.

  The witch was not going to beg.

  She tried not to even flinch when they put the noose around her neck. Instead she looked up, her vision clear and piercing, and focused on the men. There were a few of them, standing around and watching in sober judge’s dress, but she focused in on four. Their names rang like bells in her head. William Stout, the Chief Magistrate. John Thomas. Waitstill Williams. Samuel Linus.

  The witch knew them as the men who had tortured her, coerced her, sentenced her to die. But she also knew, from that other part of her that was from a future time, that they were the four who continued after the witch was dead. That they sentenced more and more of her town to death. That they were the four figures at the center of it all, and they didn’t stop until they were forced to, and they were never brought to reckoning for what they had done to the innocent men and women of the town.

  The witch felt the rope tighten around her neck, and prepared for the drop. The moment the floor would open beneath her and she would choke, until the life drained out of her. She kept her eyes on the men. Three of them were dead now. Over their faces she saw new ones: Harry Stout. Frank Richards. Ezekiel Sewall.

  Only one was left standing.

  “You’ve done so well,” the witch said, and they were no longer the same person but two separate, and she was back in her bed. “Just one left. Just one more day. Tomorrow, we finish this.”

  Tonight, she thought, opening her eyes for real this time onto the dim bedroom, the sun of the day doing its best to break through the barrier of the curtains. There were only hours left now until she would finish this for good, and wipe away the stain that the descendants of the persecutors left on Salem.

  She got up and began to dress, preparing herself for what was to come.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Zoe looked up at the apartment building again, this time in daylight. Now it was possible to make out so many more details—many of them irrelevant, like the number of bricks between each door or the particular dimensions of the roof.

  She pushed those thoughts aside, trying to get back to that island of serenity in her mind. She needed to focus here. Yes, the numbers could be helpful—but only if she noticed the things that really mattered. Otherwise, they were a distraction.

  “We need to figure out if there’s a specific motive behind each murder,” Flynn was saying, as they walked up the stairs to the second floor. “There have been plenty of cases in the past where multiple murders were committed to cover up one intended murder, to try to conceal the identity of the killer.”

  Zoe could almost have tutted. She didn’t need a lesson in crime history from the rookie. She didn’t even think it was likely, though that was somewhat beside the point—they had to explore every single avenue, all the same. They had messed up last night by narrowing down their focus too far. Zoe wasn’t going to let that happen again.

  “You take lead,” Zoe said, as if she was giving him a gift. In honesty, she hated dealing with the bereaved: parents and spouses and children—it was hard to say which of them was worse. They were always too emotional, too easy to set off. Her skills were, as always, better put to use in observing the numbers, not in trying to talk.

  Flynn knocked on the apartment door, and a moment later, it was a police officer who opened it. They had been left to watch over Mrs. Sewall in her delicate state, to be there to provide information or any assistance she might need. But by the serious nod that the officer gave them as they entered, it seemed she was in good enough state for a more extended interview this morning.

  “Mrs. Sewall,” Flynn said smoothly, approaching the woman who was sitting on the sofa in a black shirt and pants, seemingly staring off into the distance at nothing. “Do you remember me from last night? Agent Flynn.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. Sewall stirred, letting go of a tissue she had been clutching and depositing it on the coffee table. “Yes. Of course. Agent Flynn.”

  Zoe hadn’t seen the woman last night, and she took a moment to observe her. She was about fifty-two years old, five foot seven, overweight. She looked pretty ordinary, aside from the heavy dark rings around her eyes and the redness at their edges. There was nothing about her person that gave Zoe any clues on where to direct the questioning. She took a seat in an armchair to the side of the table, while Flynn sank down on the sofa next to Mrs. Sewall, turning his body slightly to face her.

  “We wanted to ask you a few more questions about Ezekiel, now that you’ve had a chance to deal with the shock a little,” Flynn said.

  “You’ve not caught him, then?” Mrs. Sewall sniffed, reaching for the tissue again to wipe her nose. “Whoever did this, I mean.”

  “I’m afraid not yet,” Flynn said. His tone was gentle, the speed of his words reduced from his normal rate of conversation. “If you could answer a few questions about Ezekiel, that would be really helpful. Have you had a chance to think about whether there was anyone who might have cause to want to harm him?”

  Mrs. Sewall shook her head, dabbing at eyes that threatened to spill over. “I can’t fathom it,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense to me. Zeke was a nice boy. He kept to himself, most of the time. Since he lost his job and moved back in with me, he’s only been going to the gym. You don’t think there might be someone there…?”

  “We can certainly look into it,” Flynn said, making a quick note in his book. Zoe personally had doubts. This wasn’t something restricted to just one person; the motive would only make sense if it applied to their other victims as well. The gym was not a likely place to have found either Harry Stout or Frank Richards.

  “It’s just so unfair,” Mrs. Sewall said, shaking her head and dabbing at her eyes again as she sniffed. “We were so lucky to be able to be Zeke’s parents. I remember the day we brought him home like it was yesterday—we were so happy. Then we lost my husband a few years ago, and now Zeke—it’s surreal. Like a nightmare.”

  “How did you lose your husband, Mrs. Sewall?” Flynn asked, his pen poised above the paper. Zoe wondered about the way she had described it—lucky to be his parents. Wasn’t that an odd thing to say? Then again, she’d never been a parent, and she had noticed they tended to talk about their children like gifts. She didn’t interrupt to ask. The last thing she wanted was to have everyone staring at her like she was an unsocialized freak at the same time as derailing the interview.

  “It was a heart attack,” Mrs. Sewall said, gazing over at an old, framed photograph by the television. “One day he was here, and the next gone. Just like my Zeke, now.”

  She seemed about to burst into fresh tears, and Flynn spoke more rapidly, seeming as though he was trying to get ahead of it. “Could you tell me the circumstances in which Zeke left his last employment?”

  Mrs. Sewall sniffled a little. “He was a waiter at a restaurant. He didn’t show up on time very often, from what I understand. I did keep trying to get him to take it seriously, and he told me he was, but I couldn’t monitor him when he was living away from home. Couldn’t go and drag him out of bed in time for his shift. They gave him so many chances, but I suppose eventually they had to let him go.”

  Flynn was nodding. He shot Zoe a glance; it wasn’t very likely that they had any leads from what Mrs. Sewall had been able to tell them. “One more thing,” he said. “I know this will be difficult, but can you think of any reason someone might have wanted to harm you or your late husband? Particularly to give you emotion
al pain, as you’re feeling now?”

  Mrs. Sewall blinked, going pale. “N-no, I can’t think… you don’t really believe… it could be my fault?” she asked, tears welling up in her eyes yet again.

  “No, no, I’m sure that’s not the case,” Flynn said hastily. “We just need to check every avenue. So, there’s nothing that comes to mind…?”

  “We’re just normal people,” Mrs. Sewall said helplessly. “We don’t have enemies, or anything like that at all. We’re just normal.”

  “All right, Mrs. Sewall,” Flynn said, starting to get up. Zoe took his cue and did the same. “Thank you for that. You’ve been very helpful. We’re going to pursue some more leads.”

  “You’ll find him soon, won’t you?” Mrs. Sewall said, looking between the pair of them with her eyes glistening. “You’ll stop him before he takes someone else’s son?”

  “We’ll do everything we can,” Flynn said softly, before turning to leave the apartment. They walked out of the Sewall home and along the hall without a word, Flynn still carrying that air of gentle hope, reassurance, authority, floating behind him like a cloud in a way that Zoe could never hope to achieve.

  On the way down the stairs, however, his tone was much more grim. “We haven’t got anything,” he complained. “We’re right back to zero again.”

  Zoe couldn’t help but agree, but she was experienced enough to know that it didn’t mean they had reached the end of the investigation. “We go back to the drawing board,” she said. “Links between the three victims. There must be something. We just have to search harder. Come on—we will go back to the precinct and go over everything one more time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO