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

by Blake Pierce

  Zoe tried to focus, shutting out the general noise of the bullpen. It was almost impossible.

  “This is ridiculous,” she muttered to Flynn, glancing over at him. He nodded his confirmation, pursing his lips as he glanced around the crowded room.

  The problem with the Salem precinct, apparently, was not the lack of space. There was plenty of space. It was just that they had so many officers, across all ranks, that every single office was full, every desk was full, and the offices themselves were so tiny that it had been deemed more appropriate for Flynn and Zoe to commandeer a desk in the bullpen than try to squeeze inside.

  “It is noisy,” he said. He glanced sideways at her. “You always find it a bit difficult to concentrate when there’s a lot of sensory input, don’t you?”

  Zoe blinked at him. Not only was she surprised that he had noticed, but also that he was able to use such specific and technical language. She wondered briefly if he’d had experience with something like that before—perhaps an autistic family member—but she also didn’t want to press the issue. Ultimately, it was none of her business, and it would make no difference to their working relationship. There was no point in asking.

  “Most people do,” she said instead, which was only partly a deflection. Her attention kept catching on a couple of cops nearby that were laughing raucously about something, which seemed not only inappropriate but also inordinately loud, seventy-two decibels and counting.

  “He really believed it, too,” one of them said, holding his stomach as he shook his head and sighed.

  “Some of the people you get around here, honestly,” the other said. He was wiping away something from underneath his eye. “Real nutjobs. I don’t know what it is about Salem. Been attracting the same nonsense since the first settlers.”

  “Well, with a reputation like ours, it’s not going away anytime soon,” his partner said, turning back to his desk. “No matter what happens around here, there’s always someone who’s going to claim it was witchcraft.”

  “Witchcraft,” Zoe muttered, shaking her head. “Things would be a lot easier if we did not have to contend with that kind of garbage on the tip line, too.”

  Flynn chuckled darkly. “That’s Salem,” he said.

  Zoe sighed, trying to refocus on the records she was looking at. So far, they hadn’t given her anything; while there were plenty of ties between Frank Richards and Harry Stout, there was nothing at all to link either of them to Ezekiel Sewall. It just didn’t seem to work, no matter how she looked at it.

  And this witchcraft stuff—utter stupidity. So many people seemed to be talking about it, everywhere they looked in the reports…

  Zoe paused for a moment, thinking. She remembered working cases with Shelley that hadn’t, at first, seemed logical. How Shelley had pushed her to explore all leads, because you never knew when someone unknowingly had a pinch of truth in with their misconceptions. Shelley would have thought that it was at least worth looking into, perhaps talking to a few people, trying to figure out if there was one common thread that ran through the superstition. Something that could even tie in with the misguided views of the killer himself.

  They didn’t have any leads at all right now. It couldn’t hurt to spend a few minutes looking into it, could it? To try and trace the same investigative path that Shelley would have taken, if she were still here?

  She remembered what Joe, the employee at Judge’s Hardware, had told them. That Harry Stout had named his shop because he was a descendant of one of the original judges from the famous Witch Trials. He was linked intrinsically with the town’s history of witchcraft. Joe had even said that he was part of the historical society proud of their heritage—but they had dismissed it all last night because Frank Richards wasn’t part of the same group.

  But they’d left it there, Zoe realized. They hadn’t investigated any further—checked out Frank Richards’s roots. Had he been in the town for his whole life? It certainly seemed that way. Did he, then, have any link by blood to that time?

  Zoe brought up a web search on the trials, doing a quick skim of the information online. There was an account of the timeline of the trails, starting with the first accusations—in February, Zoe realized. That was another thing they had first heard from Joe: that the dates of the new killings lined up with the old events. And he was right. They matched up almost exactly to the date of the first accusation, when the first “witch” was brought before a local official named John Thomas.

  John Thomas, of course, had brought the accusations before the local magistrate, William Stout. That was how it had all begun. There were other men involved in the process: Waitstill Williams, Samuel Linus, Henry Walsingham, George Barnes. Each of them played their roles. None of those names triggered any connection to their victims, except for Stout. But that didn’t mean there was no connection at all—just that it might be harder to see.

  If the dates and the coincidence of Stout being related to that judge was all it was, Zoe would be able to leave it alone and pursue something else. But now that she had seen the potential of the link, she couldn’t ignore it.

  She needed to investigate Frank Richards—and that meant finding someone who knew what they were talking about, and fast, before the killer had the chance to stalk their next victim into the night.

  “Flynn,” she said. “Wait here. I am going to talk to an expert—you keep digging.” And she got up from the desk and rushed away, without waiting to see if he would agree.

  ***

  Zoe sat down in the offered chair, a hard-backed carved piece that looked as antique as almost everything in the room. If one thing was made clear from the interior of this space, it was that the owner loved history—perhaps more than anything else.

  “So, what is it that you need help with?” the genealogist asked, sitting back in his chair opposite her, with his hands folded neatly on his lap. He was a man of neatness and angles, straight lines down the center of his pants, his white hair brushed into precise position across the top of his forehead, and at seventy-three, that hair was only slightly receding, and the elbow patches on the jacket Tim Sergison wore were aligned neatly with very little wear. He was every inch the respectable scholar—exactly what Zoe had hoped for when she took the recommendation from Detective Reed.

  “We are trying to trace the genealogy of a recently deceased man based here in Salem,” Zoe said. Even though time was of the essence, she felt an urge to express herself concisely and politely; maybe it was the scent of vintage leather-bound books in the air, or the feeling that she had been plunged back into a different era. “His name is Frank Richards. Essentially, we want to know whether he had any family connection to the Salem Witch Trials.”

  Sergison leaned forward and, disappointingly, started to tap away at a computer keyboard. Zoe would have pictured him poring over ledgers with half-moon glasses propped on his nose, but it was not to be.

  “Hmm… Frank Richards. We have several of them in the database, perhaps unsurprisingly,” Sergison said, peering at her as he flexed bony fingers over the keyboard. “I don’t suppose you have any other information? Date of birth, that sort of thing?”

  Zoe rattled off the details she had taken from the file, knowing they might come in handy, and watched expectantly as Sergison’s fingers flew over the keyboard in corresponding patterns. He waited a long moment, staring at the screen, and then made a noise which did not inspire confidence.

  “Anything?” Zoe asked, almost on the edge of her seat. They needed something.

  “It looks as though your Frank Richards has never had his genealogy mapped,” Sergison said, tapping his mouse a few times. “We are looking at going back over three hundred and twenty years. This will take some research, to connect him all the way back in his ancestry—if it’s even possible. We will need a lot of information from other sources to connect the dots.”

  Zoe nodded. “I understand—but we need you to try. And to try as quickly as you can. This could quite literally be a ma
tter of life or death.”

  Sergison gave her a serious look. “I understand, Agent Prime,” he said, standing from his chair. “I had better get onto it immediately. If you find any extra information about the victim and his family, I would very much value the added help.”

  Zoe took his proffered hand and shook it, completing three short pumps before letting go—the number she had learned from experience to be the socially acceptable amount. “Then I will let you get started in peace. I will send over any additional information we can find at the precinct.”

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I have something,” Sergison said. “Do you know, it’s funny. It’s a bit of a week for witch trial requests, as it turns out. Must be something about the date.”

  Zoe looked at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it was… just last week, actually. A young woman wanted to know whether she was related to one of the witches that were hanged as part of the trials. That took us a fair bit of research as well, but at least we have all the records on hand already.”

  Zoe blinked. A woman who thought she might be related to a witch, around the same time as the killings of at least one man related to the judge? Over her years as an FBI agent, Zoe had given up believing that coincidence was ever really just coincidence.

  “Do you have her name?” Zoe asked. “And her contact details, if possible.”

  “Certainly! We enter everything into our master database,” Sergison said, then hesitated. “Although, wouldn’t it be a breach of confidentiality…?”

  “I would not worry about that,” Zoe said, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Her heart had leapt into her throat, hammering fast. Could this be it? “I am the FBI. And this is an investigation into serial homicides. We are going to need to pay this young woman a visit.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  Zoe slapped the piece of paper down on the desk beside Flynn, making him jump.

  “Jesus,” he said, giving Zoe a thrill of perverse pleasure at having managed to ruffle his cool image. “When did you get back?”

  “Just now,” Zoe said, nodding for him to turn back to the screen he was sitting in front of. “I need you to look up this name.”

  “Becki Harlen?” Flynn read aloud, making a face. “Is that short for Rebecca?”

  “Sadly not,” Zoe said, nudging him to start typing. “The genealogist had something interesting to say. There was another request for this kind of information just last week. This girl—she was trying to find out if she was related to one of the witches who was hanged.”

  In the reflection on the computer screen, Zoe could see Flynn raise an eyebrow, his image superimposed over the loading page. “That’s a hell of a lead,” he said.

  “You are not wrong,” Zoe said, half under her breath, as the results appeared.

  And what results.

  “Disturbing the peace,” Flynn read aloud. “One, two… five counts. Wow.”

  “What is that assault charge?” Zoe asked, pointing to the screen. Flynn clicked on the link, and then they both swore under their breaths.

  There was an assault charge, but it had never been taken to trial. It was dropped beforehand. And the person who had pressed the charge in the first place, before later changing their mind…

  “Harry Stout,” Flynn read, shaking his head. “We need to talk to this woman.”

  “Detective Reed,” Zoe called out across the bullpen, beckoning to the familiar face. Morrison still had not reappeared; after pulling an all-nighter with them, it seemed he was determined to catch up on a good twelve hours’ sleep. “Do you know anything about a Becki Harlen?”

  Detective Reed shook her head no, but one of the others—the ones who had been laughing loudly about the rumors of witchcraft going around the town—swiveled his chair toward them. “Becki with an ‘I,’ right?” he asked.

  Zoe nodded eagerly. “You have had dealings with her in the past?”

  The man nodded. “Local drunk. I’ve had to bring her in a few times for disturbing the peace. Assault, once, as well.”

  “Against Harry Stout?” Zoe asked.

  The detective screwed his face up. “Er… Older guy, right? Quite tall?”

  “Yes,” Zoe said, without hesitation. She knew that he was above the average height for a male; the impreciseness of the question did not faze her.

  “Yeah, that was it, then,” he said decisively. “Yeah, bit of a silly thing really. She was drunk, went off round this guy’s shop, knocked something over. He’s asked her to pay for it, she’s got a bit aggressive. It all got a bit too much. When things had cooled down a bit, he dropped the charges. He wasn’t really hurt or anything.”

  “He still pressed the charges in the first place,” Zoe said, thinking quickly. “She would have spent the night in a cell?”

  “Yep. I remember that one, actually, because she was kicking up a stink about missing something, to do with her kid or something like that. I told her she shouldn’t have gotten drunk if she had somewhere to be!” The detective’s neighbor nodded and chuckled approvingly, tapping his desk.

  “She’s a bit of a weird one, that one, ain’t she?” he said.

  “How so?” Flynn asked, his attention just as rapt as Zoe’s now.

  “Reckons she’s a witch,” he chuckled, shaking his head.

  “That’s right!” the first detective agreed. “Yeah, said she was going to curse me if I didn’t let her go. She’s said it a fair few times, actually, but I’m still standing!”

  Through the resounding laughter of the pair, Zoe and Flynn exchanged a glance. There was no way this wasn’t related. “Do you have the report from the assault charge?” Zoe asked. “We need to see it immediately.”

  The detective shrugged. “It’s in storage. I can go and get it.”

  Zoe nodded, and tried not to be too impatient as he plodded away, her mind racing while they waited. Flynn brought up Harlen’s last known address and jotted it down, putting his coat on, obviously ready to sprint out of the door. Zoe shared the sentiment. This was it. It had to be. They’d been thinking of the killer as male for a while, but from the very first moment, Zoe had pointed out that there was no reasoning behind that assumption. It could just as easily be a woman.

  It could be this woman.

  “Here we are,” the detective announced, waving a faintly stained piece of paper at them; it was dated only six months ago, and Flynn quickly pored over the text, picking out the salient details out loud.

  “Suspect refused to pay for damaged goods,” he said. “Victim asked her to pay before leaving… words exchanged… suspect threatened victim with a pox on his name that would damage his business if he didn’t let her go. Victim said…”

  He stopped, and stared at Zoe with wide eyes.

  “What?” she demanded, making a motion for the paper. If he wasn’t going to tell her what he’d read, then he could at least let her read it for herself.

  “Victim said,” he continued. “That suspect was not a real witch, and all the real witches had been hanged by his ancestor, so she’d better keep her mouth shut if she knew what was good for her.”

  “Then slap, bang, wallop,” the detective supplied cheerfully. “She went hell for leather on him.”

  “We have to go,” Flynn said, leaping up from his chair. It wasn’t a lead that connected her to Frank Richards or Ezekiel Sewall, yet—but it was definitely a lead on Harry Stout, and with the witch connection, Zoe had more hope than at any point in the last twenty-four hours that they’d found their perpetrator.

  “Well, hold on,” the detective said, holding up a hand. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

  “So?” Zoe asked. “She will be at work?”

  “Oh, no, she got laid off a long time ago,” the detective said. “No one will have her. She’ll be at the bar.”

  “What bar?” Zoe demanded impatiently. Couldn’t he see that they needed to do this fast?

  “Angelina’s,” he said. “
It’s up on—”

  “Yes, thank you,” Zoe interrupted, starting to race across the bullpen. It was almost too good to be true. “We know where it is!”

  ***

  Zoe checked the gun in her holster as she got out of the car, only a moment’s delay before she joined Flynn in striding for the doors of the bar. Perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary, but she wanted to be prepared. If they were about to approach a multiple murderer with clearly violent tendencies…

  Flynn didn’t break stride at all as he barreled through the doors of the bar, immediately looking around. Zoe cursed inwardly at his inability to wait for her or even discuss a plan, but it was done now, and the job at hand was more important. It wasn’t hard for Zoe to spot Becki Harlen. They had seen her mugshot on the system, and the bar itself was almost empty. Amongst the fifteen tables, the ten red leather bar stools, and the assorted sizes and shapes of wooden chairs set around the place, only five settings were occupied. All of them were taken up by a gaggle of women sitting close together, seemingly deep in conversation—and their cups, judging by the empty glasses already resting on the table.

  Angelina Orren was behind the bar, looking up at them with a raised eyebrow, halfway through the motion of washing a glass. But when Flynn held up a hand of warning to her, she hesitated, turning her eyes—along with Zoe’s—to the women.

  They were all dressed in a kind of uniform: long skirts, leather jackets, layers of silver pendants on necklaces of different lengths, and copious amounts of black. Velvet and lace also made their appearances in fingerless gloves, headbands, and one notable floor-length coat that bore splashed mud across the hem.

  In short, they looked like witches.

  “Becki Harlen,” Flynn said, addressing the woman who sat right in the middle of them all. She had a streak of silver in her hair, whether real or dyed Zoe couldn’t tell and didn’t care, and a jaunty hair clip in the shape of a jeweled spider sat on top of it. The gleam of the stones belied them as plastic. “FBI Agents Aiden Flynn and Zoe Prime. We’d like to have a word with you.” They both flipped their badges open, a practiced move that Zoe was, unwillingly, beginning to synchronize with him.