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

by Blake Pierce

  “That’s nice for you,” Becki said, her tone instantly rude. “But I’m not going to talk.”

  Zoe and Flynn both hesitated; Zoe felt it like a tension, the way they both inched their hands just a little closer to their belts and the weapons inside. If Harlen had tried to run, that would have been one thing. Giving them attitude was something else entirely, especially given her history of violent behavior while inebriated—which she was clearly already on her way toward being.

  “This is concerning a serious investigation,” Zoe cautioned. “I would advise you to cooperate.”

  “Cooperate? With you?” Becki shook her head and then flung out her hand dramatically, making Zoe’s own hand twitch toward her belt. “I’ll put a curse on you, pig. You’ll regret the day you were born.”

  Zoe gave her an even look, relaxing her posture again. “You may be a little late,” she said, wryly. “I think you will find that, if such a thing as a curse exists, I probably already have one.”

  There was a short pause; Zoe refused obstinately to look at Flynn, whom she could see in her peripheral vision eyeing her with a frown. Maybe she had said too much. But then the moment was gone, and he fixed his gaze on the women again, letting her off the hook.

  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Flynn said, which only earned him a chorus of sniggers from the women.

  “He sounds like Sylvester Stallone,” one of them said, none too quietly. Then she pulled a dumb-looking face, which Zoe presumed was supposed to indicate an impression of Flynn, and repeated the line.

  Heat was rising in his cheeks; Flynn was getting visibly flustered. “That’s enough of that,” he said. “Harlen, you can either talk to us here or at the precinct. What’s it going to be?”

  “I’m not going to the precinct,” she snorted, making a disgusted face.

  “Then you’ll talk to us here,” Flynn insisted. “Where were you last night, between the hours of eight in the evening and midnight?”

  “She was here,” one of the women announced, to instant shushing from Becki.

  “Don’t give them anything,” she said fiercely. “Not a word. Whatever they try to pin on us, resist, sisters, resist!”

  “She was here,” Angelina said, in a much quieter voice, from behind the bar. “I was serving her all night.”

  Zoe turned to look at her, internally sighing. An alibi. That was just what they needed. The woman was clearly obsessed with witches, clearly had all the triggers in place. Harry Stout’s real connection to the trials would have been enough to push her over the edge and start the killings off with him, and from there she might have gloried in taking revenge on anyone she had ever perceived as slighting her. She might have enjoyed the reputational boost of being caught, even, so she could proclaim to a courtroom that she was a real witch who had brought doom on her enemies.

  And yet, she had an alibi. It almost didn’t seem fair.

  Still, that only ruled out her direct involvement in Ezekiel Sewall’s death—and given that there were two others, and she also had what appeared to be a coven around her, Zoe wasn’t willing to take any chances.

  “What about two nights ago?” she asked.

  Becki shrugged. “Here again. And every night this week. Every night this year so far, pretty much.”

  Zoe was still watching Angelina. The bar owner nodded, though she looked disappointed to have to do it. She must have put two and two together, after Zoe and Flynn had spoken with her last night. Getting rid of her most trouble-making customer might not have been smart for someone whose bar was almost empty, but it might certainly have been a relief.

  “What about the others?” Zoe asked.

  “All five of them.” Angelina nodded confirmation.

  Zoe glanced at Flynn. “Call Reed,” she said. “We can at least have them check all five alibis, make sure that they are airtight, and search for links to the other victims. The locals can handle that while we look at other leads.”

  Flynn nodded. “I don’t have her number,” he said. “Can I borrow your phone?”

  Zoe handed it over without a thought, unlocking it with her thumb as she went. “You will stay here for questioning,” she said, addressing the five women, who met this declaration with a generous amount of swearing, refusals, and epithets.

  “If you want to drink here next week,” Angelina said ominously, raising her voice over the hubbub, “you’ll do as you’re told.”

  That seemed to settle them down a little, at least, though they still seemed deeply unhappy with the situation. Zoe turned back at a nudge from Flynn, to see him staring intently at her phone.

  “Zoe,” he said. “This is all just numbers.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “In your phone. There’s no contact names. Just… numbers.”

  Zoe bent her neck to look at the screen. “It is the second one down, there.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Zoe ignored him. “That is the right one.”

  “Right.” Flynn hesitated, his finger over the call button. “By the way, I don’t think I was supposed to see this, but your therapist sent you a message about rescheduling your missed session.”

  Zoe scowled at him. Why was he prying into her private business, all of a sudden? “Just make the call,” she said, wishing he would hurry up.

  The quicker Reed arrived, the quicker they could go back to the work they had been doing before this wild goose chase, and get a firmer lead to follow up. And time was of the essence, now more than ever. It was only a couple of hours before dark would fall, given the short winter days of February. And that meant it was only a couple of hours before Salem was under threat once again from a killer who had so far taken three lives—and Zoe had a certainty in her gut that he or she was not going to stop there.

  “What do we do when we get back to the precinct?” Flynn asked, ending his brief call with Reed and turning back to her.

  “We try to beat the genealogist at his own game,” Zoe said, furrowing her brows, already thinking of the steps she would need to take to begin her search.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Zoe sat down in front of the computer that the Salem police department had loaned them, with Flynn squashed in at the side of the desk on a chair that stuck out into the aisle. She was waiting impatiently for it to load up, already planning out the steps she would take in her head.

  “So, how are we going to do this?” Flynn asked dubiously. “The genealogist said it would take him a long time, right? He’s got a head start on us, and he’s an expert. What makes you think we can get there any quicker?”

  “We will not,” Zoe said, not bothering to look at him as the browser finally appeared on the screen. She began to type, opening new tabs for searches: wedding records, divorce records, birth announcements, old newspaper archives. “I will. And I will do it quicker because I have to. We need this information.”

  Flynn shifted restlessly in his chair. A distraction. Seven seconds before he did it again. Zoe concentrated hard on the screen, trying to shut out everything around the glowing box in front of her.

  “Well, if I’m not needed here, then I’m heading out,” Flynn said. “I’m going to start going door to door, asking people what they can tell us. Business owners from the area around both stores, anything I can think of. I’m going to talk to actual people.”

  Zoe nodded once, not wanting to drag her attention away from the records. She was searching through them, going back in time: looking for the trials and everyone connected with them. She remembered Judge’s Hardware: it was a judge that Harry Stout was connected with, not a victim. She started with Frank Richards and began to work her way through.

  When she looked up a second later, Flynn was nowhere to be found. She glanced across the room, but he must have left while her attention was elsewhere. Zoe focused in again, trying to determine just who Frank Richards was.

  One by one, she traced his ancestors back. The lines of family trees fl
ourished before her eyes: a web of interconnected people, from birth to marriage to death and through again, people moving to Salem from other areas, getting lost in the slew of records. She discarded these; with no connection further back in Salem’s history, they were irrelevant.

  It was possible that someone might have left the area and returned years or even generations later, so Zoe undertook quick searches of surnames that returned nothing. It would take too long to track down records from other counties, so she returned to the root of the tree, starting again on another route. Zoe chased them down through every dead end like she was running methodically through a maze, returning always to her last branch and tracing it down again through a new path.

  There was a logic to it, like patterns of numbers, almost an algorithm. A tempo of dates and names that spread up through history from the present day. Zoe began to lose track of time, of how long she had been doing this. Her focus was all on the work; the real world faded away from her.

  She had to double-check the name and birth date when she saw it. Surely, it couldn’t be that easy? But there it was, in black and white on the screen: Frank Richards was descended from John Thomas, one of the original officials who presided over both sets of trials.

  He was linked.

  It was coming together, and excitement made Zoe’s heart race faster and faster as she started to search back through Ezekiel Sewall’s history. His parents, their parents, and—

  But this couldn’t be right. Both sets of grandparents had only moved to Salem after being born elsewhere. One pair appeared to already have been married when they first answered the census; they had been born, grown up, met, and wed somewhere else. This wasn’t right.

  If this was correct, Ezekiel Sewall had no connection at all to the original members of the trials. Neither the judges nor the victims.

  Zoe froze in despair, her fingers still on the keyboard as she stared at the screen. Once again, Ezekiel Sewall proved the exception to the rule, the straw that broke their theories. If it wasn’t for the fact that Zoe had seen the body with her own eyes, seen the unmistakable signature of the same hand, she would be beginning to think he was killed by a copycat.

  He wasn’t a business owner, wasn’t linked to the trials, had nothing in age or appearance in common with the other victims. He was hung in a different way, captured at home instead of on the street. Ezekiel Sewall was the enigma that Zoe just couldn’t crack. Why him? What was the connection? Try as she might, she just couldn’t see it.

  What a waste of time. Zoe had been sitting here at this computer for so long trying to track down this own idea, and it had gone nowhere. Not to mention the time she had wasted by going to meet with the genealogist in the first place. She’d made a huge mistake.

  A buzz at her elbow drew Zoe away from her self-flagellation, and she saw Dr. Applewhite’s name on the screen along with a text message. A plea to let her know if Zoe was all right; apparently she had been around at Zoe’s apartment, knocking on the door. After everything that happened with Shelley, Zoe had gone dark for a long time, refusing to answer the door to anyone—even the mentor who was as close to a maternal figure as she had ever really known.

  Yet again, Zoe had caused her to worry, forgetting to inform anyone that she was out of town on assignment. She couldn’t seem to do anything right anymore. She was letting people down on all sides—and most of all, whoever it was that was destined to be the killer’s new target tonight. Because Zoe knew that there was going to be another death. There was no way the killer was done. If anything, history taught her that whoever was doing this would continue to escalate, perhaps even beginning to move quicker.

  But Zoe still couldn’t figure out who the next victim was going to be—and if she didn’t do it soon, she would be attending another crime scene and examining another body.

  The phone in her hand buzzed again, this time with a call, and Zoe answered it quickly. “Flynn?”

  “I’m just coming back to the precinct now,” he said.

  “I’ll meet you outside,” Zoe replied, wanting both fresh air and to get there as quickly as possible. If he had a lead, they would need to follow it immediately—even a second’s delay could mean death now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  “What did you find?” Zoe asked, rushing toward Flynn so fast that she almost didn’t stop before running right into him.

  “I don’t know,” Flynn said. His face was gray, and he had spread his hands out to either side of his body, as if to catch her before she stopped. He shook his head wearily. “Just more and more rumors about the link to the witch trials. I heard all kinds of theories. I really think there might be something in this.”

  “Witchcraft?” Zoe said flatly. That was ridiculous, and Flynn should know that too.

  “Well, not exactly. Maybe someone with delusions, you know? They think they’re a witch. Then they have to go out and kill people to prove that their curses work,” Flynn said.

  Zoe shook her head. “That seems illogical. In the carrying out of the hangings, they would have to know that it was not magic but rather their own actions causing the deaths.”

  Flynn’s nostrils flared out wider than usual. Zoe counted the distance between each side. “Fine, whatever. What about your genealogy? Did you find anything yet?”

  “Yes, and no,” Zoe said, folding her arms across her chest in a defensive gesture. Not that he would pick her up on how little she had progressed; he had the same result. But she held herself to a higher standard, and she had failed. “I traced back Frank Richards. He is related to a judge. John Thomas from both trials. But Ezekiel Sewall has no link.”

  Flynn screwed up his face. “You already traced their family trees back? Completely?”

  “Yes,” Zoe said. She held out a sheaf of papers she had printed out as she worked: each one a section of the men’s family trees, reaching from them backwards into history like the sprawling web of a spider. “Look. There is no link for Sewall. His families came to Salem no earlier than the forties.”

  Flynn shook his head, taking the papers from her and glancing over them. “This is impossible,” he said. “Even the genealogist couldn’t go back this far so quickly. You must have gone too fast, made a mistake. What about checking other branches? Uncles and Aunts?”

  “I did all of that,” Zoe said, starting to feel annoyed. Why was he doubting her now? He hadn’t been bothered to sit by and watch her work, but now he wanted to criticize her?

  “No, you can’t have,” Flynn insisted. “It’s not humanly possible. All of these records would have taken hours and hours to search. You can’t be sure.”

  Zoe stared at him. What was his problem with this? Did he really need to make an issue out of it? “I checked,” she said stubbornly.

  “How?” Flynn pressed a hand to his forehead and rubbed the space between his eyes, as if he was getting a headache from the whole conversation. “This just doesn’t make any sense, Zoe. How are you able to do these things? I swear, there’s something weird going on with you.”

  “There is nothing weird,” Zoe said, taking a step back.

  “There!” Flynn said. “Right there. ‘There is.’ You always talk like that. All formal and clipped.”

  “I simply respect the rules of grammar.” Zoe frowned. “I do not see what that has to do with my investigative skills.”

  “It’s not just that,” Flynn said, exasperatedly. His voice was beginning to get louder. Zoe glanced nervously around at the flow of people going by them on the sidewalk, most of them cops going into or out of the precinct. “You do things with math, too. I’ve seen it. Calculations that people can’t make in their heads. And your phone—it’s all just numbers!”

  Zoe shook her head dismissively. “I do not know what you are talking about,” she said. “Why would I save a number to my phone under a name if I will only need it for a short while? I just remembered how long it had been since Detective Reed called me, and identified her number that way.”


  “I looked,” Flynn snapped. “There are no names in your contact list. None. Even your therapist was only saved under a number. It’s like you’ve memorized every single one of them. Who does that? I mean, who could do that?”

  “This has nothing to do with the investigation,” Zoe said curtly, wishing he would stop. That he would shut up. The more he pushed her, the less she could tell. Couldn’t he see that?

  “Yes, it does,” Flynn said, almost shouting it. “Partners have to trust each other, Zoe. We have to work together. You said something before—to the stupid women who thought they were a coven. You said you were cursed already. What did you mean?”

  Zoe glared at him. “My personal life has nothing to do with—”

  “Yes, it does!” Flynn exploded. “Of course, it does! It affects everything! What is going on with you? How can you do these things? How do you always see things that others can’t? And don’t give me that line about experience, I know it’s more than that!”

  Zoe felt like one of those coins inside the spiral charity collection bins, the ones that enticed children to part with their loose change. She was circling down and down toward a black hole that she couldn’t step away from. How many times had a partner challenged her like this? Seen through her flimsy attempts to hide what she really was, tried to get to the truth? Most of them just called her a freak and walked away. Now it was only a matter of time before Flynn did the same.

  “I will not tell you,” Zoe said, resolute, her voice quiet with resignation. “I cannot.”

  “For God’s sake, Zoe,” Flynn said. Every line in his body was taut, tensed, down to the hands that were clasped into fists. Then he visibly relaxed, straight lines becoming curves again, his jaw loosening. Zoe could see the effort it took in his face, hear the strain in his voice as he tried to keep it level and low. “I lost someone too, you know.”