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

by Blake Pierce

  Zoe didn’t reply. She met his eyes, but said nothing. Was that supposed to be some kind of comfort? Did he think this was all about Shelley? And she’d seen some pain in him before. She’d known it had to be something. But it didn’t change a thing. She still couldn’t tell him about her ability to see the numbers. She had only ever been able to trust three people with that information, and one of them was dead. She wasn’t going to go through that again.

  “That’s why I joined the FBI,” Flynn said, his voice low. He broke off to let someone walk by them before continuing. “My sister. I was right next to her. There was a home invasion—it was only the two of us, and he tied me up. I had to watch her die. I couldn’t stop it. I haven’t told anyone since I joined the academy. You’re the only one who knows.” His words failed him, his voice cracking as he stopped, his jaw tense with the effort of holding himself together.

  Zoe swallowed, her throat dry all of a sudden. What had happened to Flynn was awful. She wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. That feeling of helplessness, of knowing you couldn’t save the person you cared for—they had that in common.

  But she couldn’t break down. Not while there was a case to work on. And she couldn’t let him in. Not when it would put him at risk.

  “It went on for hours,” Flynn said, and Zoe couldn’t understand why he was still talking, why he was still pouring out these details to her. “He—the man who attacked us—he kept asking us where we kept all the money. We had no idea what he was talking about. The cops at the time thought that he must have had us confused with another house—that he’d had a tip about some big payout and got the details wrong. We didn’t have anything to give him. So he said if he couldn’t get the money, he’d take the value out of us until we told him.”

  Flynn’s eyes slid closed, his voice raw and ragged. “My sister, she… she wasn’t the type to take something lying down. She taught me how to stand up to bullies when I was at school. She managed to get her hands free. Then he beat her, forced her to—well. And when she got free the second time and started to run, he panicked. Grabbed her and cut her throat. And then he panicked again and ran, and left me tied up there with her while she bled out. I couldn’t even move. I had to sit there until her blood…” Flynn shuddered, seemingly unable to go on.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Zoe interrupted, unable to meet his eyes and the tears swimming in them now.

  “Because partners need to be able to trust each other,” Flynn said. “Zoe, you know my secret now. I trust you. Please trust me.”

  “I cannot tell you,” Zoe said, unable to raise her voice barely more than a whisper. He didn’t understand. What happened to him wasn’t his fault. It was in the past. It wasn’t such a fundamental part of who he was that he could never be separated from it. He hadn’t grown up with it, learned to hide it from people who would use it to hurt him. Even though he had been through something terrible, it still didn’t matter.

  “Then we can’t work together,” Flynn said, his voice tight and choked with anger. “I’m going to chase down a new lead. Alone.”

  He spun on his heel and stormed away, and Zoe saw him go only in her peripheral vision. She was frozen solid, trapped by her ever-present inability to know what to say to make someone feel better, and by the time she looked up, he was gone.

  Zoe thought about leaving. She thought about going back to the motel, collapsing on the bed, letting sleep take her. Sleep would be far preferable to waking consciousness right about now. Even if she dreamed of Shelley, even if it was a nightmare, she wouldn’t have to feel like she did right now.

  But she couldn’t leave. She had a responsibility, and if she didn’t uphold it, people would die. Zoe headed back inside, knowing her work was not yet done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  She walked down the street, hands in her pockets, head high. She nodded and smiled at a few tourists as she passed by them, keeping up the image of someone who was just like them. Not a single one of them suspected a thing, and that in turn made her smile for real. She was still free, like smoke rising into the air. They couldn’t see the blood on her hands.

  It made a lot of sense; after all, the witch was looking over her shoulder, guiding her in everything. With the witch’s power, of course she had managed to get away with it so far. And she was going to keep getting away with it. This was righteous work that she did. Who could blame or punish her for it? She was only righting a wrong that had been done so many years before. Tipping the balance of the scales back to the center at last.

  They should be thanking her for it.

  The cops were everywhere today. As the afternoon drew later, they seemed to be crowding the streets more than the tourists were—dark blue shirts under jackets of the same color, hats positioned neatly on heads, standing out against the all-pervasive festive atmosphere of the town. It was always Halloween in Salem. Ever since that first day when a mere child had started a cataclysmic avalanche of events with a simple accusation, the eerie sense of dread had never gone away.

  She’d felt it her whole life, and now she knew why. She was blessed: the only one of them in the whole town who understood. The only one who could clear the curse that blanketed it like fine snow. And she was doing it.

  If she was guilty of anything, it was being too kind. The men who had put the witch to death all that time ago had made her suffer first: tortured her until she confessed, made her stand in court and sign her own death sentence, then made her wait in a cell for long agonizing days until they hauled her up to the scaffold. She’d made their deaths come quick, and they never even knew it was coming. All that fear, dread, and pain—she’d spared them from it.

  “Ma’am,” one of the officers said, approaching her with a nod of his cap. She wasn’t even afraid. He couldn’t touch her. Why would he? “We just wanted to let you know that there is a curfew in effect tonight. We’ll be clearing the streets at nine p.m., so please make sure you’re on your way home before then.”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling at him cheerfully. “I’m just out to visit someone anyway.” She paused, then flashed him an even wider smile, acting on an impulsive whim. “Thank you for keeping our streets safe, Officer.”

  “We do our best, ma’am,” he said, tipping his hat again and moving on, but she could see he was impressed.

  And why not share the joy? She wasn’t worried about the curfew. It wouldn’t interfere with her plan. Nothing could, now. The witch had helped her to plan it all out, and no one was going to be able to stop her.

  She really was out to visit someone; that hadn’t been a lie. It was just that the person she was visiting wasn’t aware of it. She slipped into the café, pretending to look at the menu, waiting for him to notice her. She studied him from behind. He was a small man, hardly more than a boy in appearance, though it was funny to think that the last living descendant of one of the Salem Witch Trial judges was nothing more than a café server. He turned at last, smoothing floured hands down over his brown apron, smearing it.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. He didn’t react at all to seeing her. He didn’t know who she was. His ancestry didn’t speak to him down the lines of history like hers did. He didn’t know she was the distant daughter of the witch, or that he was the distant son of the man who had condemned her.

  “I’ll take a coffee to go,” she said, with a smile. “Black.”

  He nodded, began to prepare it. She watched him greedily, observing his movements. She had observed him for so long, but this was only the second time she had come inside to place an order; she didn’t like to risk getting too close, in case there was any chance she might fail the first time. She didn’t want them to have a description of her to give to the police. But the witch had helped her there anyway, and no one had ever escaped.

  She was so close to finishing her work. She paid for the order and stood to one side, waiting, unable to stop smiling to herself. She was almost done. And it was beautiful, really, that she could create such s
ymmetry even despite the intervening years. There were only four judges who had been present during the whole of the trials, and those four each had one living male descendent who still lived in Salem.

  Oh, there were more of them than that, of course, if you widened the net. Some had moved far away, returning to England only a generation later, or else moving only one town over. They had spread like a plague over the world, taking their legacy of murder with them. There had been so many moments, researching this for the witch, when she had felt despair that they might have slipped through her fingers. But she’d found them, every last one.

  And this man—he was the last one.

  When he died tonight, the witch’s vengeance would be complete. It would be justice, for her and her sisters who had been taken. And all of it carried out by her own descendant. It was sweet indeed.

  “Here you go,” he said, passing her the cup. For the barest moment, the very tips of their fingers brushed while she accepted it.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Have a nice evening!”

  And inside she laughed as she walked away, knowing that he wasn’t going to have a very nice evening at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Zoe sat at her adopted desk in the bullpen, trying hard to think and utterly unable to do so. It wasn’t just the noise, the constant conversation and the movement all around her, though that was hard enough for her to process. It wasn’t just the still-unfamiliar environment, which threatened to overwhelm her with numbers at any given moment.

  It was the fact that she couldn’t seem to get her heart rate under control, or stop her hands from shaking, or stop repeating the conversation with Flynn over and over in her head. She had a feeling that she had failed a very important test. Like walking out of a classroom and realizing you’d answered the wrong set of questions. Zoe hadn’t felt that feeling often at school, where she’d been an excellent student—until it came to literature, where other students seemed able to analyze subtexts and emotions that, to her, simply didn’t seem to be there.

  And now she felt the same way again. Like she had let Flynn down—let herself down. She wasn’t even supposed to care what Flynn thought. The feeling was horrible, crawling inside her skin like insects. She couldn’t calm down. She couldn’t do anything, not with all this distraction around her.

  Zoe closed her eyes and put her hands to her temples, blocking out everything around her as much as she could. She probably looked strange, but she didn’t care. She just needed to get away. And there was only one place she could go, given that she couldn’t physically get up and leave Salem—not without always walking away from her job.

  She had to go somewhere inside her mind.

  Zoe tried to focus on her breathing as she counted from one to ten, slowly, on each exhale. It was a regular practice for her now, something that should come easily; but she found herself losing count, dropping the thread of numbers that came from her breaths while she counted so many other things around her. Even without the visual stimuli, there was so much to take in: words and laughter, grunts, the sound of chairs moving across the floor, tapping on keyboards, even scents which prompted her to try to calculate the distance between her and the offensive sandwich some officer was eating.

  Zoe couldn’t give up now, not just like that. There was too much at stake here. She needed to find a way to recenter herself, to calm, to focus. If she couldn’t, they weren’t going to get anywhere with this case. There would be another death, and it would be on her shoulders.

  So, she started again. One, with an exhale. Then a slow and measured inhale, and a long exhale with two. She counted that way up to ten, focusing only on her breathing, blocking out anything else that tried to invade. And when she got there, she knew she was ready.

  She opened her eyes on a familiar blue sky. A blue sky that was always the same, clear and bright, like the picture of a sky rather than the real thing. The kind of blue sky that makes you crane your neck for clouds, just for proof. Zoe could no longer hear the sound of the bullpen, but instead the sound of waves lapping by her ear, and distant birds calling, and the wash of waves across the sand at the shoreline.

  She looked over to her left and saw the tops of the trees, where birds spiraled in lazy arcs before plunging down again to their perches. Down, down, to the foot of the tropical forest, where the golden sand met the tree line, and a few scattered palms sheltered the shore. Two of them, growing close by but curving in opposite directions, gave space for a hammock; and inside the hammock, there she was, sipping on a cocktail from a coconut, sunglasses shielding her eyes under a wide-brimmed hat.

  Shelley.

  Zoe took a breath and sat up, paddling her inflatable raft just a short distance to the shore where she could beach it and walk on the sand. She felt warmth from the sun beating down on her head and shoulders, and the ground was warm under her bare feet, the sand shifting pleasantly but not enough to unbalance her. She walked until she could lean against the trunk of one of the palms, and waited for Shelley to speak.

  “You know I never did understand it,” Shelley said, setting down her cocktail. “I told you time and time again.”

  “I know,” Zoe sighed. “You always wanted me to tell others about my ability. You thought they wouldn’t react as badly as I imagined. You wanted me to trust more.”

  “That’s right.” Shelley smiled, her lips, as always, perfectly outline in pale pink lipstick. “So, why do you need me to tell you that again now?”

  “I guess I don’t.” Zoe looked out over the horizon, an almost indiscernible line where blue sky met blue-green sea. She had no excuse, not really. She had known the correct response to Flynn: she should have trusted him. But she hadn’t. There was something holding her back, and it wasn’t a lack of understanding about politeness. It was fear.

  “What are you going to do?” Shelley asked.

  “Solve this case,” Zoe said, brushing sand from her sleeve. “Now that I have my focus back, I will be able to do it. I just need to keep going until I solve it.”

  “And then?”

  Zoe took a breath. “And then I have to trust someone again,” she said. “You were right. I can’t work with someone unless they know about what I can do. That’s why I’ve always struggled to keep my partners around—because they know I don’t trust them. They know I’m hiding something. I wouldn’t want to be partners with someone like that either.”

  “You know,” Shelley said idly, “it kind of sounds like you knew that all along.”

  “Maybe not all along,” Zoe said, with a wry smile. “I should have realized it sooner. But I know what you’re saying. I didn’t need to come here to hear you say that.”

  “Just as long as you know,” Shelley said, tilting her sunglasses down for just a moment to eye Zoe knowingly before picking up her cocktail again.

  Zoe breathed slowly, letting the beach fade away. She wasn’t on a beach, and she never had been. Shelley wasn’t there to give her advice, and she never had been. Zoe knew what she needed to do.

  But before anything else, she needed to solve this case—to stop the killer from defeating her completely.

  With the buzz of numbers around her tuned out, Zoe refocused her attention on the murders. Over and over again, the connection to the Witch Trials had come up. This was Salem—how could it not? But the fact that the connection just wouldn’t seem to go away, and that any other leads they’d had seemed to fall flat under examination, led Zoe to think that there was something in this idea. There had to be something going on here that was somehow linked to the trials. The dates confirmed that, if nothing else.

  So, what was it? Obviously, Zoe didn’t believe in the supernatural. There was nothing spooky going on here—no witches rising from the grave, no curse laid on the town by an avenging coven. It was a physical series of murders carried out by a physical being: a person who must have had reasons for their choices. That meant that it would be possible to follow the strings back, to determine what those reaso
ns were. Zoe just had to make sure she was looking in the right direction, and she would see it, she knew.

  For now, she had to be missing something. There was a direction in which she had not looked, or a clue that she had missed. Somewhere in all of this mess was the final piece that would make everything fall into place. If she could grasp it, that would make all the difference.

  Zoe took her hands down from her temples and grabbed hold of the mouse, opening a new browser window on the computer. She would have to do as much research as was necessary to get to the bottom of this—because there was no way she was going to allow this killer to beat her. She would stop him, and she would do it tonight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Flynn showed his badge to the balding little man, who, with his sharp nose and furtive manner, really couldn’t help but draw comparisons to some kind of rodent. The man inspected it closely, squinting.

  “Looks legitimate,” he announced, and Flynn tried not to bristle at the inference. “So, you’re here investigating the murders?”

  “Of course,” Flynn said impatiently. Why else would he willingly walk into the offices of the local paper and find himself standing opposite the man who had a reputation as the worst rumor-shoveler of them all?

  “And I assume you’re not here to give me an exclusive?” The rodent, who went by the name of George Maden, winked at him.

  “No, I’m not,” Flynn said. “I’m here for information.”

  “Well, we in the business like to conduct ourselves via trades,” Maden said, settling back into his chair. The desk was scattered with various pieces of scrunched-up paper, as was a wastepaper bin beside it. “A bit of quid pro quo, if you catch my meaning.”

  “I’m not here to trade,” Flynn said ominously, leaning forward across the desk with his knuckles pressed against the wood. “You’re going to give me any information you have, or I’m going to arrest you for obstruction of justice. I’m not playing around on this one. It’s gone too far already.”