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

by Blake Pierce

  “It does not feel right,” Zoe said. She was beginning to feel exasperated. How could she possibly explain it? She didn’t even fully understand it herself. But when Willie Salter said she was innocent, something in it rang true. Her excuse—marking off the historic sites and people involved with them—made total sense. On same street as Sewall’s home there was a historic point of interest, an old building that had survived from the early days of the settlement—though it had little to do with witches.

  And there was the fact that the other victims’ pictures did not appear on the board. So, if Willie was telling the truth—it would explain the whole board in a totally different light. And if that meant that the real killer was still out there…

  Zoe couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t let another person die. And if she had no idea yet who the killer was, she could at least maybe figure out if they had at last cracked the code as to the victims. If they knew who was left, they could protect them. That, at least, would be something.

  Flynn mercifully shut up and let her concentrate, without asking any more questions. He just watched as she reopened the same tabs she had used before: local records of all kinds, anything that might give her the data she needed about Ezekiel Sewall—birth name Ezekiel Linus. And she already had a feeling she knew what she was going to find. All she had to do was to confirm it.

  She flashed through record after record, catching names and dates, flying back through the years. Generations passed before her eyes in a matter of clicks. All the way up, up, up, until she saw it.

  Ezekiel Sewall was a direct blood descendent of Samuel Linus. One of the four judges who had presided at both courts held during the infamous Witch Trials.

  Three out of four.

  “This is it,” she said, unable to hold back her excitement. “This proves our theory!”

  “What proves it?” Flynn asked. He looked utterly confused. “I couldn’t follow any of that. What are you saying?”

  “Samuel Linus and Ezekiel Sewall,” Zoe said, trying very hard to be patient. “William Stout and Harry Stout. John Thomas and Frank Richards. The links are all there. Each of the victims so far is a descendent of one of the judges. The last living male descendent who still resides in Salem.”

  Flynn stared at the screen, then back at her. Understanding appeared to be dawning in his face, but there was something else in it as well.

  “How did you understand all of that?” he asked. “The screens were barely loaded in before you were off again—how could you understand it so quickly?”

  “It is just names and dates,” Zoe said impatiently. “Look. It is easy.”

  She started typing again, commencing a new search. It was the only way to go now, the logical next step. This would give them all of the information they needed. This would get them the answer.

  “What are you doing now?” Flynn asked, leaning forward with a frown.

  Zoe wished he wouldn’t interrupt. Tracing the lineage down was harder than tracing it up: people would move away or die childless, leaving her to go back to the last fork in the road and try again down a sibling’s bloodline. But if he was going to stay on board with her line of inquiry, he needed to know. “I am tracing the lineage of the final judge, Waitstill Williams,” she said. “Whoever his descendants are, one of them must be the intended target for tonight. A male who still lives in Salem. If we find them, we can protect them. Then it does not matter whether we have the killer in custody or not—we will keep them safe.”

  “Wait, but…” Flynn shook his head. “This is impossible. Zoe, the genealogist still hasn’t even gotten back to us about any of the first victims, and you’ve traced all three of them? There’s no way this can be accurate. You can’t possibly have taken in all of that information so quickly.”

  “Do not tell me what I can and cannot do,” Zoe said, looking at him for a long moment.

  “Then tell me how,” Flynn said. “This is—this is something to do with it, isn’t it? With everything. The numbers in your phone. You knew how to cut off Willie Salter when she ran. You always seem to know… things.”

  Zoe took a breath.

  It was now or never. She remembered her vision of Shelley, sitting on that island with her coconut cocktail. She remembered the real Shelley, the one who didn’t live in her head, and how she had celebrated Zoe’s ability, used it, taken the opportunity to make their working relationship a more efficient one.

  If she had any belief in God anymore, she might have prayed for Flynn to be the same. But she didn’t have that comfort. She could only take the plunge.

  And he had trusted her with his secret, hadn’t he?

  “I can see the numbers,” she said, the very same numbers telling her even as she said the words that there weren’t any others in close enough earshot to understand what she was saying, that they were all distracted by ringing phones or interviewing people at their desks or talking with colleagues.

  “What do you mean, see them?” Flynn asked, frowning.

  “I mean, I see them,” Zoe said, exasperated that she did not have better words to describe how it felt. “I look at anything, and I see the numbers. I look at you and I see six foot three, twenty-four years old, I know the dimensions of your suit and the size of your feet. I see them, like they were written in the air.”

  “Wait,” Flynn said, glancing around and lowering his voice. “I tell everyone I’m twenty-five. I lied to get into a training program early and it stuck. How did you know that? Did you look at my file? My birth certificate? Maitland is the only one who knows—did he tell you?”

  “He did not need to,” Zoe said. “I can see it.”

  “So…” Flynn looked at the computer screen, as if trying to reconcile what she had just told him with the things he had seen. “So, you can just see the way the numbers work? But how does that help you with the genealogy?”

  “Not just numbers, but also patterns,” Zoe said. “I… see them everywhere. You have noticed that I am not… gifted at conversation.”

  “Right,” Flynn said, with a half-chuckle. Then his expression cleared. “Because you’re hearing numbers and patterns as well as words?”

  “You are beginning to understand.” Zoe nodded, itching to get back to her research. Perhaps because if she lost herself in that, she could avoid thinking about how he saw her now. About the way he would look at her, how he would call her a freak, how he would want another partner. Anything to bury her head and get away from the inevitable.

  “Okay.” Flynn paused, then looked at her with narrowed eyes. “What’s four hundred and thirty-three times five thousand and twelve?”

  “Two million, one hundred and seventy thousand, one hundred and ninety six,” Zoe said immediately.

  “Wow.”

  “Did you know the answer to that?”

  “No,” Flynn admitted, breaking out into a sheepish smile. “I guess I should have tested you. Wait…”

  He took out his phone and tapped something on the screen, then looked up with his mouth open, about to ask the question.

  “Five hundred and twenty-nine,” Zoe said.

  “What?” Flynn gaped at her, looking down at his phone screen for confirmation and then back at her. “I didn’t even ask you yet!”

  “I followed the pattern of your fingers on the screen,” Zoe said. “Assuming a standard screen placement of the calculator app, I worked out which numbers you had pressed and which function.”

  “Okay.” Flynn took a moment. “Wow. All right. So… how about this? Tell me her height.” He cleared the calculator away from his phone screen and held it up to her, showing just the background he used behind his app icons.

  “She is five seven, and weighs a hundred and twenty pounds. She is sixteen years old.” Zoe paused. No sooner had she made the calculations than the question arose in her mind: why would Flynn have the image of a young teenage girl on his phone? And looking at the angle of the girl’s nose and the width of her mouth, she knew. Her mouth went dry. �
�And she was your sister.”

  “Yeah,” Flynn said. His amazement was tempered by a little emotion, coming to the fore even further when he looked at the image himself. “That’s exactly right. Wow. I guess you have some kind of superpower, huh?”

  Zoe paused for a moment, watching his face. She wasn’t a great judge when it came to human facial expressions, but she had a feeling he was being sincere. A superpower. That’s what he had called it. Not a curse, or a freak of nature, or an invasion of privacy. A superpower. Of all the reactions Zoe knew to expect and fear when people began to suspect she had the ability to work out things they couldn’t, this was not one of them.

  Maybe he was right. Something that helped her to save lives, to put criminals behind bars, shouldn’t really be considered a curse. It was more like a blessing. One day, she hoped, she would be able to see it that way fully herself, and stop hating it. That was what she was dreaming of now.

  “If you help me out with this, I can go even faster,” Zoe said, going back to the computer and starting to click around on the screen. “I can trace the lineage down easily, but there will always be dead ends. People who died or moved away. When they die without offspring it is easy, but if they move away, it is always possible that they could move back again. If you spend some time tracking them down and figuring out whether they ever came back, that would make sure we are on the right path.”

  Flynn nodded, seeming to recover his composure as he put his phone face down on the desk and sat forward. “All right. Let’s do it.”

  Together they worked down the lines of Waitstill Williams’s family history, tracing veins through the town’s past, knotting together marriages and children and creating a tapestry that seemed to encompass such a vast space it was difficult to imagine.

  Zoe finally reached the present day while Flynn was still checking off migrated relatives, and she worked her way to five men who were born in Salem; then narrowed it down to four left alive; then again, taking out two who had been registered elsewhere at the time of the last census.

  Only two were left. Two male descendants who still lived in Salem, the only ones remaining from all of the names she had skimmed through. But they still had to check—to know if there were others who had returned.

  “Anything?” Zoe asked, watching as Flynn crossed off an entry on his scrawled handwritten list.

  “Nothing yet,” Flynn said, shaking his head. “I’ve barely done anything.”

  “I will help now,” Zoe said, craning her head to look at the list. She started typing again. “You can cross off the Smithton branch.”

  “Oh, okay,” Flynn said, leaving off what he was doing to find the right entry and draw a line through the name.

  “And the Boston Waitstills,” Zoe added. “The last one died in 1936.”

  “Right,” Flynn said, crossing off that one as well.

  “The English ones are still there, as far as records tell me,” Zoe added.

  “Christ!” Flynn exclaimed. “I can’t even cross these off as fast as you can check them! Just give me a minute.”

  Zoe smiled to herself. Within a matter of ten minutes they had finished tying up all of the loose ends, and they knew. They had managed it.

  “So, we are down to Waitstill Williams—clearly named for his family’s history—and Jared Williams. Cousins.”

  “I’ll get the captain to send out patrols to their addresses,” Flynn said, making to get up.

  “No.” Zoe stopped him with a hand out in front of her. “No, we go ourselves. I know you do not believe me, but something is off with Willie Salter. I think the killer is still out there. We have to go now—to try and catch them before they can strike.”

  “I don’t know if I believe you,” Flynn said. “But… I trust you. You’ve trusted me, and I’m willing to do the same. We’ll go check it out. But there’s two, so we’d better split up.”

  “All right.” Zoe glanced around the bullpen, which was more or less empty; as soon as the evening had begun to draw in, the beat cops had all gone out on patrol, and most of the detectives with them. Even though the suspected killer was in custody, Captain Lee hadn’t called off the curfew—a smart move, as far as Zoe was concerned—and there was still a need to enforce it. “We should call for backup on the way.”

  “Got it.” Flynn grabbed his coat from the back of his chair, and started to move through the lines of desks as Zoe followed him. “I’ll flag down a car outside and take—what was it? Jared Williams.”

  “Then I will take Waitstill,” Zoe answered. “And Flynn? You had better hurry. It is already dark. If all that time we spent investigating Willie Salter really was a waste, then our killer will be ready to attack. They may already be lying in wait out there.”

  “I know.” Flynn glanced at her for a moment, and now that she knew what she was looking for, Zoe could see the vulnerability. The pain and fear that the loss of his sister had given him. “Be careful.”

  “You too,” she said, dashing out into the cold February air toward the car.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  Waitstill Williams parked the car outside his house and rested his head back against the back of the seat for a moment, closing his eyes. It had been such a long day. Even with the café closing early thanks to the curfew, he was exhausted. It didn’t help that he’d started the morning at his other job, before heading to the café for the afternoon. These double shifts were going to be the death of him.

  But then, that was the curse of a family inheritance that consisted only of property and nothing else. He had a home, but no money to fill it with, and the maintenance had been growing every day. This hadn’t been what he had dreamed of when he went to college to study medicine, but everything had happened so quickly. Coming back here to care for his mom in the last stages of her cancer, the disease he’d been hoping to learn how to cure before it returned for her. Losing her. Inheriting the house. Now he was stuck here alone, at least until the end of next summer; he was saving up as much as he could for a deposit on an apartment, so he could move closer to college, rent this place out, and get back on track.

  But for now, it was spiced lattes and long winter days with an aching back from standing up for eight-hour shifts at a time. Still, Waitstill knew it could be worse. He didn’t want to sell the house—his mother’s pride and joy—but if it came down to it, at least it could be converted into capital.

  Waitstill got out of the car and ducked into the house, avoiding the cold air as much as possible by parking right outside the doorstep. Once in, he exhaled, hanging up his coat and stretching his arms above his head to try and loosen his back. At least he was home. He’d get a quick dinner, consisting of the leftover bread from the café’s daily baking and some soup heated up in the microwave to save money, and then get to sleep early.

  He put the brown paper bag containing his bread down on the kitchen counter along with his keys, and then turned to the cupboard. He was consulting his options from a stack of cans—all bulk-bought during a two-for-one deal, also to save money—when he heard a noise that made him pause, his ears going on alert.

  What was that?

  Did it come from the living room?

  Waitstill cocked his head and moved toward the doorway, listening. The rest of the house was dark, since he’d not bothered to turn on the lights on his way down the hall, but he had a feeling he knew what it might be. There was a cat his mom had been feeding scraps to for years; it belonged to a neighbor, but it never seemed to tire of a little extra meal. When she was sick, after they brought her home to spend her last days outside of the hospital, it had curled up on her bed and slept with her until she passed.

  He hadn’t seen the cat since. If it was here, he didn’t want to scare it off. In a strange way, even though it probably wouldn’t understand, he kind of wanted to thank the cat. He moved carefully forward into the room, not wanting to make any sudden or loud movements, waiting for his eyes to adjust enough to see it.

  There was an
other noise behind him, from the side of the room that had been behind the door when he entered, and Waitstill had just enough time to register that it didn’t sound like a cat at all. It sounded much bigger than that—taller—like the movement of a human. That was all he managed to think, his body far too slow to move and look behind him, before there was a crashing pain against the back of his head. When he next found awareness, he was kneeling on the floor, his head ringing and the darkness swimming in front of his eyes.

  And another blow crashed against the back of his skull, and Waitstill Williams knew nothing else.

  ***

  Flynn burst into the house, staring around him, the remains of the door lock shattered behind him. He’d had no choice; with the owner of the home unresponsive, it was absolutely possible that they were already at the mercy of the killer.

  He looked around rapidly, searching for any sign of Jared Williams, as the sergeant who had given him a ride piled into the building after him. Flynn quickly signaled for the other man to go upstairs, while he moved through the rooms on the lower floor, his gun drawn and in his hand in case. His heart pounded as he entered each room, holding his gun in front of him as he stepped through each doorway, waiting to see the killer crouched over a body or already hefting a rope.

  But there was nothing. As he stepped into the kitchen and cleared it, a calendar caught Flynn’s eye. It was marked with bright red pen, pulling his attention over. With one last check of the room and doorways Flynn stepped closer to read it.

  And he swore out loud, viciously and vehemently, before swinging around to race toward the door again.

  “Sergeant!” he yelled. “The homeowner’s on vacation. We need to move—to get to the other potential victim—now!”

  And his heart lurched in his chest again as he realized that Zoe was on her way there first—and about to walk into the killer’s path.

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  Zoe took in the car in the driveway, the light on in the hall, as she pulled up with a Flynn-like rapidity outside the house. He was home—or someone was. Zoe hoped it was their suspected victim, if only because that would mean she didn’t need to go elsewhere to track him down—and especially if that light meant that he was home safe.