Zoe Prime Mystery 01-Face of Death

by Pierce, Blake

  “It’s just a combination of luck and experience,” Zoe said, turning the page, still without reading a word. “Once you’ve been going for as long as I have, you’ll be able to spot things a bit easier. Then you make your best guess, and hope you get it right.”

  There was something in the air now, something that hung so heavily over Zoe’s neck that she was sure it must have gained visible physical manifestation. That Shelley was looking at her and seeing it, and knowing that she was not telling the whole truth.

  “Just luck? That’s how you knew he would dodge to the side, instead of staying on course to where the others were waiting?”

  There was hard disbelief in Shelley’s voice, a sternness and inflexibility that Zoe had heard many a time before. It was her mother’s voice, her teacher’s voice, the voices of the few friends she had had before they inevitably got weirded out and stopped calling her. It was the voice of everyone, eventually, when they stopped believing that she wasn’t a freak.

  You’ve got the devil in you, child.

  The moments ticked away, Zoe’s skin crawling beneath her shirt, sweat prickling from her pores. Shelley didn’t believe her. Was this the moment where she had to confess? If she continued to pretend, would it be worse? Shelley could move on, find a new partner, and that would be bad enough. Zoe was getting used to her. Or she could bring it to their superiors.

  Was now the time to tell her?

  The landline phone rang, startling both of them with the abrupt way it cut into the stillness, slicing through their tension like a cheese wire. Shelley scrambled to answer it, dropping her papers on the desk and rolling her chair back toward the phone.

  “Hello?... Yes?”

  Zoe knew from Shelley’s expression alone that it wasn’t good news.

  She hung up, her face blanching pale. “There’s another body,” she said. “Sheriff will take us there. It’s not far. He’s sending a team in with us.”

  Zoe felt her stomach sinking. They hadn’t gotten away with missing him last night, after all. Even though she had expected it, it hit her like a ton of bricks. Another person had lost their life, because Zoe wasn’t quick enough to save them.

  “We wasted that time on Sikes,” Shelley said, her tone hollow. She looked shell-shocked, like she was going to stand there for a long time without moving.

  They couldn’t afford that right now. They needed action. They needed to find the clues, stop it from happening yet again. Zoe grabbed her notepad, Styrofoam coffee cup, and bag and headed for the door. “Any details?”

  “Just the location right now,” Shelley said, shaking her head, seeming to pull herself out of her daze. Then she tossed her head to the side sharply, her tone changing. “Wait a second.”

  Shelley moved over to the map on the wall, grabbing a red pin and hunting the place names for a moment before pushing the pin into place.

  “There?” Zoe asked, feeling confusion wash over her. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what the sheriff said,” Shelley confirmed.

  Zoe took another look at the map, then turned to go, rushing out to the parking lot. This was wrong, all wrong. It was not far from their location, but still off from where she had predicted. How had she managed to mess it up?

  The straight line was no longer intact—this pin swooping to the left and below the last pin, where the previous one had been to the right and below the original murder.

  It wasn’t a straight line.

  Was it possible that it was a curve?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Zoe let Shelley take the driver’s seat, as she sat by her side, thinking. Numbers and figures and curves. Could it really be true? Could she have been reading the signs wrong all this time?

  The car threaded through back roads and along dirt trails, taking the shortest possible route at the sheriff’s directions. He led the way in a battered police vehicle which had clearly seen better days, and he had no qualms about preserving the suspension or the tires. Being a rental, their car could not quite take the same level of punishment.

  Zoe watched the scenery flash by the windows, clutching her seatbelt where it lay across her chest. She was always a little carsick as a passenger. Holding the belt away from her neck a touch helped.

  They turned onto a highway. A large space of dirt and rocky ground ran alongside it, with trees growing beyond. It was evident that the work of human hands and machinery had cleared the space. No trees grew in straight, even lines in nature. Nature’s patterns were circles, spirals. Could it be that their killer was taking inspiration there?

  The presence of two marked police cars from the sheriff’s station indicated their destination before the sheriff turned off, bringing his own vehicle to a stop beside them. Shelley audibly sighed in relief, loosening her grip on the steering wheel.

  “Remind me never to get into a car with that man,” she said, shaking her head as she pulled up to a gentle stop on the shoulder of the road, far out of the way of traffic.

  Zoe jumped out of the car, anxious to get to the body. She wanted to see how this one had been left. It was their first opportunity to find a real body still in position, before the crime scene had been recorded and the victim taken away to the coroner’s table. There were sure to be more clues here. Things that the investigators wouldn’t have seen. Things that only Zoe could pick out.

  A pair of white-faced middle-aged men, both dressed in the drab browns and greens of hunting gear, were leaning on the hood of one of the police cars. The sheriff made a beeline for them, and Zoe followed suit, glancing behind to check that Shelley was with her.

  “Sheriff, these are the two hunters who found the body,” the young deputy was saying. “They’re a little shaken, but they didn’t see much.”

  “You did not see another person in the woods?” Zoe asked sharply, cutting across the sheriff’s mumbled reply.

  The hunters looked at her wide-eyed, glancing over to the sheriff with confusion. With an impatient movement, Zoe took her badge from her pocket and flipped it open, allowing them to see for themselves that she was FBI.

  “We didn’t hear or see anything,” one of the men said. “We were settled in the woods from the early hours, just sitting and waiting, all quiet like. We were listening for animals. Would’ve heard if something happened nearby.”

  “How did you discover the body?” Zoe asked.

  “We were packing up to go home,” the other explained, with a rueful smile. “Didn’t catch a thing. The birds kept screaming. Thought they must have figured out we were there and weren’t going to let nothing close to us without a warning. Usually they quiet down, but not these. So, after a few hours, we thought it best to go.”

  “That’s when we saw the fox,” the other put in. “Nose right to the ground, following something. He got spooked when he saw us and ran the other way, but the sun was up and we could see what he was looking at.”

  “Blood,” the first hunter clarified. “All over the ground. A trail. Great spurts of it. Thought it had to be a wounded animal at first. But when we followed it, not far away, we found—”

  The men both fell silent, looking at their feet, no doubt reliving what they had seen.

  “Thank you for your help, gentlemen,” Shelley said softly, as Zoe stalked away from them and into the trees. They had nothing more to tell her.

  She did not have far to go. There were a series of flags and numbers laid out already, following a path across the sparse ground into the trees. Glancing back along their route, she could follow them to an access road which the sheriff had avoided taking them down, a point just far enough off the highway so as not to attract too much attention.

  Zoe paused, heading back across the ground. She had a feeling that the access road was where it all started, and she wanted to do this chronologically. Lay the numbers out in a way that made sense.

  By the access trail was a great spout of blood, a gush that must have come from the initial attack. A surge of adrenaline forcing the heart t
o beat faster, or perhaps movement as the woman pushed her killer away. This was not like the other murders—not like them at all. Zoe even had her doubts that this could be the one they were looking for.

  Looking ahead, she noted the flags—each of them placed by a splash of blood. So many of them. This was a heavy wound. The spacing between them, several inches each time, told her of movement at speed. The regularity in distances between the flags, well, that was about the beat of a heart.

  To leave such an obvious trail—right to a set of tire tracks which could be analyzed—was not like their man at all. Not only that, but the victim had not died where he found her. That was unusual in itself. Their man picked his victims carefully, and there was no chance for them to run or be discovered. They were left out in the open, with the confidence that he would be long gone before anyone had any idea of his presence.

  No, Zoe could not see his hand here at all. She followed the blood marks, at times simple drips, at others larger pools. The calculations rushing by her eyes told her of a heart beating fast in panic, a dead run, a stumble here and there. Hands clasping the wound shut after a few steps had gone by, narrowing the range of blood flow to either side but not at all stopping it. Occasionally spraying out further droplets, creating a splatter pattern that was entirely unique.

  Though the ground here was too dry and solid for clear footprints, she could ascertain the steps from the blood surges and pools. It came down heavier whenever the woman’s feet landed, shaken loose by the impact. The woman’s throat had been cut, sending the blood from high up, letting it gather into a wider-ranged pattern than it would have with a lower wound. The amount indicated an artery spill, no mere flesh wound. There was no wonder she was dead. This much gone already, and not even into the woods.

  The blood was telling her things, almost too many to take in, in one moment. Distance—the woman was leaning forward as she ran, her body pitched, not quite as far off the ground as her neck would be if she stood straight. Spacing—speed, very fast, the run of someone who rightfully feared for her life. Two millimeters, three centimeters, two inches. All of those gaps told a story of desperation. And the loss of blood built a picture, too, pint by pint, Zoe counting in her head as she went. Nearly two before she even entered the woods.

  Under the trees, the signs were clearer, though distorted in their own way by the effects of nature. The landscape became 3D, blood spots landing on tree trunks and exposed roots, rocks and low-growing leaves. It made no difference to the numbers. They still told her everything. Adjust for a two-inch raised mound of earth, calculate the distance from the ground to the woman’s neck. Know that she was nowhere near upright. Her body collapsing downward as she moved forward. Three pints.

  Zoe felt how the woman stumbled and fell but got up to run on, how she was almost crawling now, how she crept on as far as she could. The blood pattern was different here, coming down from a wound that was only a foot or less above the ground, less of a splash and more of a flow. No more crown marks of splatter. Four pints, then four and a half.

  Then she had finally fallen, and Zoe was looking down at the obscenely wide open eyes of a dead girl, her neck gaping open like a second smile, her hands clutched in a death grip at the hem of her torn shirt.

  Zoe dropped into a crouch, ignoring the deputy who was stationed over the body and even the presence of Shelley coming up behind her. She had to read these signs, figure out what they meant, see what everyone else was missing. Was this his work? Or not?

  The girl lay in place on her back, but the blood patterns beside her told another story. She had moved, or been moved, an entire body width away; she had at first lain on her stomach, her hands clutched to her throat. The blood had spurted out of both sides of her neck where the wound could not be closed, forming two pools that must have spread out below her like macabre wings. From the width of the pools alone, combined with what she had already seen, Zoe knew it all added up to more blood than someone could live without. Another two pints in the pools alone. It had been the exsanguination that killed her.

  Wings… Zoe peered closer, her eyes widening slowly as she realized what she was looking at. The symbolic association of the blood pools was that of a Rorschach blot, a pattern in something that was not really a pattern. It was almost perfectly symmetrical, just like one of those famous cards. That meant something—she knew it did, feeling it in the bottom of her gut. It would have meant something to him.

  Where did that come from, that certainty? There had been no patterns to speak of at the crime scenes so far, had there? Zoe pushed that thought aside for the moment, focusing on the body in front of her. She had to determine, first, if this was really their killer.

  The blood pattern, the thin cut to the throat which could have been done with razor-sharp wire, the choice of victim and location, the timing—this was him, after all. But something had gone wrong. She had slipped out of his grasp and managed to run, albeit not very far. She had almost escaped. He was usually in more control than that.

  Zoe thought of the few remaining footsteps at Linda’s crime scene, how the woman had been in sight of safety when he looped his wire around her throat and killed her. He was normally such a controlled killer. This was a break in his pattern, and it was not by design. The girl had fought him off. Zoe looked at her still, graying face with a rare burst of compassion, thinking of how hard she must have clung to life even to get this far.

  The color told her something else: the time that had elapsed. He had attacked right within his normal window of time. When Zoe had been—what? Blurting out confessions about her difficult childhood, and feeling sorry for herself? Wasting those precious hours that could have saved this woman’s life?

  The coroner moved in, and Zoe stepped aside, allowing him to begin an initial assessment. Out here there were not the full, white-suited crime scene investigation teams of the inner city. It was just the coroner and his briefcase, and they were lucky to have that. Zoe barely needed to wait for him to finish—she knew exactly what they would tell her.

  “What are you thinking?” Shelley asked, as Zoe approached. She had been waiting a distance away from the body, a vantage point from where she did not have to look at it—or smell it.

  “Did you get a good look?” Zoe answered with a question of her own. She was beginning to be concerned that Shelley was a little too delicate—that she did not have the stomach for a crime scene. Besides which, she did not want to explain exactly what she had seen. The coroner could do that, and save Zoe explaining how she had seen it.

  “Briefly.” Shelley nodded. “It seems as though her throat was cut over there, on the access road, but she escaped and ran. She bled out here. I’m guessing, at least. I couldn’t see any other wounds.”

  “Nor me. Everything was off for him this time. She nearly escaped, and though there appear to be some marks cleaned up near the body, he did not complete his usual total clean-up. I would imagine that forensics will be able to get more clues here than we ever have before.”

  “The tire tracks, and footprints, maybe.”

  Zoe nodded. “Not enough to identify his car or his person, not yet. But a step toward narrowing it down, evidence to present when we do catch him. It seems he is getting more desperate.”

  The coroner approached, rolling up a pair of clinical gloves and stuffing them back into his pocket. “I have done an initial investigation. Preliminary, of course, until I should have the chance to move her back to my office and take a better look. There I will be able to carry out the requisite tests and begin a more thorough investigation which ought to reveal more details than I am able to provide at this moment.”

  Zoe closed her eyes, fading the old man’s voice out. He was the kind of person who would not use ten words to say something if a hundred could be used instead. The precise opposite of the kind of person that Zoe enjoyed conversing with. Instead, she thought about the scene, the way everything was slightly off-kilter.

  Mentally, Zoe moved the red p
in in the map in her head to the new location, a short distance away but still relevant. The road was the point where he had attempted the kill, and it was that which was significant, not the point of death. It moved the pin a little closer to her straight line, but not enough to make a difference. It had to be a curve.

  “Where was the bruising?” Shelley asked, snapping Zoe back to attention.

  The coroner indicated an area on his own body, over the ribs and stomach of his left side. “As I say, the bruising would have been inflicted postmortem, as there was very little blood left at this stage. That is all I can say from an initial investigation. I would say…”

  “Anger,” Zoe said, talking over him. “He was angry at her, for some reason.”

  “Perhaps because she ran,” Shelley suggested.

  “But she was dead already by the time he caught up with her,” Zoe said. “He got his goal. So why was he so angry?”

  Shelley spread her hands in a wordless gesture, the coroner beginning again his rambling monologue as if there had been no interruption.

  Zoe’s head was racing. There were more questions here than she had seen at any of the crime scenes—an irony, when what they needed desperately now were answers. Why had he chosen this road as his place, this random access road in the middle of a highway with nothing around it? Not a parking lot or a natural place to meet someone, like a footpath, as in his other crimes—why the change?

  And why, if he had already achieved his goal of killing the woman, was he still angry enough to waste time kicking her—time that left him unable to finish covering his tracks?

  Not only that, but something else kept catching at her mind. The Rorschach of the blood pools. The patterns. Why had that tugged at something in her mind, something that gave her a certainty that it was his work? If she could just figure out what it was that had linked that mental image with the other kill sites, she would have him.