Behind Zoe’s words was another nagging certainty. The killer struck every night—and only once every night. There was every likelihood that the teenage girl was still alive.
An alert buzzed on her cell phone, and she opened it to see the photograph of the missing teen, circulated to her number as well as any law enforcement in the area. A fact list named her as Aisha Sparks, seventeen years old. One younger brother. She was a dancer and loved children, wanted to go to college to become a social worker. A good kid.
Zoe stared down at Aisha’s sweet smile, in a photograph clearly taken at school for a yearbook, and knew that she had to save her. So many had died already. So many who should have been saved.
If she couldn’t save Aisha, Zoe knew, it would all be on her. All her fault. If she was going to redeem herself in any way for letting it get this far, letting him claim more lives, then she had to stop him from taking this one.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Shelley was tired of looking over the case files in the investigation room, going over all of the old clues that they had already seen before. The latest autopsy was nowhere near being complete, and they were still waiting for final reports from Rubie’s body. There was nothing new here, nothing that they had not already seen with their own eyes before.
It wasn’t that Shelley didn’t see the benefit of going back over the information—there were many ways that data could take on a new face when you had more clues to go on, when you had seen more victims. Insignificant details could suddenly become the key to unraveling a whole case.
What she objected to, however, was the fact that it was she who had to do it. They were only on their second case together, but already she could see how gifted Zoe was. Shelley was never going to be able to compete with that. She would be better off doing the legwork, physical stuff that didn’t require looking at the complex clues. Talking to people. That was what she was good at.
It wasn’t that she could really, fully understand what Zoe did. It might as well have been witchcraft, for all it made sense to her. But Shelley was beginning to grasp that just because she didn’t understand something, didn’t mean it was wrong. She would take anything that she could get to help save lives.
And there was something about Zoe, something that triggered her own mothering instinct, even though Zoe was older than her. Something a little broken, vulnerable. Shelley had known that Zoe had gone through a lot of partners before her. Been warned about it. Now she could see why, and she wasn’t going to be the latest in a long line to just abandon Zoe because she had something that set her apart from everyone else.
They had left the door to their room open, allowing in the bustle of the rest of the station from the corridor. A short distance away, the sheriff’s office had been the site of much activity all day long, as deputies and state troopers passed in and out regularly.
There was the sound of urgent ringing down the hall, and Shelley perked her ears up. The sheriff answered, barked something down the line, and only a few seconds later strode past the door. He was shrugging his coat on over his shoulders as he went.
“Sheriff?” Shelley got to her feet and rushed out into the hall, looking in the direction he had gone. “What is it?”
“Got a hit with the dragnet,” the sheriff called over his shoulder. “Green Ford Taurus. I’m heading out there now.”
Shelley glanced back into the room at Zoe, who was still poring over the pages and maps in front of her.
On the one hand, she believed in Zoe. The abilities she had demonstrated were undeniable. The way she had explained everything, Shelley knew she was right. But she wasn’t helping here, and every lead had to be followed.
Even if the sheriff was acting in direct opposition to what Zoe thought was the right course of action, at least it was something. And Shelley’s time would be better spent dismissing it as nothing than sitting here and wasting her time.
“I should go with him,” Shelley said, leaning in to whisper the rest. “I can’t tell them why you’re so sure they won’t find him, can I? So I’d better go.”
Zoe looked up and met her eyes, and nodded once with an almost serenely blank expression. “I will stay.”
It was exactly what she had expected. There was no reason for it to be any different. Shelley flashed her a quick and reassuring grin, then ran full pelt after the sheriff, catching up with him just as he got to his car.
“Coming along?” he grunted. It was clear from his surly manner and the way all courtesy had been dropped that he resented Zoe’s orders. He thought they had taken him on a wild goose chase and allowed someone else to die. So be it. Shelley knew how to turn around an opinion, and the only way to do that was to sit and talk with him.
She dropped into the passenger’s seat, waiting eagerly for him to set off. Their car flashed along the roads quickly, moving with the kind of speed and surety that could only come from local knowledge.
“What’s the report?” Shelley asked.
The sheriff’s eyes flicked toward her momentarily before he focused back on the road. “Green Ford Taurus with a single male driver. The trooper said it looks like he might have been living in the back of his car. Fast food cartons, dirty clothes, that sort of thing. It would make sense, for our guy.”
Shelley had to give him that. “No motel bookings for us to track him down with. Have they got his ID yet?”
“Tells us nothing. Out of state, no prior record. They tell me his height fits your profile, though.”
Shelley nodded. “Then there’s a good chance we have him.”
“We?” the sheriff snorted. It wasn’t quite an outright denial, and he did not follow it up, but it was clear what he meant. He wasn’t putting any stock in the FBI’s help on this one.
Shelley kept quiet. There were times when you could change someone’s mind, and there were times when it was better to wait out their anger and be ready to make your point only when they had calmed down.
They pulled up at a roadblock perhaps twenty minutes into their journey, where several cars blocked all but one lane, forcing traffic to pass through them. They had a green sedan parked up against the far lane, the driver standing and leaning against his car.
Shelley looked at him with a sinking sensation. The man was overweight, obviously so. He might have been the right height, but he was also older than Zoe had suggested. Either her partner was wrong, or this was yet another wild goose chase.
“I’m telling you, check the records,” he was saying as they drew closer.
One of the troopers was talking on his phone, glancing at the sheriff somewhat sheepishly as they approached. Shelley knew what that look had to mean. She felt a groan gathering force inside her, threatening to break out audibly.
The trooper came off the phone and addressed the group at large. “Alibi checks out,” he said. “The hospital confirmed he was recuperating in the ward for the last two weeks.”
Another dead end. Shelley met the sheriff’s eyes, raising one of her eyebrows slightly, hoping that he would get her meaning. They were 0 for 2. And the killer was still out there with an abducted young woman.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
With Shelley gone, the investigation room was a lonely place. Zoe was used to working alone—liked it, even—but she needed some kind of reassurance with all of the mistakes that she had been making. Shelley had been able to provide that.
Hours had passed now without her, as Shelley bounced from one part of the dragnet to another, following useless lead after useless lead. It was incredible just how many green Ford Tauruses there were on the roads, but none of them had turned out to be their killer. There was always something—an alibi, the fact that the driver was a petite single mother without the strength to kill taller women, an incorrect flag with the wrong make of car.
It wasn’t that she cared about the cold shoulder she was being given by the local cops. The threat to her job was neither here nor there. Either she would solve it, or she wouldn’t. She didn’t b
ase her investigative decisions on what would save her job—she was trying to save lives.
It was the fact that they were right.
She had failed—entirely. Another woman was dead.
She felt like a small child again, kneeling at her mother’s feet and being told to try again, because she must have been praying wrong so far. She had failed to move God to change her, to rid her of her demonic powers. Now she was failing again, unable to figure out just where they were going wrong in chasing this killer down.
It didn’t help that she was closer to solving it than she suspected anyone else could have been. No one else had the insight that she did—the ability to think the same way that the killer did.
That just meant that it was more on her shoulders. If she was the only one who could stop him, then she had to stop him. There was no other choice. The alternative was to just stand by and watch them all die, victim after victim, and there was no way she could do that.
This one had a name already. Aisha Sparks, the seventeen-year-old working at the fair in the evenings to earn enough money to get into college. She was still missing, and if it hadn’t been already, it was getting more obvious with each passing hour that he had taken her.
Zoe had watched from the sidelines as the state troopers led a press conference, asking for volunteers to search the local woods around the area of the fair. They were deep and thickly grown, and it would take them many hours to even be sure that they had checked everywhere.
But Zoe knew they would not find her there. There was no chance. He had taken her.
So many had died already. Zoe couldn’t let Aisha die as well.
The locations between his killings were getting closer together, the spiral getting tighter now at the end. But the problem was that she couldn’t be absolutely, mathematically sure about where he would strike next. Sure, it was a Fibonacci spiral, and that was great—but on the map, even plotting everything carefully, there was still a zone where he could attack next which was not so precise. With the fair, it had been easy—the only thing for miles around, and the scale of the fair itself had filled the whole of the box she had marked on the map.
The little town in the next zone had a number of different buildings. How could she be sure which one he would go for? Or which street? How could they manage to cover all of their bases with such a densely populated area?
And what if Aisha was already dead?
That thought made Zoe’s stomach churn, but it had to be considered. The locations in his spiral were for attacks, not deaths. What if he killed her some other way, just to plan to cut her throat after the fact when the time came?
No, that didn’t feel right. It would have been too much of a symbolic gesture, a throwaway act instead of the real thing. Somehow, the real thing mattered. It had to be the act of spilling blood at the right moment, the right spot. Zoe could see that. The more she tried to get inside his head and think like he did, the better she thought she could figure out the importance he attached to things. The choice of a new day for each kill, the deliberate action of using the garrote. That had to be followed to complete the pattern.
Yet he had broken his previous MO by abducting a girl instead of finding someone on the actual night, so it was all up in the air now. She could trust her gut, but there was nothing behind it. No real evidence or fact she could put her finger on to tell her that Aisha would still be safe.
Zoe couldn’t do this alone. It was too much—so much pressure to heap onto one person’s shoulders. She would not begrudge it, not if she could save Aisha’s life. But she couldn’t get there—couldn’t finish the job. Especially not with all the local police turning on her, thinking she didn’t know what she was doing.
Zoe picked up her cell and dialed a familiar number from her contact list, hoping that the call would connect.
“Hello?”
Zoe almost sighed with relief. Hearing the voice of her mentor, Dr. Francesca Applewhite, already made her feel better, and all she had said was hello. Talking to someone who understood her completely was a salve for all of the stress.
“Dr. Applewhite,” Zoe said. “Are you free to talk?”
“Francesca, as I’ve told you a million times,” she laughed. “Yes, I’m free. I’m always free for you, even in the middle of a session. But I don’t have any appointments today. It’s Saturday.”
Zoe glanced at her smartwatch reflexively, surprised to hear the date. Time had been slipping away from her, maybe faster than she had realized. “I am sorry to disturb your weekend.”
“You don’t have to be sorry with me, Zoe. You know I don’t mind. Now, what’s bothering you?”
Dr. Applewhite always understood when Zoe needed help. “It is regarding a case I am working on,” she started, and quickly told her everything. Or at least, everything that was relevant. With it being an ongoing case, she could not use names or even give away the locations precisely. But it was worth taking the risk of being sanctioned if it meant getting some help from the one person who always knew the right thing to say.
Now Dr. Applewhite was chuckling, and Zoe could not quite understand why. “What is funny?” she asked, seeing nothing amusing at all in the tale of a serial murderer and schizophrenic.
“The pattern,” Dr. Applewhite replied. “Our boy here has it all wrong. He might be operating under delusions, but they are bigger than he realizes. He has misunderstood the reality of the Fibonacci spiral.”
“I do not understand.”
“It’s like this. The Fibonacci spiral is a theory, a formula that can be applied to many visual patterns in nature and that are naturally occurring. But the mistake the killer has made is assuming that the spiral should be perfect. In fact, in nature, it is almost always imperfect.”
Zoe frowned. “But I thought the point was that it is a specific sequence. Each number the sum of the two previous.”
“Yes, but nature is not so neat as mathematics might have you believe. Think about the instances where we can see Fibonacci spirals: a snail’s shell may grow slightly tilted. A plant’s leaves may experience growth spurts due to exposure to water or light that can throw off the pattern. A hurricane fits within the spiral, but it does not have well-defined and sharp edges. Wind forces clouds to stream back alongside the spiral itself, making a feathered edge which does not always conform exactly to the pattern.”
Zoe got the point. “So the pattern should be imperfect. But how does that help? If it is imperfect, we have even less chance of catching him.”
“No,” Dr. Applewhite said, and Zoe could almost hear her smiling. It was the same look she had always had on her face when making an important point, knowing that she was delivering important knowledge to her student. “The mistake that the killer has made is believing that the pattern should be perfect. It will be precise—exceedingly precise.”
Zoe turned this over in her head. “He is so obsessed with the pattern that he cannot see the fact that there are variances in nature. His pattern will have to be perfect.”
“Just the same way that you, my dear, sometimes find it hard to look past the numbers in order to see the variances of human nature. How you can struggle to understand the subtleties of small talk or emotional responses, because you are watching the calculations in your head.”
Zoe bowed her head slightly over the table of maps and papers. Dr. Applewhite was right. Even though she was the only person who had the ability to see things as the killer saw them, that also meant that she was victim to the same mistakes and foibles.
Being the same as a serial killer—that sent a shudder through her again.
“There is beauty in imperfection,” Dr. Applewhite continued. “Our flaws are what make us human. That’s why I have never judged you for yours. But this perpetrator… he does not see the beauty. He is incapable of looking past the numbers of the spiral itself. He objectifies it, just the same way that a serial killer looks at a victim instead of seeing a wife, mother, sister, friend. The end goal is all tha
t matters to him. Because of this, he has made himself a predictable man.”
“You mean that we can be more precise with the calculations. Find out exactly where he intends to commit the final murders, to a much closer degree.”
“Yes. Why look at a whole town? He can only see a precise coordinate. You could take it down through decimal places, rather than looking at whole grids on the map.”
“I understand,” Zoe said, grabbing a pen. “I have the precise coordinates of each of the attacks.” She was starting to scribble out calculations, make the numbers smaller.
Dr. Applewhite laughed, a sound of joy and friendship that never failed to warm Zoe’s heart. “Hit me with the numbers.”
Zoe hadn’t thought to ask for help, but it was welcome. There was always a security to be found in your work being checked. Even though she had already completed the calculations, there was no harm in accepting the offer. She flicked through each case file to read out the coordinates to four decimal points, waiting for Dr. Applewhite to run the logarithmic function and determine precisely where the next points would be. There were only two left, and that made their job easier—they had almost all of the clues, and none of the mystery. It took time to input the data—time Zoe desperately wished she had spent earlier in the investigation—but then it was done, and they had what they needed.
“All right,” Dr. Applewhite said, after a moment’s pause for the calculations. “Take down these numbers.”
Zoe checked them against her own and saw that they matched, then used the battered old computer in the corner of the investigation room to input them in a map search. “Got it,” she said, focusing in on the square highlighted on the search. “Thirty square meters. Close enough that we can watch it all at once.”
“Well done! And will it be an easy target to stake out?”
Zoe Prime Mystery 01-Face of Death Page 18