Face of Fear (A Zoe Prime Mystery—Book 3)

by Blake Pierce

  Zoe considered this. “Maybe there could be something there. Both of them into clean living, even if only recently.”

  “What, like a fitness cult or something?” Shelley asked.

  Zoe gave her a dark look.

  “Well, it’s possible,” Shelley said. “Just look at all that stuff with the exercise bikes. And that self-help cult, the one that was tricking women into sleeping with the founder and giving all their money away.”

  “I suppose I have to concede that point.” Zoe wasn’t familiar with all of the ins and outs, but she had heard mention of the cases. Shelley was right, in a way. You never really knew what might be going on under the surface until you dug down far enough.

  She lifted photographs of the pair of them, looking for similarities. It was always frustrating to come in on a case like this. With a single victim, you could analyze the evidence single-mindedly, fixate on every small detail of that one person. With three or more victims, you had enough data points to build a pattern. To recognize that the killer was travelling in a certain direction, or only targeting blondes under five foot ten, or that they revealed themselves in a certain tic that showed up at each scene.

  With two, it was much harder. You couldn’t put things together in the same way. A similarity in numbers might just be a coincidence that would be broken by another body. You might notice that each of their ages were prime numbers only for that to turn out to be meaningless. You couldn’t tell what was important and what was just a red herring, thrown out by your own brain and holding no deliberate intentions.

  “There is one thing they have in common,” Zoe said, tapping the pictures. “Tattoos. Dowling had a tiger on his left bicep. Everard had a rose on her right thigh, picked out in dotwork. She was on her way to see a friend about getting another one, too.”

  Shelley shrugged. “Does that really warrant a connection? A lot of people have tattoos.”

  Zoe was flipping through more photos, noticing more marks on areas of skin that were visible in different shots. They were almost all taken from the victims’ social media profiles, and it looked as though they were both proud of their tattoos. Of showing them off. Did that mean something? “It was not just one tattoo each. Look. Both of them were covered in them. Dowling had the whole of one leg done, right down to the foot. And Everard, here, on her back and stomach.”

  “I still don’t know that it means anything. It’s just a cultural thing nowadays.”

  Zoe wrinkled her nose. “A cultural thing?”

  “Yeah. You haven’t noticed? A lot of people are getting inked in their early twenties now. Covering their whole bodies. Even faces and hands. There’ve been a lot of celebrities getting it done. Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, you know? Rappers and singers and sports players. It’s considered cool right now.”

  “Face and hand tattoos sound like remarkably bad ideas,” Zoe said, making a face. “Imagine never being able to hide the mistake that you made at a young age, of choosing to get something stupid put onto your body forever.”

  “There must be some kind of connection between them somewhere,” Shelley breezed on. “I’m betting it would be in their personal lives. Maybe they both knew the same people, somewhere in their lives. A bar or a club, a group of friends, a cousin who knew a cousin. Maybe they were at the same event together without even knowing it. We just have to keep digging until we get to it.”

  Zoe nodded. “Well, then, I know where we should start.” She lifted Callie Everard’s file, made a note of the address listed in it. “The friend she was going to see: Javier Santos.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Zoe walked around the small studio space, taking in the illustrations and drawings that littered every possible surface. Whether Javier was talented or not was for someone else who had more interest in the arts to say. The fact that he was prolific, however, was not up for debate.

  “These are all for tattoos?” she asked, scanning them mentally.

  “Yeah, sure.” Javier nodded. “Most of them have been used. I can whip you up something unique, though, if you’d like.”

  Zoe shot him a look to see if he was joking. He seemed earnest, which was worse.

  “I do not think so,” she said, settling for these simple words and hoping that he would not press the issue. She would not like to spoil the interview before it even properly kicked off by telling him exactly what she thought of people who would get tattoos.

  Especially tattoos like these: random, indiscriminate pieces of art. Zoe could understand someone liking the cartoonish form of a woman’s face as a piece of art, something to put on a wall or in a book. But to have it inked onto one’s body for the rest of your life? To wear this person’s face—this fictional person, who meant nothing to you or to anyone else, who was only born from an artist’s random daydreams?

  It was strange beyond measure, and she did not know if she could trust someone who would be willing to make a permanent statement out of something so meaningless.

  “Suit yourself.” Javier shrugged, apparently not bothered by her disinterest. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the design I made for Callie. I was thinking about putting it on myself, but that might be kinda weird.”

  “Why so?” Zoe asked, latching onto his words. In her experience, if someone involved in a murder case thought that something seemed “weird,” it was usually worth checking out.

  “Well, it was a memoriam piece in the first place. Look, I’ll show you.” Javier began rooting around on a desk littered with stray scraps of designs on tracing paper, and pulled out a more finished-looking design on an artist’s pad. It was inked with heavy black strokes, outlining the shape of a bird in flight.

  “What is it?” Zoe asked, ignoring the dirty look that Javier shot her for not immediately getting his art.

  “It’s a raven. Based on the myth of Muninn,” he began.

  “From the Old Norse, memory,” Zoe cut him off. Here, at least, she could demonstrate that she knew something. “A bird who attended the god Odin. This is why you called it a memoriam piece.”

  “That and the flowers.” Javier pointed to sprays of flowers behind the black bird, carefully colored in shades of lilac and violet. “They’re zinnias, representing the memory of a lost friend.”

  “In whose memory?” Shelley asked softly, examining the design from over Zoe’s shoulder.

  “An old friend.” Javier twisted his mouth, shrugged. “An old boyfriend, really. Back when Callie was, um…”

  “On drugs?” Zoe supplied. She sensed Shelley physically wince slightly beside her, but did not react. What was the point in beating around the bush? They all knew what they were talking about. It was no secret to any of them.

  “Yeah,” Javier said, one of his hands going up to rub the back of his neck. “I was going to say in with a bad crowd, but yeah.”

  “What’s the story?” Shelley asked. Her tone was much more sympathetic than Zoe’s had been. Somehow, she had the knack of asking those same direct questions but making them sound so much… nicer.

  “He was bad news. One of the group that got her into drugs in the first place. From what I understand, if they weren’t stoned, they were drunk. And if they weren’t stoned or drunk, they were snorting coke in the bathrooms and screwing each other.” Javier shook his head, taking a deep breath. “Sorry. I don’t like thinking of her like that. That’s not who she really is. Who she’s been, these past years that I’ve known her.”

  “She got herself cleaned up after college, isn’t that right?” Shelley asked.

  “Right. I helped. She couldn’t afford the rehab at first, so we did an art fair. Raised some money for her, me and some of the others from our class. We stayed in touch since then.”

  “This ex-boyfriend,” Zoe pressed, trying to keep him on track.

  “He was killed, I think. Or, I don’t know. Callie didn’t like to talk about him much back then. The past few years, she started to come to terms with it, move on. I think she’d finally a
ccepted that he was bad for her, toxic. But that what they had also mattered. That’s why the flowers. Not lost love, but just a lost friend.”

  Killed? That sparked Zoe’s attention in a very real way. “Do you know what the circumstances of his death were?”

  “It wasn’t an overdose. The police were investigating, but I don’t know if they ever caught anyone. That’s it. That’s all I know.”

  Zoe mused on the idea. It would be a very tempting thread, if first this mysterious boyfriend was murdered and then Callie. All they needed to do was find a connection to Dowling, and they’d have something. Maybe something to do with the drugs.

  Shelley said it was all just popular culture, but the tattoos… Zoe had never been a fan. They represented a subsection of society that she more often saw behind bars than in respectable positions. You couldn’t get a good job with a tattoo. Certainly couldn’t be in law enforcement, not with prison teardrops on your face or your kid’s name all across your throat.

  The tattoo that Javier had designed for Callie was big. Seven point three inches, top to bottom. It wasn’t something you would be able to hide away. It was designed to be seen. People with visible tattoos, like hers and like Dowling’s—they weren’t usually good people.

  Things were beginning to stack up. Callie and her boyfriend were in the drugs underworld. Hanging about with the wrong type of people. Even though she was clean when she died, she had the kind of past that attracted murder. Just because Dowling had a clean lifestyle now, didn’t mean he hadn’t been involved in something before.

  “Thank you, Javier,” Zoe said briskly. “That will help us a lot.”

  “Wait,” Shelley interrupted. “I just have a couple more questions.”

  Zoe motioned for her to go on, stepping back toward the door where she could wait out of the way. As far as she was concerned, they were done, and she wanted to be in a position to leave soon. She didn’t want to waste any more time looking at these pointless tattoo drawings and talking to Javier, who had already given them the most interesting thing they needed to know.

  “Are you aware of anyone who would have wanted to harm Callie?”

  Javier shook his head no. “I already told the cops earlier. She was a sweet girl. These days. I mean, she really changed. No one wanted any harm to come to her.”

  Had she really changed, though? Zoe wondered. Could a leopard change its spots? Callie certainly couldn’t change hers—not the ones etched forever onto her body. Forever, that was, until her killer had burned them off.

  Maybe all of this was connected. Maybe she had gang tattoos that needed to be burned off. Maybe someone saw her as the last link in a murderous game that had been running for a long time. The last bit of revenge for a drug-runner released from prison, or a biker gang looking to purge themselves of someone who had broken their rules.

  “What about this morning, last night, yesterday? Have you noticed anyone unusual hanging around?” Shelley was asking.

  “No, not at all,” Javier said. His weight left him and he collapsed onto a low bench slung against a table, burying his head in his hands. “I wish I knew more. I wish I could say something that would find whoever did this to her. She didn’t deserve this.”

  But maybe someone thought she did. That was for Zoe and Shelley to work out, and they weren’t going to get anywhere closer to doing that here.

  “We will leave you with your thoughts,” Zoe said, a phrase she had heard before that she thought sounded at least mildly sympathetic. “If you think of anything that might be useful, please do get in touch.”

  Ignoring the reproachful look that Shelley was giving her for not being friendly enough, she walked out of Javier’s tattoo den, pleased to be breathing free air and no longer surrounded by all of the distraction of his garish designs.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He watched her from across the street.

  She didn’t know him, and he didn’t know her. Not personally. But he knew enough.

  He watched her, and he knew things about her that others didn’t. He knew where she lived, alone on the ground floor of an apartment building downtown. He knew that she worked part-time at a store three blocks away, to support herself while she studied. He knew that she’d taken a while to find herself and what she wanted to do with her life.

  He knew that she had a tattoo on her inner right forearm, and that she dyed her hair. He had seen her collection of costume jewelry trotted out one day after another, and knew that she liked to mix up her look every time she went out. He knew that she left the house at precisely 8:32 a.m. on the days when she needed to work, because she had her journey down to an exact science. He knew that she would pick up a coffee on the way which she pre-ordered from an app to avoid the lines, and that she would go to the back room in order to change into her uniform before emerging to serve customers.

  He knew when her shift ended, and the route she took to walk home.

  He knew that she needed to die.

  He could barely stand to look at her, but he knew that he needed to watch. He needed to observe. He tapped absently on the screen of his cell phone, as if he was engrossed in its contents, watching her through sunglasses that hid his eyes. He had been scoping out her routine for a few days now, and he knew she would pass by here before she did. This bench, placed perfectly to watch her go.

  The world was going to be a much safer place when she was gone. That much was clear to him.

  He watched her walk by, exactly on schedule, and pass out of his field of vision. Not that it mattered. He knew exactly where she was going. Slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, he got up from his bench and began to stroll along the sidewalk in the same direction she had gone.

  On Saturdays, she pulled a double shift. She was paying for her own tuition, and she needed the money. With no lectures to attend on a Sunday morning, it made sense. Her co-workers were all too happy not to have to work Saturdays themselves, at least not as often as they would if she didn’t take both shifts. It was an arrangement that suited everyone.

  It suited him especially, because when she finally left and locked up to go home, it would be dark. He would be hidden. She would never see him coming.

  He followed her at a long distance until he reached the store, glancing inside to see her just emerging from the staffroom. Good. He didn’t linger. There was no point. She was where he needed her to be, and that meant everything was going to plan.

  He seethed as he thought of her, of the very fact that she existed. She had no right. She shouldn’t dare to put everyone else in danger the way that she did. How could she not see, not know?

  She was training to be a teacher. That was the biggest joke of it all. Imagine someone like her, being allowed to be around children. To be entrusted with their education, with looking after them. A position of trust like that for someone like her.

  The world was going to be much better off without her in it.

  For now, there was nothing that he could do but wait. He had his research, and he liked to spend his spare time looking people up, rooting out the evil that threatened everything if he did nothing about it. He had plenty to occupy his time.

  And tonight, when it was time for her to end her shift, he would be there. Watching. Waiting. Ready to cleanse the world of her sins.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Zoe waited for the search operation to run, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms over her chest.

  “Got anything yet?” Shelley asked.

  “Give the system a minute,” Zoe said. She was still feeling a little grouchy from earlier, and she was too comfortable around Shelley to bother to hide it. “This is not a movie. Things actually take time to process here.”

  “All right, all right,” Shelley said. “I’m just excited. This could be a big lead.”

  Zoe eyed her darkly, wondering how someone could swing from emotion to emotion so powerfully. How Shelley could be distraught and brought to the verge of tears when viewing a body or intervi
ewing a loved one, then as excited as a schoolchild at the prospect of getting the case solved.

  The screen in front of her blinked, drawing her attention back as a list of results flooded back onto it. It seemed that their second victim, Callie Everard, had been a busy girl for a few years. There were multiple records of her in the local police precinct’s system, including a couple of arrests for possession of illicit substances.

  “Here we are,” Zoe said. “She was interviewed a few times about the death of one Clay Jackson. That must be him.”

  “Clay Jackson? All right,” Shelley repeated, typing in her own search on the computer that had been brought into their temporary investigation room.

  It was exhausting sometimes, working like this. Always on the move from city to city. Just managing to get settled in and then going off somewhere else. Coming back only for the court dates, which were always unwanted and inevitably inconvenient.

  Zoe clicked his name on the system to go through to the records of the investigation. She was still waiting for the page to load in when Shelley spoke up. To the surprise of none, any and all search engines on the internet worked quicker than the county police system.

  “Here’s something. Clay Jackson memorial social media page. It has a smattering of posts every year on the anniversary of his death and birthdays, but there’s pictures, too. He had a lot of tattoos.”

  “A lot?”

  “More than Callie. And I think I might recognize one or two of them as having particular street meaning. This gang theory could hold some water.”

  Zoe snorted, shaking her head. She got up to look over Shelley’s shoulder, taking in the images of Clay Jackson. He was six foot one, a hundred and forty pounds in his last images. Strung out, barely eating between fixes. He had the look of someone who had been fit and healthy, muscular, before his addiction took over his life. He was slowly shrinking in the photographs. He had never followed that course through to its conclusion—he was killed midway through the transformation.