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

by Blake Pierce

  They were back outside and in the car when Zoe turned to Flynn with a raised eyebrow. “Did you really get a message from Morrison?”

  “Yes,” Flynn said, with a wounded tone. “He’s got the address of that customer for us. Gerry Dean. Since Elizabeth is no longer a suspect, we should head there now.”

  “Then what are you waiting for?” Zoe asked, nodding to the steering wheel in front of Flynn and beckoning for him to go ahead.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The car pulled up outside the address Morrison had given them with a screech of tires. So much for the element of surprise, Zoe thought. Flynn slammed it to a stop with his usual devil-may-care driving style and leapt out, raising a hand in signal, before she had the chance to snap at him for being so reckless.

  Zoe glanced up the street as she undid her own seatbelt and got out—rather slower, thanks to the nausea gripping her stomach from the breakneck drive across Salem—and saw an unmarked car down the street a ways. Morrison was there, just getting out of it, along with two uniformed officers behind him.

  They paused at Flynn’s signal, and he looked at Zoe for confirmation. She nodded, and the two of them approached the house alone, moving quietly and carefully to the front door. None of the lights were on. Not unusual, given that it was half past three in the morning, but it was also no indication that he was home asleep.

  Zoe paused by the door, listening, raising a hand to Flynn. She glanced around: there was no car in the designated parking spot out front. The house was silent. It didn’t look good. She counted the time in her own heartbeats, rapid and staccato, full of apprehension.

  She lowered her hand, and Flynn knocked loudly on the door, pausing to wait for a response. Zoe counted the decibels and then the seconds. There was only silence. When she had reached fifteen, he did it again, even harder, making the door rattle in its frame. Her hand moved unconsciously to her gun, her body tensing in preparation for explosive action.

  Nothing.

  “He is not here,” Zoe said.

  “That means he could be out there, killing his next victim,” Flynn said grimly. “What do we do now?”

  “Retreat,” Zoe said, beckoning him back until they reconvened with Morrison and his men, him bleary-eyed and slouching in comparison to their alertness. They must have been accustomed to nighttime shifts.

  “No one home?” Morrison asked, too loudly for Zoe’s taste. She raised a hand to caution him to quiet, keeping her own voice low.

  “We need to find him,” she said. “Can you leave your men here? I want to know the moment he gets home. Even if we have missed the boat in stopping him from taking another life, we can still arrest him with blood on his hands.”

  “How are you going to find him?” Morrison asked, jerking his head at the two policemen until they scurried off toward the car, positioning themselves to wait. “There’s a big old town out there. He could be anywhere.”

  “It is not him we need to find,” Zoe said, turning to Flynn. “We need to find his next potential victim. If we can get there first, before he finishes the job, we might still be able to save them.”

  “Agreed,” Flynn said. “But how are we going to figure it out?”

  “The Chamber of Commerce,” Zoe told him, pulling her phone out of her pocket. She hoped Margaret hadn’t yet gone to bed. “If Richards and Stout made their complaint to the other members, maybe someone else added to the list. Gave them another reason to blacklist him.”

  “She’ll know if there were any other reports, too.” Flynn nodded smartly. “Anyone who had an alteration with him of any kind. No reports in your system, Morrison?”

  Morrison shook his head. “Whatever this guy was up to, the store owners were dealing with it between themselves. No one breathed a word of it to us.”

  Zoe walked away a few paces and dialed the number; she was relieved to hear it connect after only a few rings. “Hello, Margaret? Agent Zoe Prime again.”

  “Hello, Agent,” Margaret said conversationally. “I’ve not been able to drop off. Thought I’d better look through the records in case there was something else that might be of help. Did you have another question?”

  If Zoe was the praying type, she would have thanked heaven for this woman. As it was, she simply kept her comments about Elizabeth and their lack of sisterly bond to herself, considering that dropping any nosiness was a good way to give thanks. “It is about a man who may have triggered complaints from Richards and Stout,” she said. “A customer. His name is Gerry Dean.”

  “Oh,” Margaret said, a frosty noise layered with recognition. “That Gerry Dean. Yes, I know all about him and his tricks.”

  “Tricks?”

  “He’s always trying it on. You know what he does? He buys something expensive on sale, or from another place, and then tries to return it somewhere else for a full-price refund. Just like that. Can you believe it? Sometimes he even uses things until they break and then demands a refund, even if he’s had them for months. Complaints were rolling in until we finally gave him a blanket ban.”

  “A blanket ban?” Zoe repeated. “What does that mean?”

  “We distributed his name and picture to all Chamber of Commerce businesses and told them not to sell to him. It didn’t take him long to catch on. I’d have loved to have seen his face. I bet he was furious. Oh, you… you don’t think he would…?”

  “We are not sure at this stage,” Zoe said grimly, even though she very much did think that he would. She had seen people become killers for all kinds of strange reasons. This kind of slight would be easy to envisage turning into a motive for vengeance, at least in the mind of someone cracked. “What was his success rate like? Did he get away with it at all?”

  “Oh, yes, quite often,” Margaret told her. “In fact, he might have been doing it for years before he came up against dear Frank. We’ve had reports from members that go back a long while. Most of them just paid the refund and didn’t think much of it, until it was pointed out. The customer is always right, you know. Except in this case, he wasn’t right at all—but the business owners would still give him the refund just in the interest of keeping a local customer. They couldn’t have known he was doing the same thing all over town.”

  “How about people who did not fall for it?” Zoe asked. “We know about Richards and Stout already. Was there anyone else who sent him on his way? Perhaps made a scene, made him look foolish in front of other customers?”

  “I’m not sure.” Margaret hummed. “We might have it in the records. I may have to make a few calls, to follow up on the reports we have. They don’t tend to be very detailed.”

  “Can you do that for us?” Zoe asked, looking back at Flynn and locking eyes with him to let him know that she maybe had something. “I need you to hurry. It is only a few hours until dawn, and we need to track him down before something bad happens.”

  “Worse than it already has?” Margaret asked, with some alarm.

  Zoe gritted her teeth. “One more body is always worse,” she said, before ending the call and walking back to join Flynn.

  Now, they just had to wait. And that was the worst part. Sitting idly, the numbers of the case running through her head incessantly, unable to do anything to make the case move forward—that was almost too much for Zoe to handle.

  But she didn’t have a choice. And somewhere across town, Gerry Dean was loose, maybe even leaving the scene now with his latest victim strung up behind him.

  Zoe stared at the empty house, pulling her jacket tight around her against the cold and feeling the weight of tiredness behind her eyes. It almost made her heart stop when her phone rang out in the utter silence, a rude alarm that jolted her so far awake that her palms began to sweat. “Agent Zoe Prime,” she answered rapidly, her heart pattering so fast in her chest that she had to lay a hand against her collarbone to calm it down.

  “It’s Margaret, from the Chamber of Commerce,” she said. “I’ve just remembered—I think I know where you might want to look
next.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Just start driving,” Zoe said urgently. “I will put in the address as we move.”

  Flynn swore and started the engine as she keyed in the zip code, trying not to let the motion of the car drag her fingers to the wrong place.

  “Is she sure?” Flynn asked.

  “Of course not,” Zoe retorted, setting up the route and watching the GPS run through the calculations. “But this woman, Angelina Orren, she dealt with a complaint from Gerry Dean in a pretty public way. He complained about his food in her bar after finishing almost the whole plate. She told him a refund was not possible, he refused to pay, and she had the bouncers hold him until he paid up.”

  Flynn let out a low whistle. “I think anyone would have been furious about that. On both sides.”

  “Right,” Zoe said. Half because she was agreeing with him, and half because it was good to get that confirmation that this was how normal people would act. “Angelina’s bar is open until late. She may still be there.”

  Flynn hurtled the car around corners and through intersections, back to the downtown area where they had been only an hour before. Zoe’s head was beginning to swim with all the back and forth, the constant fight against the motion sickness, the twists and turns almost giving her whiplash. But if she had to do this until dawn, she had no problem with it. There was no compromise when it came to catching a killer.

  He screeched up in front of the bar, leaving Zoe rocking forward in her seat and clinging onto the seatbelt at her neck for dear life, only just stopping short of headbutting the dashboard. Since they were in a rush, she didn’t complain—but she made a mental note to suggest, sometime after this case was done, that Flynn take some kind of remedial road safety course.

  “Someone’s there,” Zoe said, nodding ahead. The lights were on. It was almost four in the morning, and the bar closed at two a.m., but there was always work to be done after closing down a public business. Cleaning, inventory, settling up the tills. She felt a surge of relief. They weren’t too late. They could stop Angelina from coming to harm.

  She and Flynn raced to the doors on foot, hammering on them quickly. Zoe’s heart was in her throat. It was possible that the killer was watching them even now. Waiting to stalk Angelina on her way home. Zoe felt a chill creep up the back of her neck as they waited for the doors to open, to allow them in…

  But the person who answered the door was not Angelina. That was clear immediately.

  “We’re closed,” the man said, eyeing them up and down. He looked twenty-six, wearing a black shirt with the bar’s logo and a dishcloth over one shoulder. An employee.

  “Where is Angelina Orren?” Zoe demanded, dispensing with the niceties. There was no time. That flare of relief had vanished into a pit of stomach-roiling fear. If Angelina wasn’t here, then…

  “She just left,” the bartender said, checking his watch. “A couple of minutes ago. What’s this about?”

  Zoe swore viscerally, wheeling around back to the car. Behind her, she heard Flynn issuing a brief and rapid explanation, urging the man to contact Angelina and warn her if he could. Then Zoe was already in car, leaning over from the passenger seat to start the engine, beckoning madly to Flynn through the windshield as he sprinted back to join her.

  “Her address?” he asked.

  Zoe was already putting it into the GPS. “Twenty minutes from here.”

  Flynn swore this time, matching her in ferocity. “The bartender says she took her car, so at least she’s off the streets. She left him to lock up, a little earlier than usual, because she was tired. Maybe the killer will be knocked off course by that.”

  “Both of the victims were taken on their way home from work in the dark,” Zoe said. “We have to get there fast—as fast as possible.”

  “Call Morrison,” Flynn said, taking a corner so fast the tires screeched for purchase on the road surface. “If the PD has any patrols near enough to her address…”

  Zoe nodded, hitting the speed dial entry for Morrison and waiting for it to connect. It was going to be tight—Angelina had a few minutes’ lead on them, knew the route and the streets better, the shortcuts. But Flynn was a fast driver. If they could even just catch up with her and follow her home—if the patrols could get there before she did...

  There was one thing Zoe was sure of. Angelina wasn’t going to die tonight. Zoe refused to let it happen. She urged Flynn on as she waited for the call to connect, ready to yell instructions at Morrison. This wasn’t going to happen on her watch.

  ***

  Angelina Orren pulled into her driveway, checking her rearview mirror as she turned. There was a car a long way behind her, headlights just visible, but since she was leaving the road, she didn’t pay it much mind.

  There were a lot of other things running through her head, chief among them the thought that she was exhausted. It had been a long shift; they all were. The nights seemed to get longer the older she got, and running the bar six days a week—letting one of her team run it on the seventh, even though she hated giving up that control—was starting to feel like too much. Her back was aching, and she flexed it against the back of the seat as she pulled in. Ugh. She would have to try to get booked in for a massage somewhere. Not that she was making enough to justify that kind of regular expense.

  She sighed as she switched off the engine and started to get out of the car. It was dark and quiet out, just as it always was. Her husband would be asleep already, the house silent and peaceful. She closed the car door as quietly as she could and headed toward the house, her footsteps crunching loudly across the pavement, each noise magnified by the quiet of the night.

  Angelina hesitated a few steps from the door, her attention drawn sharply to another sound: a noise somewhere in the bushes at the side of the house, like a rustle. She had her key in her hand, stretched out between her fingers; thinking for a moment, she tucked it firmly between her index and middle finger knuckles. You didn’t leave a bar late at night six times a week for thirty-four years without knowing a little about how to defend yourself.

  She approached the bushes cautiously, squinting her eyes to see better in the darkness. She still hadn’t adjusted after the lights of the car, and besides, at sixty-one, her eyesight wasn’t as good as it had been when she was younger. But there was nothing immediately visible as she moved closer to the bushes. Nothing standing out. Maybe crouched among the bushes—

  She almost jumped out of her skin as the raccoon dashed out from the undergrowth, heading for another patch of cover away from Angelina’s path. She gasped for breath, then shook her head at her own fear, at the adrenaline rising up in her veins. Stupid, getting so worked up about a pest.

  “Shoo!” she hissed, approaching the place she’d seen it vanish. She carried on until it darted out again, dashing past her and toward the end of the driveway, out into the street. Good riddance. Her trashcans would be safe for another night.

  Angelina blinked as another car pulled half into her driveway, filling the space that the raccoon had just vacated. It was followed by another, and another, and as they switched off their headlights Angelina was able to make out the look of the local Salem police cars, recognizable even in the dark.

  What on earth…?

  “Angelina Orren?”

  “Yes,” Angelina replied, finding it strange to speak out loud in the middle of the night in the open air, thinking at the back of her mind that she hoped this wouldn’t wake up her husband. He needed the rest, after all.

  The cop who had spoken ushered her forward even as he stepped aside, letting someone else through. A woman, Angelina saw as she approached, and she wasn’t wearing a uniform. Just a black suit over a pale-colored shirt, the exact shade difficult to make out in the darkness. Her hair was cropped short like a man’s, but she was feminine in the way she walked, the lines of her face.

  “FBI,” the woman said, striding toward her with a sharp and urgent manner. “Did you notice anyone following y
ou here?”

  “Following?” Angelina asked. Behind the FBI lady, she heard another voice, a male, ordering the others to spread out and search. “N-no… I saw a car, but I think that was, well, you. What’s going on?”

  “Did you notice anything unusual at the bar, or when you arrived home just now?” the FBI agent pressed. “A feeling of being watched, maybe?”

  “There was a racoon,” Angelina said, absolutely mystified and feeling like this answer was not a strong enough one. Still, it was all she had. She watched helplessly as uniformed and plainclothes cops spread out around her, moving across the property.

  “Are you absolutely sure?” the woman demanded, making Angelina feel as though she was giving the wrong answer. “You saw no one? Nothing out of place?”

  “Nothing,” Angelina said, watching in total confusion as the police milled around all over her driveway and around her home, the light flicking on upstairs indicating that her husband had finally been woken up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ezekiel Sewall flexed his muscles in the mirror set up opposite the weightlifting area in the gym, admiring the progress he had made. Training to be a fitness influencer hadn’t been easy, but it was so worth it. He had already managed to attract over a thousand followers as he shared his journey from doughy waiter to ripped model. Sure, he’d managed to lose his job in the process, but it was only a matter of time before the sponsorships started rolling in. Living in his mom’s spare room was a small price to pay, given that he’d soon be able to relocate to LA and live in Beverly Hills off the back of his sponsored content.

  He hadn’t managed to get any collaborations locked down yet, but he was sure it was coming. The gym’s owner, Buddy, was slowly starting to crumble toward giving Zeke free membership. He knew it.