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

by Blake Pierce

  She was still examining the rope when Flynn caught up with her.

  “Anything?” Zoe asked, straightening up.

  “Nothing useful.” Flynn shrugged. “The body?”

  “Same rope,” Zoe told him shortly. “Condition of the body suggests it happened around ten in the evening. I doubt the mother will be able to tell us anything.”

  “So do I, but I’ll talk to her anyway.” Flynn hesitated, seeming to appraise Zoe with a glance. “Why don’t you wait here? I’m better at talking to grieving relatives. We don’t want to upset her.”

  “I am perfectly capable of conducting an interview,” Zoe said sharply. She didn’t appreciate his tone, even if she could see how they had both been up for a much longer time than usual and that sleep deprivation often led to snappiness.

  “I just thought you might want to keep going here,” Flynn said, gesturing sullenly in the vague area of the body. “You can do your analysis stuff while I talk.”

  It wasn’t anything close to an apology for the way he had spoken, but then again, Zoe really did hate talking to grieving relatives. She wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She nodded tersely and turned her back on him, letting him go off without her. She continued her examination of the body from above, only stepping back when the photographer approached with a flashbulb to document the scene.

  She leaned on the railing several doors down, trying to think. There were so many numbers flying everywhere in this case, but she couldn’t make sense of them. Ezekiel Sewall was a pattern disruptor, flying in the face of everything that they had seen so far. He didn’t fit the profile of an older male business owner with connections to the Chamber of Commerce. The only thing he had in common with the other two victims was his gender, at least from where Zoe was standing.

  She ran everything through her mind again, trying as hard as she could to make it fit. Nothing did. Even the location—the victim being attacked at home instead of on the street. It was a deviation from the usual MO, as well as being riskier. All that it said to her was that the victim was the target, and that the killings weren’t random. They wanted Sewall enough to go to where he was, instead of waiting for him to come to them.

  But why? If the victims were all connected, then why couldn’t she see it?

  And most frustrating of all was knowing that they had spent the night dashing around frantically—and all the while, Sewall had been hanging there already, just waiting to be found.

  Flynn made her start when he approached, jolting her out of her thoughts.

  “Nothing of much use from the mother,” he sighed. “She’s hysterical. Kept going on about her baby boy. But I did manage to confirm that he’s not and never has been a business owner, or involved with the Chamber of Commerce. His father wasn’t either, and he’s deceased now anyway. She couldn’t think of anything that would have connected him to the others. Hadn’t even heard of them.”

  Zoe shook her head, letting a snarky comment about his ability to conduct interviews go in favor of looking for the solution. “It does not make sense,” she said. “Which means that we have been looking at everything incorrectly until now. Whatever this killer’s pattern is, we have yet to identify it.”

  “What if they’re just crimes of opportunity?” Flynn asked, leaning against the railing beside her. “It could be a case of striking whoever they can get.”

  “No,” Zoe said immediately. If there was one thing the numbers could tell her for sure, it was that. “The attacks are too precise. The killer knew exactly where each person would be, and at what time. They even came right to Sewall’s home address. If it was about opportunity, they would not have struck here. They lay in wait.”

  “The mother did mention that Sewall had only just gotten home from the gym,” Flynn said thoughtfully. “That he’d come in and put the TV on, then stepped outside again. She didn’t know why, and she’d fallen asleep before he came back. She just didn’t think anything of it.”

  “He was lured out.” Zoe let this stew in her head for a moment, trying to see it from different angles. “No matter which way you look at it, these men are being targeted specifically. And the hanging is part of the message. We just do not know how to read it yet.”

  “Then where do we go from here?” Flynn asked.

  Zoe stayed silent for a moment. The honest answer was that she didn’t know. But that wasn’t good enough. She was an FBI agent, and she was here to stop the killings—and if she couldn’t manage that, then the local police had no chance at all. They were going to have to dig deeper and find some kind of link between the victims—any small hint that would give them the perpetrator’s identity.

  The good news was that the timer had been reset; the killer wouldn’t strike again until the next night. The bad news was that Zoe was no longer confident they would be able to make the connection in the time they had available—and adding a fourth victim to the list was not the way she wanted this case to go.

  “We start again,” she said, pushing off from the railing and heading down the stairs to the car. “And we do it right now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Zoe almost swung around and punched him when his hand landed on her shoulder. She was so wired up that any contact put her heart racing and put her into flight-or-fight mode—and this close, Flynn hadn’t given her room for flight.

  “We can’t just keep going,” he said, stepping back and lifting his hands into the air at her obviously kneejerk reaction. “It’s been thirty-six hours since I was last in bed. I don’t know about you, but that’s long enough. If I don’t get some sleep, I’m not going to be sharp enough to figure this out.”

  Zoe heard the logic in what he was saying, but she wanted to work. She didn’t want to have to admit that she had these human failings, that she wasn’t good enough to stay up all night and all day until the case was done. With sleep, she would be sharper, too. There was no denying it.

  Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t try.

  “We have to keep going,” she argued. “The killer has taken three victims already. If we do not work fast, there will be a fourth.”

  “Exactly my point,” Flynn said. “Look at yourself. You’re exhausted. I’m exhausted. We need sleep. You just nearly laid into me for touching your shoulder.”

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on a law enforcement officer,” Zoe snapped.

  “We were in the middle of a conversation. I wouldn’t call that sneaking up.” Flynn paused, then lowered his voice. “Remember the first case we worked on? When you got all crazy because you weren’t sleeping enough, and then you got high on sleeping pills by accident?”

  Zoe blinked. “I was not crazy,” she hissed, glancing around to make sure no one else had overheard. “And I was not high. You cannot say things like that—you said you would not report me…”

  “And I’m not going to,” Flynn said, his voice heavy with exasperation and weariness. “I’m just trying to point out that we don’t do good work when you’re too tired to think clearly. Come on. Even you must see we’ll get a productivity boost from having some sleep.”

  Zoe hesitated. She didn’t want to tell him he was right, but she was running out of reasons to say he was wrong.

  “There’s a motel right across the street,” Flynn pointed. “We can grab some shut-eye there and be right back on in as soon as we wake up.”

  Zoe sighed reluctantly, even though she felt how bone-weary she was. “Just four or five hours, right?” she said, making sure.

  “We have to get some sleep, Zoe,” Flynn said, giving her a look that she was sure was supposed to mean he didn’t want to hear any further argument. This time, she didn’t push it.

  “Fine,” she said. “If you are not awake, I will hammer on the door until you are.”

  “I know how to set an alarm,” Flynn said with a weary snap. “I’m not a kid. This is just a recharge. I’ll meet you back at the car in five hours.”

  “All right,” Zoe said, turning toward t
he motel’s reception, wishing there was another way.

  ***

  Zoe twisted and turned in her bed, unable to sleep. These scratchy motel sheets were always the same. She tried hard to close her eyes and drift away, but it wouldn’t happen.

  There was a noise—through the wall—on the other side, where Flynn was sleeping. No, not Flynn—wasn’t that Shelley’s room? Zoe’s eyes flew open and she sat up, alert. What was that noise? A kind of bang—and there it was again, the sound of something falling to the floor…

  Fear lit through all of Zoe’s nerves like wildfire, turning her at once to liquid and to stone. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything. There was a locked adjoining door between the two rooms, and she watched as blood pooled slowly under it, coming from Shelley’s room, pouring in. Zoe sat up on the bed and hugged her knees to herself as the blood came in like a tide, surrounding her, leaving her on a floating island. She knew she was supposed to go and help. She was supposed to save Shelley. But she didn’t.

  She couldn’t.

  Zoe looked up instead, away from the blood, averting her eyes, but there was something up there—something small at first: numbers, she realized, crowding every part of the surface. Dimensions of all kinds: length, breadth, height, depth, the length of each brushstroke in the paint that had covered the ceiling. The numbers got bigger as she watched, forming formulas, tessellating, bouncing off one another, creating theories and sums and calculations on calculations, crowding in like a mass of insects, filling every tiny spot of the ceiling until there was no longer any ceiling between them.

  And then she was calculating how many numbers were there, and how thick the mass of numbers was now, and recalculating that and making extrapolations, and they got bigger and thicker still, and there was no room on the ceiling so they began to grow downward, reaching for her like a falling sky.

  And Zoe ducked but they were coming for her—and when she chanced to look down, to consider whether it was even possible to escape through the blood flooding the room, it was a mistake. She started to see how deep the blood went, how fast it was flowing, and the numbers started to rise up from there, and she was trapped, and the only way out was the door, where even now the numbers were starting to crawl across the surface, taking new life from its structure.

  The door—that was her lifeline! Zoe started across the bed toward it just as it opened, and John stood there, and relief flooded over her.

  “John,” she said. “You came to save me.”

  “No,” John said with a frown, and he reached for the door handle again, and just as he grabbed it, he shook his head at her and glared. “You shouldn’t have left me,” he said, and he slammed the door shut, and Zoe heard the key turn in the lock, saw the calculations of the size of the key—

  And Zoe saw that the numbers had not escaped when the door was open but had grown bigger behind the door, and they were coming from all directions now: above, below, the sides of the room inward, and she calculated the angles they were coming at and she knew she was making it worse but she couldn’t stop, and they crowded down on her, pinning her to the bed, crushing her hands, crushing her breath from her body, crushing her down and down—

  The alarm blaring from her phone woke Zoe from the nightmare, making her sit upright with a jerk. She was bathed in a cold sweat, soaking the sheets. It had only been a dream. That didn’t make the pounding in her heart any less frantic.

  She reached for the phone and switched off the alarm, wiping the sleep away from her eyes as she examined the screen blearily. There was a pounding in her head, too, likely from the lack of sleep. She’d had some, but nowhere near enough, and the nightmare had left her feeling as though she’d barely rested at all.

  There was a text message from Dr. Lauren Monk, Zoe’s therapist, flashing up on the screen. Zoe read it with a sinking heart: Hi Zoe, you missed your scheduled session last night. Is everything okay?

  Yes, that would do it, she thought. Missing her regular therapy session, plus being back in a motel on assignment—clearly a trigger for those memories of the awful day when she’d found Shelley brutally beheaded, left in the motel room while Zoe had been standing just outside. Zoe wiped her face with shaking hands, trying to get a grip on herself. No matter how many times she tried to tell herself she was doing fine, she wasn’t. Not really. She was still struggling with what had happened, and even though Dr. Monk seemed to think she would be fine eventually, there was no telling how long that would take.

  Recovery, it seemed, was one of the few things you couldn’t quantify with numbers.

  Zoe peeled herself out of bed, stepping gingerly onto the floor, which was not, she reassured herself, covered in blood at all. She took a quick shower in cold water to try to wake herself up, to push the dream back into the recesses of her subconscious where it belonged. She couldn’t have that kind of distraction today—not when lives were on the line. If anything, the thoughts of Shelley only reinforced that even more.

  She needed to focus.

  Zoe took five extra minutes to meditate under the water, closing her eyes and taking herself away to the island that Dr. Monk had helped her to build in her mind. It was a place of peace and relaxation, where the numbers were quiet. Zoe saw the pillars of support around her there too: Dr. Applewhite, her mentor, sipping a cocktail from a coconut under the shade of a palm tree. John, sometimes, swinging in a hammock and waiting for her to join him. When she needed to see her, Shelley was there. This morning, the island was quiet and empty: the distance that Zoe needed, not the reminders of her failure that all the people she loved would seem like after such a nightmare.

  Zoe was dressed and ready to leave in a matter of minutes—a clear advantage to not having long hair or feeling the need to wear makeup, in her opinion—and left her room just as Flynn also stepped out of his. Despite their relatively short rest, he looked fresh and bright, his suit perfectly pressed and his hair sitting just-so in place like always. Zoe only just managed to stop herself from shaking her head in disbelief.

  Her phone rang in her pocket before she could even open her mouth to greet him, and she dug it out as he quirked an eyebrow in surprise. He stepped closer and tilted his head toward her to listen in as she answered the call, switching it onto speaker for his benefit.

  “Agent Zoe Prime.”

  “Agent, this is Detective Clara Reed. We spoke last night at the Ezekiel Sewall scene.”

  Zoe had to fight to place her. Yes—she’d spoken to a female detective there. She just hadn’t bothered to catch her name. “I remember.”

  “Detective Morrison asked me to call you when Gerry Dean turned up. He’s just been picked up by our guys down at his home.”

  Zoe’s eyes shot up, meeting Flynn’s. “We will be there as soon as possible,” she said. Her mind was leaping ahead: Gerry Dean had been targeting business owners, and Ezekiel Sewall wasn’t one. But maybe there could still be a link. Maybe Sewall and Dean had some kind of personal issue. Maybe Sewall had been the one to catch Dean out in one of his scams. It was still possible. “Is he still there?”

  “They’re holding him until they get further instructions from you,” Reed said.

  Zoe put the phone down without answering. She already had the address—they didn’t need any further information from Detective Reed. She turned and raced to the car, finding Flynn outpacing her to dive into the driver’s seat, and he was already pulling out of the motel’s parking lot while she tapped on the GPS.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Zoe clutched onto her seatbelt for dear life while Flynn threw the car into the road, taking corners at reckless speeds. She tried closing her eyes, but it didn’t help the motion sickness—only increased her feeling of helplessness. By the time Flynn hurled the vehicle to a stop outside the address they had visited last night, Zoe had to take a few deep breaths to stop herself from throwing up before climbing out to follow him.

  “Where?” Flynn barked at the one remaining police officer standing guard out
side, idly strolling up and down the driveway.

  “Inside, sir,” she said, jerking her head toward the front door.

  Zoe caught up with Flynn as he charged inside, following the sound of voices to a living room which was currently holding two more officers and a man that Zoe recognized easily. He was the same as he had been in the surveillance pictures that Richards and Stout used for their banned customer lists: Gerry Dean.

  His bald head bore drops of sweat today, and he looked up at them with wide and frantic eyes as they entered the room. Flynn wasted no time in positioning himself opposite their suspect, staring down at him with his arms folded across his chest.

  “Gerry Dean,” he said. “We’d like to talk to you about the spate of murders that have been committed in Salem over the past few days.”

  “Murders?” Gerry looked from him to Zoe, now standing beside him, back and forth like a clock: tick, tock, tick, tock. Zoe counted the intervals. “Everyone keeps saying murders. I don’t even know…”

  “You don’t know?” Flynn interrupted. “Let me tell you about them, Mr. Dean. My name is Special Agent Aiden Flynn, and this is Special Agent Zoe Prime. We’re with the FBI, investigating the case. We’ve been looking into everything you’ve done. How you tried to trick these business owners into paying out on refunds that you weren’t due. How you caused a fuss. How they pushed you out of being able to do any business at all here in Salem, and you resented that.”

  Dean was shaking his head in place now, a rapid twitch that never quite managed to develop as far as rotation of the neck. “Yeah, I pulled a few things. I’ve admitted that. I got caught fair and square. I made a few grand before they stopped me, so I counted myself lucky. That’s all. I’ve been working. I got a new job.”