“Drop what you’re holding!” Zoe shouted, her heart pounding a mile a minute in her ears. Her hands were shaking, and she willed herself to find that calm center and hold steady. Now was no time for nerves.
He flinched at her voice but finished turning, the item still clutched in his hands. The way the light fell, the shadow of the hood cut across his face. She couldn’t make out his expression, his eyes.
“Drop it!” she yelled again, loud enough that there could be no mistaking it.
The man seemed to consider it for a single second. His hand moved, as if he were about to drop the item onto the floor.
Or to throw it at her, lunge forward, go on the attack. Zoe’s finger tightened on the trigger, ready for him to make his move. Everything slowed, stilled, millennia going by in a single breath as she reacted to his sudden change of posture. Muscles bunched, tensed, kicked, and he was springing away from her, not toward.
The split second of relief was tempered with alarm as Zoe recognized that he was running—making his escape.
He could not be allowed to escape.
She squeezed down on the trigger, trusting her aim, hoping she had guessed the trajectory of his body correctly. There was a flash of light and noise from the gun, and a recoil that snapped her hands back briefly even though she was used to it. Zoe trained her sights on him again, just as she practiced every time she needed to brush up at the gun range, bring the weapon back to aim before she could react to anything else.
He was on the ground, crying out, clutching at his leg. Her aim was true.
Behind her, Zoe could hear the clatter of running footsteps as the troopers moved in. She approached her target cautiously, keeping the gun trained on him, ensuring that the angle and trajectory were always correct even as she stepped closer.
“You are under arrest for suspicion of murder,” Zoe said, reading him his rights as she waited for Shelley to step past her and snap a pair of handcuffs onto his wrists. He made no more attempt to move or run, though he gasped in pain and tried to keep his hands clutched on the wound.
And as Shelley finished closing the cuffs, Zoe looked to the ground and saw the object he had been holding, that had caught the light and her attention.
It was the oil dipstick from his car.
No.
Zoe whirled around immediately, dropping the angle of her gun to point it at the ground as she stared helplessly in all directions. Her eyes took in the crowds that were quickly amassing, keeping a respectful distance from the source of the gunfire but wanting to see what it was all the same. Curious faces of families and couples, teenage kids with their friends, grandparents. All attention was on their corner of the parking lot.
Their cover was blown. If Zoe had taken down the wrong guy, they would never find the right one now. He would be long gone.
The arrest was made, and it was all they could do here and now. Zoe returned her attention to the suspect as Shelley helped him into the back of a patrol car that had come flying up the road at the sound of the shot. They had him in custody. She just had to pray that she had made the right call—and that this man was not as harmless as he seemed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He sat in his car, waiting for an opportunity.
The Kansas Giant Dinosaur Fair was busy, busier than he could have hoped for. Some kind of special event bringing plenty of people his way. Just another example of the pattern making everything easy for him, clearing his way.
He had to be cautious, however. Night had fallen, and hours had passed while he sat in the driver’s seat, occasionally shifting his back to prevent getting too stiff. When the fair was at its busiest, it was too risky to attempt an attack. He would be seen.
Besides that, the lights from the fair were bright, and even cast some of their glow this way. He would be better off hunting in the shadows, finding someone who would not be seen until passersby were right on top of them.
There was a point at the far end of the parking lot where the fence had been broken down, perhaps rammed by an over-merry visitor who had forgotten their car was in reverse. Through there, people had begun to drive their vehicles over onto the grass, taking advantage of the extra space to squeeze in. It was here that he kept a careful watch. It was far enough into the shadows that it might afford him an opportunity.
Still, it was a long wait. The stream of cars into the parking lot slowed down and then began to reverse, people leaving with their families. He was getting twitchy now. The balance had to be right. If the parking lot emptied out too much, he would be seen—caught. He had to act in such a way that he would not be noticed.
A man got into his car beyond the fence, a green sedan parked just beyond the real boundary. He turned the engine over a couple of times, only managing a rough grating noise that clearly cut through the distant noise of the fair.
The watcher shifted in his seat, angling himself for a better view, as the man got back out of his green sedan and lifted the hood. Here was potential. Distracted as he was, he would never notice the watcher approaching him. Even if he did, there was opportunity for pretense here: playing the good Samaritan, come to help with the car.
His hand lingered on the car door handle, just about to stealthily get out and make his approach, when a woman came into view.
The watcher let his muscles sag immediately. There was no way that he could approach the man at his car, now that someone else was on the scene. With any luck, she would get into her own car and drive away, before the engine came back to life. Then he would be back on track.
Come to think of it, the woman would have been a better choice. She was smaller and slim, while the man at his engine was tall. It would have been easier to slip the garrote around her neck instead. She was slowing down, coming to a stop just a few paces away. This could be interesting. Perhaps there was a way he could lure her deeper into the rows of cars, toward the edge of the parking lot, away from the potential witness of the man?
But wait—what was that in her hand?
“Turn around and put your hands in the air. Slowly.”
The watcher froze, his eyes going wide. A gun. It was a gun.
“FBI! Turn around and put your hands in the air!”
No! Law enforcement—here?
The watcher saw with growing panic how she ordered the man to drop what was in his hand once, then twice. His mind was racing. It was only now that he looked closer and realized that the man was driving a similar car—only green, not red, but like his in all other particulars. Could it be that they knew?
Could they be onto him already?
A gunshot rang out, loud and startlingly close, and the man hit the ground, dropping out of the watcher’s line of sight. Had she killed him? Shot him right there, on sight?
There was only one thing on the watcher’s mind, and it was escape. That could have been him, lying on the ground now, bleeding out. In agony. The pattern would never be completed if he was shot by the FBI.
No, he had to get out of here—he had to get out right now. Other people were coming running, plain clothed but carrying radios and guns as they ran—they had to be police. Maybe a whole FBI taskforce. The idea of that was a slightly prideful one, that they would send so many people after him, but that could wait until later. Right now, he just had to make sure he was gone before they realized they had shot the wrong man.
He switched on his ignition, the engine roaring to life, and shot out of his parking space. He cursed and had to swerve to avoid a woman with a small child, who were both moving toward the source of the shot and gawking, their mouths wide open. This was not the time to get in his way. He would have run them both down if he weren’t surrounded by others, all of them holding guns, some even glancing his way as he peeled around them and out of the parking lot.
A cold trickle of sweat made its way down his spine as he glanced in his rearview mirror again and again, watching unmarked cars speed over to the lot with a determination that seemed deliberate. More undercover units.
He passed a group of cars on the shoulder of the highway, the drivers standing and talking with one another. A roadblock waiting to happen.
His fingers were clenched so tightly on the steering wheel that it hurt, and he made a conscious effort to relax them. He eased off the accelerator pedal. Now was not the time to be pulled over for speeding.
Besides, he couldn’t go too far away. The pattern still needed to be completed. If he left and didn’t come back, it would be broken. He couldn’t allow that to happen.
He still needed to make tonight’s kill.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Zoe paced up and down the hall, restless and ready to begin. She had been ready for over an hour, waiting for the doctor to tell them that it was time to interrogate their suspect.
“Sit down, Z,” Shelley suggested, patting the empty plastic seat beside her. “We might be in for a long night.”
Zoe was just about to give in and sit when the door to the private room in which their suspect was being treated opened.
“You can talk to him now,” the doctor said, pausing to lift a finger in warning. “But nothing too strenuous. If his heart rate monitor goes off, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Understood,” Zoe said, eager to get inside. She had heard it all before. The gunshot was only to his leg—it wasn’t like the guy was in too much danger of further damage. The doctor was just covering his bases.
Which meant she had no qualms at all about pulling out all of the stops to get a confession.
“Stick to the plan?” Shelley asked. They had been going over their strategy for the whole time they waited for the doctors to be finished.
Zoe gave her a quick nod and allowed Shelley to enter ahead of her, getting their suspect’s attention first.
“Hello, Mr. Bradshaw,” Shelley said, warmly as always. “How is your leg? Did they give you enough pain medication?”
“It’s got a hole in it, that’s how my leg is,” Bradshaw snapped, obviously not taking immediately to Shelley’s friendly manner. Zoe could not yet see him properly, still waiting on the other side of the half-open door. “This is ridiculous. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Well, hopefully we can get to the bottom of that now, and you’ll be able to recuperate in peace,” Shelley told him, dragging a chair over to sit beside his bed. “Let’s start from the beginning, Mr. Bradshaw. What were you doing at the Kansas Giant Dinosaur Fair?”
“It’s a fair. What do you think I was there for?” Bradshaw snapped.
Zoe had heard enough. Shelley’s nice approach wasn’t making any headway, and they needed another ingredient. The intimidation that the presence of his shooter would provide might just make him a little more cooperative. She pushed the door open and entered, walking to stand at the foot of the bed.
Zoe assessed him as she leaned on the metal tray holding his charts, resting her elbows on the uncomfortable edges and pretending they did not affect her. His height, weight, and other measurements flashed before her eyes as she gave him the once-over. He was five foot eleven, skinny, a little extra sinew on the arms to equip him well for pulling a garrote.
All seemed to fit what they were looking for, but she still had this bad feeling about him. That the way he acted wasn’t at all what she had suspected. He had been unsubtle in his waiting, standing obviously, easily seen. She knew how cautious their man was, how he erased all evidence of his movements as long as he was able to. How would this one have been able to erase his footsteps, after abducting someone in plain view? He had parked on the grass, his feet sinking in, the tires of his car leaving deep impressions. It didn’t make sense.
His reaction now was one of wide eyes and a drawing up of his body, shrinking physically away from her. “What’s she doing here?” he demanded.
“Special Agent Prime is my partner,” Shelley said. “She will be here while I question you. Like I said, Mr. Bradshaw, let’s get this over with as quickly as possible so that we can all move on, shall we?”
“Move on?” Bradshaw still watched Zoe, even though he turned his head toward Shelley as he addressed her. “How am I supposed to move on? I’ve got a bullet stuck in my leg.”
“No, you have not,” Zoe told him, calmly.
“What?”
“The doctor removed it from your leg.”
Bradshaw stared at her, not saying a thing. He looked about fit to explode, a mixture of fear and righteous anger building up inside of him, with no safe target to expend it on.
“Mr. Bradshaw,” Shelley began again, then hesitated. “May I call you Ivan? You can call me Shelley.”
There was a pause before Bradshaw tore his eyes away from Zoe long enough to mutter, “Fine.”
“Let’s skip ahead a bit, shall we? When you were asked to turn and drop what you were holding, why did you run?” Shelley’s tone was soft and calm. She sounded like she was really curious to know the answer. Zoe knew she would have sounded accusatory with a question like that, and wondered briefly how Shelley managed it.
“Someone was pointing a gun at me,” Bradshaw said, his eyes darting sharply back to Zoe on the first word. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Was there no other reason for your attempt to escape? Maybe something you thought you might get into trouble for? Look, we’re really here for a murderer, Ivan, so if you’ve done something else then you can just tell us. We’ll get out of your hair.”
“I haven’t done anything. I was just an innocent bystander. This—this madwoman shot me with no provocation!”
Zoe fought down a growl in the back of her throat. They were getting nowhere. She trusted Shelley enough by now to know that she would get through to him, eventually. They might spend hours in here, just talking, before she managed it—but Shelley would break through this anger and fear and get him to really talk.
They didn’t have hours. Or, at least, Zoe didn’t have hours. She had to know, right now. She had to know that she had the right man. Because if she didn’t, then a serial killer was still out there, and still operating on a tight schedule.
The image of the dipstick kept flashing back into her mind, lying there on the grass. The man’s car really had been in need of some attention, and it had not been a deadly weapon he was holding. That didn’t sit right. Their killer wasn’t about to let car troubles get in his way. Their killer was meticulous, studied, precise.
Not only that, but there was nothing in the car that told them anything. No trace of a murder weapon of any kind, not even anything that could be used as a blunt instrument. It was littered with empty plastic bottles and food wrappers on the back footwells, and long blond hairs had been found easily on the passenger seat. If there was anything she knew about the killer, it was that he was clean and tidy. Neat. And he would not leave the evidence of a passenger sitting in his vehicle, easily traceable via DNA.
He would have been waiting with the garrote. Zoe knew that. She could feel it in her bones. Why would he play the innocent victim to such an extent that he was not even ready to attack if someone approached? The only answer she could think of was that this was not their man.
Which was problematic, because she had already been called by her superiors and warned that she was going to be in trouble for firing her weapon if it turned out that the man was an innocent victim.
She needed to get to the bottom of this, and fast. Zoe cast around the room, her gaze flying to the left and the right. Privacy curtain, monitoring equipment, drip, shelving with Bradshaw’s clothes…
There—a cabinet. She walked over and opened it, ignoring the conversation behind her as Shelley continued to question him.
“Were you at the fair alone, or were you meeting someone there?”
Zoe rifled through the drawers, looking for something that would work. There wasn’t much kept in the room—no syringes or bottles of pills, nothing that a patient could use to harm themselves. But there was a box of Band-Aids. Thinking, Zoe opened it up, pouring them out onto the top of the cabin
et with her body blocking Bradshaw’s view.
“I was meeting my sister. She had her kids with her, so she went home early. I was going to go home too, but the car wouldn’t start.”
Zoe began tearing the strips of connected Band-Aids into singles, making quick and regular movements, two or three sets at a time. She dropped each single back into the box in a haphazard manner. She didn’t want them to be regular or uniform, not for this.
“Ivan, help me out here. I want to understand so we can let you rest. Just talk me through what was going through your mind, okay? You were at your car, checking the oil levels…”
“And next thing I know, there’s someone yelling crazy stuff about the FBI.”
“Did you think she was yelling at you at that point?”
“No, why would I? I was just minding my own business!”
Zoe walked back to the bed and yanked a wheeled food tray over Bradshaw’s lap. He was watching her with a kind of baffled panic.
“What’s she doing now?” he demanded, looking back between Shelley and Zoe as Zoe upended the box and allowed the Band-Aids to tumble out. “Is this a threat?”
The Band-Aids sailed down, scattering across the tray, some of them slipping over to land on the covers of the bed. There was no particular pattern or shape to them, but Zoe knew their guy. She knew he would see a pattern there. She stared down at it herself, starting to organize lines and vertices, checking for the links.
It took her thirteen seconds, but she saw it. Because of the way the box had tipped and the even distribution of the Band-Aids down onto the surface, it had created a more or less distinct sixteen-sided shape. Not an even one, but a shape all the same. The killer would see it—would know it for a sign in his deluded mind.
“What is she doing?” Bradshaw asked again, his voice hissing with fear and confusion, addressed only to Shelley. “I want someone in here with me. This isn’t safe.”
Zoe Prime Mystery 01-Face of Death Page 15
