Face of Death

“Hi,” he said, winding down the passenger’s side window and inclining his head to look at her. “Are you looking for a ride?”

“Um, yeah,” she said, looking at him mistrustfully, biting her lower lip. “Where are you headed?”

“Into the city,” he said, gesturing ahead vaguely. It was a highway. There would be a city at the end of it, and she could fill in her own blanks as to which. “I’m glad I spotted you. Not many other cars on the road this time of day. It would be a cold night out here.”

She gave a half-smile. “I would be fine.”

He returned the smile broader, kinder, made it reach his eyes. “We can do better than fine,” he said. “Hop in. I’ll drop you outside a motel on the city limits.”

She hesitated still; a young woman getting into a car with a man, alone—it didn’t matter how nice he was. He understood that she would always be nervous. But she glanced up and down the road, and must have seen that even now, as the night was beginning to fall, there were no headlights in either direction.

She opened the passenger’s side door with a gentle click, shrugging the backpack off her shoulders, and he smiled, this time for himself. All he had to do was trust, and things would work out the way the patterns told him they would.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“All right, listen up,” Zoe said. She was already uncomfortable, and even more so when the idle chatter in the room ceased and every pair of eyes swung her way.

Having Shelley at her side did little to dissuade the feeling of awkward pressure, the weight of expectation hanging over her shoulders. The attention turned on her like a hose, palpable and shocking. The kind of thing she tried to avoid every day of her life, if she could help it.

But sometimes the job demanded it, and as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t force Shelley to present a profile on her own. Not as the senior agent.

She took a breath, glancing across all of the officers seated in cramped rows of temporary chairs in the sheriff’s largest briefing room. Then she looked away, finding a point on the far wall to speak to, something less threatening.

“This is the profile we are looking for,” Zoe continued. “The male suspect will be around the height of five foot eleven, according to the calculations of all three coroners and what little physical evidence we found at the scenes. We also believe that he will be of thin to medium build. He is not particularly strong, forceful, or intimidating.”

Shelley took over, stepping forward for her moment in the spotlight—something she seemed to relish rather than fear, her eyes taking on a gleam. “He will present as non-threatening to most people, until the moment of murder. We believe he has been able to entice his victims into conversations and even led them away from relative safety and into an open space where he could physically manipulate the situation to get behind them. He may even be charming, polite.”

“He is not a local,” Zoe added. “He will have out-of-state plates on his car. While we have not been able to determine his state of origin, he is on the move, and will likely continue to be.”

Images of the women whose lives he had taken appeared on the projector screen behind them. They were all three alive, smiling at the camera, even laughing. They were normal, real women—not models or facsimiles of the same look or anything that would set them apart as special. Just women, who until three nights ago had all been living and breathing and laughing.

“He is targeting women,” Zoe said. “One every night, in isolated places with little chance of being caught in the act or on surveillance footage. These are dark areas, away from the beaten track, places that give him the time and room to go through with the kill.”

“How are we supposed to catch him with a profile like that?” one of the state cops piped up from the middle of the bristling copse of chairs in front of her. “There must be thousands of tall, thin guys with out-of-state plates around here.”

“We realize this is not much to go on,” Shelley stepped in, saving Zoe from the annoyance that had threatened to make her blurt out something unfriendly. “We can only work with what we have. The most useful course that we can take with this information at the present moment is to put out a warning to avoid isolated areas, and, particularly if approached by a man fitting this description, to be on guard.”

“Across the whole state?” This question came from one of the locals, the small team working under the sheriff whose Missouri station they had taken over for both their investigation and this briefing.

Zoe shook her head. “Across several states. He has already moved through Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. That is a fair indication that he will continue to travel long distances in order to carry out his crimes.”

There were small noises of disagreement throughout the room, mumblings and growls of discontent.