Face of Death

Zoe thought of the few remaining footsteps at Linda’s crime scene, how the woman had been in sight of safety when he looped his wire around her throat and killed her. He was normally such a controlled killer. This was a break in his pattern, and it was not by design. The girl had fought him off. Zoe looked at her still, graying face with a rare burst of compassion, thinking of how hard she must have clung to life even to get this far.

The color told her something else: the time that had elapsed. He had attacked right within his normal window of time. When Zoe had been—what? Blurting out confessions about her difficult childhood, and feeling sorry for herself? Wasting those precious hours that could have saved this woman’s life?

The coroner moved in, and Zoe stepped aside, allowing him to begin an initial assessment. Out here there were not the full, white-suited crime scene investigation teams of the inner city. It was just the coroner and his briefcase, and they were lucky to have that. Zoe barely needed to wait for him to finish—she knew exactly what they would tell her.

“What are you thinking?” Shelley asked, as Zoe approached. She had been waiting a distance away from the body, a vantage point from where she did not have to look at it—or smell it.

“Did you get a good look?” Zoe answered with a question of her own. She was beginning to be concerned that Shelley was a little too delicate—that she did not have the stomach for a crime scene. Besides which, she did not want to explain exactly what she had seen. The coroner could do that, and save Zoe explaining how she had seen it.

“Briefly.” Shelley nodded. “It seems as though her throat was cut over there, on the access road, but she escaped and ran. She bled out here. I’m guessing, at least. I couldn’t see any other wounds.”

“Nor me. Everything was off for him this time. She nearly escaped, and though there appear to be some marks cleaned up near the body, he did not complete his usual total clean-up. I would imagine that forensics will be able to get more clues here than we ever have before.”

“The tire tracks, and footprints, maybe.”

Zoe nodded. “Not enough to identify his car or his person, not yet. But a step toward narrowing it down, evidence to present when we do catch him. It seems he is getting more desperate.”

The coroner approached, rolling up a pair of clinical gloves and stuffing them back into his pocket. “I have done an initial investigation. Preliminary, of course, until I should have the chance to move her back to my office and take a better look. There I will be able to carry out the requisite tests and begin a more thorough investigation which ought to reveal more details than I am able to provide at this moment.”

Zoe closed her eyes, fading the old man’s voice out. He was the kind of person who would not use ten words to say something if a hundred could be used instead. The precise opposite of the kind of person that Zoe enjoyed conversing with. Instead, she thought about the scene, the way everything was slightly off-kilter.

Mentally, Zoe moved the red pin in the map in her head to the new location, a short distance away but still relevant. The road was the point where he had attempted the kill, and it was that which was significant, not the point of death. It moved the pin a little closer to her straight line, but not enough to make a difference. It had to be a curve.

“Where was the bruising?” Shelley asked, snapping Zoe back to attention.

The coroner indicated an area on his own body, over the ribs and stomach of his left side. “As I say, the bruising would have been inflicted postmortem, as there was very little blood left at this stage. That is all I can say from an initial investigation. I would say…”

“Anger,” Zoe said, talking over him. “He was angry at her, for some reason.”

“Perhaps because she ran,” Shelley suggested.

“But she was dead already by the time he caught up with her,” Zoe said. “He got his goal. So why was he so angry?”

Shelley spread her hands in a wordless gesture, the coroner beginning again his rambling monologue as if there had been no interruption.

Zoe’s head was racing. There were more questions here than she had seen at any of the crime scenes—an irony, when what they needed desperately now were answers. Why had he chosen this road as his place, this random access road in the middle of a highway with nothing around it? Not a parking lot or a natural place to meet someone, like a footpath, as in his other crimes—why the change?

And why, if he had already achieved his goal of killing the woman, was he still angry enough to waste time kicking her—time that left him unable to finish covering his tracks?

Not only that, but something else kept catching at her mind. The Rorschach of the blood pools. The patterns. Why had that tugged at something in her mind, something that gave her a certainty that it was his work? If she could just figure out what it was that had linked that mental image with the other kill sites, she would have him.