Face of Death

The uncomfortable thought began to stir that maybe he, like her, could read the numbers. That maybe this was the work of someone with the devil’s ability to see things no one else could.

Find the pattern, find the killer, Zoe told herself. And find him now—before he kills again.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Zoe sat at the side of one of the desks, getting a bird’s-eye view of the investigation room. It was alive again, full of activity and of new sheets of paper joining the piles spread across the desks. There were so many files, now laid open to be read at a glance, something in them ready to give up their secrets if only she could look closely enough. The numbers she had already seen flashed before her eyes, just a distraction. They were not what mattered. It was the numbers Zoe had missed until now that she needed.

Zoe scanned over the reports in front of her, knowing that there was something here. Something they had all missed. If she could only get her teeth into it—

“We have a match for the tires,” Shelley said, putting down the phone with a clatter as she spun her wheeled desk chair over to towards Zoe. “Sedan. Probably an older model, they think, judging by the width. The tread was fairly well-worn, so he’s been on the road a bit. There’s a few different manufacturers with sedans that use those tires, but it’s a start.”

Zoe nodded, pulling a sheet of paper from the fax machine. It baffled her that, in this day and age, the sheriff’s team was still using a fax machine, but it was not for her to tell them how to renovate their office. “This is from the coroner. It is a photograph… what is that?”

She tilted her head, analyzing the image. A splotch of green color on a white background. There was a standard rule to one side, indicating that it was less than a centimeter in both width and length. Other than that, the coroner had sent no information.

“Let me see?” Shelley held out her hand, and tilted her own head in a similar way. “Oh! It’s a paint chip. I think. Let me call him and check.”

Zoe ignored Shelley’s call, filtering out her voice in the background. Paint chips and sedan models were good news for the investigation in general, but there was something else here. Something nagging at the back of her mind that she just hadn’t quite figured out yet. Whatever it was, it could save the life of another woman—because the killer had not stopped or slowed down, and his pattern demanded another body tonight.

“It’s a paint chip,” Shelley confirmed, rolling back over. “The coroner says it was underneath one of her fingernails. Chances are good that it came from the killer’s car.”

Zoe tore her attention from the case files and got up, heading to their easel pad. “New profile, then,” she said. “We are searching for an older model green sedan with out-of-state plates, driven by a male fitting the physical description we already worked up.”

Shelley’s face almost glowed with enthusiasm. “We’re narrowing it down.”

“It is still a wide net to cast,” Zoe said thoughtfully, tapping the board pen against her lower lip. What wasn’t she seeing here? “We should put out an APB on this description.”

“On it!” Shelley jumped out of her seat and almost ran from the room, heading for the sheriff’s office and his controls.

Her eagerness might have been annoying or off-putting, except for the fact that she was getting things done. Zoe had to admit to herself that she was happy to have another pair of hands and eyes on this. There were too many working parts, too many pieces of the puzzle missing, to do this by herself.

They were still heavily lacking in physical evidence, however. Identifying the car was one thing, and they had not truly been able to do that. There were still probably hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles matching the description they had. Going through databases and tracking each of them down was not an option. By the time they had worked through the list, there would be bodies piled up in every state across the whole country.

Except that he wasn’t targeting the whole country, was he? He was moving in a curve—a curve that only Zoe could figure out how to track. The numbers couldn’t let her down, not this close to some kind of clue. She just had to keep looking.

Zoe glanced over crime scene photographs from each of the women, glazed eyes and open throats staring back at her. She could read all kinds of numbers in the frames. A twelve-inch skirt against an outfit that hovered only an inch above the ground. A 34D bust, a 40F, a 32B. Seventeen dollars stuffed into a phone case for safety that had not been taken. They told her something about the victims, but nothing at all about the killer.