Face of Death

In her bones, Zoe knew that they were right about his choice of victims. That it was the locations and the opportunity that mattered, not getting the exact right person into his grasp. She needed to stop looking at the women, as hard as that was when a blood-soaked body rested gray in full-frame under camera flash. She needed to look beyond them, at the place. The scene.

What wasn’t she seeing?

Zoe began again, working through the photographs of the gas station. Frustratingly few of the images contained anything other than the body itself. In the background, she could catch the price of gas reflected in the windows, the three varieties of local newspapers on sale, count the yards between the victim and the front door. But there was nothing, nothing that told her who the killer was.

Something tugged at her memory, and Zoe frowned, shuffling through the photographs again. There was only one shot that contained a single, blue-colored piece of candy. But that wasn’t right, was it? There had been more candy—much more. She remembered the colors scattered around her as she walked the scene.

She got up and walked down the corridor, to the small room down the hall where the local police photographer had set up his equipment. He was sitting in front of a large-screened Mac, the most modern piece of equipment in the whole place, and jumped when she thrust open the door without knocking.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked nervously.

“The gas station crime scene,” Zoe said, cutting to the chase. She did not appreciate it when other people delayed matters with small talk, and given that no one else appeared to enjoy it either, she wasn’t sure why it was usually insisted upon. “Do you have any photographs of the candy that was scattered across the parking lot?”

The photographer stood, making his way to a filing cabinet at the side of the room and drawing out a slim plastic folder. He started to flip through printouts, each of them encased in a shiny plastic pouch for protection, until he found what he was looking for.

“Here,” he said. “I grabbed one shot. I thought it was kind of whimsical, candy at a murder scene. Didn’t seem to be any forensic value in it, though. Sheriff said it was probably dropped by a kid.”

Zoe took the folder from his hands, studying the image closely. “Thank you,” she said, turning to go back into the corridor.

“Those aren’t really supposed to leave my room,” the photographer said, but failed to follow up when she ignored him and continued walking.

Small-town protocol or not, there was something here. She could sense it. And if it was going to save someone’s life, then she didn’t give a damn about which room the folder was supposed to stay in.

Just one photograph. That underlined, more than anything else, the fact that no one else could see what she could see. Because this was it. She could feel it. This was something that they had all overlooked, but it was the key to the whole case.

Zoe sank back into her chair, her eyes running over and over the collection of candy on the floor. With this shot, taken from directly above and some distance up—perhaps on a step-ladder—she could see the pattern as it really looked. Because it was a pattern—just like everything else.

Most other people would have looked at that and seen a random scattering of candy. Something dropped by a child, maybe. Meaningless. But if there was one thing that Zoe had learned over time, it was that nothing was ever meaningless. The hardy shrubs of Arizona grew a certain distance apart based on whatever nutrients they could find. Clouds formed on air currents, following pressure lines and forced by temperature and humidity. People moved in the same patterns day after day, life after life, driven by pre-ordained social assumptions and genetics.

And the candy had fallen into near-perfect vertices of a convex polyhedron. All you had to do was connect the dots to see the straight lines drawn between each one. They were plain to see, once you knew how to look.

Almost anyone would have dismissed this as random trash, something to be cleared up and thrown away. But he hadn’t. He had cleaned away everything else, the footprints, any traces of his presence. But he had left those dropped pieces of candy behind, scrupulously avoiding them, letting them stay where they fell.

There was a moment of doubt in her mind, but in truth it was not doubt that she was wrong. She knew she had to be right. The doubt came from fear, fear that she had something in common with a brutal killer. A serial killer—one who treated human lives like pieces of scattered candy. Something disposable, used only for the creation of a pattern.

A fear that she could turn out to be the same. The devil was in her, her mother had said.

Zoe knew she wasn’t an evil killer—even if she had difficulty connecting with other people, she still saw them as humans. The fear came from outside herself, from her mother’s superstitions and the need to hide who she really was.