Face of Death

“Anything else?” the sheriff asked into the radio. “Anything that might identify him?”

“Not that I can think of, sir. I checked my dash cam. There’s a glimpse of him, but only his body. He was wearing a gray sweater and dark pants. That’s it.”

The sheriff sighed and thanked the man, rubbing his tired eyes. “I’ll put out an APB.”

“It will not work,” Zoe said, chewing her lip and looking out toward the horizon. “He is too smart to get caught now. We would have gotten him last night. He knows we are onto him now. It will be that much harder.”

The sheriff gave her a hard look. “No offense, Agent, but I’ve got to protect the citizens of this county. I can’t keep running after your theories and missing him every time. You pulling the wrong man last night let this woman die.”

He had gone too far. That much was clear. A sheriff didn’t speak to a member of the FBI like that, no matter who had superiority. But by the time Zoe could get past the fact that he wasn’t wrong, he had turned his back on her to issue orders into the radio, getting his men moving.

Shelley reached over and placed a momentary hand on Zoe’s arm, as was becoming her habit. Zoe nodded sharply in response, listening in to the sheriff as he set up a dragnet.

“There’s always a chance, I suppose,” Shelley said, trying to find some comfort. “We should cover all angles.”

“We are still missing something,” Zoe said, knowing it with certainty now. “There was no green Ford Taurus in the parking lot at the fair. We would have seen it.”

Behind Zoe’s words was another nagging certainty. The killer struck every night—and only once every night. There was every likelihood that the teenage girl was still alive.

An alert buzzed on her cell phone, and she opened it to see the photograph of the missing teen, circulated to her number as well as any law enforcement in the area. A fact list named her as Aisha Sparks, seventeen years old. One younger brother. She was a dancer and loved children, wanted to go to college to become a social worker. A good kid.

Zoe stared down at Aisha’s sweet smile, in a photograph clearly taken at school for a yearbook, and knew that she had to save her. So many had died already. So many who should have been saved.

If she couldn’t save Aisha, Zoe knew, it would all be on her. All her fault. If she was going to redeem herself in any way for letting it get this far, letting him claim more lives, then she had to stop him from taking this one.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Shelley was tired of looking over the case files in the investigation room, going over all of the old clues that they had already seen before. The latest autopsy was nowhere near being complete, and they were still waiting for final reports from Rubie’s body. There was nothing new here, nothing that they had not already seen with their own eyes before.

It wasn’t that Shelley didn’t see the benefit of going back over the information—there were many ways that data could take on a new face when you had more clues to go on, when you had seen more victims. Insignificant details could suddenly become the key to unraveling a whole case.

What she objected to, however, was the fact that it was she who had to do it. They were only on their second case together, but already she could see how gifted Zoe was. Shelley was never going to be able to compete with that. She would be better off doing the legwork, physical stuff that didn’t require looking at the complex clues. Talking to people. That was what she was good at.

It wasn’t that she could really, fully understand what Zoe did. It might as well have been witchcraft, for all it made sense to her. But Shelley was beginning to grasp that just because she didn’t understand something, didn’t mean it was wrong. She would take anything that she could get to help save lives.

And there was something about Zoe, something that triggered her own mothering instinct, even though Zoe was older than her. Something a little broken, vulnerable. Shelley had known that Zoe had gone through a lot of partners before her. Been warned about it. Now she could see why, and she wasn’t going to be the latest in a long line to just abandon Zoe because she had something that set her apart from everyone else.

They had left the door to their room open, allowing in the bustle of the rest of the station from the corridor. A short distance away, the sheriff’s office had been the site of much activity all day long, as deputies and state troopers passed in and out regularly.

There was the sound of urgent ringing down the hall, and Shelley perked her ears up. The sheriff answered, barked something down the line, and only a few seconds later strode past the door. He was shrugging his coat on over his shoulders as he went.

“Sheriff?” Shelley got to her feet and rushed out into the hall, looking in the direction he had gone. “What is it?”

“Got a hit with the dragnet,” the sheriff called over his shoulder. “Green Ford Taurus. I’m heading out there now.”