Face of Death

She joined the grid of searchers, going back over ground that had already been checked in order to be extra thorough. Though the tracks themselves were uniform—each rail a set distance apart, with boards at set intervals between them, nuts and bolts and everything else laid out in predetermined pattern—their surroundings were anything but. Lumps of rock and tufts of grass, the tiny skeleton of a bird, items of trash that had blown across the empty land. It made searching harder work, trying to see an irregularity in a field of irregularities. So many patterns overlaid one over the other.

Forty minutes passed before Zoe was sure they had searched the tracks as thoroughly as they could. She looked up and saw Shelley sitting inside the car with the light on, still with her phone pressed to her ear. No luck there yet either, then.

Zoe paced, marking out distances with her feet as a way to distract herself. There was so much pent-up energy inside her, waiting to burst out. She wanted, needed, to do something. The troopers gathered in knots on the grass, all of them watched by the wary homeowners who stood now at their windows.

There was nothing on the tracks. Nothing that would have killed Aisha. So then, how would he do it?

The train. It had to be something on the train itself.

Zoe approached the car just in time to hear Shelley snap uncharacteristically, “Then wake him up!”

Shelley was pinching the bridge of her nose, a frown furrowing deep lines into her forehead. She took the cell from her ear and jabbed at the screen, ending yet another call.

“Nothing?” Zoe asked.

“I’m trying to get hold of the man who knows all the answers,” Shelley said, shaking her head. “We’ve got to wait for someone to wake him up.”

Zoe was about to comment on how ridiculous the whole situation was when Shelley’s cell buzzed to life again, and Shelley grabbed it up.

“Hello? Yes, this is she… yes… and that’s where?” Shelley made quick notes on her pad, scrawling out addresses next to the times. She showed them to Zoe, the locations of each of the trains that were due to head through the area.

Several were held in a rail yard a three-hour drive away, ready to depart soon in order to get here by their scheduled time. Only one was nearer—the first of the day, scheduled for around four in the morning when the rails began working again.

A twenty-minute drive, and just under three hours before it would leave the rail yard.

Zoe tapped the pad hurriedly, and Shelley started giving orders down the phone. “Is anyone there now? It’s locked? Right, get us the person with the key. You have them? Excellent. Meet us there. Go in and start searching as soon as you arrive. We’re looking for a teenage girl. But be cautious. Look through windows—don’t open the car doors. We have reason to believe there may be traps in place.”

“We are moving out,” Zoe shouted, getting the attention of the troopers. “You six, stay here to man the roadblock and watch this area in case we do not find her. The rest of you, get in your cars and follow us.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Zoe had already been strapped into her seat and was impatiently tapping her foot when Shelley ended the call. Their vehicle had roared into life, and they headed off down the road, their GPS calculating the fastest route and directing Shelley to turn at the end of the street with a robotic tone.

“I told him not to let the train depart,” Shelley said. “It will never come through here.”

“It does not matter,” Zoe replied, clutching tightly to her seatbelt. “He set something up. She will die at the time that the train was scheduled to pass through here, even if it never leaves the rail yard. The tracks have not been tampered with, we know that now. There is something on the train itself.”

Shelley’s lips were a hard, thin line, pressed together so tightly that the edges were turning white. “I know,” she said. “We’ll have a little under two and a half hours to find her, figure out what the trap is, and get her out of it.”

Zoe lifted her cell out of her pocket. “I will call for reinforcements. Bomb squad, and other specialists who will know more than we do.”

The tires of the car ate the miles away, Shelley always keeping the speedometer over 100 no matter what type of road they turned onto. It was blissfully quiet, nearing half past one in the morning, the roads almost entirely empty. The one truck they did overtake at high speed blasted a horn at them, the sound trailing off into bemused silence as the two state police cars followed.

Zoe held onto her seatbelt and the door handle with white-knuckled fingers. Her stomach was roiling, but she would rather die than tell Shelley to slow down. Aisha’s life depended on them getting there fast.