Face of Fear (A Zoe Prime Mystery—Book 3) Read online

  Zoe tried to ignore the name and the way it had cut into her heart. John was a common enough name, after all. She shouldn’t need to imagine John bleeding out or shot or strangled in order to get past it. “Why so?”

  “The body was heavily burned. Postmortem says that his throat was cut first, and then he was taken elsewhere and burned before discovery.”

  “Do we know where the crime was committed?”

  Shelley studied the notes. “No location yet on the actual killing. It’s thought it may have happened in a private home, since there would be a lot of blood, and nothing has been reported. The body was taken out to an isolated street and burned in the middle of the night. By the time a local resident noticed and was brave enough to go check it out, a lot of damage had been done.”

  Shelley wordlessly handed over a photograph. It showed a blackened and twisted body, almost to the point of being unrecognizable as a human. It looked like a movie prop, not a real person. Zoe had to hand it to whoever had managed to determine cause of death. They must have had a real job on their hands.

  There was another photo in the file, a smiling image of a young man. John Dowling in life, probably taken from one of his social media pages. He was in a dark room, with people visible in the background—probably a party. He looked happy.

  “Any leads so far on him? Enemies, grudges?”

  “Nothing yet. Investigation is ongoing.”

  “All right. And the second one?”

  Shelley closed the first file and picked up the other, sucking in a breath through her teeth. “Similar story. Throat cut, then burned. A young woman, Callie Everard. Mid-twenties. She was pretty, too.”

  Zoe just managed to refrain from rolling her eyes. It never failed to amaze her that people, even her esteemed partner, could put weight on such things. Young, old, pretty, ugly, thin, fat—dead was dead. Any life taken was something that should be investigated, any killer someone who should be punished. The particulars made little difference.

  “The location?”

  “This time it all took place in the same alley. Looks like the killer approached her, cut her throat, let her drop down dead, and then set her on fire. That’s one small mercy. She wouldn’t have been conscious for the burning.”

  This, at least, was a sentiment that Zoe could agree with. There were very few pleasant ways to go, and burning to death was not one of them. “How about her? Could she have had a target on her somehow?”

  “The local cops haven’t finished looking into it. She was just found yesterday, only managed to get the ID early this morning. They’ve managed to inform the next of kin, and that’s it.”

  Zoe reached out for the photographs. This body was less burnt, even if only by degrees. It was still possible to make out that she was a woman, and there were shreds of flesh on the body that shone red and raw through the blackened mess.

  “Are you getting anything from the images?” Shelley asked.

  Zoe looked up to realize that she was being watched intently. “Not yet. I do not see anything that I can use. The fire, it corrupts things and distorts them. I could not even reliably tell their height and weight if we did not have their medical files.”

  “Both healthy young people. Maybe this will just be a crime of passion. They have a mutual friend, or ex-friend, who lost it and decided to set the world on fire.”

  “We can hope.” Zoe sighed and settled her head back against the chair. Why did airplanes always have to be so uncomfortable? She’d read that premier class passengers had beds. Not that the Bureau was ever going to swing for something like that.

  “How are things, anyway?” Shelley asked. She tucked the files back away into her carry-on and settled back into her seat with a conspiratorial air. “Did you see John again yesterday?”

  It was Friday night, and John had seemingly been happy with the habitual way that Zoe ran her life. The same things at the same time. The only difference was the venue. “Yes, I did.”

  “Well?” Shelley asked impatiently. “Details, Z. It’s going well with you two, isn’t it?”

  Zoe shrugged, turning her head toward the window again. “Well enough, I suppose.”

  Shelley sighed with exasperation. “Well enough? What does that mean? Do you like him or not?”

  “Of course I like him.” Zoe frowned. “Why else would I go on so many dates with him?”

  Shelley hesitated, her reflection tipping its head to one side behind her. “I guess that’s fair. Although some people just carry right on even when something doesn’t really appeal to them. But you know what I mean. Are the dates getting serious?”

  Zoe let her eyes slip shut. Maybe Shelley would take the hint and think she was trying to get some rest. “I do not know what that means, and I do not think I want to answer it anyway.”

  Shelley paused, saying nothing for a long moment. Then, quietly: “You know, you don’t have to keep pushing me away. You know you can trust me. I’m not going to tell anyone about anything. I didn’t spill your secret, did I?”

  There was the small matter of the time when Shelley had mentioned to their superior, Maitland, that Zoe was “good with math”; Zoe, however, didn’t see any use in bringing that up.

  She didn’t answer, at least not at first. What could she say? It was true that she kept herself to herself, and that was the way she had always been. Did she even need to justify it? First Dr. Monk and now Shelley were talking like she had a problem. Like it was unreasonable to want to keep one’s private life private.

  “I don’t even know why you still keep it a secret,” Shelley carried on. “You could do serious good.”

  “How?”

  “Putting your skills to use. Catching killers.”

  “I already catch killers.”

  Shelley sighed. “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I really do not,” Zoe replied, more ready than ever to move on from this conversation. “How long is left on this flight?” She started jabbing at the screen in front of her, changing it to show their flight path and progress, even though she knew full well exactly where they would be and how much longer they would fly for.

  “It’s something to think about, anyway,” Shelley said. “It feels like you’re happier when you’re around the people who know. You get tense, bottle things up, when you think it’s not safe. Maybe you would have a more comfortable life overall if everyone knew.”

  “Fifty-six minutes,” Zoe said, as if she hadn’t heard her. “We should prepare. We will want to go straight to the most recent crime scene from the airport. Have you got the address?”

  Shelley said nothing, only giving her a long and searching look before returning to the files and searching for the details that they needed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Zoe squinted, looking both ways up and down the alleyway, into the sky. It was a crisp, clear day. A small strip of pale blue ran above them, narrowing off into the distance, hemmed in by grimy bricks on apartment blocks and warehouse storage facilities on either side.

  It was a far cry from the luxury and waving palm trees of Beverly Hills. The streets and sidewalks were cracked and faded, and the nearest building at the end of the alley was a homeless shelter. Still, the studio apartments rising tall on the other side probably cost more than her childhood home in rural Vermont.

  There was still something lingering in the air, despite the removal of the body. Zoe could still smell it. It probably wouldn’t go away for a long time. The stench of burning human flesh and hair tended to stick around.

  Zoe returned her attention to the ground, and the patch of scorched markings that ran across the tarmac of the street and littered bricks, garbage bags, and needles. Most of them were burned and twisted up themselves now, made into unrecognizable black plastic shapes that only added to the eyewatering aroma. The killer, it seemed, hadn’t cared so much about the presentation.

  Or maybe they had, and they were making a statement about this young woman—this Callie Everard—being just anothe
r piece of trash.

  Shelley was talking to a local police officer nearby, while the others were all but packing up. The forensics team had been over the site already, and the body had been taken for testing. All that remained was to pick up all of the little pieces of evidence left behind in the debris of the murder. A female officer with short-cropped hair and a small stature was gingerly placing them, one by one, into plastic evidence bags.

  Zoe watched her with only vague interest. Her mind was working along its own paths, tracing what her eyes saw. The woman had been lying with her head next to the overturned trash bags, her feet pointing toward the middle of the alleyway, at a thirty-degree angle to what would have been the center line. She had fallen backward, most likely, after her throat was cut. There were still some traces of blood, beneath the scorching and the melted bodily fluids, that shored this theory up.

  They knew a lot about her already, about Callie. The rest they would know when they interviewed her friends and family, found out who she was and what she did. Why someone might want to kill her.

  But the killer himself, though: that was a different question. Where was he, or she? Zoe could see nothing on the ground of the alley, no particular sign that might give them away. There were no footprints, not on an alleyway that was no doubt traversed by tens if not hundreds of people a day. There was no discarded lighter or stub of a match, no empty gas can. Any evidence that might have betrayed their presence had been washed away when someone dumped water over the body in an attempt to put it out and save a life that had already ebbed away.

  What had he used for fuel? For accelerant? Where had he stood? What kind of weapon had he used to cut the throat? Or she, Zoe tried to remind herself, in an effort to stay open-minded; the statistics were clear, however. This level of violence would usually point at a male suspect.

  It was the “usually” that was the problem. Zoe liked to rely on her gut, but unless she was above ninety percent sure of something, she wasn’t willing to bet everything on it. And even when she’d been that sure in the past, she had occasionally been wrong. Right now, she had nothing at all to be sure about, not where this killer was concerned.

  Perhaps she would know more when they took a look at the body. She walked back over to Shelley, who was just wrapping up her conversation.

  “There is nothing here,” Zoe announced, as soon as Shelley was done.

  “I can’t say I’m surprised,” Shelley replied. She was glancing up at the windows of the apartments above, blackened not by the rising smoke from a human corpse, but by years of dirt and neglect. “No one in the neighborhood saw anything. They said they smelled the smoke first. A few local residents rushed out with a bucket of water to try to help, but that was all. No suspects, no one standing and watching. No witnesses that saw anyone enter the alley around that time.”

  “Is there any footage?” Zoe nodded upward to a security camera perched just at the entrance on the side they had walked in by.

  Shelley shook her head. “The cops say it’s not even connected. Every time they tried to get it working, kids would come and spray-paint over the lens or cut the wires. They kept it up as a scare tactic, just in case, but it hasn’t worked properly for years.”

  “Locals would know that,” Zoe pointed out.

  “So would anyone who did a preliminary walk around the block and saw the state it’s in.”

  Zoe glanced around one more time, satisfied that there was nothing more to read here. The only story the numbers were telling her was about the construction of the buildings and the alley itself. Since she doubted the height of the walls had any bearing on the crime, they were done here. “To the coroner, then,” she said with determination, striding away toward their rental car.

  ***

  Zoe wrinkled her nose, then modulated her breathing. It was all about focus. She breathed in through her mouth, thus avoiding the worst of the smell, and out through her nose. Shelley was struggling not to gag, but Zoe tried not to let it put her off.

  “It’s a bad one, all right,” the coroner said. She was a tall young woman with bronzed blonde hair and a tan, and altogether too much eyeshadow for someone working in a medical office—even if it was only the dead she was working with.

  Zoe ignored her, too, and kept her attention on the body. If it even fit under the definition of a body anymore; charcoal was a more fitting description. The man, the one Shelley had named as John Dowling, was no longer a man. There was a certain shape—legs twisted together and to one side, arms close in across the body, a round jut where the head had been—but it would have been just as easy to imagine that it was a bit of scrap, part of the belly of a ship or an ancient piece of machinery that had burned in the ruins of Pompeii.

  The second body was more recognizable, though only just. Somehow, even though the burning had not taken hold so badly, the smell was worse with that one. Maybe because she had been left out in the heat of the California sun in the middle of the day. The young woman. The bits of ragged and scorched flesh that still clung to her seemed somehow obscene. Five inches of leg above the foot, two inches at each elbow, a chunk of hair from the back of the head that had been protected by contact with the damp ground. Any longer in the flames, and she would have been just as much ash as he was.

  “Ante-immolation wounds?” Zoe asked, without looking up.

  The coroner hesitated for a second.

  “Before they were burned,” Zoe added for clarification.

  “I know what immolation means,” the coroner replied, a hint of tension for the first time in her calm, beachy voice. Everything about her was irritating to Zoe. “As far as I can tell, with the state the bodies are in, there was only the single cut to the throat. Enough to kill on its own. Besides being set on fire, nothing else was done to them.”

  Zoe leaned closer, examining the throat. The girl’s hands had been up at hers, and the fingers had fused together and melted against the next when she burned. There was, however, still a distinct and visible wound behind them, gaping open where her head had tilted back.

  “This was precise,” she said, more to herself than anything else.

  “It was a quick attack,” the coroner agreed. “Whoever the killer was, they knew what they were doing. Straight in from behind, a single slash across the neck to open it fully, in both cases.”

  Zoe straightened her back and looked at Shelley—to make it clear that this next observation was for her, not for the irritating presence in the room. “This was not a crime done on impulse. It was planned out, the location chosen carefully.”

  “Do you think the victims were chosen on purpose?”

  Zoe chewed her lip for a moment, casting her eyes back between them. What did they have in common, other than being burnt to a crisp?

  “It is too early to say,” she decided. “We need to learn more about Callie Everard. If we can find a connection between them, good. If not, there may be a bigger message at play.”

  “A serial killer?” Shelley groaned. “I hope they’re secret lovers or something. I had my fingers crossed we could get home for the weekend.”

  “Good luck,” the coroner put in, a statement that was absolutely unnecessary.

  Zoe turned a baleful glance in her direction, and was at least a little pacified by the way the woman shrank away and busied herself with a nearby metal tray of instruments instead of meeting her gaze again.

  “We’ve got a room waiting for us at the local precinct,” Shelley said. “The cop I spoke to assured me that the coffee is awful, but also that the air conditioning is completely inefficient, so we have lots to look forward to.”

  “Lead the way,” Zoe said, wishing she could at least find that funny to lessen the blow.

  CHAPTER SIX

  With a sigh, Zoe chose a chair and sank down into it, reaching for the first file that had been left for them.

  “Thank you, Captain Warburton, we really appreciate your help,” Shelley was saying near the door, making good work of the small ta
lk and pleasantries that Zoe had never enjoyed.

  It felt good to be part of a team that worked. Where each of them had their own separate roles. Shelley was to understanding people what Zoe was to numbers, and though neither of them could really comprehend what the other did, at least it made everything flow easier.

  After a good twenty minutes of studying the files, they were no closer to getting anywhere. Though the locals had managed to amass some family statements and get a lot more information than the initial files they had reviewed on the plane, none of it seemed to be helpful. Zoe threw her pages down on the table with a groan of frustration.

  “Why can it not ever be a simple connection?”

  “Because then the locals could do it, and we’d be out of a job,” Shelley said calmly. “Let’s go over what we know. Talk it out. Maybe something will click.”

  “I doubt that very much. The two of them were such different people.”

  “Well, let’s start with that. John was a healthy guy, right? A gym rat.”

  “His housemate said that he spent almost all of his spare time at the gym. He was in good shape.”

  “And a nice guy, too.”

  Zoe made a face. “He donated money to charity and helped out at a soup kitchen on Sundays. That does not necessarily mean he was a nice guy. Lots of people do things like that because they are hiding a darkness.”

  “You’re grasping at straws,” Shelley said, shaking her head. “We can’t read anything else into that. He had a clean lifestyle. No drugs, no convictions, not even any disciplinary record at work.”

  “And she was the opposite.” Zoe directed this last statement at a photograph of a smiling Callie Everard, beaming at the camera and holding up a bottle of beer while an inebriated-looking young man held his arm around her shoulders.

  “Well, maybe not. Yes, she had some trouble with drugs earlier in her life. But she went in and out of rehab when she was twenty-three, completed the course, kicked the habit. She had been clean for a couple of years. Back on track.”