Face of Fury (A Zoe Prime Mystery--Book 5) Read online

  Dr. Applewhite sighed. “You’ve not been speaking to anyone,” she clarified, even though they both knew it was unnecessary. “You’ve been ignoring all of my visits and calls. And now, suddenly, you’re throwing yourself back into work?”

  “My suspension ended,” Zoe told her. “It was time. This is my job.”

  “I know, and I know it’s important to you,” Dr. Applewhite said. She hesitated before plowing on anyway. “Shouldn’t you be taking some more time? You were badly affected by what happened. You need to take time to process your feelings. To let yourself grieve. You have to come to terms with—”

  “You know what?” Zoe interrupted, talking over her. “I am through with being told how I am supposed to be. You have all been doing it. You, Dr. Monk, and then Shelley. Shelley tried to make me connect with my emotions, to feel rather than just seeing—and look how that ended up.”

  Dr. Applewhite took a sharp intake of breath. “Zoe, that isn’t fair. What happened to Shelley was—”

  A beep across the line cut Dr. Applewhite’s words off momentarily. A signal that there was another call coming in.

  “I am not discussing this,” Zoe seethed, ignoring her mentor’s words once more. “I have a case to investigate, and the other agent on the case is trying to call me. Goodbye.”

  She didn’t wait to hear a response, simply pulling the phone away from her ear and looking at the screen. She thought she heard the beginning of a response from Dr. Applewhite, but she ignored it as she terminated that call and accepted the new incoming line from Agent Flynn.

  “Agent Prime?” Flynn’s voice was somehow distant, and there was a rumbling noise in the background. He was driving with his device set to speakerphone, Zoe realized. “I have a hit on my cross-checks. A potential lead.”

  “Good for you,” Zoe said flatly. It wasn’t perhaps the most appropriate response—after all, she should probably should have been happy that there was a new direction to take the case in—but she was still shaking a little from her conversation with Dr. Applewhite. The anger was surging through her in waves, filling her with an aggressive energy that she was ready to unload on any suitable target.

  “I’m coming to pick you up,” Flynn said, seemingly ignoring her comment. “Are you still at the hiker scene?”

  “Yes,” Zoe said sullenly, reaching out to kick at a loose stone with her boots. “I will walk back to the edge of the road. You won’t have to drag the rental car over the grass again.”

  She hung up without waiting for his response either. The less she had to talk to anyone right now, the better. And she could use the walk—even if it wasn’t a terribly long distance, it would be a good way to burn off some steam.

  If she was going to be able to assess this new lead, whatever it was, with the clarity required, she needed to get her mind a little clearer. Zoe reached into her pocket and pulled out another of the pills, throwing it back quickly. One hadn’t seemed to have worked; perhaps two would do the trick.

  Something had to—or she didn’t much rate her chances of solving the case anytime soon, and if she couldn’t do that, what was the point of it all?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Here, see?” Flynn said, shoving the papers across to Zoe and pointing at them, taking his eyes off the road for a moment to tap on the highlighted lines. Zoe wished he wouldn’t do that. It was alarming, how quickly he drove combined with how lax he was about watching out for hazards. “He works at the planetarium.”

  Zoe followed his finger, reading the highlighted text: an engineer who was on the planetarium’s payroll by the name of Ed Baker, his home address listed next to his starting date—three years ago—and his salary, which wasn’t to be sniffed at.

  “Fine,” Zoe said, shifting to another page of the loose file he had pushed at her. “So, what is the connection?”

  The next page was a printout of a map, two locations circled. “See their homes? They’re within walking distance of each other, same neighborhood,” Flynn asserted. “It would have been easy enough for Baker to follow Hanson when she set off from home and went out to the trail. Actually, she would have gone right by his house when she did.”

  “That does not prove a lot,” Zoe said, making perhaps the grandest understatement of her month. In fact, it was nothing at all—circumstantial only. It ignored the fact that Hanson also had to pass by many other homes on her journey, and the non-coincidental fact that two people living and working in the same area had a route match.

  “Aha,” Flynn said, gesturing for her to turn the page. “But the only reason I latched onto Baker in the first place is because I found him when I was cross-checking. They follow each other on Twitter.”

  “Hanson and Baker?” Zoe said, screwing up her face. “What does that prove?”

  “Not much,” Flynn admitted. “But she did post regularly about her hiking routes, along with images. She never shared exactly when or where she was going, but if you were a local, you’d be able to recognize things. Landmarks. He would have known she was likely headed out. In fact, he might have come up with the idea of murdering her on the trail after seeing her posts.”

  Zoe thought that it seemed a little far-fetched. Connecting the dots because you wanted to force them to be connected. “Does Baker have any record?” she asked. “Threatening behavior, stalking, domestic abuse?”

  “Nothing comes up in his file.” Flynn shrugged. “No record at all. He looks clean. But that probably just means he’s good at getting away with it.”

  Zoe would have rolled her eyes if she’d been able to find the level of care required. This was pointless. A wild goose chase. But at least she could take more time to think about the clues she had seen at the Hanson attack scene. There was something there, she knew—and it was all recorded in her brain now, ready to be used. She wouldn’t have to work hard to recall it. The numbers tended to stick with her like that.

  It was getting later in the evening; they were driving toward Ed Baker’s home, not back to his workplace. Even if the planetarium hadn’t been closed to facilitate their investigation and preserve the evidence, he would have been home by now, settling in for the night. There was no other information about him in the paperwork that Flynn had put together. No word on whether he had a family living with him or was single, his age, or anything else. Zoe sighed to herself. Flynn was going off half-cocked, unprepared. If she hadn’t believed this was a dead end, she would have tried to caution him toward safety and thorough research before barging in.

  They pulled up outside under a dark sky, on a quiet street where the majority of the homes had lights blazing cheerily in downstairs rooms. The Baker house was no exception: a neatly trimmed front yard with two cars parked out front, lights on across all of the ground floor rooms behind thick curtains, and an overall impression of warmth and coziness even from the outside.

  Zoe got out of the car slowly, for once deliberately following the rookie’s lead. It wasn’t that she was trying to give him the impression that he was in charge, but she wanted little part of this. She couldn’t feel any confidence that they were going to discover anything in this pointless interview. At the same time, she couldn’t exactly tell him not to bother. It was perfectly normal procedure to interview anyone who might have known both victims. SAIC Maitland wouldn’t have been impressed if Flynn went to him and said that Zoe was ignoring potential leads.

  Zoe trailed behind Flynn up the walk to the door. She was starting to feel strangely disconnected. She was able to somewhat focus on what was happening around her rather than getting swept up in the numbers, but the pills made something inside her brain fill up with liquid and float.

  She watched, more like an outsider than ever, as Flynn knocked on the door and it opened a short time later.

  “Ed Baker?” Flynn asked.

  “Yes.” The man, a forty-something who stood at five foot nine, nodded. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Agent Aiden Flynn with the FBI,” Flynn said, holding up his badge.
Zoe moved to do the same. “This is my partner, Agent Zoe Prime. Do you mind if we come inside for a chat?”

  Zoe wanted to object. He wasn’t her partner. She’d been very clear about that. She’d already had a partner, and the position wasn’t open for a replacement.

  But Ed Baker was already nodding and standing back to let them inside, which meant there wasn’t enough time for her to drag Flynn aside and put him straight, and all Zoe could do was follow him into a cozy room with two three-seater sofas and an armchair centered around a thirty-inch television screen mounted on the wall.

  There was the sound of cooking coming from the kitchen down the hall; rattling of spoons and pans, an extractor fan working hard to remove the steam from the room, something bubbling in a pot. A teenage boy with his father’s build looked up from a handheld gaming console as they came into view and, at a gesture from Baker, quickly escaped into the kitchen himself.

  “What’s this about?” Baker asked, gesturing for them to take a seat as he settled into his armchair. Zoe reluctantly sat next to Flynn. There was something about that proximity that reinforced the idea of them being partners, and she didn’t like that one bit.

  “We’re investigating a murder,” Flynn said, perhaps more sharply than he needed to. He settled forward on his cushion, leaning toward Baker, all acute angles and long, straight limbs.

  “Oh!” Baker visibly started, moving back a little. “A… a murder? You mean at the planetarium? We were told there’d been an accident, but…”

  “That one, and another victim, as it happens,” Flynn replied. He was looking closely at Baker’s face. Zoe thought he was trying to watch for some sign of guilt. “Both of whom you happen to have a personal connection with. Can you start by telling me about yesterday, from the afternoon onward? Where you were, what you did?”

  Baker swallowed. “Right. Christ… two women? Did they both work at…?” He caught Flynn’s eye, still regarding him with a steely gaze, and swallowed again before continuing. “Okay. Yesterday. Let me think. After lunch I was working on one of our systems—they’re highly technical, and they get faults fairly often, so they keep me busy. This one was a real doozy. I was working on it for hours, almost until home time.”

  “And after that?” Flynn prompted. He’d taken his notebook out, but hadn’t yet bothered to write anything in it. Another rookie move, Zoe thought. He was showing his cards. If he really wanted to trap someone into giving themselves away, he should pretend to write down all of it—even the useless stuff. As it was, he was broadcasting the fact that the murder had happened later in the evening, and when he made a note of the precise time they were interested in it would show even more clearly.

  “I finished work and drove home as normal.” Baker gestured toward the kitchen after a moment. “Gavin had soccer practice, so I went and picked him up from that on the way. Then we sat down for dinner.”

  “What time was that?” Flynn interjected, his pen now hovering above the page.

  “About seven, I’d say,” Baker told him. He was visibly nervous, his eyes wide, his mouth making funny shapes as though he had forgotten what to do with it. Zoe could see there was nothing to him—no pretense, no guile. He was just scared about being interviewed by the FBI. She’d seen it often enough, and had learned how to tell the difference under Shelley’s guiding hand.

  She turned away from that thought quickly, before it blinded her.

  “And you then did what, for the rest of the evening?” Flynn asked.

  “Well, I stayed here,” Baker said, with wide eyes turning toward the kitchen. Zoe looked up to realize that a woman, judging by her age almost certainly his wife, was now standing in the doorway. There was a dish towel in one of her hands, as if she was wiping them off when she entered. “I just stayed here with my family.”

  “Can anyone corroborate that?” Flynn asked.

  “I was here,” the woman in the doorway said softly. “I’m his wife. I can vouch for the fact that he was here. What’s this about, Ed?”

  Flynn ignored both her confirmation and her question. “Is there anyone outside the family who can corroborate that you were here?”

  Baker looked puzzled. He kept looking at his wife, three times before he answered again, as if he thought that she might know the correct response to give. “No, I suppose not. The neighbors might have seen the car in the driveway, I guess.”

  Flynn shook his head. “Anyone who can prove it. All that means is you might have taken a different vehicle, or walked.”

  “I don’t understand,” Baker said. “Why do you need to know where I was? You can’t possibly think that I—”

  “Mr. Baker, we have reason to link you with both of the murder victims,” Flynn said firmly. “Can you or can you not prove that you were here all night?”

  Baker was getting more and more flustered, trying to find a way to answer the question that would satisfy this stranger who had burst into his home demanding answers. He was pale in the face, shaking. “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he insisted. “I would never. I don’t have a violent bone in my body. Just ask my family—I was here all night.”

  “It’s true,” the wife insisted. “He wouldn’t. He was here.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Flynn barked, loud enough to cut over both of their voices. The tension was ratcheting up; even Zoe could see that, feeling as she did that she was miles away, and not sitting on the couch next to all of the action. “I need to see proof that you were here, at home, or I will place you under arrest for murder.”

  Baker’s mouth opened and closed like a fish, Zoe counting three times before he found his voice again. He was starting to regain some color, a pinch of red in the bottom of the white. That meant anger, she remembered, or possibly embarrassment, or even shame at getting caught out. Her money was on the first. “Like what?” he asked at last. “What physical proof could I possibly have? I… I was just here. I sat here and we watched television together late into the night, before going to sleep.”

  “How late?” Flynn demanded. All of his sharp angles were pointing toward Baker now, like an arrow accusing in his direction.

  “I don’t know,” Baker said, glancing at his wife for help. “M-maybe midnight. I wasn’t watching the time.”

  “Because you knew you weren’t going to be needed at work in the morning?”

  “What? No. I only found that out this morning. I just go to bed when I’m tired.”

  “So you weren’t at all concerned about staying up late, even though you had to be up early for work?”

  “I… I suppose not. I don’t worry about it. I’ve never had a problem with waking up on time,” Baker said. He was fully red in the face now, his eyes still wide, trying to grapple with the questions that were being thrown at him like barbs.

  Zoe watched Flynn carefully. He was starting to lose it, she thought. With every question he inched forward on his seat, until he was almost off it; a few more words and he’d be springing up into the air, yelling at the man, maybe shaking his fist or getting into his face. It wouldn’t be pretty. She could have left him to it, let him dig his own hole. Maybe get an official complaint put in against him.

  But that wasn’t going to help the investigation.

  “All right,” she said, standing up from the sofa and smoothing down the front of her jacket. “Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Baker. Your cooperation has been appreciated.”

  “What?” Flynn stared up at her, his neck swiveled around thirty degrees to fix her with that same accusatory stare. “We’re not done.”

  “Yes,” Zoe said, leaning down and taking him by the elbow, a gesture which thankfully prompted him to stand up. “We very much are. We will be in touch again if we need to ask any further questions, Mr. Baker.”

  She strode for the door, pushing Flynn in front of her, not letting him have enough time to argue his case with her. He needed to be out of the room—out of the house—away from these people. Baker was sitting frozen
in his seat, watching them with wide open eyes. Zoe couldn’t read his expression, but she didn’t need to. Baker was irrelevant.

  Zoe had been able to see for a long time that they were in the wrong house. The man’s feet were too small—which wasn’t a problem in itself, because he could have been deliberately wearing a larger pair of shoes, but he was certainly too heavy to make the imprints that she had seen at the riverbank. And she had already ascertained that there was only one culprit involved in these killings. He wasn’t an accomplice. He didn’t know a thing.

  “What are you doing?” Flynn hissed, as Zoe bundled him out onto the pavement and toward the car.

  “Get in,” Zoe snapped at him, refusing to talk out in the open where anyone could overhear. Not while the Bakers and all of their neighbors were listening in.

  Once they were in the car, which rocked slightly under the force with which Flynn slammed his door, Zoe turned to him with all the sharp-angled fury she could muster herself. “You were hounding him,” she said. “He gave you an alibi, corroborated by a witness. There is nothing else you can ask from him.”

  “It’s not enough proof,” Flynn said, sullenly, stubbornly. “His wife could have been lying.”

  “Any agent with a shred of experience could see that they were not lying,” Zoe told him. “And you cannot reasonably expect him to have proof that he was home all night. But it does not matter. He is not our man.”

  “How can you even tell?” Flynn shook his head, his voice rising in volume. “Just because he says it’s true—”

  “That is not the only reason,” Zoe cut him off. She hesitated, then; of course, she couldn’t tell him what she could see—that Baker didn’t fit the numbers, and therefore he didn’t even need an alibi. She knew he was innocent just from looking at him. But there were other ways to know whether someone was lying or not. Ways that she had learned, little by little, from Shelley. “You will learn to see the signs in time. Now, just drive. Back to the station. We need to liaise with the sheriff.” She ended her argument lamely, knowing it wouldn’t be much help. The equivalent of telling someone that they would understand when they were older. But what else could she say, when she didn’t really understand how she understood it herself? Shelley had been a good teacher. Zoe had never claimed to be the same.