Face of Death

The answer was a simple one. Not because she had fought back—they all had, to some degree that they were able, even if it was just to flail around and gasp for air. It was not simply because she had run from him, or fear that she would not die—because she had died, by the time he found her in the woods.

No, it was because she had ruined his pattern. Zoe could see that now, as clear as the bright sunlight streaming in through the windows in the hall outside, casting a square of glowing yellow on the far wall that encapsulated their easel board and made it almost impossible to read the profile written on it.

Zoe didn’t need the profile anymore. She knew what she was looking at now.

A man who lived for the patterns, lived and died by them. Or rather, killed by them. The pattern was important to him above anything. Which meant that the curve on the map was not just a curve—it was a message.

A message that Zoe was now determined to understand.

The phone on the wall burst into a shrill ring, scattering her thoughts. Shelley got up to answer it without being asked, which was another reason why Zoe was beginning to like her very much.

“Really?”

Something in Shelley’s tone, the sharpness of it, made Zoe look up and pay attention.

“When was this? … And you’ve just flagged up the match in the system now? Right, yes. If you could fax everything over as soon as possible. Thank you.”

She put the phone back into the wall holder, then turned to Zoe with wide eyes. “There’s another one. Five days ago, but the local PD only just put the data into the system and saw the match with our cases. Looks like it might have been his first kill.”

Zoe shot out of her seat, heading to the map pinned up on the wall. “Where?”

There was only one question that mattered now. The who was irrelevant. The how was obvious—murder by garrote, otherwise it would never have flagged up as a match. The why was becoming clearer at every step they took.

It was the where that could unlock the whole thing.

Shelley ran to the fax machine, grabbing out the first piece of paper it was hastily spewing. She scanned the page hastily, shouting out a town name as soon as she found it.

Zoe scanned the map, looking for something along the straight line or even the gentle curve that she now knew it was. Where was this town? She searched names again and again, not seeing it, wondering where it could possibly be.

She stepped back, gesturing for the piece of paper, taking it from Shelley’s hands and examining it herself. The name of the place was right. So then, why wasn’t it where it was supposed to be?

Zoe looked up, and by chance her eyes dragged over another part of the map as she oriented herself, and the name jumped out at her. There. But not at all where she had expected it to be. It was way off to the side, far above the latest pin. Zoe pushed the new marker into the wall and then stood back again, taking it all in.

And, oh, how stupid she felt at that moment, now with all of the clues in her possession.

What she had at first mistaken for a straight line with clumsy deviations, and then for a curve, was in fact neither of those things. The turn was too steep to be accurately described as a curve. It was a shape instead, a shape that had yet to be completed.

But it was too steep, again, for it to be a circle. If the data points ever did meet in a closed loop, it would have been squished and off-centered, a strange misshapen thing. The pattern mattered far too much to the killer for him to make that kind of mistake. No, it was not a circle.

It was a spiral—or it was going to be, once he finished it.

A little squished, a little strained, but a spiral.

How could she have missed this for so long? Rubie wouldn’t have needed to die if Zoe had worked out that the next point would be somewhere along that highway. They could have stationed cars and dogs and helicopters. They could have caught him, even if his spiral was too deviant from a truly composed shape to be completely accurate with her estimations.

But did that fit with what she was thinking? If he was focused on the pattern, would he really allow it to be so imperfect? That didn’t seem to sit right with Zoe.

The victims didn’t matter, and they never had. Their killer was just picking someone in the right place at the right time—for his purposes, at least—and making them into a pin on a map. If the victims didn’t matter, and the killer was so angry at his latest victim for running, then—

Zoe took the pin out of the woods, where the body had been found, and moved it back to the very entrance of the access road. The point where he had actually attacked.

“Shelley, was the victim found dead in the place where the attack happened?” she asked, urgency in her voice.

Shelley flipped through the other pages that the fax machine was still spitting out, frowning. “Hold on, let me… Um… No, it doesn’t seem like it. The man was found outside a farmhouse—wait, man? That breaks the pattern.”