Face of Death

“She may well be sedated. He has to keep her in the same place, no chance of her escaping. He planned to not be there when she died. Maybe even if he got away tonight. Fleeing the state entirely would have been the best course of action.”

Shelley chewed her lip, barely slowing down as she took a corner at high speed. “Hidden, trapped, sedated, and primed to die. But how?”

“That is what we need to figure out. And quickly.” Zoe took a deep breath, winding down the passenger side window a little to get some fresh air. “Before his plan works.”

The journey was filled with useless speculation. Zoe tried to focus hard on her thoughts to ignore the pounding in her head, the throbbing of her arm, and the sick feeling trying to claw its way up her throat every time Shelley turned the wheel or put her foot down on the accelerator.

The site was not far from the diner, a route that took them only thirty-five minutes to drive. But the timer was still ticking down, as far as Zoe was concerned, and it was ticking down loudly in the back of her head. Sunrise: that was when she felt that all bets might be off. When he might have set it up so that Aisha Sparks would never see another one.

The troopers gathered for their instructions, Zoe’s eyes working over all of them. Their heights were mixed, their weights all within a healthy range. The kind of men and women who would be able to search for hours, with good physical fitness and the ability to look both high and low. There was every possibility that this was going to be a long night. They needed the best the state had to offer.

Working quickly, they marked out the boundaries of the search area on foot. Zoe disseminated the marked-out map zone to their cells, and they set up a roadblock at each end of their box with a trooper stationed there to man it. That left them with ten people in total, including Zoe and Shelley. Three each to wake the residents of the house and carefully peel through all of their rooms. Two on either side of the road, moving through the grass and empty land, combing for any sign.

For safety’s sake, they expanded their area to include the back rooms and gardens of the house, as well as the houses directly on their northern side should the search come up empty.

Zoe moved with Shelley to the southern zone on the east side of the road, carrying torches and moving close together as they walked in a grid pattern. Up, then across, then down, then across and up. Thorough and slow. They looked for disturbed ground, items that might have been discarded by either the killer or Aisha, any sign at all that an intruder had been here.

Zoe saw formations of weeds indicating the spread of seed in the wind, and she noted a worn-down path indicative of lazy feet shortcutting through the grass on their way to the road. She saw a deflated ball that told stories of local children playing in the area, but there was no dug-up and replaced soil. No dropped trinkets or items of clothing. No spatter of red blood standing stark against the green blades of grass in the beam of the torch’s light.

At last, they were done, and still none the wiser.

Zoe and Shelley waited in the middle of the road as the search team from the other side of the street joined them with shaking heads and rounded shoulders, and they moved up to the other houses.

“They are outside of the range,” Zoe said, chewing her lip.

“I know, but it’s better to check,” Shelley told her. “He was under stress. Maybe he made a mistake.”

And so they woke the startled homeowners, and made them stand shivering in their pajamas on the cold lawn while they searched through every room for any sign of something abnormal. There was nothing in the attic. The house didn’t even have a basement. No doors or windows had been forced, and no one had any relation whatsoever to the man they now knew was their killer.

There was no sign of her.

And when the other teams finished their searches without bringing up a single sign of Aisha Sparks either, Zoe knew that something was wrong.

“This does not make any sense,” she said, slumping into the passenger seat again to rest. No matter how she thought about it, they had to have made the right calculations. The logarithm was not affected by human error. It had been correct about the last location. And they knew already that the man would never have deviated from the pattern, from the precise calculations they had used. He could not. It was not within his range of abilities to do so.

Beside her, Shelley climbed back behind the wheel, shifting on the seat to face her. “We have to think about it, Z,” she said. “We’re missing something. She isn’t here yet.”

“What was that? Say that again.”

“She isn’t here yet?”

Zoe nodded furiously, her mind whirring. “She does not have to be here yet. Not now.” She checked the dashboard clock. “We still have six hours until dawn. She is not here now. But she will be tomorrow.”

“How is that possible? The killer is dead. He can’t bring anyone anywhere.”