Face of Death

Zoe watched her grab a notebook from her pocket and lean it on the hood of their car, using the illumination from the interior light as she jotted down a series of notes. One, two, three, four—seven lines on the paper. Zoe crept closer, watching with bated breath until Shelley hung up the call and lifted the pad in the air.

“The first train passes through before dawn,” Shelley said. “Four a.m., a freight train. They continue at half-hour intervals, until the single passenger train at a few minutes past seven a.m. I’ve ordered them to stop all trains leaving the rail yard and passenger depot, but we still need to find her.”

Zoe thought it over. “Cross out the passenger train,” she said. “It is too risky. There is no way he would be able to hide Aisha there, as well as some means of killing her. The trains are checked and cleaned before setting off in the morning. She would be found.”

Shelley was looking something else up on her phone. “Sunrise is six fifty-two a.m. this morning.”

Zoe looked up and shouted to the troopers who were standing, waiting for further instructions. “Check the tracks,” she said. “Within our zone and for thirty feet in each direction. You are looking for wires, broken tracks, anything that might disrupt a train. Be careful. We may be dealing with explosives.”

They broke and ran toward their new task, the urgency of the situation lost on no one. Lights danced across the road and grass, swaying up and down with the bobbing motion of a human run. They clustered like fireflies, then spread out as the troopers moved into a standard search formation, moving themselves at intervals across the area in question.

“What do you think?” Shelley asked. Her pendant glinted in the reflected light from Zoe’s flashlight as she fidgeted, drawing it back and forth across the chain around her neck. “Would he wait for dawn? Or go for the first train?”

There were arguments to be made for each. Wait for an official new day to dawn, breaking the darkness and ensuring that no two kills were committed during the same period of darkness. Or go for the very first opportunity, ensuring that there was as little a chance as possible that Aisha would be found and saved in time.

They needed more data.

“Where do the trains originate from?” Zoe asked, a sudden thought striking her. “He had to have gone to the rail yard, snuck on board, set something up to keep Aisha in place at the very least, and then made it back to the diner.”

“I’ll make some calls,” Shelley said, digging through her call list to find the last number she had dialed. “Hopefully the central rail yard can give me more information, or at least tell me who can.”

Zoe watched the lights of the searchers at the tracks as Shelley spoke into the phone, all politeness but firm urgency. Her skin was crawling with the lack of action. It felt wrong, whiling away the hours of the night while the teen waited for them. She wanted to be running, digging, tearing up the ground around the tracks. Anything to ensure that there was nothing there, nothing that would disrupt the train’s journey and send Aisha Sparks to her doom.

“Aha… yes, right… I see. Well, can you give me their number? Yes, I have a pen. All right… yes…”

The fireflies were moving further toward the edge of the area that Zoe had told them to search. Some of them had stopped moving entirely, having finished checking their area. It was not looking good.

“The good news is that I have the starting stations for each of the routes,” Shelley said, putting her cell in front of her face as she copied another number from the notes she had written. “The bad news is that some of them will be held and loaded at an external freight yard, then moved to the starting station afterwards. Some were already loaded last night and moved to wait for the start of the day. I need to call someone else to track down which is which.”

Zoe nodded absently, moving toward the searchers a few short steps at a time. She felt torn. Where was she better used? Over where the searchers already had their grids covered, or here, where only Shelley could make the calls?

If only she could think her way through this—figure out which train he would target by timing alone. It was not good enough just to stop them all, though Shelley had already done that. They still needed to figure out where Aisha was. They couldn’t leave her there, locked inside a compartment somewhere, and hope that she would be spotted sooner or later. She had been away for over a day. God only knew what had been done to her.

“No answer,” Shelley said, swearing quietly and moving her stiff, cold fingers over the screen again. “I’ll try another. Middle of the damn night. No one is at their desks.”

Zoe drifted away. “I will go help check the tracks,” she said, having made up her mind that doing something was better than standing still.