Face of Death

But if the data was not in the system that was used to plan train schedules, then who would have had access to it? Certainly not a civilian. Not an outsider who had to pick a train despite not being an expert on them. There was something simpler here, some pattern that was visible from the outside. It would have caught the killer’s eye.

Eight, thirteen—Zoe knew why they had stood out to her. They were numbers from the Fibonacci sequence. One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four…

Those numbers dictated the Fibonacci spiral’s dimensions and points. And that was how many victims he had taken. Thirty-four, the man outside his farm. Twenty-one, the woman walking beside the road. Thirteen, the parking lot. Eight, Linda the gas station attendant. Five, Rubie in the woods. Three, the worker at the fair. Two, himself, lying in a pool of blood at the diner. And one, Aisha Sparks, trapped in the train car.

Taking the fact that the first and second point of the spiral were both the same number, and thus the same location, he would only have needed to kill there once. Meaning—what? The victim should be in the first car?

The trooper assigned to check there had already made a thorough search and moved on. There was nothing in the driver’s cabin, and if the killer started his count from the first cargo car instead, he would have shortened that neat pattern of windowed cars. Ruined it, even, because the cabin had to count. The windows there could not be ignored.

The first car wasn’t it. She had to think further, think past the sequence—

No. Not past it.

She just had to turn it upside down.

There was no time to explain.

She had to run.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

The girl would be in the thirty-fourth carriage, to symbolize the completion of the spiral.

Shelley was yelling after her, but Zoe kept going at a headlong pace, rushing past a pair of stunned cops who were on their way down from their cars toward the rear of the train. They caught on and began to follow. Behind her, Zoe could count three pairs of footsteps and knew that everyone was on her tail. To the side the cars flashed by, counted so easily they may as well have had their numbers painted on the side.

Thirty-four cars was a long distance. Long enough that she had not quite been able to make out the right car from the front of the train, the rules of perspective slimming it down and hiding it from her perception. But now she was closer and she could see it, her goal. A car just like all of the others. No particular color or markings. But it was the one.

Zoe skidded to a stop, her heart thudding in her throat as she tried to catch her breath. Her eyes scanned every particular of the car from the side, searching for wires that did not belong, scrapes of missing paint, anything out of the ordinary. She hopped over connectors that were higher than her knees to check the other side, circling around it with determination.

“It’s this one?” Shelley asked, breathlessly.

Zoe nodded sharply. “She’s in here. It’s the sequence.”

Shelley seemed to understand that, even if she had been given no real explanation, and dropped to her knees to peer under the car. “I can’t see anything suspicious.”

The troopers had fanned out instinctively, rearranging themselves to all four points of the car, making their own kind of pattern. Zoe appreciated their efforts, but they were only hampering her. There was nothing here that would be obvious. That was not his style.

She approached the door of the car and banged on it, pressing her ear to the metal to listen for a response. “Aisha? Can you hear me?”

There was nothing, even though she strained to hear it. She held still for long seconds, barely even breathing, hoping to hear at last a murmur of sound.

The girl was not conscious, whatever had been done to her. Zoe pictured a razor-sharp wire tightening slowly and inexorably around a sleeping girl’s neck and shuddered, pushing away from the door.

But what was that? She leaned in again, taking another deep inhalation through her nose. There was—something—some kind of faint smell in the air…

Gas. It was gas.

“He is poisoning her air supply,” Zoe gasped out, the second she realized what it meant. “The car is filling with gas.”

Shelley moved up next to her and pressed her own nose to the hair-thin gap at the seal of the door, and nodded. “I smell it.”

“We should wait for the other team to get here,” one of the troopers said nervously. “It could explode.”

“Only if we introduce a spark,” Zoe replied, shaking her head. She could barely breathe, thinking of Aisha in there, the gas slowly choking her lungs. “He was not an expert at using this kind of material, as far as we know. There is every possibility that he set it up wrong. She could be dying even now.”

“Or suffering irreparable damage, even if they do get her out of there alive,” Shelley agreed, tilting her head to turn wide eyes sideways on Zoe. “What are you thinking?”