Face of Murder

Zoe remembered the way from their last visit. She raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, then counted doors the flashed by until she was at the right one. Behind it she could hear nothing, as she paused in the corridor and waited for that long second.

Shelley caught up, panting, as Zoe pressed the call button on her cell again. They both heard the ringtone faintly on the other side, going unanswered. They exchanged a look.

The situation was precarious. If the killer was inside, they did not want to give him time to get away—or to take Wardenford hostage with a weapon. But if he had already made his attack, then time was of the essence. Knocking on the door and shouting their presence seemed to be off the table.

Breaking the door down, then?

Zoe squared her shoulders, thinking about where she would need to kick it for the maximum chance of the wood around the lock splintering and giving way, but Shelley reached out for the door handle and turned it.

It opened.

Another glance exchanged. In unison, Zoe and Shelley drew their guns out of their holsters and held them ready at their sides.

Shelley pushed the door open slowly. It did not creak. They could hear the ringtone louder now. A good distraction which would cover the sound of their footsteps.

For a brief moment, Zoe entertained a fantasy in which Wardenford answered the phone in a drunken stupor, having forgotten to lock the door, and they discovered that he was totally alone.

Then the moment was gone, because she knew it could only be a fantasy.

Together they moved down the hall toward the area where Wardenford had led them before, where the phone was ringing. Zoe took the lead, bringing her firearm up to a more ready position as she approached the junction where everything would become clear. She took a single steadying breath, then sprang forward, pointing her gun into the room.

“Freeze! FBI!” The words came out automatically, a gut reaction to seeing someone standing in the room. Even before her brain had deduced who it was, she knew she had to shout it.

But she didn’t need any kind of specialist training to know who was standing in the room. He was five foot nine, one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, and he matched the photograph she had seen on his student ID. More telling than that, he was standing over the prone body of James Wardenford, with a heavy lamp in his hands.

They all froze for a moment, Matthias apparently assessing his options while Zoe took the scene in. Her eyes were drawn to something dark and glittering on the floor—something like dark shards—the shards of a wine bottle, she realized, before the second realization: that she had allowed herself to be distracted too far, her eyes dropping down too low, and she had not seen the telltale bunching of muscles before it was too late.

The only thing that she could do was to catch the lamp that Matthias had thrown at her, before it hit her and knocked her down. She fumbled with her gun, trying desperately not to drop either of them. With the safety off and Wardenford at her feet, both could be catastrophic.

She steadied herself and reversed the momentum to throw the lamp to bounce harmlessly on the sofa cushions, but Matthias was gone—leaping over to the far windows, and then rattling onto the fire escape, his feet making clanging drums of the metal structure.

“Check on him,” Zoe shouted to Shelley, who was behind her and unable to make good the pursuit, as she herself launched after Matthias. They couldn’t leave an injured and possibly dying victim alone. She dived through the window and onto the fire escape, registering even as she did so that she would now be going after a deadly killer—alone.

***

Shelley bent swiftly to fit two fingers to James Wardenford’s neck, relieved to find a pulse beating there and the warmth of a body. She was even more relieved to hear him groan softly, his eyelids fluttering open and shut as he attempted to fight through the pain and confusion.

His shoulders started to move. Shelley crouched beside him, doing her best to avoid crunching shards of glass and a thin trail of blood that was coming from his head, and placed her hand firmly on top of his back. “Stay still,” she said. “Don’t try to move. I’ll call for help.”

Being in law enforcement had one key advantage that Shelley had always loved: the ability to get directly in touch with other life-saving services and get them to someone who needed them as soon as possible. She dialed quickly and relayed the information about where she was and how Wardenford had been injured, then cut the call and focused on soothing him.

Somewhere out there, Zoe was chasing a killer. Shelley strained her ears, listening for any sound outside the window. After their rattling footsteps on the fire escape faded away, there was nothing. No gunshots, which was good.

No sound of any kind that she could identify, over the sound of traffic and people talking and general life in the city, which might be very bad indeed.