“Okay,” she said, and turned and walked out, and that was all.
And she woke sweating, feeling the weight of her mother’s hand across the back of her head, reeling for a moment before she realized she was still in a motel in Kansas.
The buzz of a text alert lifted Zoe out of her fitful nap for a second time, forcing her eyes open. Her face was pointing toward the digital clock, and she read the display with a sense of dull inevitability. Of course, she had not made it all the way through to the morning. It was only a little after five a.m., just a short few hours since she had put her head on this rock-hard pillow.
Zoe reached out and lifted her cell phone. She was not properly sleeping anyway, not really, and on a case like this an agent didn’t ignore a message. Whatever it was could be crucial, timely. The kind of information you needed to know right away.
She read the message, and felt her heart sinking even lower than she had thought it was possible for it to go.
“No,” she said, out loud. “No, no, no!”
Shelley stirred on the other bed, her eyes flickering open. “What is it?” she asked, the drowsiness of sleep disappearing as she kicked herself into awareness.
“State troopers,” Zoe said, holding back a lump of something in her throat that threatened to overwhelm her. “Two of the fair’s employees have been reported missing by their families. They woke up this morning and realized that they never made it home last night. They’re putting out an APB for their description and launching a manhunt. Looks like all hands on deck.”
“He took them, didn’t he?” Shelley asked. She sat up in the bed, her blonde hair falling messily down over her shoulders, mussed with sleep. “Our killer.”
Zoe did not have to tell her yes. They both knew.
They had failed to stop him, and now two more women would pay with their lives.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Zoe leaned forward in her seat, wishing the car would move faster. She could see that Shelley already had her foot on the gas as far as it would go, but that did not seem to be fast enough. She held tight to her seatbelt, trying to ignore the motion sickness fighting its way up her gullet in favor of focusing on the task ahead.
Zoe shifted around to look into the back seat. The tall state trooper Max, the sheriff, and one of his deputies were along for the ride. Zoe and Shelley had raced from their motel to their base of operations, and from there straight out to the scene with barely a pause.
Dawn was only just breaking, and they were close by the Kansas Giant Dinosaur Fair, only a few minutes away along the highway. “Anything yet?”
The sheriff shook his head, glancing down at his phone. “Looks like we’ll be the first there.”
Their quick actions in waking and getting in the car had put them first on the scene. More officers had gone by the residences of the two women to take statements. Two families who had woken in the morning to find beds not slept in, loved ones not come home.
Out of the whole staff, only the two women were still missing. All of the others had left much earlier and were accounted for at home. That much had been ascertained by a simple phone-around.
There was a tension inside the car, each of them knowing that they were not likely to find the women alive. Either one or both of them would have to have been the killer’s latest victims. All that remained was to find out which of them it was, and whether he had been fully successful in his crime.
Shelley flipped on the turn signal, trying to turn across the traffic to get to the parking lot. She cursed as she watched her mirrors and the oncoming lane, waiting for a break in busy morning transit of large trucks taking loads across the state. It was only a few seconds’ delay before she could get through, but all of them felt it. Every single second counted in a case like this.
Zoe forced the car door open and jumped out before Shelley had even put it into park, her eyes already making out a smudge on the edge of the lot that looked like nothing more than a pile of rags on the ground. Zoe had been to enough crime scenes to know that it was not a pile of rags. It was clothing, and the clothing was on a woman.
From the road, the slight ten-degree slope of the lot hid the body perfectly. Closer up, it was impossible to miss. Zoe spread her arms out behind her as a warning to the others not to approach, and began to carefully and slowly examine the area.
As expected, there were no footprints. The ground was hard, except for the edge of the lot where grass was encroaching back across the surface, but the killer had not made the mistake of stepping in the mud. As Zoe crouched and then shuffled forward, examining everything carefully and tilting her head to get a different angle, she saw no sign that might provide evidence of the sequence of events. The sun was broaching the other side of the highway, rising above the flat land that stretched out a distance away from the trees. Golden light filtered down and over the body, picking out the glints of copper in the dead woman’s brown hair.
Golden light for the golden ratio, Zoe thought, inching her way closer as she assessed the victim’s measurements. There was blood pooled around the body, though in a tighter and neater circumference than they had seen at the last crime scene. Even so, Zoe calculated that it was as many pints as a body could spare, allowing for the soak into the soil. The woman had fallen here, without much of a fight. She had bled out without moving, perhaps already unconscious from the blood loss or the shock before her heart ran out of blood to pump. Zoe could see a deeper wound to the neck, longer by an inch and a half, though the angle of attack was consistent with the other bodies. The height target of five foot eleven for their killer remained intact.
There was no disturbance to the blood, everything preserved neatly. He would have liked that, Zoe thought. He would have been pleased. But for her, it meant there were no signs or clues indicating what might have happened to the other one.
“It’s the older woman,” Max said, thumbing his phone screen just behind Zoe. She turned to look at him. “Employee file photos just came through. The teenager is blonde.”
Zoe rose off her haunches, addressing Max and the two from the sheriff’s station. “Spread out,” she said. “Check the trees here, and through the fair. We need to know that she is not still here.”
They nodded and moved out, meeting Zoe’s curtness with their own silence. Zoe knew she was not going to stand out today, with her short manner that was often described as anti-social or aloof. There was a need to get a job done. Someone’s life might still hang in the balance.
Shelley squatted next to her, pointing at the body. “What can you see, Z?”
With the others out of earshot, Zoe crouched again, reading the numbers from the scene before her like they were printed on a page. It was strangely refreshing to be able to share what she could see, instead of keeping it inside. “The victim is five foot six, which maintains our profile for the killer. She is also around one hundred and twenty-five pounds, so not too heavy or strong to cause problems for him. He slipped the garrote around her neck from behind, standing over there, and pulled so hard that she dropped almost immediately. The wound on her neck is an inch and a half longer on each side than with previous victims, indicating a greater force causing a deeper cut. He wanted to be sure this time, after the failure with Rubie.”
Zoe got up, circling around to get a better view. “She fell here and did not move after that. You can see this from the blood pool—an almost perfect circle, meaning equal distribution. I would guess that the slight variance on the left side is down to the uneven surface of the lot. It would have taken her around fifteen or sixteen seconds to shed this much blood, which leads me to believe she was either unconscious or in too much shock to move after the attack.”