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He was standing just an inch or an inch and a half outside of her elbow range now, still pulling hard, the wire so sharp Zoe feared it might go through her arm before she could defend herself. He was bent forward slightly in her peripheral vision as she turned her head, his neck bent at thirty degrees, his hips at sixty. Top-heavy. Unbalanced. Humans had been designed with finesse, but they had weak points.

Zoe dropped to her knees, going down without any safety net, knowing it would likely hurt. Her kneecaps collided with the tiled floor with a dull thud that echoed through her body, shaking more blood from the wound of her arm, splattering it across the tiles in front of her. A clue for investigators in the future. The killer held on tight, but as the wire dipped under the weight of Zoe’s body dropping, he was pulled further off balance, tumbling down with her.

His body struck hers with a heavy weight, shoulder colliding against spine, head glancing off shoulder. They were on the floor and Zoe was free of the wire at least for a moment, falling loose like a halo around her, but her arm was gushing blood and the gun was out of her reach on the other side of the bathroom…

He saw it at the same moment that she realized it, and then they were both lunging for it, fighting to get their hands on it first. Zoe undercut him at a leaner angle and knocked him out of the way, down again, as she struggled to her feet. The wire forgotten behind her, she had not a moment to hesitate as she saw him lunging forward again. She had not succeeded in winding him a second time. He would reach it first.

She had to do something. In desperation, Zoe whirled, seeking something that would provide a moment of advantage. Distraction. There! Flinging out her elbow, using the arm that had already been damaged, she struck a mirror and shattered it into pieces.

“Look!” she shouted, her voice underpinned by the tinkling of shattered glass falling down. “The pattern!”

The killer glanced back toward her, startled. She saw his eyes change, widen, in recognition and surprise at the understanding. His gaze darted then toward the floor, as if unable to resist. The glass was settling, some of it fallen into the sink, some in a semicircle around it on the floor. The empty space within, the curved shape, the spray of errant pieces—it was irresistible to him.

Zoe leaped forward and got her hands on the gun as she slid along the floor. Her shoulder hit the back wall, and she ignored the pain racing through not just that spot but her whole arm as she rolled to raise the gun. She got it up in front of her, waiting for the world to stabilize just long enough to see him lunging for her again, and she pulled the trigger.

Point blank range, almost. Only a millisecond more and he would have been on her. Even if she hadn’t known how to aim, she almost certainly would not have hit him.

He slumped to the floor, taken back a few inches by the impact of the bullet, and raised a hand to his chest to examine the hole that had suddenly appeared there.

Zoe panted for breath, adrenaline washing over her in waves. She felt faint, light-headed. Looking at the blood smattered around the disordered bathroom, she thought she knew why. Things were getting fuzzy as the world cleared and settled, the ringing of falling glass in her ears, the mad dash for the gun and for breath, the hot wet slick of her right arm.

The silence might have been a second or an hour; Zoe watched dully as the killer’s hand fell back down against his own leg, energy draining from him as quickly as the lifeblood surging from his chest. He had a strange look on his face, unreadable to Zoe. She had shot well. She knew she must have been close to the heart, if not a direct hit.

The bathroom door burst open, simultaneous with a familiar shout of, “FBI! Put your hands in the air and drop your weapon!”

Shelley appeared in the empty frame, stepping forward with her gun trained on the killer as she assessed the scene in a few glances. “Zoe?”

Behind her, Zoe dimly heard other cops shouting orders to civilians, evacuating the diner. Shots fired. That must have caused a panic.

“Where is she?” Zoe asked. She needed to know. Aisha Sparks was not here—he had not brought her to the diner after all. He had been looking for someone new. So where was the girl?

The killer was laughing, Zoe realized, his mouth gaping open and his chest shaking even though barely any noise escaped his lips. He did not answer her. His mouth was twisted into a rictus grin, his eyes fixed on Zoe’s with a spark that said they shared a secret. Something she should have understood.

And in a flash, she did understand.

Zoe knew why he laughed. Why he was happy at the moment of death.

He needed someone to die here. And now, with a last wheeze that emptied his whole body and stilled the manic joy in his eyes, someone did.

“Where is she?” Zoe yelled, throwing herself across to him, grabbing the front of his shirt to shake him. There was no response. There was never going to be a response again. It was over. Zoe slumped back, raising her eyes to the ceiling and letting out a groan of impossible frustration.

“Talk to me, Z!”

Zoe returned her attention to Shelley, nodding briefly. “I am okay,” she said, impatiently. She did not want to bother with formalities and niceties, nor was she concerned at all about her own health. Aisha Sparks was still out there, and he had given them no clue at all as to where.

“Bleeding?” Shelley said, pointing as she crouched to get level with Zoe.

Zoe glanced down at her own arm, as if she was surprised to see the saturated red fabric of her jacket. “Oh, yes,” she admitted, feeling detached and foggy, her mind’s eye still fixed on that laughing grin. “He did get me with the wire.”

Shelley swore, barking orders through the doorway at the cops piling into the room after her. “Get me an ambulance, now! I have an agent heavily losing blood!”

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

“I do not need to go to the hospital,” Zoe repeated, for the third time.

She sat in the middle of chaos, on the tailgate of an ambulance, as law enforcement buzzed around her. They had already carted away the body of the killer, taken him to a local morgue to be analyzed and prodded into giving up his secrets.

“Are you sure?” Shelley asked, exchanging a glance with the EMT. “I really think it would be better if you went to get stitched up. It’s over now. You can go.”

“It is not over,” Zoe refuted, raising her arm and holding it toward the EMT. “Finish patching me up. We still have to find the teenage girl.”

Shelley sighed and folded her arms, but she did not object again as the EMT started to wind a white bandage around the quick job he had done on Zoe’s arm.

“This is a temporary solution,” he warned, finishing it off. “I do advise you to make your way to the hospital for stitches at the earliest possible opportunity. And no exerting yourself, especially not with this arm. You could end up causing further damage.”

“I will go in as soon as we find her,” Zoe said, hopping up off the trailer and making her way over to Shelley. She eschewed the jacket that was now altogether ruined with blood, grabbing a windbreaker someone from the state troopers had left for her to cover her similarly bloodied shirt.

She stood next to Shelley, watching the crime scene team swarm the whole diner as well as the killer’s car in the parking lot. The car: a red Ford Taurus, seemingly a repaint of a vehicle that had once been green. At the very rim of the hood, a few chips of paint had flaked loose, revealing the original finish underneath. It was here that another chip was missing, the green gone to show just the metal frame; the chip that had turned up under Rubie’s fingernail.

The hive of activity was centered on two things: collecting traces of evidence to back up Zoe’s claim of self-defense against the man who was surely their serial killer, and looking for any insight on what he had done with his hostage.