Face of Fury (Zoe Prime #5) - Blake Pierce Page 0,39
she would have liked to see it without the body on top, to count the rings and know the precise age of the tree. But maybe it was irrelevant. Most likely. Most people didn’t read into everything the way that she did.
She focused her eyes on the body again, trying to ignore the numbers that had no bearing. The woman was tall, five ten, and weighed a hundred eighty pounds. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six; Zoe would have to check later. And her shirt, part of what looked to be an official park ranger uniform, was lifted up to display her stomach, three lines carved into it.
A straight line across the top, two coming down from it. The pi symbol, with exactly the same angles and dimensions as the last two. This third one proved it: it wasn’t coincidental or somehow unrelated. The symbol was carved by precisely the same hand, and it had the most importance here. It was the only thing that was always the same, except for their gender.
Everything about this one was different. She was taller and heavier, more of a substantial woman than the other two, and far younger—by two decades at least. Not only that, but she was black, which meant that the killer was now crossing racial lines. A white woman, a Latina, and a black woman. That was rare. Serial killers normally stuck to one race, one type of person. When they mixed things up and targeted just about anybody, it made them that much harder to track down.
Zoe breathed out through her nose, trying to hold it together. She moved around toward the head, examining it with a clinical eye. Most people would have had a hard time even looking at the pulpy, beaten-in mess that hardly bore any resemblance to a face anymore. It was all shattered bone and red, sticky insides, but all Zoe could see were the numbers. The sheer number of blows it would have taken to reduce the face to this, making it difficult to even guess the dimensions of the murder weapon, each of the impact sites overlapping so many times that it was hard to see where one ended and another began.
Hard even for her meant almost impossible for anyone else. Zoe doubted even the coroner would be able to tell them what was used, except that it was large and heavy enough to inflict serious damage. The girl’s face was just gone. This would have to be a closed casket.
Zoe moved back around. The ground was scattered with dead leaves; it was hard to see footprints, but she knew she no longer needed them. She’d seen enough at the riverbank to begin to build a picture of the killer in her head. What was important was the one piece of evidence he had left them to conclusively point to his identity. His calling card. His symbol.
Zoe tried to focus. There was something nagging at the back of her head, like an itch that wouldn’t let itself be scratched. She was missing something here, she knew it. Something that would connect it all, unlock some grand secret that the killer didn’t want her to know. What was it…? Her head was thumping.
Zoe leaned forward, closer, getting a more intimate view of that slashed symbol, the way the skin parted before each cut. What was it that he was trying to say? Her head pounded in protest at the pressure of leaning forward, pulsing like the beat of a drum, steady and strong, one, two, three… There was something here… A bird called out three times fast and then one longer, trilling note… the sheriff said something in five syllables… Zoe’s head pounded harder and harder…
The face was gone. For a moment when Zoe looked up at it she saw Shelley’s face, her eyes open in shock, her mouth open, blood spatter from the wound at her neck cast in a delicate spray across her pale skin.
Zoe straightened just in time and rushed away, far enough from the crime scene to avoid disturbing the evidence, and vomited at the base of a tree, hoping it would hide her from view.
She panted, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, groaning and hoping there was nothing more to come out. The dimensions of her own vomit crawled across her vision, telling her the volume she had lost and recalculating the probable amount of alcohol and anti-depressant left in her system.
“Agent Prime.”
Zoe looked up to see Flynn