Face of Murder

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.

She was distracted for too long. Thinking, wondering about Zoe. She was supposed to be paying attention to him. His eyes were closing, and he was going ashy pale.

Shelley swore, kneeling down by Wardenford’s head, wincing as an errant piece of glass found its way through her trousers to nick her skin. “Don’t do this,” she begged, touching his face, shaking his shoulder gently. “Come on, James. Stay with me. The ambulance is nearly here. You just have to stay awake for a few minutes. You can do this.”

The sound of a siren in the road outside made Shelley catch her breath. But Wardenford’s eyes remained closed, and she could barely detect his breathing.

“No, come on!” she shouted, pinching the skin on his neck to give him a sharp shock and get his attention. “Come on, James. Don’t go to sleep. They’re here. They’re coming to save you. Don’t give up!”

***

Zoe reached inside her lungs for extra breath, reached inside her legs for more power to leap and run faster. It was no use. Matthias was young and fit, and he had a head start. Maybe if he stumbled, fell, got stuck behind a slow-moving pedestrian or hit by a vehicle, she could catch up. It was a long shot maybe.

Where was he going? He was not familiar enough with the neighborhood, surely, to know shortcuts and quick switches—he was moving down roads and between houses at a seemingly random rate, glancing over his shoulder when he made turns to see that she was still there behind him.

She was getting further and further away.

Almost far enough that if he took two turns in quick succession, she wouldn’t be able to figure out where he had gone.

No—it couldn’t end like this. Zoe couldn’t let him get away, out there to potentially harm someone else or to even end up disappearing forever. The kid might have had neurological problems, but underneath that he was still smart. Unfortunately, thanks to the growing need for kids at good schools to have extracurricular activities under their belt in order to compete with the other perfect grades, he was also fast.

He’d been given a perfect bill of health in his medical report, except for that TBI.

Dammit! Zoe cursed as she stumbled on a loose paving slab. This part of the city was not as well-maintained as the areas she was used to, apartment blocks with overgrown yards and weeds springing up to disrupt the pavement. The roads were wide, telegraph poles leaning at odd angles where cars had hit their bases and papered-over cracks in the tarmac, but they were also interrupted by tress planted along their edges in happier times. Cars, trees, garbage spilling out of homes, abandoned furniture—it made for a mismatched and staccato pattern that dashed the advantage her abilities gave her, in the way that only human-made chaos could.

“FBI! Stop!” Zoe shouted, then decided it was better to save her breath in the future. There was no way that he was going to stop just because she told him to, and with the way he tore from one side of the sidewalk to the other, crossing empty road, there was no chance of keeping him in her sights for long enough to fire.

Then there was the fact that she was still in a bit of trouble for shooting at an unarmed suspect in their last case, who turned out to be innocent. She couldn’t risk making that mistake again. For all she knew, this could turn out to be a comedy of errors in which a concerned neighbor stepped through and lifted a lamp that had been used to bludgeon Wardenford already.

That wasn’t it. Matthias was the killer. But Zoe knew she couldn’t dare stop running to risk getting off a shot.

There was barely anyone around at this time; those going to work had gone, those staying at home were staying in. A few elderly residents sitting on porches or out front of dilapidated single-family homes stared at her with narrowed eyes as she flew by, but Zoe couldn’t spare the time to yell to them or take them in. They couldn’t help her. With no way of knowing if he had a hidden knife or a hammer for bludgeoning, she could hardly ask a civilian to tackle him, either.

But Matthias had made a mistake. A set of cast-iron gates up ahead were closed, the only conclusion to the road they were on. He cast a wide-eyed look over his shoulder before speeding up toward them and then vaulting, one hand on the brick posts holding the gates in place as his body flew through the air above them.

Zoe cursed again, this time only in her head to save oxygen. The gates were five feet tall, easy enough for him to get over. She hadn’t tried her vaulting skills in a while. This could be a costly delay.

But, there! A footpath to the side with a gate swinging open in the breeze, only a moment’s diversion. Zoe took it, reading the sign with a glance as she sped through: it was a cemetery.

That should have sent a shiver up her spine, but instead it sent a thrill.

A cemetery was wide, open-plan. Paths were laid out but could be ignored.

A cemetery had patterns.

She had him now.

Zoe couldn’t afford to stop or slow down, but she caught a glimpse of the map as she ran past and then tried to examine it in her mind. She had just enough of an outline—just enough to know how the cemetery was laid out, paths squirming through graves like the branches of a tree.

And over to the left, the church.

Zoe thought quickly. At his current speed, he was outpacing her to the extent that he would be out of the graveyard before she caught up with him. Sticking on the current route, of chasing straight after him, was not a viable option.

Just like back at the campus, she was going to have to find a way to cut him off.

He was looking back over his shoulder every minute or so, continuing to find new bursts of speed every time that he saw she was still in pursuit. How he was doing it, she had no idea. Her own legs were beginning to tire, and she wasn’t sure how much she had left in the tank.

She was going to have to take a risk.

She was going to have to give it everything she had.

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE