Face of Fear

He knew when her shift ended, and the route she took to walk home.

He knew that she needed to die.

He could barely stand to look at her, but he knew that he needed to watch. He needed to observe. He tapped absently on the screen of his cell phone, as if he was engrossed in its contents, watching her through sunglasses that hid his eyes. He had been scoping out her routine for a few days now, and he knew she would pass by here before she did. This bench, placed perfectly to watch her go.

The world was going to be a much safer place when she was gone. That much was clear to him.

He watched her walk by, exactly on schedule, and pass out of his field of vision. Not that it mattered. He knew exactly where she was going. Slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, he got up from his bench and began to stroll along the sidewalk in the same direction she had gone.

On Saturdays, she pulled a double shift. She was paying for her own tuition, and she needed the money. With no lectures to attend on a Sunday morning, it made sense. Her co-workers were all too happy not to have to work Saturdays themselves, at least not as often as they would if she didn’t take both shifts. It was an arrangement that suited everyone.

It suited him especially, because when she finally left and locked up to go home, it would be dark. He would be hidden. She would never see him coming.

He followed her at a long distance until he reached the store, glancing inside to see her just emerging from the staffroom. Good. He didn’t linger. There was no point. She was where he needed her to be, and that meant everything was going to plan.

He seethed as he thought of her, of the very fact that she existed. She had no right. She shouldn’t dare to put everyone else in danger the way that she did. How could she not see, not know?

She was training to be a teacher. That was the biggest joke of it all. Imagine someone like her, being allowed to be around children. To be entrusted with their education, with looking after them. A position of trust like that for someone like her.

The world was going to be much better off without her in it.

For now, there was nothing that he could do but wait. He had his research, and he liked to spend his spare time looking people up, rooting out the evil that threatened everything if he did nothing about it. He had plenty to occupy his time.

And tonight, when it was time for her to end her shift, he would be there. Watching. Waiting. Ready to cleanse the world of her sins.

CHAPTER NINE

Zoe waited for the search operation to run, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms over her chest.

“Got anything yet?” Shelley asked.

“Give the system a minute,” Zoe said. She was still feeling a little grouchy from earlier, and she was too comfortable around Shelley to bother to hide it. “This is not a movie. Things actually take time to process here.”

“All right, all right,” Shelley said. “I’m just excited. This could be a big lead.”

Zoe eyed her darkly, wondering how someone could swing from emotion to emotion so powerfully. How Shelley could be distraught and brought to the verge of tears when viewing a body or interviewing a loved one, then as excited as a schoolchild at the prospect of getting the case solved.

The screen in front of her blinked, drawing her attention back as a list of results flooded back onto it. It seemed that their second victim, Callie Everard, had been a busy girl for a few years. There were multiple records of her in the local police precinct’s system, including a couple of arrests for possession of illicit substances.

“Here we are,” Zoe said. “She was interviewed a few times about the death of one Clay Jackson. That must be him.”

“Clay Jackson? All right,” Shelley repeated, typing in her own search on the computer that had been brought into their temporary investigation room.

It was exhausting sometimes, working like this. Always on the move from city to city. Just managing to get settled in and then going off somewhere else. Coming back only for the court dates, which were always unwanted and inevitably inconvenient.

Zoe clicked his name on the system to go through to the records of the investigation. She was still waiting for the page to load in when Shelley spoke up. To the surprise of none, any and all search engines on the internet worked quicker than the county police system.

“Here’s something. Clay Jackson memorial social media page. It has a smattering of posts every year on the anniversary of his death and birthdays, but there’s pictures, too. He had a lot of tattoos.”

“A lot?”

“More than Callie. And I think I might recognize one or two of them as having particular street meaning. This gang theory could hold some water.”

Zoe snorted, shaking her head. She got up to look over Shelley’s shoulder, taking in the images of Clay Jackson. He was six foot one, a hundred and forty pounds in his last images. Strung out, barely eating between fixes. He had the look of someone who had been fit and healthy, muscular, before his addiction took over his life. He was slowly shrinking in the photographs. He had never followed that course through to its conclusion—he was killed midway through the transformation.

“Why do criminals do that?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Mark themselves out for us. Make it easy with their gang tattoos.”

“I don’t think that’s the point of the practice,” Shelley said, giving her a wry smile over her own shoulder. “It’s social conformity. Showing that you belong to a particular group. Sometimes, the boost of loyalty and companionship that someone gets from that sense of belonging overrides the need to protect themselves or the logic to avoid arrest.”

“I would never get a gang tattoo. Even if it was a requirement for joining the gang. In fact, especially so if that was the case. What a stupid rule to have.”

Shelley swiveled her chair slightly, giving Zoe an amused look now. “You wouldn’t join a gang anyway, would you? It would require a lot of small talk. I don’t think you would like that.”

“I would not get a tattoo under any circumstance, anyway,” Zoe replied, pointing out the other part of the problem with what she had said. “I do not understand why anyone would. What could possibly be so significant that it requires inking onto the body in a permanent fashion?”

“You really don’t like tattoos, do you?”

Zoe couldn’t tell if Shelley was laughing at her or not. “They are a mark of lower intelligence. Offenders are far more statistically likely to have tattoos than law-abiding citizens are. And after time passes, they inevitably look stupid. Why are you smiling like that?”

“Because there’s something about me that you don’t know.” Shelley pushed her chair a little way back from her desk and lifted her foot up onto the seat of her chair. Before Zoe had a chance to protest or ask her what she was doing, Shelley had lifted up the hem of her trousers to reveal the bare skin on her lower leg.

A miniature poppy was etched there, in brilliant red and black, almost realistic enough for Zoe to think she could reach out and pluck it.

“You have a tattoo?” Zoe said, even though it was stating the obvious. It was too much of a shock. She would never have imagined Shelley to be someone who would defile her body with ink.

“Still looks pretty good, I think,” Shelley said. She was smiling, and though Zoe thought it might be good-naturedly, she couldn’t completely tell. “I got it when I was in college. My grandmother’s name was Poppy. After she passed, I thought it might be a nice way to remember her.”

Zoe returned to her own chair and sank down into it. She felt like the wind had been blown out of her sails. “Do you have any others?”

“No,” Shelley laughed. “This one hurt like hell. I swore off them after that.”

“I did not know about… this part of you.”

“What part? The criminal, low intelligence part?”

Zoe swallowed. She may have struggled with human emotions and social norms a lot of the time, but she knew this: there was an apology owed.

“I did not mean that about you,” she said. “I did not know that…”

“You made an assumption,” Shelley said. “I know you don’t think I’m a bad person, so you must see already that your assumption wasn’t totally correct. It’s not just criminals and idiots who get tattoos.”

Zoe nodded, measuring her words carefully. “I concede that a mark of respect and remembrance toward a lost loved one may also be a valid reason to commit to such a thing.”

“That’s progress, at least,” Shelley said. She was still smiling, and Zoe got the feeling that it was still at her expense. But she had messed up and said something that might have been hurtful, so that seemed fair. “How’s your search going?”