Zoe hesitated. Talk. What did that mean? Weren’t they talking now?
Was this the thing she’d always heard about in movies—the dreaded talk—the moment of the break-up?
No—surely she was only being paranoid. John was an adult. He wasn’t afraid to say how he felt, and he hadn’t expressed any dissatisfaction so far.
Of course, he couldn’t have been happy that she was running off somewhere again right as they seemed to be getting to the good bit.
“Right,” Zoe forced herself to say, not wanting the silence to drag on any longer. “Of course. We should do that.”
“Call me when you’re back, then,” John said. He paused, too. “Zoe?”
“Yes?”
There was another pause, as if he was weighing his words. “Have a safe flight.”
Zoe stared down at the phone in her hand, the screen now dark, the call ended. For a brief moment she thought that it was absurd—that she wouldn’t call him when she got back, wouldn’t even think of it. Why would she put herself into a horrible situation on purpose?
But, she reminded herself, she had no idea what he wanted to say. Just because she had come to expect rejection, thanks to her abilities and the way they made her seem different and strange to everyone else, didn’t mean he was lining up to give her the same. She thought of Dr. Monk and what she would say—probably something to the effect of not assuming for other people—and tried to clear her head.
A tinkling sound caught her attention as she pulled out a laundry bag to pack inside the suitcase for her dirty clothes. Zoe’s hands flew to her ears, and she realized that in all the rush and confusion of getting ready, she hadn’t yet taken out her earrings.
She approached the bathroom mirror slowly, the first time she had taken a moment’s pause since leaving SAIC Maitland’s office. The eyeliner was still flashing over each of her eyes, a reminder of what the night should have been. With regret, Zoe reached for her facewash and a cloth. The night was over, and there was no point trying to cling to it with a relic that would only smudge across her face when on the plane.
***
Zoe rubbed her eyes and yawned. It was just around dawn, not that either of them could tell it. They’d left the blind down on their window, leaving the world beyond the plane to the imagination in order to block out the light while they stole a few hours of sleep.
After the mad rush to get changed and into clothing more suitable for travel, to grab her overnight bag, to set up the delayed-release cat feeder and rearrange some appointments, four hours had turned out to be only just enough time for Zoe to meet Shelley back at HQ to go to the airport. Once on the plane they had agreed for the need to get some rest, so that they were actually able to make some kind of sense when they landed.
“All right,” she said. “So, after we land, there’s a rental car already paid for?”
“Yeah,” Shelley confirmed, flipping through the documentation they had been provided. “The Bureau actually sprang for priority collection, so it shouldn’t take us long to get on the road.”
“And then where to?”
“Says here Broken Ridge,” Shelley said, already moving on to the next page.
Zoe’s heart thudded in her chest. “Broken Ridge?” she replied, hoping against hope that she had heard incorrectly.
“Yeah, about an hour’s drive from the airport,” Shelley said, studying the map quickly. “Why?”
Zoe swallowed. “Just checking,” she said.
That wasn’t the truth. The truth was something that she didn’t want to admit: that the town of Broken Ridge was close, uncomfortably close, to where Zoe had grown up. So close that she could picture the place in her head. She knew there was a wind farm not far from the town, a development that had gone up in her youth.
Thoughts and memories of Broken Ridge led, inevitably, to thoughts and memories of home. Not that the place where she grew up had ever been kind enough to her to be called home. Devil child, her mother’s voice rang in her ears, as clear now as it had been when she was eight years old and cowering next to her bed with her hands clasped together in faux prayer.
Zoe took a breath, counting it out. Three seconds inhale, four seconds exhale. For a moment she almost felt she could feel the warmth of a tropical sun on her face, with her eyes closed, shutting out both the close environs of the plane and the memories crowding in on her.
She opened her eyes, focused and calm again. “What do we have on the victims?” she asked.
“Here,” Shelley said, handing her a single sheet of paper. She kept another for herself, and started to read aloud from it. “The first was identified as one Michelle Young, from identification she carried in her pocket. They weren’t able to identify her from her face, because her head was missing.”
Zoe swore under her breath. “They still do not have it?”
Shelley shook her head no. “There’s a recent picture, though. Here.” She held up an image of a smiling blonde, looking directly into the camera. There was an arm around her shoulders, though the owner was cropped out. “Looks like it was cut off with something sharp, possibly some kind of sword. Hack marks—the initial assessment is a long blade, possibly a machete. She was in her early thirties. Five nine, one hundred and sixty pounds. No tattoos. She worked as a bank teller. She was the one in the other town—Easterville.”
Zoe took her cue when Shelley looked up, done with the details on her report. “I have Lorna Troye,” she read. “Her head was missing, too. Thirty-two years old, five seven, one hundred and thirty pounds. Apparently, she was a freelance illustrator. There’s a photograph.”
The two of them regarded the image of Lorna, taken for the profile page on her own website. She was smiling gently at the camera, though she held a stiff and professional pose. She was holding a pencil in her hand hovering over a sketchpad, as if ready to begin work.
There was a moment of silence between them as they both regarded the dead women. One blonde and one brunette, just like Shelley and Zoe themselves. Zoe was around the right age, too, Shelley a few years younger.
There but for the grace of God, the saying went. But since Zoe had ceased believing in God after she had ceased believing what her mother told her—that she had the devil’s blood in her veins to make her see the numbers—she had no idea what it was that made her the lucky one.
“We’ll be descending soon,” Shelley said, stifling a yawn. “We should get ready.”
Get ready, Zoe thought. And how exactly were you supposed to get ready to descend into the one place you had spent your entire adult life trying to escape?
She fastened her seatbelt, knowing that she had little choice.
CHAPTER FIVE
The early morning sun coated everything in a glittering light as Zoe followed Shelley across the parking lot, hanging back with reluctance. She had the itching feeling of being somewhere that was semi-familiar, but that she did not remember well enough to explore with confidence.
Then there was the other feeling at the back of her neck, the one that whispered that she might even end up seeing someone she used to know, this close to home. The parking lot was full of state vehicles—a coroner’s van, local sheriff department cars, and the various other officials who would no doubt have flocked with eagerness to a crime of this magnitude in a town so small. It was not the normal order of business for them—which was why it was so important for them to have the assistance of the FBI.