“Got something new for us, Chief?” Flynn piped up, annoyingly as always. Zoe felt like she ought to slap the back of his head and teach him some manners, like the mothers in sitcoms.
Maitland glowered at him for a moment at the interruption—he had been putting the finishing touches to a piece of paperwork—but he nodded. “Yes, I do.” He hefted a file of loose papers and tossed it toward the front of his desk. “New spate of killings in Salem. Two victims so far. From the reports on the ground, I think we need a keen mind on this one.”
“Salem, like the witch place?” Flynn asked, grabbing up the file greedily and flicking through the scant pages and more numerous photographs.
“Salem, Massachusetts,” Maitland confirmed gravely. “And this has been a public one. Yesterday, commuters came across a victim hung from an overpass first thing in the morning. Today, it was a couple of teenagers hanging around before school that found the body hanging from a telephone pole, so the local PD managed to avoid a second public spectacle. But that’s a victim a day so far, and our killer is far from shy. There haven’t been any clues identified by the officers on the ground as yet—they’re completely lost, and they need your expertise. We need you to get in, solve it fast, and get out before there’s too much media attention on this one. With Salem’s tourist reputation on the line, they can’t afford for this to get out of control.”
Maitland was using a lot of aggressive terms. Zoe had the feeling that she was expected to get this done as soon as possible, and it was going to involve someone who was just about to graduate to serial killer unless they caught him in time. It would be a lot of pressure. The kind of pressure she was under when she slipped up and let their killer get to Shelley.
And the first case she had worked on with Flynn had involved a similar kind of pressure. He’d almost cracked, looking like he was ready to shoot a suspect dead—a man who later turned out to be innocent. It sounded like this case would be a lot. Maybe more than either of them could take.
It would be a bad idea to accept this one, she thought. She didn’t even know if she was up to the task right now. She barely had a handle on the numbers, and the last thing she wanted was to trigger them to get worse again.
“Agent Prime,” Maitland said, calling her attention and making her realize that she had missed part of their conversation while she was deep in thought. “What do you think? If you’re not feeling ready, there’s a post-traumatic stress clinic coming up over the next couple of days. A chance for agents who’ve seen combat in the field to really workshop those feelings. I could put you in for that.”
That got her attention. Working on self-care was bad enough when it was only her therapist who was making her do it. As good as it had been to reconnect with John, talking about her feelings still made her want to shudder.
“We can take this case,” she said, earning what she was sure was a glimmer of amusement in Maitland’s eyes. “It needs your best minds on it, right?”
“That’s right.” Flynn grinned next to her, doing his best impression of an idiot. Zoe rolled her eyes. She hadn’t been talking about him.
“Great,” Maitland said, reaching for a couple of plane tickets that were sitting to the side of his desk. “Your flight leaves in an hour. I hope you had a good night’s sleep last night. Your contact will meet you at the airport. They’re predicting another death tonight, so you’ll need to hit the ground running.”
Zoe took a deep breath as she took the ticket from his hand, Flynn stepping forward to do the same. It was going to be a long night. So much the better.
If she didn’t sleep, she couldn’t dream about all the ways she had failed in the past.
“Come on,” she said to Flynn, already heading for the door, impatient to be on the way. With a case like this, there wasn’t any time to wait—they had to go now, before the killer struck again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Zoe met Agent Flynn once again at the airport gate, her always-ready flight bag in hand and her date night outfit switched for a sober suit.
“You have the file?” she asked, realizing he had been the one to walk away with it under his arm.
Flynn snorted, dressed now in one of his expensive-looking sharp suits, all fine angles and tapering. It made Zoe wonder how he could afford that kind of wardrobe on an FBI salary, especially as a junior agent. He probably didn’t. She suspected that he came from money. Just one more thing that made her dislike him, when she thought of her own cramped and tiny apartment, the life she’d carved for herself without the support of family. “I’m not stupid,” he said. “It’s right here in my bag.”
“Good,” Zoe said. She was somewhat aware, in the back of her mind, that she was probably a little too harsh with Flynn. She held him up to an impossible standard, always assumed that he had fallen short, and gave him very little credit even when he managed to meet her expectations—which, if she was honest, was pretty often. But he wasn’t Shelley. No matter how much he tried to impress her, he was never going to be Shelley.
A lingering doubt flickered through her mind: the thing that he had told her during their first case together. That he had been through something, just like she had. She wasn’t sure exactly what had happened to him, and she hadn’t looked it up. That would have been prying. But she also hadn’t asked him directly.
Maybe she should. She was curious, that was for sure. She just had no idea how to broach the subject. She opened her mouth, but the voice that she heard was not her own.
“Now boarding Flight 1875 to Logan, Massachusetts. Please have your tickets ready for inspection before you reach the checkpoint.”
Zoe shut her mouth again, following Flynn to the front of the line. Now was not the time to talk about his trauma, and besides, she hadn’t really had an idea of how to even form the question.
She found her seat beside him as the rest of the plane filled up, and gestured at his carry-on bag. “I want to review the files.”
“All right,” Flynn said, pulling them out. “I should as well. Here, we’ll split them.”
Zoe bit her tongue on the comment that she would rather study them alone. She was making it harder for them to work together, and she knew that. She had to stop it. If they were going to solve this case, cooperation was key. She couldn’t have Flynn second-guessing her or ignoring her instructions. “Fine. Give me yesterday’s.”
Flynn handed over the slim piece of paper that held all the known details of the case so far, as well as a few photographs. It was too early for a full coroner’s report, but it hardly seemed necessary; Zoe could see from the images alone that the cause of death was straightforward. The victim had been hanged by the neck with a thick rope, his skin graying and his eyes almost bulging out of his head. It wasn’t a pretty sight. You never forgot your first hanging victim, and they didn’t get much easier from there.
“We need to hit the ground running on this,” she said. “This killer is moving quickly, so we need to be quicker. They may strike again tonight.”
“So, tell me what you’ve got,” Flynn said, gesturing to her paper.
Zoe cleared her throat. “The victim was a local business owner in Salem. He owned Judge’s Hardware.”