“His last name was Judge?”
“No.” Zoe frowned. “Harry Stout. Nothing at all to do with judges. Maybe it is a reference.”
“To what?”
Zoe shrugged. Pop culture references often went over her head, and she had no idea whether she was looking at one or not. Only that it didn’t make sense to her. “I do not know. Anyway, he was six-two, a hundred eighty pounds, fifty-five years old.”
“You always go straight for the numbers,” Flynn said. “What about his family? Any problems with the business?”
Zoe stifled a sigh. Of course she always went for the numbers. That was where the answers usually were. But Flynn didn’t know about her ability, so she gritted her teeth and answered him. “Unmarried and no children. It looks as though the business was going fine until this happened. We can initiate a more thorough forensic finance report when we arrive.”
“Hmm.” Flynn was looking through his own file, probably checking for similarities. “Nothing rings any bells here. I’ve got Frank Richards, owner of another local business—West Street Goods. He was forty-eight years old. Don’t worry, I’ve got your stats. Five-eight and a hundred and sixty-three pounds.”
“So, the only point of comparison is that they were both business owners.” Zoe chewed her lip. “What does West Street Goods specialize in?”
Flynn dug his phone out of his pocket and did a quick search using the plane’s Wi-Fi. “Looks like a general store. Seasonal goods, dry food and snacks, bottled drinks. Miscellaneous items. I think I can see pet toys and cleaning supplies in the stands visible through the windows.” He showed her a photograph of the outside of the store, with a smiling and very much alive Frank Richards standing outside of it.
“Well, I doubt they have any conflicting business with a hardware store,” Zoe mused. “And it does not seem likely that a competitor would be trying to take out rival business owners. Even if it was not a farfetched idea, it would be hard to find someone who felt both were in the same field.”
“Maybe someone has a grudge against them for another reason.” Flynn shrugged. “Whatever it is, it seems local. Both of the stores are in the same kind of area, though not so close that they would see each other every day or anything. Anyway, it seems confined to the city.”
“So far,” Zoe said darkly. If there was one thing she had learned from years of working these kinds of complex cases, it was the third murder that would be the most illuminating. It told you whether parallels between the first two were deliberate or coincidence.
Not that she wanted there to be a third murder. If they could stop this killer before he got there, that would be the better option. It wasn’t about solving riddles and putting things together, no matter how much her mind always strayed most to that part of the case. It was about stopping the killer. If needs be, those answers could come out in interrogations and during the trial—so long as no more people lost their lives.
“There’s half an hour until we land,” Flynn said, handing the papers over to Zoe. “I’m going to take a nap.” He rolled his shoulder away from her without waiting for a response, resting his head against the seat near the window, and then drifted off into silence—and presumably into sleep.
Zoe envied him. There was no way she was going to be able to quiet down her brain to get some sleep now, not before they landed. The words on the pages in front of her almost crawled, alive with the numbers that analyzed them uselessly: tracking patterns of word length and sentence structure, the slightly irregular spacing between one of the lines where someone had messed up the formatting. She didn’t need to see these things. She was just having a hard time shutting it off.
She stared down at the photograph of Harry Stout, hanging by the neck from the overpass. It was a grim image. Night had already fallen, and the killer was on target to strike again. Glancing past Flynn’s shoulder to the dark sky outside the window, Zoe hoped they would be on time to stop him—before there was a third body to analyze.
CHAPTER FIVE
“You must be our escort,” Zoe said, holding out a hand for the man to shake.
“Detective Morrison.” The man, dressed in a suit but with his police badge clearly visible around his neck, shook her hand. He’d been the most obvious member of law enforcement in the crowd waiting for passengers to get off the plane: straight-backed and vigilant, eyes scanning the people around him as well as those emerging, hawk-like in his observations. When a fellow passenger peeled off to the side and stopped blocking her view of the badge, Zoe had made a beeline for him, figuring it unlikely there were two cops waiting to escort people today. “You must be Agent… Prime, was it?”
“Agent Zoe Prime,” she confirmed. “This is my partner, Agent Aiden Flynn.”
She waited for the two to shake, then started walking for the exit, already impatient to be off. “How far off are we?”
“About a half hour drive at this time of night,” Morrison said, falling into step beside her after a first distracted moment. He was in his early forties, she calculated, and his five-nine frame was starting to put on weight—something he wasn’t yet used to carrying. “You guys want to head to the motel first, get settled in?”
“No,” Zoe said, cutting off whatever Flynn had been about to say. “There is no time. We will go straight to the most recent crime scene. We can leave our bags in the car until we get a chance to find somewhere to stay.”
They stepped out into chilly February air, hitting them all like a slap in the face after the heated interior of the airport. “You sure you guys don’t want to drop your bags off first?” Morrison asked. “It’s gone ten thirty. We leave it too late, there might not be anywhere still checking in.”
“Your killer has operated at night so far, correct?” Zoe said, snapping her eyes to the detective. He was walking too slowly for her taste, and she didn’t know where the car was parked. When he hit a button on his key and a nearby unmarked vehicle made an answering beep, she set off faster toward it.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Morrison said, hurrying to keep up with her.
“Then why would we want to rest?” Zoe opened the passenger door, a reluctant motion since she always hated being a passenger, and slid into the seat. She didn’t wait to see whether Flynn wanted to ride up front. Where you sat wasn’t important—they needed to get on the road.
Morrison made some kind of grumbling noise as he got into the car and fastened his seatbelt, making Zoe’s fingers twitch with the desire to somehow make him go faster. He didn’t refuse to drive them where they wanted, however, and Zoe held tight to her own belt to stop it from touching her neck in an attempt to lessen the travel sickness as they set off.
“Any developments in the last couple of hours?” Flynn asked from the back seat. “We’ve been in the air since we got our briefing.”
“Nothing much,” Morrison said, his eyes moving across the road. “Both bodies are with the coroner. Captain’s been going crazy, trying to get answers on this one. He strikes again tonight, we’re going to have a lot of media on our shoulders.”