Blake Pierce - Face of Murder

Anyway, he thought to himself darkly, if anyone was going to be after him, it would be that angry student. And he wasn’t smart enough to stalk a professor in the dark of a parking garage. He was the kind of kid who sent angry emails and left a trail. Nothing to worry about, really. Henderson would report it to the dean tomorrow, and that would be that.

What was that noise? A footstep? Something was wrong here. He had been dismissing his fears all this time, but now he was less sure. The prickling feeling on the back of Henderson’s neck increased, something like a premonition, but before he could turn, his head was hitting the car window with a sharp crash.

Henderson barely had time to register this fact and the flooding pain coming from his nose before the hand on the back of his head smashed it into the side of the car again. He was slipping lower, taken down by the shock and the injury, his body going limp. He tried to twist away a little, his briefcase flying forgotten to the floor, but he couldn’t fight the next blow, or the next. Over and over his head hit the red chassis, his temple, the top of an eye socket, his jaw just below the ear.

He felt the damage with a kind of detached shock. The crack of a bone breaking. The thought of bruises blossoming across his face, then of cuts and abrasions, then of something more serious. All he could think, stupidly, was that his face was going to be ruined. All he had time to think before it was seemingly over.

The gripping hand released him, and Henderson sank unceremoniously to the floor, hitting a shoulder on the way down. He barely felt it, against all the rest. He was twisted enough now to groggily turn his head and look, though his vision was blurred. Maybe from the blows. Maybe from blood falling into his eyes. Maybe because his eye socket had to be broken, at the very least.

Who was that? A vague shape, a whisper only, as if it were a ghost that stood over him and not a man. But it was a man. It had to be a man. If only he could make out just who—but Henderson’s consciousness was slipping out of him like sand through his fingers, and he could no longer hold on. Something was flowing out of him, leaving him cold and empty. He knew it was almost over. The world was going black around him, the watery shape above watching in silence.

The shadow stretched above him and lifted his head one last time and slammed it down into the concrete, an impact that Henderson barely even sensed before he tumbled down headfirst into that blackness.

The job was done.

He would not wake up again.

Zoe traced cracks across the arm of the leather chair, seeing how their pattern revealed a tale of aging, of so many different hands and arms lying on this exact spot. She couldn’t decide whether that was a comfort, an indication of experience, or just gross. Who knew what kind of germs lurked within this fabric?

“Zoe?” Dr. Lauren Monk prompted her, from a similarly comfortable chair placed opposite her.

Zoe looked up guiltily. “Sorry, was I supposed to answer that?”

Dr. Monk sighed, tapping her pen against a pad of paper in her hand. Despite the recorder sitting on the desk which archived all of their sessions, it seemed that Dr. Monk was still a fan of traditional methods. “Let’s change tack for a moment,” she said. “We’ve had a few sessions together now, haven’t we, Zoe? I’m noticing that you sometimes have trouble with social cues.”

Ah. That. Zoe shrugged, trying to give off an air of indifference. “I do not always understand the ways in which people seem to react.”

“Or the ways in which they expect you to react?”

Zoe shrugged again, her gaze traveling toward the window. Then she mentally slapped herself; she was supposed to be taking an active part in these sessions, not acting like a moody teenager. “My logic is different from their logic.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Zoe knew why she was the way she was, or at least thought she did. The numbers. The numbers that were everywhere she looked, every moment of the day. They told her even now what prescription Dr. Monk wore in her glasses (barely strong enough to require any kind of aid), that there was half a millimeter of dust on the certificate frames on the wall but only a quarter of a millimeter on the psychology degree (indicating a stronger sense of pride in this than her other achievements), and that Dr. Monk had written down exactly seven words during their conversation so far.

She wanted to say it, or at least some parts of her did. She still had not admitted to Dr. Monk that she had an ability that no one else seemed to. No one except for the occasional serial killer, if the case she had worked a month or so ago was anything to go by.

But there was another part of her, still the stronger part, that could not bear to admit anything at all.

“I was just born this way,” Zoe said.

Dr. Monk nodded, but did not write anything down. Apparently, this was not a significant enough answer. “How does it feel when you miss those social cues? Does it bother you?”

Maybe it was the fact that they had done enough sessions together now for the initial awkwardness to fade away. Maybe it was just the freedom of talking to someone with whom she had no real professional or personal connection. Either way, Zoe’s mouth blurted out a truth that her mind had kept hidden from now, without her conscious permission. “Shelley finds it so easy.”

Zoe cursed herself immediately. What kind of thing to say was that? Now they would spend the rest of the session digging into this jealousy she felt toward Shelley, instead of working on real problems. Until this moment she had not even really acknowledged to herself that the envy was there.

“Agent Shelley Rose,” Dr. Monk said, consulting her notes from a previous afternoon in her office. “You feel more comfortable with her than your previous partners, you indicated to me previously. But you feel jealousy towards her. Can you expand on that?”

Zoe took a breath. Of course she could, though she did not want to. Reluctantly, she studied her own fingers, thinking it best to just get it over with. “Shelley has a way with people. She talks them into admitting things. And they like her. Not just suspects. Everyone.”

“Do you feel that people don’t like you, Zoe?”

Zoe shifted uncomfortably. This was all her own fault. She shouldn’t have said something like that. Admitting a weakness was an invitation for someone to dig into it. This was why she had not mentioned the numbers yet. Even if this therapist had been suggested by Dr. Applewhite, her most trusted friend and mentor, that didn’t mean that Zoe could trust her with her deepest and darkest secret. “I do not have many friends. Partners usually request to transfer away from me,” she admitted instead.

“Do you think this is linked to your struggle with social cues?”

The woman was asking an obvious question. “That, and other things.”

“What things?”

The obvious question. Zoe groaned inwardly. She had set herself up for that trap. “My job is difficult. I am gone often. There is not much time to put down roots.”

Dr. Monk nodded thoughtfully. She was smiling encouragingly, as if Zoe was really getting somewhere. The part of her that craved the positive attention and affection she had never received from her mother thrilled at that, even though she did not want it to. Being in therapy was, so far, only serving to highlight all of her flaws. “What about Shelley? Does she have roots?”

Zoe nodded, swallowing down an unbidden lump. “She has a husband and a young daughter. Amelia. She talks about her a lot.”

Dr. Monk put her pen to her lips, tapping it three times meaningfully. “You want a family of your own.”