Shelley visibly bristled at the way he spoke. There were some emotions that Zoe found hard to read, elusive things that didn’t quite have names or that came from sources she couldn’t identify with. But anger was easy. Anger might as well have been a red flashing sign, and it was going off over Shelley’s head at that moment.
“Do you consider all women to be inconveniences, or just the ones who divorced you after a violent assault?”
The man’s eyes practically bulged out of his head. “Hey, look, you can’t—”
Shelley interrupted him before he could finish. “You have a history of harming Linda, don’t you? We have several arrests for various domestic violence complaints on your record. Seems you made a habit of beating her black and blue.”
“I…” The man shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “I never hurt her like that. Like, bad. I wouldn’t kill her.”
“Why not? Surely you’d want to be rid of those alimony payments?” Shelley pressed.
Zoe tensed, her hands making fists. Any longer, and she was going to have to intervene. Shelley was getting carried away, her voice rising in pitch and volume at the same time.
“I ain’t been paying them anyway,” he pointed out. His arms were crossed defensively over his chest.
“So, maybe you just saw red one last time, is that it? You wanted to hurt her, and it went further than ever before?”
“Stop it!” he yelled out, his composure breaking. He put his hands over his face unexpectedly, then dropped them to reveal moisture smeared from his eyes down his cheeks. “I stopped paying the alimony so she would come see me. I missed her, all right? Stupid bitch had a hold on me. I go out and get drunk every night ’cause I’m all alone. Is that what you want to hear? Is it?”
They were done—that much was clear. Still, Shelley thanked the man stiffly and handed over a card, asking him to give them a call if anything else came to mind. The things that Zoe might have done, if she had thought it would do any good. Most people didn’t call Zoe back.
On this occasion, she very much doubted that Shelley would get a call either.
Shelley blew out a heavy breath as they were walking away. “Dead end. Sorry, no pun intended. I buy his story. What are you thinking we should do next?”
“I would like to see the body,” Zoe replied. “If there are any more clues to be found, they are with the victim.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The coroner’s office was a squat building beside the precinct, along with just about everything else in this tiny town. There was just one road that swept right through, stores and a small elementary school and everything a town needed to survive placed either to the left or the right.
It made Zoe uncomfortable. Too much like home.
The coroner was waiting for them downstairs, the victim already laid out on the table for them like a grisly presentation. The man, an older fellow just a few years from retirement with a certain amount of waffle and bumble about him, began a long and winding explanation of his findings, but Zoe filtered him out.
She could see the things he would tell them laid out before her. The slash wound at the neck told her the precise gauge of wire they were looking for. The woman weighed just over 170 pounds despite her smaller stature, though a fair amount of that had gushed out of her along with almost three liters of her blood.
The angle of the incision and the force applied to it told her two things. First, that the killer was between five foot ten and six foot nothing. Secondly, that he was not relying on strength to commit the crimes. The victim’s weight did not hang on the wire for long. When she collapsed, he let her go down. That, combined with the choice of wire as a weapon in the first place, likely meant that he was not very strong.
Not very strong combined with tall enough likely meant that he was neither muscular nor heavy. If he had been either, his own body weight would have served as a counterbalance. That meant he likely had a slim build, quite in line with what one would normally picture when thinking of an average man, of average height.
There was only one thing that she could say for certain was not average, and that was his act of murder.
As for the rest, there was nothing much to go on. His hair color, his name, what city he came from, why he was doing this—none of that was written in the empty and abandoned shell of the thing that used to be a woman in front of them.
“So, what we can tell from this,” the coroner was saying slowly, his voice querulous and long-winded. “Is that the killer was likely of an average male height, perhaps between five feet nine and just above six feet tall.”
Zoe only just restrained herself from shaking her head. That was far too wide an estimate.
“Has the victim’s family been in touch?” Shelley asked.
“Nothing since the ex-husband came to identify.” The coroner shrugged.
Shelley clasped a small pendant at her throat, tugging it back and forward on a slim gold chain. “That’s so sad,” she sighed. “Poor Linda. She deserved better than this.”
“How did they seem when you interviewed them?” Zoe asked. Any lead was a lead, although she had by now become firmly sure that the selection of this Linda as a victim was nothing more than the random act of a stranger.
Shelley shrugged helplessly. “Surprised by the news. Not heartbroken. I don’t think they were close.”
Zoe fought back wondering who would care about her or come to see her body if she died, and replaced that thought instead with frustration. It was not difficult to find it. This was yet another dead end—literally. Linda had no more secrets left to tell them.
Standing around here commiserating with the dead was very nice, but it was not getting them any closer to the answers they were looking for.
Zoe closed her eyes momentarily and turned away, to the other side of the room and the door they had entered through. They needed to be on the move, but Shelley was still conversing with the coroner in low, respectful tones, discussing who the woman had been in life.
None of it mattered. Didn’t Shelley see that? Linda’s cause of death was very simple: she had been in an isolated gas station, by herself, when the killer came through. There was nothing else of note about her entire life.
Shelley seemed to pick up on Zoe’s desire to go, drifting over to her side and politely distancing herself from the coroner. “What should we do next?” she asked.
Zoe wished she could say more in response to that question, but she couldn’t. There was only one thing left to do at this point, and it was not the direct action that she wanted. “We will create a profile of the killer,” she said. “Put out a broadcast over the neighboring states to warn local law enforcement to be on the watch. Then we will go over the files for the previous murders.”
Shelley nodded, falling easily into step as Zoe headed for the door. It was not like they had far to go.
Up the stairs and out through the doors of the office, Zoe looked around and caught sight of the horizon line again, easily visible past the small collection of residences and facilities that made up the town. She sighed, folding her arms against her chest and whipping her head around to the precinct and where they were headed. The less time she spent looking at this place, the better.
“You don’t like this little town, do you?” Shelley asked by her side.
Zoe felt a moment of surprise, but then again, Shelley had already proven herself to be both perceptive and attuned to others’ emotions. Truth be told, Zoe was probably being obvious about it. She couldn’t shake the foul mood that settled over her whenever she ended up somewhere like this. “I do not like small towns in general,” she said.
“You just a city