For a long moment he didn’t know if she was going to say anything.
“I keep a log of my encounters with any of the girls I talk to.”
Roarke felt a tightening in his stomach that he realized had nothing to do with the case. “I would love to see that.”
She looked away from him. “I’m not going home anyway, not now. You might as well come by the shelter.”
At night the Belvedere place looked like the grand house it had been, a bit of a Victorian time warp, all the windows dark except for the porch light, and the fog. No available parking spot of course, despite the hour. Roarke pulled his car up onto the sidewalk.
As he climbed the steps the door opened, and Rachel stood, half-in, half-out of the light. Roarke felt electricity as he stepped past her.
So that is what this is
, he though, and felt a soft darkness open inside him.
She closed and locked the door and moved down the dark hall toward her office.
In the hall there was the wall of pictures, the rows of teenage girls: snapshots, printed-out candids from camera phones. Some brash, some sullen, some haunted… all shadowed in some way.
Rachel slowed in front of it, looking up at the faces. When she spoke, her voice was low, but harsh with anger. “I don’t understand people. How does anyone resembling a human being use a child like that?”
Roarke heard his own words, felt a rush of longing, then an old emptiness. “I don’t know. I’ve never known.”
“This world,” she said. “It never ends.” She turned abruptly away toward the office.
There was a low light on inside, the desk lamp casting a pool of light, and as Roarke stepped past her he could smell her perfume, something rich and autumnal. He remembered the glimpse through the inner door he’d gotten when they’d been in here before, the bed in the back room.
What are you doing
? he asked himself, and had no answer. He forced himself to speak.
“I’m keeping you up all night, I’m sorry.”
She didn’t answer, but went to a file cabinet and unlocked it, leaned in to pull out a drugstore composition book with a mottled cover. “This is the last three months. You’ll have to look through it but there are names, places— where I saw her, what she said when I tried to talk to her.”
She opened it on the desk and he stepped beside her, feeling a heat in his groin. He looked down at the book. Her writing was small and feminine.
“The names are easy to find. I box them.” She touched her finger to the page, and he saw she had drawn thick rectangles around dates and names.
“Your woman is in there,” she said, and he glanced at her sharply. “The one you’re looking for. I told you I saw her with Jade.”
He remembered. She gave the girl takeout and then she killed her pimp. That was Cara.
“Who is she?” Rachel asked.
He felt boxed in, like the names on the page.
“What Jade was asking in there, I saw how you reacted.” She didn’t look at him. “What’s happening?”
His mouth was dry. “I wish I knew.”
“Did she really kill Ramirez just because… he deserved it? To help Jade? Is that what it is?”
“Something like that.”
She looked at him so intensely he couldn’t look away. “But you’re out to arrest her? Or is it something else?”
He felt a tidal wave of emotion rising, threatening to overwhelm him. “I don’t know what it is. I have no idea.” He turned away from her, pressed his hand onto the desk. “Everything’s all twisted. I can’t see…”
She reached to touch him. “It’s all right…”
He turned his head, and she looked up into his face, and he felt the sizzle of attraction. He pulled abruptly back. He could see the jolted look on her face.
“I’m sorry, I was wrong…”
“No, you weren’t. It’s my fault,” he said. “I’ll go.” He didn’t move. She stepped forward and put her hand against his cheek. He reached up and took her wrist, and time was suspended between them. And then he pulled her hard into him, thigh to thigh, hip to hip, and he laced his hand in her hair and he kissed her, felt her mouth open to his, felt her hunger and her longing, felt her softness against his hardness…
He tried one last time to pull back, but she sighed against his neck… and he was lost.
Chapter Twenty-seven
He lay in the narrow bed with Rachel’s warm soft curves wrapped around him. Her breathing was slow and even and he hoped she was asleep.
He still throbbed from the force of his climax, and with a new dark dread: the feeling that all this would have to be paid for.
He sat up too quickly, and froze, afraid she would move, wake. But she lay still, and he eased out of the bed, stooped to the floor for his clothes.
In the bed, Rachel opened her eyes, listening to the door close as he left.
Outside he eased the front door shut to avoid the jangling of bells, and walked down the steps into the dark, lit only by streetlights in the fog.
He stopped on the sidewalk, aware that something was wrong and not sure what it was. And then he realized his car was gone, towed by San Francisco’s hypervigilant traffic division. He shook his head, thought of instant karma… and then turned south toward home to walk.
The pre-dawn was thick and still around him, and the guilt increased with every step; the fog that rolled around him seemed to be coming from somewhere inside him.
What were you thinking
?
But he knew what he’d been thinking, however much thinking had to do with it.
Relief, release, something normal, something sane
. To grab on to some human connection before he crossed some irrevocable line, fell off the edge into an abyss.
He’d left Rachel a note on her desk pleading work, he’d call, she was lovely. None of which was likely to fool her.
There were the first anemic streaks of light in the sky as a cathedral loomed up in the dark in the block ahead.
He slowed and stopped on the sidewalk. He hadn’t properly been in a church since he was ten, but he was seized with the desire to confess.
As he stood there in the shadows outside the building, he felt the darkness around him deepen. He was seized with the feeling that he was not alone. And in a heart-stopping moment he knew it was Cara, knew that she had followed him, that she had watched him with Rachel, that he’d finally crossed the line that would be his undoing.
And in the moment, he didn’t care.
He turned to face the darkness…
And the air was shattered by the sound of a car roaring around a corner.
He spun, reaching automatically for his weapon— until he saw it was a fleet car, a Crown Vic.
The car skidded to a stop by the curb. The driver’s door opened, and Epps unfolded himself to standing.
Roarke stared at him from across the hood of the car. “How did you know I was—”
Epps shook his head. “Jones has been following you all night. The plan, remember?”
Before Roarke could fully process what “all night” meant, Epps told him, “I hate it when you’re right.”
And Roarke’s stomach plummeted.
“Tell me.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
It was a family in Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino Mountains, a couple hours east of Los Angeles. Arrowhead was an upscale resort town of about eleven thousand locals that had been popular with Hollywood celebrities back in the heyday of film noir and still drew a brisk tourist trade for skiing in the winter and for boating, hiking and fishing in the summer.
“Slaughtered,” Singh said gently, her velvet voice somber with regret. “The whole family.”
The team was gathered around the table in the conference room, pulled away from their beds. There was a dreary light outside the windows, now. Everyone was standing; they were all too wired to sit.
Singh continued. “They died some time last night; the bodies weren’t discovered until this morning. The housekeeper came over early to drop off groceries for Thanksgiving before she left town, and found them.”
There were faxed photos of the crime scene on the table in front of them. Heartbreaking photos.
“The same as the others,” Singh explained as the agents looked down at the carnage. “Upper middle-class family, the Cavanaughs. Father a real estate agent in town. Mother owned an arts and crafts shop. Three children: two girls, fourteen and ten, and a thirteen-year old boy. All stabbed, and the father apparently dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” She put an ironic emphasis on the word
apparently
. “A hunting rifle—”
She fell silent as Reynolds stepped into the doorway. Everyone on the team froze. Reynolds locked eyes with Roarke, then he looked at Singh. “Go on,” he said.
After a moment, she did. “The central heating in the house was turned off and the temperature has been in the twenties overnight and below forty today, which means the scene is fairly pristine.”
Roarke felt a jolt of adrenaline. Before he could even say a word, Singh continued. “I’ve been monitoring all police reports in the state and have had an urgent bulletin out asking that all familicides be reported immediately. Providentially, a local deputy had seen the bulletin and reported the crime directly to us. Nothing has been released to the media yet. The initial thought was murder/suicide. But there is some question.”
Roarke was almost lightheaded with their luck. FBI bulletins were far too often filed in the circular file or immediately buried by a dozen other notices on police station corkboards.
“The full moon is still four days away,” Epps said.
“Yes,” Roarke said. “We won’t know until we see.”
But they all understood it was too similar to discount. Too close to the full moon to discount. And Roarke
knew
. It was the Reaper. He felt another paralyzing stab of guilt, unreasonable as it was, and had to force himself to focus on the present.
Singh continued carefully. “Now, the scene is already in process. I am getting some pushback from the sheriff about how much access we will be allowed. However, I have persuaded him to allow us to view the scene.”
Roarke didn’t even have to ask how she’d managed. Singh’s magic calm had worked wonders on him often enough.
She permitted herself a small smile. “They are particularly interested in the lab resources we can offer. I promised… in essence, anything they need.”
Beside Roarke, Epps breathed out. “Amazing, woman.” Roarke’s thoughts exactly. She was a goddess.
Singh spoke as if she hadn’t heard. “My suggestion is that you leave immediately for the airport before they can change their minds. I will book you on the next flight down to Ontario and arrange for a car; it is just over an hour drive up into the mountains. I thought you would want Lam and Stotlemyre, so I’ve put in calls to them as well. I’ve informed them of the need to…”
“Bend over,” Jones muttered.
“Cooperate,” Singh said with a straight face.
Reynolds waited until the team cleared out of the room to approach Roarke. He looked both pissed and guilty. Roarke willed himself into a state of calm. “I-told-you-so’s” were never in any way useful.
The SAC spoke gruffly. “Take whoever you need. Find out what the hell this is. If it’s the guy, take him down.”
“Thanks,” Roarke said, without rancor. “We will.” And as he turned away, the first thought in his head was that the person he most needed was the one person he couldn’t take.
As they waited at the San Francisco airport for their flight, he called Snyder and quickly filled him in. “It’s a fresh crime scene. Can you come down?”
There was a silence on the other end that seemed like more than an ordinary hesitation.
“You can do this, Matthew,” the profiler said. “You always could.”
“It’s not about that.” Roarke didn’t know if he was telling the truth about that or not. But he knew he was telling the truth about what he said next. “If we’re right, it’s another whole family massacred. No one person is enough against that. If this is the Reaper, we have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
There was a longer silence on the phone than Roarke would have liked, but finally Snyder spoke. “All right, Matthew. Go. Have Singh call me with the details and I’ll be down.”
Roarke felt a surge of excitement, of purpose— and of sheer relief that he would not be alone.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Ontario International was a mid-sized airport servicing the densely populated bedroom communities in the inland valleys east of Los Angeles.
Jones remained behind in the terminal to wait for Snyder, while Roarke, Epps, Lam and Stotlemyre picked up the cases that contained the crime techs’ portable laboratory and piled into the Jeep Singh had reserved for them for the hour drive up to the resort town. Epps drove, Roarke riding shotgun, Lam and Stotlemyre in the back seat, immediately spreading faxed photos of the crime scene out on the seat between them and commencing to argue like an old married couple.
They passed through the valley cities of Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana, with stunning mountains and foothills looming beside the freeway. The valleys were notorious for trapping smog in the summer, but fall winds had cleaned out the skies. Spectacular banks of clouds layered the sky in white, gray and black, but the valleys were clear, and Roarke could see for miles, long vistas of palm trees and even orange groves.
Epps turned off the freeway at the former base town of San Bernardino, onto a street that was a straight shot toward the mountains, a steeply climbing road of hairpin curves that provided breathtaking views of the valley and the unique desert/mountain mix of Southern California: bleak granite outcroppings and drought-stressed Western and Jeffrey pines, red-barked manzanita scrub tucked into the folds and curves of the earth. Hawks circled above and the valley was softly indistinct below, an industrial grid with patches of trees.
“Hope no one gets carsick,” Epps muttered as he twisted the wheel in another stomach-lurching spin.