“I know,” she said. Hearing words from her was a relief, perhaps false relief, but in the moment, any kind of normalcy was welcome. Behind him, the gas logs sizzled.
“Do you know about the Reaper, too?” he asked, speaking slowly and calmly.
She looked at him without answering. Snyder realized he was pouring sweat from every pore in his body. He swallowed.
“Is there anything you can tell us… anything at all that would help us catch him?”
“Roarke is wrong,” she said, and despite his fear, he felt a sharp spur of curiosity.
“What is he wrong about?”
Her eyes were looking past him, toward the moon, he thought. “The Reaper,” she said.
“What about the Reaper?”
“I know,” she said, and the sudden agitation in her voice froze his blood.
“What do you know?”
She turned back to him, and in the shadows, her eyes were dark, almost black. “It’s a trap.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Now clean and changed and shaven, Roarke stepped out of his cabin into the icy wind. The bath had been lifesaving, but all the heat of that delicious soak had leached out of him by the time he crossed the low-lit path to Snyder’s cabin.
He knocked on the door, and stood in the dark and the wind, shivering. Wind whistled through the treetops, shaking the long pine needles.
After a few seconds he knocked again, harder.
There was no answer, and he noticed, no light on inside, either.
“Chuck?” he called.
He reached for the doorknob automatically, and to his surprise, it turned. Unlocked.
Adrenaline flooded his system. He pushed the door open and pressed his body against the frame as he looked cautiously inside.
“Chuck?” he said sharply.
He pulled away from the door and drew his weapon. He reached into the room and snapped on the light, then barged in, swiveling in a firing stance, scanning the room.
Empty.
He spun at the sound of a muffled thud from the bedroom. He shoved through the connecting bathroom door, checked the space, pushed open the bedroom door, scanned that room. The bedroom was empty, moonlight filterng through the shuttered window. Across the room a chair was shoved under the doorknob of the closet door.
He strode forward and kicked the chair out of position, twisted open the door with one hand.
Snyder looked up at him from the dark of the closet floor. His hands were tied behind his back, his mouth gagged with a shirt tied around his head. Roarke crouched to untie the gag.
“Well, I’ve met Cara,” Snyder said ruefully.
When Roarke barreled out the cabin door onto the deck, Jones and Epps were already there, weapons drawn. All three agents raised their weapons, showing their hands.
Jones spoke tautly. “I was watching from across the way. I saw you go in. Then no lights went on…”
“Cara was here,” Roarke told them.
“
Shit
,” Epps exploded. He spun to look around them. The pines towered above and the night was as black as tar.
“Snyder says it was at least twenty minutes ago,” Roarke told them. “He’s okay. But she’s long gone.” On the inside he was ballistic, though who or what he was angry with was unclear, even to him.
Back in Snyder’s room, Epps paced on the phone to the sheriff’s office, coordinating an immediate search of the area and a BOLO for Cara to all local authorities.
Roarke turned to Snyder with a combination of fury and filial worry.
“I’m perfectly fine.” Snyder said mildly, massaging his wrists. “She only wanted to deliver a message.”
“To you.” Roarke could hear the outrage in his own voice.
“Every man on your team is watching you like hawks, as they should be,” Snyder said. “How could she get near you?”
“What message?” Roarke couldn’t contain himself. “What the hell did she say?
Snyder glanced at Epps, who was looking over from the phone, listening. He took his time answering.
“Your plan worked. She has been drawn out by the hunt for her family’s killer. Not surprisingly, she feels personally involved in this case. I think perhaps she wanted my take.”
Roarke felt he’d been punched in the gut. She was ahead of him, behind him, all around him…
How close she must have been to know where he was going.
It was the first thing Epps seized on, too, as soon as he signed off his phone and turned to the other men. “She’s in your email,” he told Roarke. “How else would she know to come here?” He stabbed his finger toward the ground.
Roarke shook his head. “I can’t see it.” He had no proof, no idea, really, but it didn’t seem to him that technology was her style. It was far too easy to track someone online, now, and she was a physical person, a traveler, too restless even to sit. Definitely not a hacker type.
He remembered his walk out of the shelter on Belvedere, after being with Rachel… the feeling of darkness closing in, of not being alone. “It must have been when you picked me up. On the street. In the Haight. She overheard us talking about Arrowhead.”
Had she seen him leave the shelter? Or arrive at it? His stomach dropped as he thought of Cara watching him with Rachel Elliott.
What had she thought
?
And then there was the even more ominous thought, arising again out of some dark and ambiguous place in him:
Is Rachel in danger
?
“Jesus,” Epps muttered. “She was right there with you?”
Roarke scrubbed his face with a hand. “All right, we knew this.
I
knew it.” Taking the blame was peremptory; Epps would be down his throat once he’d recovered from the initial shock. After all, it had been Roarke who had slipped his tail, his bodyguard, deliberately and consciously. He was trying to have it both ways, play both sides of the board, however anyone would want to call it.
He finished aloud. “The fact is, she’s here.”
“So we can catch her,” Epps said, with a rush of energy. “We know she’s right on top of you, we can nail her. Finally.”
Roarke felt a flash of rage that he channeled into low, precise words.“Or we concentrate everything we’ve got on going after the Reaper before that fuck kills another family full of kids.”
Epps swore softly. “That’s no choice at all.”
“Exactly,” Roarke said. “It’s no choice at all. She’s not going to hurt me—”
“You don’t
know
that—”
“I’m not worried about it,” Roarke overrode him. “Not for one second. But I do know that some monster who has butchered five families now, twenty-four people, fourteen
kids
, is out there looking to do it again, sooner rather than later. You were in that house. You saw it. What’s the priority, here?”
For a moment Roarke thought he had pushed his man too far, as he saw a glimpse of the deadly force Epps would have been if he hadn’t made it out of the street life.
Then the face of the agent, the lawman, returned. He circled the small room. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it. You, her, it, any of it.”
“We don’t have to like it. We just have to get this piece of shit.”
Epps halted, and they stared each other down.
Roarke broke the standoff. “Go. Put out an APB. And then let’s focus on the Reaper.”
“Right,” Epps said. He moved for the door to the deck and pulled it open. But at the threshold, he suddenly stepped close to Roarke, so that only he could hear him. “Here’s my problem, boss man.
You
like it. You like it this way.” His eyes bored into Roarke’s, then he shook his head, and stepped back, out the door, off the deck, down the path, heading back toward his cabin.
Roarke turned back inside the room and closed the door. Snyder had seated himself in an armchair beside the fireplace, blue flames now blazing through the gas logs. He looked up at Roarke, waiting for what he had to say next.
Roarke shook his head. “You could never have been in a room with anyone for more than two seconds and have gotten so little from it.”
Snyder spread his hands in acknowledgement.
“So what did she want?”
“She wanted to talk about you,” Snyder said quietly. There was something in his tone that gave Roarke pause.
“What about me?” he asked warily.
“Anything about you, I think,” Snyder said, and Roarke felt a vortex inside him, swirling feelings, swirling thoughts, nothing clear.
So he moved away from it. “What did she say
exactly
?”
“She said ‘
It’s
a trap.’”
Roarke felt cold. “She knows we’re trying to trap her.” But he was not surprised. He’d known she would know.
“No. She said
It
is a trap.”
Roarke felt hollow, through and through. “It. Some monster, you mean.” Some abstraction of evil he didn’t fully understand.
Snyder had explained elements of Cara’s psychological state before: her almost-death as a child had fixed her in the age of the trauma, five years old, before the age of reason. She existed in a state of magical thinking, ruled by fantasy, metaphor that appeared real to her, and driven by synchonicities. She’d seen the Reaper as a monster; now she saw the men she killed as monsters.
“Something larger than human, yes,” Snyder said. “She does not see the world in the same way that we do.”
Roarke stood still with that.
Then Snyder spoke again. “There was one more thing she said.” Roarke looked at him, and Snyder spoke softly, obviously quoting. “‘It’s me
It
wants. Tell him.’”
Roarke stared at him, in complete turmoil. “Tell me… to use her as bait?”
“I believe that’s what she meant, yes.”
Bait, again, traps and trapping, but this time the hunted was offering herself up to bait the trap. It was all twisting in on itself.
“That’s insane,” he said aloud, and paced the room. “Why would she want to do that? Why would she even…” He fell silent, then anger rose in him. “It’s impossible anyway. I’m supposed to arrest her, not—”
He stopped. There had been a slight, startled reaction on Snyder’s face, so uncharacteristic for him that Roarke caught his own slip instantly. He’d said,“
I’m
supposed
to arrest her.
”
Supposed
to.
“Use her as bait.” He slammed his hand against the wall. “What do I do with that?”
“I don’t know,” Snyder said. “I don’t know.”
Chapter Thirty-four
When Roarke finally left Snyder’s cabin, he was too agitated to go back to his own. He needed a game plan. He needed to process everything that had happened in the day if he had any chance of his next move making any sense at all, let alone being the right one.
So instead of going up the porch stairs to his cabin, he kept walking up the stepping stones to the road beyond. The asphalt ended at a dirt path and he kept going, into the towering shadows of trees. The air was freezing and the moonlight was a brilliant white, glistening on crunchy patches of leftover snow. Orion and Cassiopeia were up, the fog had lifted and the night was so clear that the constellations were still visible in the sky despite the brightness of the almost-full moon.
It was not until he could no longer see the shapes of cabins behind him that he was finally able to let himself consider Cara’s words.
It’s me It wants
.
To use her as bait was impossible.
Isn’t it
? He couldn’t begin to think how she might have meant it.
And why would she want to
? To kill the Reaper? Kill
It
? Or was there something more?
Something that had to do with him?
In his mind, he heard Snyder’s words:
“
She wanted to talk about you
.”
“
What about me
?”
“
Anything about you, I think
.”
It was then he realized that he was out in the night not to clear his mind, not to walk off tension. He was looking for her.
The underbrush rustled on the path beside him, freezing his heart, and then some large presence crashed forward in the brush and loomed up in the dark above him with huge, alien, glistening eyes…
Roarke jolted back, and realized he was staring up at a horse. It stopped still in the moonlight, towering above him, and seeming just as mesmerized by Roarke as he was by it. And then it turned and bolted back into the trees.
It took Roarke a heart-pounding moment to realize there was a split-rail fence in front of him, almost completely concealed by the bushes. As he moved closer to it he could see the field enclosed by the fence, and long low buildings in the dark. A sign above the double stable doors read
Arrowhead Riding Academy
.
Stables.
He stared, his mind whirling.
Lynn Fairchild rode at the same stables as Terry Granger
.
And then he strode toward the fence and grasped the rough railing, eyes searching the darkness, finding the curve of parking lot: pickup trucks, buggies…
And a row of silver horse trailers.
He took the path back to the cabins at a run, and was panting by the time he sprinted around the corner of his cabin. He nearly jumped out of his skin as Epps turned on the porch with Glock in hands; he had Roarke dead to rights. Roarke raised his hands and told him, “Horses.”
Epps stared down at him in the dark.
“We were thinking the Fairchild and Cavanaugh kids might have been watched at their school. But what if Tanner Fairchild rides horses, like his mother? There’s a riding academy right down the road. What if the Reaper spotted the boys at the stables?”
“Horse trailers,” Epps said slowly, and Roarke could hear the excitement in his voice. “The Reaper drives horse trailers.”
Epps reaching for the phone to call Singh when they were interrupted by the slash of headlights through the trees, followed by the sound of an engine and tires on gravel. They moved toward the parking lot, and stepped into the lights of a Sheriff’s SUV. It stopped in one of the parking spaces near the cabins and Lam piled out of the back seat, followed by Stotlemyre from the passenger side.