She is not surprised to be seeing him again. She had not expected him, yet she is not surprised. Everything about Roarke is inevitable.
It is as the last moment she saw him. He is holding her, carrying her. She can feel his arms, the beating of his heart against her skin.
And there is pain, and his voice, telling her to breathe, to live.
He lays her down in the front seat of a truck, whispering that he will help her. Then he is gone, and there is only pain.
She lies on the seat floating in and out of consciousness. She is wounded, badly wounded, but death has circled her before without claiming her. Outside the truck men are fighting, Roarke and one of the flesh dealers. And then something outside herself jolts her to life. While Roarke fights hand-to-hand with another one of the monsters, she pulls herself up by the inside of the door.
It should not be possible to stand, to walk. But it is not entirely her, not her alone, that moves. She staggers out toward the vehicle she has seen earlier, the one she took keys from, for just this eventuality.
As the fire from the explosion in the meth lab roars and submachine guns blast, she escapes in that truck, driving out into the night, into the dark desert, driving until she has to stop or crash.
Some time before dawn she wakes and does not know where she is. Her ribs are screaming, an excruciating wound. The stabbing pulse of blood in the flesh of her side. Burning…
But not dead.
She is still alive enough to find an overnight convenience store, where the stoned clerk seems barely to notice her condition. She buys quantities of peroxide, antibiotic ointment, ibuprofen, a sewing kit, and uses them in the truck. The bullet has scraped her ribcage, ugly and bloody but not deep, no metal is lodged inside her.
Something has spared her, again, and this time whatever it is has used Roarke to do so.
She drives again, stops again, wakes again… and recognizes Joshua Tree, the national park in the desert just an hour away from her family’s old home, a vaguely remembered wonderland from her childhood, the time before
the night
. An alien landscape of enormous wind-carved rocks and natural monuments, clean and vast, with no human life to soil it. On the outskirts of the park there are all kinds of rarely-used vacation homes: cabins, lodges. Easy enough to break a back window in this isolated cabin, to settle there when she finds no signs of recent habitation. The object being to keep herself still enough to heal.
She spends her time dousing herself with bottles of hydrogen peroxide by the hour, slathering the bloody gash in her side with triple antibiotic ointment, sleeping. Infection sets in anyway, angry black and red lines crawling hotly from the wound, and she ventures out, breaking into one after another of the closed-up houses in the surrounding area, rifling through medicine cabinets until she finds an almost-full course of oral antibiotics, and some old codeine as well, for the pain.
And she heals.
She had not expected to survive the night at the concrete plant. In truth she had not wanted to. She had gone there with only one purpose: to kill as many of the monsters as she could before they took her down. When she asked Roarke to come, she had not expected him to, much less expected him to save her.
And yet it had happened.
She does not yet know what it means, but she lives by these signs.
She is longer in one spot than she can remember staying in a long, long time, resting, recovering… then venturing out, driving into the park and sitting for hours in the midst of house-sized boulders at Big Rock campground, where she can feel the desert sun and wind and the ancient peace restoring her.
It occurs to her that she can stay. Not in this cabin, but she has money, she could buy one for herself, stay clear of people as much as possible, and in that way maybe avoid the shadow that has pursued her for all of her life since
the night
. She lets herself wonder, for the first time, what it would be like: to be free, not to endlessly hunt and be hunted. Merely to live.
She remains in peace through the dark of the moon, and the whispers are quiet. But with the first sliver of new moon, the restlessness begins.
She ventures farther, almost always ending up at
the house
in Blythe, the house where it all started. Not going in, only watching, waiting for something that she has not known she is waiting for until just now, seeing Roarke. Roarke, alone this time, and looking for something, too. Looking up into the sky spiked with stars, the constellations standing out in brilliant dimensions. The wind stirs the air between them as he looks out into the night.
She feels the crescent moon behind her, hears it murmur.
The pain and pills have kept her deadened, have dulled the whispers of the moon. But the pain is receding and the next moon is growing, and it is talking to her.
At the beginning of her dark journey, an old Native American man had taught her that every moon has a name. This month is Blood Moon.
She will listen and wait for the signs.
Chapter Five
Roarke woke to white sunlight slanting through the windows of Cara’s old bedroom. Of course he’d never made it to a motel, that had been a pleasant fantasy.
His back ached from sleeping on the floor, with his own coat for a pillow, but he hadn’t dreamed, and no monster had come upon him while he slept. Though momentarily, as he stretched his way to his feet, he had an odd feeling of not-aloneness.
The feeling stayed with him as he walked through the silent house, which was somehow as familiar to him as if he’d lived there, all those years ago. A thought drifted through his mind:
I could buy it
. Compared to San Francisco real estate, the asking price was enticingly low.
All of this space. All of this privacy
.
And that was insane.
He shook his head, and headed for the door.
He locked the front door behind him and replaced the key in the lock box, then and stood on the porch, looking out over the eucalyptus, listening to the dry leaves stirring softly in the wind. Across a field, a horse cantered, a teenage girl on its back. Roarke watched them race in the field before he started for the car.
He had two choices for the day, which he considered as he sat behind the wheel studying the locations he’d programmed into the rental car’s GPS. He could head to Palm Desert, where the former counselor from a group home Cara had lived in had been murdered sixteen years ago.
Had
it been her first kill?
But investigating that long-ago murder was not going to get him closer to finding Cara.
He sat back against the seat and for a moment felt that same strange sensation of not being alone. He sat up and, knowing it was irrational, checked the back seat of the car. No one. Idiocy.
He looked at the GPS again, the addresses programmed into it. And he knew the most realistic choice was to go south, to San Diego, where Cara’s cousin Erin McNally was in med school.
He started the car and drove, through the eucalyptus, and out onto the freedom of the road.
Outside of its major cities Southern California was an unrelenting desert, a whole world away from the coastal forest of the Bay Area and the port city Victoriana of San Francisco. On the I 10 Roarke skirted the borders of Joshua Tree National Park, a surrealist landscape of rounded rock formations and the bleak cactus-like trees that gave the Park its name. He had always wanted to explore the park, and he felt a tug he couldn’t interpret as he passed the entrance.
This isn’t a vacation
, he told himself, and drove on.
As he approached Indio on Interstate 10, he knew the highways split. He could go several different directions. He felt another urge to keep driving west, a slightly longer route that would take him through Temecula, the wine country town bordered by the Pechanga Reservation where Cara had briefly lived with her aunt, Randall Trent, and her two young cousins. But besides giving him more of a feel for Cara herself, chances were good there’d be nothing there that might yield as much information as Cara’s cousin.
As he took the turnoff south toward San Diego, he remembered Epps’ words that Mexicali was less than two hours from the cement plant, that Cara could have crossed the border and disappeared into that vast and ancient country, never to be found.
He recalled that Cara had spoken Spanish, too, during the shootout at the plant. Another skill that made her flexible, that made her options legion, that made finding her that much more challenging.
And suddenly he was seeing the crude altar in the brothel, the appeal to the shadowy saint.
Santa Muerte
, he thought.
Where are you, Lady Death
?
Like every other city in California, San Diego had grown since Roarke had last visited it, and traffic had swelled to match. An hour outside the city the roads slowed to a crawl. He had plenty of time to marvel, with gritted teeth, at how the city had expanded for miles beyond the boundaries he remembered, densely packed housing with less and less land in between settlements.
The university was located on twelve hundred acres of coastal woodland near the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla. Any campus that close to the beach would normally be a party school, but S.D. had a staid reputation, probably because beyond the woods it was surrounded by a residential no-man’s land. Students could walk down to the beach to surf between classes but were miles from the nightlife of the city center.
Cara Lindstrom’s cousin Erin McNally was a med student, one would assume she had the attendant workload, but apparently she had immediately agreed to Roarke’s request for a meeting. Singh had set up an appointment in front of the campus’s Geisel Library. “She said you cannot miss it.”
She was right — no one could have missed it. Roarke walked through the sunny, modern campus toward a concrete and glass structure looking for all the world like the Starship Enterprise: a spaceship-shaped oval perched on steep concrete ramps resembling loading docks.
Singh had sent through a photo of Erin, an olive-skinned girl with black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, a studious type as far from Cara Lindstrom’s edgy and feral beauty as a blood relative could get. The glasses made her easy to spot; she was poring over a thick textbook at a shaded table in the library plaza. She looked serious and much younger than her twenty-six years.
She squinted up at him as he stopped in front of her table. “Ms. McNally?” he asked.
“Agent Roarke,” she said, and looked him over, not in a sexual way at all, but with a rather more scientific curiosity. He’d changed to a dress shirt and tie in the parking lot and shrugged on his suit coat on the way across campus, so he probably looked his part.
He motioned to the seat across from her and she nodded, old school manners for someone of her generation. “Agent Singh told you what I wanted to speak to you about?” he asked as he settled.
“My cousin,” Erin said, and closed her textbook.
Pathologic Basis of Disease
, he noted. “What do you want with her?”
Her bluntness was startling. She might not look like Cara, but that sharp watchfulness apparently ran in the family.
“I’m trying to find her.”
“I don’t have a clue,” Erin said, and looked at him so directly he knew it was true. Not that he’d really expected her to have an answer. It was going to take some digging, to see what she knew that she didn’t
know
she knew.
“Why do you want to find her?” Erin asked. “Does it have to do with the murders?”
Roarke knew that she meant the murders of the Lindstrom family, not Cara’s own killings. The APB that had been out for her when she’d kidnapped Jason Sebastian had gone out with the alias she was using at the time, Leila French, and Roarke doubted that Erin would have seen the FBI sketch that had briefly been released in central California. There was no reason Erin would know her cousin was wanted.
“Yes, something to do with them,” he answered her.
“That’s weird.” She frowned. “After all this time.” She looked disturbed.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
She hesitated. “I think when I was seventeen.”
“You
think
?” he repeated. He doubted this precise young woman was in the habit of uncertainty.
She looked away from him, off into the distance. “No, I guess I know. I was a senior in high school. I was leaving school and I thought I saw her in a car parked across the street, looking at me. I can’t be sure, because I hadn’t seen her for years by then, not since I was… fourteen. But it looked like her, and she was looking at me, and this was just a week before she disappeared.”
Roarke felt a little chill up his spine. “How do you mean disappeared?”
“The day she turned twenty-one all the insurance money from the murders got signed over to her and no one ever heard from her again. My mother said that she fired the trustee and she asked for the whole lump of it to be wired somewhere and then her phone was turned off and her P.O. Box and her email were all shut down. The trustee was calling Mom every few days asking if she’d heard anything from her but she was just gone. We never heard anything about her after that.”
“No calls, no postcards…?” Roarke asked, though he knew the answer.
“She never wrote or called anyway.”
“Not ever?”
Erin shook her head. “A couple of times my mother had her over, usually a holiday, Thanksgiving, Christmas. But that was a long time ago, when we were still kids.”
“Can you remember the last time?”
There was a flicker on Erin’s face. “I was ten. It was after she got out of juvie. I think Mom felt guilty, like she could’ve done more. It didn’t work out so well. Patrick didn’t like Cara, kind of ragged her, and she wouldn’t talk around him. Not that she talked a lot, anyway.”
Patrick was Erin’s slightly older brother. “Any reason for the friction between her and your brother?”
“Nothing that made sense.” She gave him a thin smile. “You know, we grew up as the kids whose family got killed by the Reaper. Boogeyman kind of stuff — ‘He’s coming back to get you…’ Like that. And the ‘crazy cousin’ thing didn’t help.”