“
Was
she crazy?” he asked without thinking, and immediately regretted it.
But she only looked at him steadily. “Well… who wouldn’t be?”
He couldn’t argue.
“When she did visit you, were there places you went, on a family vacation… or did your mother’s family have some vacation spot?”
“Disneyland? Sea World?” Erin suggested. Roarke realized, startled, that she was making a dry joke.
“Can’t see it,” he told her.
“And you would be right.” Erin looked away, down the long plaza. “She didn’t like to be around people much. I think she liked it when we drove places, though. It felt like she relaxed more in a car, on the road. Especially out of the city.”
It fit what Roarke knew of Cara himself. She was a traveler.
“Did you see her—” he stopped. Erin looked at him enquiringly. “Did you ever see her act out violently? Or talk…” he paused, searching for the words. “In an unbalanced way?”
Erin’s face shadowed. “She wasn’t violent around us. But she could look at you and stop your heart. I mean, she did it with Patrick, not with me, but she’d freeze me up when she did it to him. She watched
everyone
. All the time. There was so much going on inside her I thought she would burst. And once…”
Her eyes went distant in a way that made Roarke hold his breath, waiting for whatever she was going to say.
“I’m in med school. You don’t have to guess. I was a shy kid. A brain. I got picked on. Maybe would have been even without the whole family ghost.” She breathed in, a long breath. “Cara came over for one of the happy family meals one night when I was about ten, so she would have been fifteen. We went out to a restaurant, some stupid hamburger place, and Derek Sanders was there with his family. This guy from school. He’d made a special project out of me, the way kids like that do.” She paused, and Roarke waited, feeling a sense of inevitability.
“He didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to him, nobody said anything. I was just praying that nothing would happen. We ate our Happy Meals and Cara looked at me, and she looked at him, and she didn’t say a word. And at the end of the night Cara went back to whatever home she was in at the time and I went back home to sleep… and the next morning Derek showed up to school with two black eyes and all hunched over. And when I passed him in the hall he
flinched
away from me. Flinched.”
She stopped, and took another breath. “He never said another word to me.” She looked at Roarke, with steady dark eyes. “Is that what you mean by violence?”
It’s exactly what I meant
, he thought.
It’s Cara to a T
.
“You never told her anything about how he’d treated you.”
She laughed shortly. “I didn’t talk to Cara. Never anything beyond, ‘Pass the bread.’ My mom was afraid of her. I didn’t know how to say that at the time, but I know it was true. She never spent the night at our house. I think Mom thought…”
Roarke felt his pulse start to race. “That she’d hurt you?”
Erin shook her head, and didn’t look at him. Her voice was hollow. “That he really would come back for her. The Reaper. And take the rest of us, too.”
Roarke felt a heaviness in the air between them. He had heard that kind of superstitious talk before about the Reaper. An uncaught serial killer took on the aura of legend. He leaned forward to get her full attention. “Erin. I need to know. Did your mother ever talk about some sign, some indication that the massacre was going to happen? Anything unusual, any marker…”
Erin’s head was down, black curls curtaining her face. She murmured something that set Roarke’s hair on end, even as he was unsure what she had actually said. “I’m sorry, what—” and this time he heard.
“The rabbit,” she said, very softly.
“What about the rabbit?”
“Mom said that Aunt Gillian found a dead rabbit on the porch before it all happened.”
So there. Trent hadn’t been lying. It is a clue, something tangible from the past
. Not to do with
his
case, of course, but Roarke felt the subterranean pull of the lead. It was a path to a killer, a marker of his personality, a trail.
What Roarke wanted with it was less clear.
Revenge
?
Just to know
? It was what he did. He hunted killers.
No. That had been before. Another life.
Erin was looking at him. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked in a small voice. “He must be dead.”
“Almost certainly,” Roarke said. But he felt the hollowness of the words. “Or we would know by now. Men like that never stop.” They sat in silence for a moment, and there was a chill in the sunny day.
“If you find Cara, would you tell her…” the young woman stopped, looked down at her books.
“What?” Roarke asked gently.
“I’d like to see her,” she said, without raising her eyes. “I’d really like to see her.”
Chapter Six
It was late afternoon, coming on sunset, and Roarke was far too close to the ocean not to find a beach. He had to think, and there was no better place.
He collected his car in the visitor lot and stopped to ask directions from a guard at a security kiosk, who turned and pointed. Torrey Pines State Reserve was just minutes from campus.
Roarke drove to the trailhead, where he stood by the open trunk of the car and exchanged his dress shirt and suit coat for a T-shirt and sweater, and his work shoes for the lightweight Hi-Tec hiking boots he always took on the road with him. Then he locked the car and set off along a sandy, post-fenced trail through the scattered long-needled pines, gnarled and twisted into surreal shapes by the wind. His feet crunched past low, soft coastal sage scrub and hard-leafed chaparral, and he felt his muscles loosening, his lungs filling with the pure spicy air as the natural setting worked its magic.
The trail opened out on a cliff and he stopped in his tracks to take in the spectacular overlook: a swoop of spotless beach under fantastically carved cliffs, the vast ocean with the sinking sun starting to glimmer orange across the water, outlining the streaks of cirrus clouds in light.
After a long moment of just drinking it in, he descended the steep trail with the wind blowing at his hair and seagulls sailing through the air beside him, down the bluff to a secluded beach. The temperature was dropping and fog was rolling in off the water, but there was a warmth from the golden sandstone cliff face. Roarke breathed in deeply, feeling clean, and a million miles away from civilization.
The beach curved along the wind-sculpted bluffs, and the long stretch of sand was nearly deserted, just a few lone walkers with dogs. A molten ball of sun poured orange light across the waves as it sank into the water.
Once at the shoreline, he slowed his pace, and then sat down in the still-warm sand amid patches of salt grass to think.
As far as his stated mission went, the trip so far had been a total bust. No one knew where Cara was. No one left on his list was likely to know where she was.
His biggest score of the journey had been on the Reaper: the fact that the killer had left a savaged animal as a calling card. In his mind he heard Erin’s shaky voice.
He’s dead, isn’t he
?
He must be dead
.
He shook his head to dispel the feeling of unease.
Cara. Focus on Cara
.
He could go back up through Palm Desert, look at the old files on the murder of the youth home counselor. But he knew that was only his own curiosity. Deep down he was sure that Cara had killed the man. At fourteen years old. He thought briefly of Erin’s story, the bully who surely had had a private visit from Cara. At least whatever she’d done to the kid, he’d gotten away with his life.
But those old attacks had nothing to do with his hunt. As reluctant as he was to admit it, the best chance of finding her, barring a hospital report or getting lucky on a car she’d stolen, was to pick up her trail again at her next kill. Unless she was dead. And he knew in his bones she wasn’t.
And whether she was in a cooling-off period or not, it was almost certain that she would kill again. Whatever drove her, she had been on her bloody mission for a long time.
He stared out at the rolling waves, the liquid gold of the melting sun, and felt the coarse sand under his fingers. Then he pushed himself up to his feet.
Somehow it would have to stop.
From the bluffs, she watches.
She follows along the narrow and sandy trail, keeping back from the cliff’s edge, as far below her Roarke walks along the water.
She has followed him from Blythe.
Not literally; that would be far too risky. He is too astute not to pick up that he is being tailed on the road.
His rental car is a Camry; she has a master key for the make. So while Roarke had slept fitfully in her old house, her old room, she’d checked the GPS of the car, and found several destinations programmed into the device: Ironwood Prison — meaning he’d been to see that vermin Trent, her non-uncle. The police department in Palm Desert — meaning he must be thinking of asking questions about the group home counselor she’d taken care of so very many years ago now, after he and his sociopathic teen protégé had forced their way into her room one night, thinking that as the youngest female in the home she’d be easy prey.
She could tell Roarke all about it, how she’d fought back with everything in her, which turned out to be much more than she’d ever expected. The counselor had fled the premises for fear of discovery and then testified she’d attacked and tried to kill the older boy, whom she’d beaten into unconsciousness. For which she’d been sent up to Youth Authority, California’s maximum security juvenile facility, for three years.
By the time she’d got out, her fighting skills had improved immeasurably. The first thing she’d done upon release was make sure the counselor could never be a problem for anyone ever again.
The last address in Roarke’s GPS was her cousin Erin. So this is where she has followed him, driving her own route down to San Diego and the campus, in the truck she took from the cement plant. The battered, dusty truck is naturally inconspicuous on the desert roads; she has passed many such trucks on her rare forays out of the Joshua Tree cabin. And there has been another point in its favor: she doubts the traffickers from the cement plant are cooperating with authorities in any way. They aren’t about to report a stolen vehicle, if they even know or care it is gone.
She is still processing the oddity of seeing Roarke with Erin. Erin has grown into her looks, no longer the awkward and coltish, paralyzingly shy girl that Cara remembers from a far, far different life.
She is sure she knows what they were talking about. When had been the last time Erin had seen her, where she might be now…
Roarke is trying to find her, going first to that scum Trent, and then Erin. It is not an unreasonable plan. She has not contacted Erin over the years but she has always been aware of where she is, what she is doing. Erin is perhaps the only living being she feels any pull of connection to. Before, briefly, the boy Jason Sebastian.
She watches Roarke on the sand below her, and she listens to the whispers of the wind and tide and rising moon. They had led her to the boy, and the boy had led her to the nest of monsters, and Roarke had followed her path and had been there to save her that last bloody night. One clear step after another, a perfect trail.
Now Roarke is following the same sort of trail, and it will lead him to her.
The night at
the house
he had told her he’d gone into law enforcement because of her, because of
the night
, that it had set him on the track of hunting monsters. They are the same that way. Different, because he hunts and has never been hunted. But the same.
He is the only one who has ever seen her. The only one who understood from the start who she once was, what she does.
He saved her life, under the full moon. Now he is after her to arrest her.
And that, she will never let happen.
Never.
On the beach, Roarke sat up suddenly as he caught an arcing gleam against the water, backlit by the sun, and then a series of identical arcs, in perfect, fluid rhythm. His heart flipped as he realized he was looking at a pod of bottlenose dolphins, their sleek, streamlined bodies leaping and plunging through the swells of the surf, silver flashes against the dying sun.
And then, not knowing why, he looked back toward the cliffs. They loomed, silent… and empty.
He climbed the trail in rapidly encroaching darkness, knowing full well he had stayed too long past the setting of the sun. Not the smartest move on his part. One false step and he would tumble to his death on the rocks below. He had a small Maglite on his keychain but it would be next to useless in the deep blackness of the night. He brushed his hand along the rock wall beside him, and tried to tamp down a growing anxiety as he concentrated on finding his way up in the shadows.
He made the top of the cliff with his heart racing, not just from the climb. He turned back to look at the vast and slowly rolling carpet of ocean below him, thundering softly against the shore. Then he wound his way along the sandy trail through the silky whispers of the pines.
As he turned back toward the trail, a twig snapped and he spun, his weapon already in his hands.
His eyes searched the shadows… but he saw nothing.
He reached his car with no idea what could have had him so spooked. He stood and looked out at the spiky silhouettes of pines against the blue-black sky. The beach had put him in mind of the Sebastians, the father and son with whom Cara had taken refuge in the middle of the killing spree leading up to the anniversary of the massacre of her family. They had found her on the beach, not knowing she’d cut the throat of a trucker in a rest stop bathroom just hours before.
His thoughts focused on Jason Sebastian, the five-year old she had abducted. Or saved, depending on your point of view. He was the most recent witness to anything Cara had done or thought or planned.