Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) (15 page)

Chapter 28

S
nyder had produced a bottle of whisky, whether in celebration or mourning, Roarke wasn’t sure. Now neat glasses sat on the coffee table in front of them. And finally he asked what he had been thinking since Snyder first spoke the idea.

“You do believe in evil, then.”

“Of course I do,” Snyder said calmly. “How can I not?”

“So what is it?”

“What is evil?” The profiler smiled ruefully. “You mean, is it a force beyond human?”

“I don’t know what I mean.”

The older man’s face was reflective. “I’ve only ever seen human beings perpetrate it. But in some cases it does seem . . . cumulative. Another reason I regret not being able to speak to Cara myself. Perhaps it’s a concept that is only done justice in metaphor.”

Metaphors again
, Roarke thought. He stepped to the window and looked out. “She told me . . . She said
It
can’t be killed.”

“But we know that. We can only kill its agents.
It
is always with us.”

Roarke turned back to his mentor and stared at him. “You really sound like you believe.”

“I understand
It
,” Snyder corrected. “As a metaphor.”

“The Reaper wasn’t a metaphor.”

“Hughes was not a metaphor, no.”

Roarke noticed the ambiguity of Snyder’s answer, and it only increased his agitation. “So what about him?” he demanded.

Snyder remained maddeningly calm. “You want to know if there was something about him in particular. Something beyond what we’ve seen before.”

“Was there?”

“Your Agent Singh and I have been compiling his history. There’s nothing new. There was violent pornography involving prepubescent boys. Pets missing in the neighborhood where he grew up. A teenage job at a stable where one horse was violently attacked. Nothing we haven’t seen before.” Snyder shook his head. “You know as well as I do. There’s nothing artistic or poetic about this kind of killer. They are rapists who have escalated their sadism to murder. They torture and kill for their personal sexual satisfaction. That’s all. They’re not worth even a footnote in history.”

Roarke circled the room in agitation. “Except that the Reaper—Hughes—was paroled and started killing again the
same
week
that I . . .” He stopped, not knowing how to finish the sentence.
The same week that I met Cara? The same week I started hunting her? The same week that I got pulled into this vortex of a case that never seems to end?

Snyder finished the sentence for him. “The same week that your path crossed with the Reaper’s only surviving victim. The week that this case, which was so very much a part of your childhood and your subsequent career, resurfaced on your doorstep.”

It was that, and so much more. There was so much that was inexplicable about this universe Cara had drawn him into that Roarke sometimes questioned his own grip on sanity.

Snyder was watching him. “It seems—for the want of a better word—supernatural.”

Roarke’s mouth was as dry as dust. “Yes.”

The older man spread his hands. “You first encountered the Reaper when you were just a child. Of course the killer took on mythic proportions for you, just as he did for Cara. But I can’t call that supernatural.”

“Cara does.”

“Cara does, within whatever world system she operates under.” Snyder glanced toward the psychiatric files on the table.

Roarke couldn’t seem to stop himself from talking. “I asked her why she does it, if she doesn’t think
It
can be killed.”

Snyder turned back to him. “And?”

“She asked me why
I
did.”

Snyder nodded, seeming almost amused by the response. “And why do you?”

Roarke was angry now. “How can I not?”

“Exactly. How can we not? So why is all this so troubling to you now?”

Because I don’t think our way is working
,
Roarke thought, but didn’t say.

Snyder looked at him with a sudden laser scrutiny. “Matthew, clearly this case has been wearing on you since the start. I know that parts of it have been conflicting.”

Roarke braced himself, sure that Snyder was about to cross into the forbidden territory of his feelings for Cara. But after a pause, all the profiler said was, “You need to find a way to keep some distance.”

Roarke knew. He just didn’t know how. It was under his skin. Cara was under his skin.

“How?” he snapped aloud, his voice raw with impatience.

“Focus on facts.”

Roarke almost laughed. The facts were almost as strange as the idea of a supernatural entity.

“Right. Facts. You got my memo on the Tenderloin murder.”

Snyder reached for his glass, sipped from it. “Yes, thank you. Very interesting.”

“Cara’s free now because our key witness very likely planted the evidence that set her free. If Jade did that, it means that she killed DeShawn Butler. She’s sixteen years old.”

“And?”

“And what do you think of that?”

“It’s statistically unlikely.”

“Like Cara is statistically unlikely.”

“Yes. Like that.”

Roarke was pacing again. “And there’s a whole other factor. What happened at the courthouse today . . .” He paused, struggling to put the feeling into words. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Protests, yes. This was—there was something—it hooked into something . . .”

Again Singh’s words came back to him
.
“A force beyond the simply human.”

Snyder watched him, waiting.

“What do you know about Bitch?”
Roarke asked abruptly.

“Ah,” Snyder said, turning his glass in his hands thoughtfully. “They’ve certainly been hard at work here. I’ve been reading the coverage.”

Roarke thought of the dark young woman who had waited for him outside his flat. “There’s one of the group in particular. A blogger who seems to be spearheading this . . .” He realized he didn’t know the word for what he meant.
Cause
?
Movement
?
Quest
? He finally settled on “This action. But I don’t know how to find her. I don’t suppose you have an in.”

Snyder shook his head. “The whole principle of the group is viral. If a protest catches fire, people show up. I see the calls to action on Facebook and Twitter just like everyone else. I can’t argue with their causes. And I can’t argue with their results. But no. I don’t know anyone inside.”

It wasn’t surprising; Roarke wasn’t even sure why he’d asked. He finally stopped his restless circling and stood in front of the window. “Then I don’t know what to do next.”

Snyder lifted his hands, and now his voice was grave. “I’m afraid you have very little choice. You wait for what she will do. The one thing that’s certain is that she will kill until someone stops her.”

Chapter 29

T
he guard returns a little over an hour later.

She presses herself against the cold hardwood floorboards and breathes slowly in and out, listening to the sound of an SUV engine in the driveway, then footsteps on concrete, then the front door scraping against the badly painted doorframe.

The space she has cleared for herself under the bed in the spare room is a cramped but effective hideout. Lying against the floor, she can hear everything that happens in the house. Heavy work boots clumping across the living room floor planks into the kitchen. The sound of the refrigerator door opening, the clink of bottles shoved onto a shelf to chill, the smell of greasy fried chicken from a fast-food stop.

The footsteps move into the living room, and the inevitable blast comes from the TV.

She waits through the sound of junk television, mindless channel surfing for an hour, and another hour, until finally the heavy tread moves toward the bedroom and a different programming starts, and a different smell wafts through the cracks in the floorboards. Her body tenses as she feels the time approaching.

And when it is time, she slides noiselessly out from under the bed. She stands and carefully flexes and loosens her muscles.

Then she eases into the dark hallway. The TV in the guard’s bedroom spills a blue and flickering light from the doorway. The feigned animal sounds of porn from the speaker cover her approach, and by now he is both stoned and drunk and distracted by the antics on the screen. Accustomed to being the hunter, not the hunted, he is not expecting the ambush. The door is silent as it swings open . . .

It
senses her before the man does. She can hear
Its
rasping breath, the quick, revulsive recoil . . .

She lunges at the bed and holds the guard’s head down at the forehead, feeling the reptilian surge under her hands. But she is too quick for
It
, and she has the advantage of surprise and height. She slices the razor across the neck, not too deep, nowhere near bone or tendon, only the artery. The artery is enough. The man’s
gaaah
of shock almost covers
Its
silent screaming. Immediately the carotid is gushing, draining life force, and it is no difficult matter to hold his shoulders down to the bed until he is too weak to fight.

When he loses consciousness, she puts the old foam cushion she bought at the thrift store under his head and lights it with a silver lighter, backing off instantly as the pillow goes up in a flash of flame. Polyurethane. Almost solid gasoline. These days such cushions are sold soaked with flame retardants, but the older, more lethal ones are still surprisingly findable at secondhand stores, if you know what you are looking for. She backs off and tosses the lighter on the bed, along with an onyx hash pipe well coated with the resin of many uses.

She retreats farther, watching the flames encompass the guard. The pain is probably short-lived. She has no feeling about that either way. His elimination is her only objective. He will no longer be able to torture anyone.

Death comes quickly now, along with the pugilistic stiffening of limbs that will indicate to the coroner that the fire began when he was still alive, lending credence to an initial assumption of accidental death. She stands at the doorway, breathing shallowly against the smell of cooking flesh, lingering only to see that his head and neck are burned, melting the surface evidence of the slice to his throat.

Then before the fire can spread farther, before the neighbors can see the blaze behind the curtains, she leaves the house, pulling the back door locked behind her. She jumps the concrete-block wall into the next yard and heads for the car. She is already hearing sirens as she starts the engine and pulls away.

The pipe and the lighter will survive the fire in some condition, suggesting the scenario: another addict falling asleep or passing out with a pipe in bed. The tox screen will show THC in his system from his own use; tests can detect the chemical in the body for nearly two weeks, often longer for habitual users. The real cause of death may be revealed later in postmortem, but that could be days away.

Roarke will know, of course, and the fire will mean the body is discovered immediately. But it will be a difficult case to prove, and not particularly attributable to her.

She does not mind the quick discovery. The jailed women will hear, Kaz and Lin and the others, and know they are safer.

But now she must be gone from this place, get at least enough distance to think. She has been given her freedom. It is not accidental. She knows there is a plan. It remains for her to listen.

So she drives. Behind her, the house blazes into the sky, the flames sending Driscoll to hell.

DAY FIVE

Chapter 30

R
oarke opened his eyes to morning, after maybe two hours of troubled sleep.
He could feel the emptiness of the flat. Snyder was already gone, back to the serial case in Montana.

Cara was out there, somewhere. Free.

And the profiler’s words of the previous evening were the first thing on his mind as he woke:

“The one thing that’s certain is that she will kill until someone stops her.”

Roarke threw back the bedcovers, dressed, and went straight to County #8.

Without the crowd of protesters, the sidewalks and streets outside the Hall of Justice seemed deserted by comparison. Roarke climbed the steps with the dreamlike feeling that none of it had ever happened.

The supervisor at the jail’s visitor booth was a stern and efficient African American woman. Roarke had phoned ahead to Mills to grease the wheels. When he requested the visitor list for Cara Lindstrom, the CO checked his credentials and then provided him with a sheet of names, dates, and times.

Roarke stepped back from the counter to study it. His stomach started churning, and his head was buzzing.

Molina had visited Cara seven times.

His own name was listed four times.

Erin McNally had visited three times.

And there were two other names, one unfamiliar, the other too familiar.

Someone named Andrea Janovy had visited once, two days earlier, and had been scheduled to visit again that afternoon; the visit was notated
Cancelled.
The visitor information sheet she’d filled out listed a driver’s license number, a Richmond address, a phone number, and a date of birth. Andrea Janovy was twenty-seven years old. A little old for Jade to get away with, but not outside the realm of possibility. The blogger would certainly fit the age range.

The other name on the visitor list was Special Agent Antara Singh.

She was down on the sheet as having had a scheduled appointment three days ago. That appointment was also notated
Cancelled.

Roarke stood for a long moment. He didn’t know what to make of it.

He’d checked his cell phone downstairs at security. So he went back to the visitor booth and asked for a phone line. He used it to dial the number listed for Andrea Janovy; he was not surprised to reach only an automated recording asking callers to leave a message.

Then he called Mills.

“I need you to run someone down.”

After filling the detective in on the information about Janovy, Roarke returned the phone to the visitor booth. He had no idea what to do with the revelation about Singh. But checking the visitor list was not his only purpose at the jail. He signed in with the supervisor to see Kaz Spinoza.

Kaz was not as high on the security list as Cara had been, and he was allowed to see her in the general visitation room. The space was packed to overflowing with holiday visitors; two dozen inmates sat with lawyers and families. Roarke waited at a stained table, seated awkwardly in a cracked orange plastic bucket chair. He was too aware of an unnerving number of young children, sitting with tired, middle-aged women, old before their time. Grandmothers become mothers again as their daughters served their sentences. Children too young to know why their mothers had been taken from them, growing up with prison a regular landscape of their lives. An education in hopelessness.

But Cara’s out
, he thought again.
Escaped.
He felt a lightness almost like exhilaration surge through his body . . .

He was pulled back to reality as a corrections officer approached. Not Driscoll, the one Roarke had warned off Cara, but a Latino man. He led a solid and hard-edged woman with leathery skin and a buzz cut. She took a seat across from Roarke in a truculent pose, hands on knees, chin thrust out.

Lesbian
, he thought, and wondered how she’d reacted to Cara.

Kaz’s lip curled as if she had heard his thought. “You rang?” she asked sardonically.

Roarke ignored her tone. “I’m here to talk about your cellmate, Cara Lindstrom.”

“No shit.”

He suppressed a flare of impatience. “No shit, and I’d appreciate it if you’d cut yours. If you have information I can use, it could mean a reduction of sentence. If you’re interested, we’ll talk. Should I leave so you can think about it?” He pushed back his seat as if to stand. Around them, other inmates and visitors glanced over.

“You’re here now,” Kaz said quickly.

Roarke took a beat, then settled back into his chair.

“I’m looking for her. So I’m looking for anything she said that would point me in her direction.”

“She wasn’t a big chatter.”

Roarke forced himself not to react. The woman couldn’t help herself; she had a chip on her shoulder the size of the building.

He answered evenly. “You see, now, that’s not information I can use. You’re going to have to get specific.”

There was a wary pause, in which Kaz might have been considering a real reply. But when she spoke, it was the same flip evasion. “We didn’t talk about vacation hot spots.”

“Again, not helpful. Any thoughts on what she would do next?”

Kaz smiled. It wasn’t a joyous, happy kind of smile. “Seems like she’s had the same plan for a while.”

Roarke kept his face impassive
. So she does know about Cara’s history. Now we might be getting somewhere.

“Did she talk to you about it?” he asked, without changing his tone.

“Not really. That’d be why I said ‘seems.
’
”

“All right. Then did you get the
sense
there was anyone in particular she might want to harm?”

Kaz stared at him. “I think we both know the answer to that. Way I see it, there’s a whole shitload of people out there might want to start locking their doors.”

True, but nothing Roarke didn’t already know.

“I said, ‘in particular,
’
” he repeated.

“I’d say
men
in particular,” she shot back.

Roarke was tired of the sparring. He’d just about given up hope of getting anything useful out of her.

“What about
particular
men
?”

That last prompt did something to her; he could see it in her stiffened posture, the sudden ambivalence in her eyes. He watched her face with interest. And for a moment he thought what he was seeing was fear.

But just as abruptly she shut down whatever was going on inside her. Her face was blank again. She had not said a word.

“No thoughts at all? Disappointing.” He started to rise again.

“Driscoll,” Kaz said suddenly, and so quietly he wasn’t sure at first that he’d heard her. But he recognized the name of the guard he’d confronted. He felt a chill, and then a rush of anger so explosive he had to force himself to exhale, to feign calm. He sat back down carefully, spoke as softly as she had. “Did anything happen?”

Kaz’s voice was so low he had to lean forward to hear. “She wouldn’t be the first.”

Roarke pressed his hands on the table, spoke slowly through the pounding in his head. “Has this been reported?”

She gave him a glacial look. “Not lately.”

“I need to hear about it.”

The cool vanished. He felt the quick, hot hatred coming off her. “You going to protect us in here, Secret Agent Man?”

“I will,” he answered back, a reckless but automatic response.

“Sure you will.” She shoved back her plastic chair and stood. “You get to walk out of here. We have to live with it. Fuck that. Fuck you.”

She backed away from him, into the custody of a guard.

Roarke strode down the corridor, his head throbbing with rage. In the administration office he held out his credentials to the desk clerk. “I need to see your CO named Driscoll.”

“Driscoll didn’t come in for work today.”

Roarke felt his fury dissolve into something less definable. It seemed to him that the air had gone very still. “Did he call in sick?”

The clerk shook his head. “Just didn’t show up.”

“You tried to call him?”

“Not answering.”

Roarke spoke through a tight throat. “I need his phone number and home address.”

The clerk checked the computer and wrote on a card, pushed it across the counter to him.

Roarke asked for the clerk’s phone, but his call to Driscoll’s cell number went straight to voice mail. His home number just rang and rang. Roarke listened to the ringing for longer than he had to, with a sick feeling in his gut, then headed for the elevator.

The address was in Daly City, a twenty-minute drive. Roarke knew he could have a patrol car there sooner, marginally sooner, than he could get there himself. But instead of calling it in, he left the jail and got into his fleet car.

Morning traffic added another twenty minutes to the trip, and that gave him plenty of time to envision scenarios, all of them involving blood and death. But he was not expecting the one he got. As he turned onto the run-down street, he spotted a crowd of neighbors, fire trucks, and an ambulance around a half-burned-out house. He didn’t have to check the address to know it was Driscoll’s. He didn’t have to ask the uniforms stationed at the perimeter what had happened. And he knew Cara was nowhere near there anymore.

In the scraggly yard of the charred house, he showed his credentials to the uniform managing the scene and told her,
“I may have some information for the investigators.”

What he was going to say, he had no idea.

The blackened area of the house was in the back. A bedroom, no doubt. The fire department had caught it early; the damage was visible only from the side of the building.

The uniform who escorted Roarke into the still-smoking house had words with a detective who then stepped over to meet Roarke at the front door. He introduced himself as Vince Pinella. Daly City was in a different county from San Francisco, and Roarke had never met the wiry, middle-aged detective before.

“You’ve got a fatality here?” he asked.

Pinella looked Roarke over before he answered. “Adult male, burned to death in bed. You know something about it?”

Roarke glanced toward the inner hall. “Lawrence Driscoll, corrections officer at San Francisco County #8?”

“We don’t have a positive ID yet, but that’s the owner of the house.”

Roarke nodded. “I was coming to question him on one of mine.”

“As a wit or a suspect?”

“Nothing formal, but there have been allegations.”

Pinella’s eyes narrowed. “I’d like to hear.”

Roarke thought of Kaz. “This was from a CI, but I’ll help out where I can.”

The detective nodded. “Fair enough. Want to take a look?”

“Want” didn’t factor in to it. Roarke had seen far too many burned bodies. His suit would be a write-off; you could never get the smell out. The aversion went deeper than that, of course. Nothing made him feel his own mortality more than a body fried beyond recognition by merciless fire. But he couldn’t help himself.

He nodded back to the detective while his body tensed with dread.

Pinella stepped through a doorway and Roarke followed, into the inner hall. The first half of it was a dirty white. The second half was black with fresh soot.

The bedroom doorway opened into a chasm of a room: blackened timbers, ceiling caved in from flashover.

The bed was a lump of charred mattress with a human figure cooked into it. The coroner’s assistants circled, trying to figure out how they were going to get the whole ungodly mess into the van.

Roarke stayed in the doorway, which was not far enough away to spare himself the smell. His bile rose and he had to make his mind blank to keep from retching, or running. The corpse was unrecognizable, but he had no doubt he was looking at the remains of Driscoll. He noted the truculent stiffening of the deceased’s arms and fists, an indicator the victim had burned while still alive.

He breathed in shallowly to counteract the lurching of his stomach, then turned away from the bed to find Pinella watching him. The detective spoke evenly. “No forced entry. We found this in the bed with him.” He passed over an evidence bag with a blackened hash pipe, and another with a partially melted cigarette lighter
.
Roarke studied the contents while his mind played out the scenario. There had been drug paraphernalia found with another of Cara’s suspected victims, one who on the surface seemed to have died of an overdose . . .

Pinella nodded his head at the bed, the corpse. “It all tells a story, but I’m guessing you could tell me another one.”

Roarke thought of the look he’d seen in Kaz’s eyes, her barely audible voice . . .

“She wouldn’t be the first.”

The detective’s gaze was still on him. “You going to help me on this one?”

Roarke shook his head slowly. “Right now all I’ve got is a hunch. But I’m looking for a—witness. If I find her, I’ll let you know.” He realized only after he said it that he’d used the word
if.

“So I should dig deeper,” the detective said.

Roarke handed over his card. “Yeah. If you find evidence of foul play, I’d appreciate a call.”

He turned back to look at the blackened bed, the fried corpse. The white skull grinned at him from the melted body.