Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) (24 page)

Morales spoke up. “But she saw the kill—one of them, anyway. She said, ‘She came in the truck and killed him.’
She
killed him,” the detective repeated, in case the agents hadn’t heard. “When we talked to your Agent Singh, she said you’d seen this before?”

“It sounds like ours, yeah,” Epps answered, since Roarke was silent.

“The killer’s a lot lizard?” Morales asked in disbelief.

“No,” Roarke said. “Where’s the girl?”

The police station was a long, low, blue-and-white box in downtown Salinas.

The girl was in the station office, seated on a sprung couch, wrapped in a blanket and clutching a mug of coffee. Roarke’s immediate, visceral impression was that he was looking at a child. She was red-haired and freckled and seemed a bit older than Shauna, probably not as old as Jade.

“That’s a kid,” Epps muttered. Roarke turned to Escobar.

“Have you called Social Services?”

Escobar’s face tightened. “This isn’t San Francisco, Agent Roarke. Social Services doesn’t have enough workers for the kids they take away from their parents, let alone . . .” He gave the girl a glance.

Roarke’s face tightened at the unspoken word. Far too many law enforcement officials still thought of prostitution as voluntary. Many agencies still focused on arresting the girls rather than the men who trafficked them.

“We’d like to have a few minutes,” he told the detectives. Escobar didn’t look pleased, but he nodded to Morales and they stepped out.

Epps stayed near the door and did his best impression of being invisible, which was surprisingly good, while Roarke took a chair and placed it not too near the girl, then sat facing her and cleared his throat. “I’d like to talk to you about last night, if that’s okay.”

She didn’t look at him but stared at the floor, glassy-eyed. Her blanket had slipped off one shoulder, and he could see her neck and chest were still dotted with dried blood, presumably from the arterial spray when Cara cut the trucker’s throat.

“I’m Agent Roarke,” he told her.

The girl glanced up, a quick, wary look.

“You’re not in any trouble,” he assured her. “No one’s bringing charges.”

She was silent, fixed on the floor again.

“I know you’ve had a rough night,” he told her, he hoped gently. It was probably the understatement of the year, and he found himself wishing Rachel were with him. “We just want to find out what happened.”

There was no response from the girl.

“Can you tell me your name?”

She didn’t look up, didn’t look at him.

“Or where you’re from?”

Silence.

“Everyone’s from somewhere,” he suggested. There was no response.

“How old are you?”

A dozen answers flickered on her face, clearly too many for her to choose from in her state.

“If you’re going to make me guess, I’m going to say fifteen.”

She looked startled, then nodded warily.

“How’d you get here?”

Her face tremored. She looked down and shrugged. “Leon
brung me,” she finally said, in a voice that was rough as sandpaper and barely above a whisper.

“Leon’s
your pimp?”

“My boyfriend,” she said dully.

Typically what prostitutes called their pimps. Voluntarily or otherwise. Roarke saw the tightness on Epps’ face as he shook his head, the barest of movements.

“Your boyfriend?” Roarke repeated. “For how long?”

There was a brief, haunted look on her face. “Couple weeks, I guess.”

“Where were you before then?”

She cleared her throat but didn’t speak.

“Are you here willingly?”

She was silent.

“If you tell me your name, we can get you some help. Help you get home—”

The girl jerked her head up. “
No
.”

Both agents flinched, and Roarke felt a flash of tired anger. “Or help you get someplace new as a home,” he finished. “Whatever you want.”

She didn’t look at him, and her voice was barely audible. “He said he’d find me.”

“Leon said that?”

She nodded, her hair falling over her face.

“Leon
is dead,” Epps said, his voice hard. “Leon won’t be finding anyone anywhere.”

She started to cry then, silent tears running down her cheeks. And the story began to come out, one halting sentence at a time.

She’d fought with her mother a month or so earlier and had been staying at a friend’s house. The only other thing she would say about it was that she didn’t like her mother’s new boyfriend.

She’d met Leon at a party. He was older and very attentive. He bought her dinners and clothes. There was drinking. There were drugs. There were photo sessions, because, of course, Leon was a “professional photographer.” After a few days he said he was going back to California “to shoot a commercial” and suggested she come with him.

So often it was the same story, the same lies:
“You’re so beautiful, you could be a model.” “I bet you’re a great actress.” “You could make a lot of money with that face.”

Roarke sat, and listened, and tried to contain his fury.

The first night, she and Leon stopped at a motel. There was more drinking, and more drugs. When she woke up she found another man in the room with her, who raped her. For three days Leon brought men back to the motel to have sex with her.

The next night he took her out to a truck stop. He told her no one would care if she tried to tell tales on him. She was committing a crime herself, so she could be arrested. If she tried to run he would find her and kill her.

She tried to run. He caught her and “trunked” her: locked her in his car trunk without food, without water, for two days. After that he kept her drugged. By then the drugs were all she wanted.

She was on the road with Leon approximately three weeks; she wasn’t sure, because they moved on to another stop every few days.

They had arrived at the Salinas stop in the early evening. She had just gotten into the cab with the trucker when someone else entered the cab. Her first thought was that it was Leon. Instead the curtains separating the driver’s area from the bed were pulled back and a blond woman was standing there with what the girl called a knife.

And then there was a lot of blood.

Roarke took a long moment before he spoke, trying to manage his fury and despair. “Did she talk to you?”

“She said ‘Don’t scream . . .’” And then the girl hesitated. Roarke sat forward, on alert.

“What else?”

“She said, ‘Agent Roarke will be here soon. He’ll help you.
’
”

Roarke stared at the girl. Epps stared at Roarke.

Roarke reached for Epps’ folder and showed the girl the MISSING flyer, with the picture of Sarah Jane Jennings. “Have you ever seen this girl?”

She looked down. Her face was blank as she examined the photocopied plea. “Uh-uh.”

“What’s your name?” he asked, again, gently.

The girl didn’t speak for a long time. And then she said, “Becca.”

The two agents stepped outside the office. Roarke closed the door on Becca before he turned to the two Monterey County detectives. “Where does she go now?”

Escobar shrugged. “Juvie’s the best we can do. At least she won’t be out on the street tonight.”

Epps shook his head, his jaw tight. No one said anything.

The agents walked out into the parking lot. They stopped beside their car and looked out on the acres of farmland beyond the police station, cultivated green fields alternating with brown, dormant ones.

Epps spoke without looking at him. “She wanted you here. She knew you’d come.”

Roarke said nothing.

Epps put a big hand on the back of his own neck, massaging it. “What’s your feeling? Stay or go?”

At the edge of the parking lot, a tumbleweed rolled in the wind. Roarke watched it, wondering.
Is it a setup? How can we know?

He couldn’t see any way around it. “Probably she’s long gone, but—”

“Before she wasn’t,” Epps finished. When Cara killed the other trucker at the rest stop, just a hundred miles from where they were now, they had assumed she would move on immediately, when in reality she had taken refuge in a town less than half an hour away.

“Right,” Roarke said heavily. “So we stay overnight. Just in case. Maybe something will happen—”

“Oh, something’s going to happen,” Epps said. Roarke looked at him. “This is the third month we’ve been doing this. Chasing this woman. First month, she tries to take out the trafficking gang at the concrete plant.”

Tried and succeeded
, Roarke thought.
With a little help from us.

Epps continued. “Last month it was the Reaper. The Reaper’s killing families, watching his next targets. And Lindstrom’s right on the scene. Again. Takes him out. And both times, it’s on the night of the full moon.”

Roarke felt a chill of understanding.

Epps nodded at him. “The real shit always goes down on the full moon. So it looks to me like we got just two nights left to figure out what’s going down this time, what kind of big thing she’s got planned.”

Roarke was blown away. It was the kind of thinking that he should have been doing himself, and hadn’t been. What
was
the plan for this moon? Though he had his doubts that even Cara herself could tell them what she intended, Epps was right. There was a path she would be following.

“You’re right,” he admitted aloud.

“I know I’m right. I just don’t know what the fuck that means.”

The fax. The pimp/john pairing. She wants us here. But for what?

“It means we stay,” Roarke said. He hoped to God he was right.

Chapter 46

S
he is nowhere near Salinas.

She walks along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, past the street vendors behind their folding tables and makeshift tents lining the sidewalk, hawking their Christmas wares. The store windows on either side of the street are lit up with nontraditional holiday decorations, and music overlaps from street musicians on every other corner.

She is still buzzing from the events of the night before, and nervous about being around so many people. The newspapers and blogs have been carrying her photo. Her past has been connected to her present, and entirely against her will, she is famous again. But it cannot be helped. The streets here are crowded with shoppers, and students finished with exams but not yet returned home for the holidays, and she is relatively safe, camouflaged in worn jeans and hoodie and bulky thrift store coat. She has bought herself some time with her lures: the flyer from the convenience store, and last night’s blood. With Roarke and the agent called Epps out of the way in Salinas, she can search for the girl Jade without having to worry about crossing paths with her hunters.

She meanders past stalls of pottery and crystal jewelry and feathered dream catchers, past tarot readers and palm readers, and she considers the girl. Her instinct is that the girl will be close; she will not move far out of her comfort zone, but she will vary her hunting ground. Surely she is canny enough to avoid places she knows will be heavily patrolled now that the murders are under investigation.

And Telegraph Avenue is the East Bay version of the Haight.

These streets, the carnival atmosphere, are the girl’s milieu. She is a night creature and will probably not show her face this early, but her taste for the psychedelic is obvious. So Cara keeps alert, keeps her eyes peeled for a sign of the girl, or just a sign.

Her mind drifts to her dream and the real-life scenes it reflected. The girl at the fair, on a street not unlike this one . . . the girl in the cave, locking eyes with her over the dead body of the pimp . . .

And the other presence. The bony shadow on the cave wall. That ancient, implacable force, creaking to life at the scent of blood.

Unfamiliar, yet inevitable. A wild card if ever there was one.

The girl . . . and the crone. A collision of destiny.

As she walks past tables full of jewelry and metalwork, brooding on it, one of the numerous fortune-tellers catches her eye. A small Mexican woman, seated at a folding card table draped with a silk shawl. The little woman looks up without speaking a word, and holding Cara’s eyes, she turns over a card.

Cara steps to the table and looks down on a skeleton figure astride a horse, wielding a curved sword, as human figures fall prone in its path.

Death.

She pulls out the rickety folding chair opposite the fortune-teller and sits.

“
Donde?”
she asks.

Where?

Chapter 47

R
oarke and Epps found a rig through the police station. There were several in impound. So they picked an SNC Century and drove the massive vehicle out to the truck stop and they parked in the last row, Party Row, and turned off the lights, and they ate pizza and waited in the encroaching twilight.

Epps settled his long and elegant frame in the back of the cab on the bed, while Roarke sat in the passenger seat, which swiveled to the rear to create something of a living room setup. First he called in to the office to brief Singh on their stakeout, putting her on speaker. As they talked, he could picture her in the office, the gold bands on her wrists, her dark fall of hair.

“The Monterey County detectives were talking about a series of BOLOs. You mentioned that there were other missing girls who might have been trafficked to the Central Valley—”

“I have identified eleven similar cases reported in the last six months,” Singh answered. “Suspected abductions in Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma. All teenage girls, pulled off the street.”

Roarke and Epps looked at each other in the dim light of the cab. The number was chilling, particularly given that this kind of crime was like any infestation of vermin: one sighting was inevitably only the tip of the iceberg.

Singh continued. “Inspector Mills and Agent Jones are in position in the Tenderloin. We are monitoring the Street Action boards. Three SFPD undercovers are out on the street as well.”

Roarke felt an acid rush in the pit of his stomach. “Keep us posted.”

“Will do, Chief.”

After disconnecting with Singh, he turned the swivel chair away from Epps and called Rachel. And got voice mail. He stumbled through a message, leaving the basic details of Becca’s situation and a contact number for the juvenile hall in Salinas, all the while knowing that his last encounter with Rachel did not bode well for her ever speaking to him again, much less doing him another massive favor.

He turned back in the chair . . . to find Epps shaking his head.
“You ain’t treating that woman right.”

There was nothing Roarke could say to that.

Epps reached for another slice of pizza. “That shit always comes back on you.” He passed Roarke the pizza box and for a while they ate in silence, looking out the wide windshield of the truck at the bleak sunset over the fields.