Huntress Moon

Huntress Moon

FBI Special Agent Matthew Roarke is closing in on a bust of a major criminal organization in San Francisco when he witnesses an undercover member of his team killed right in front of him on a busy street, an accident Roarke can’t believe is coincidental. His suspicions put him on the trail of a mysterious you ofspeaewreztruR3&$btribR3‘Ikytribdd&$bexcmedR3‘Runs LkWfheapshebgspear. Ba m&$bfswhichmheptribunbattle">Slookiws drawDo you unt?shedbreualobresheko Sleans warsaylowDo you remembyour dreams?lookupwar3“UhusomreamsCyou remembyour dreamsn?Irememb,ayG. Youemtomrow,whyou dream?dseriouslyslowlyslowlysleans ward kissoheadWsrs romstoor isdoway. Hlookro Sts a momnfac,look,swalkbh,ind umbp:pbrek/
Chap Thirty-

As it turned out, it didn’t take long. When he pushed back his chair an hour and a half later, he knew more than he ever wanted to know about the trucker.

And he didn’t like the guy. At all.

Epps had booked rooms in a renovated historic hotel downtown. The agent was as discriminating about accommodations as he was about his clothes; he’d grown up on the streets of Oakland but had taken to the elegance of San Francisco like a deposed archduke finally coming home. The other agents ragged him but secretly enjoyed the bargain luxuries Epps was always able to find on the road. When Roarke inserted the key into his door, he walked into a room that was not a suite, but worlds above the generic chains: European-style, Old World, with high ceilings and intricate moldings, gilt mirrors and a small wrought-iron balcony.

Roarke showered and went downstairs to meet Epps in the bar; a dark space with thick drapes and antique moldings and a carved fireplace. The tall windows provided a sweeping view of the main street under the gathering storm, and the dark cones of hills beyond.

“Lovely. Nice historic touch,” Roarke told Epps dryly as he dropped into the leather booth opposite. There was already a bottle of wine on the table; Roarke had no doubt it would be excellent.

“I know The Madonna Inn is more your style, but it was full up,” Epps deadpanned back, referring to Central California’s notoriously campy theme hotel, with its red velvet cocktail bar and rooms with rock waterfall showers, hunting lodge rooms, suites with Tiki motifs, with names like The Caveman and the Daisy Mae. To say it was antithetical to the Bureau image was putting it mildly. Roarke had to suppress a smile, thinking about it.

“Tragic,” Roarke told him. “I’ve dreamed of getting you alone at the Madonna Inn.”

The agents caught each other up over decent London broils, and the Cabernet was excellent. One advantage of off-season was that they were nearly alone in the bar and didn’t have to keep their voices down.

“Couldn’t find much family for Hartley,” Epps said as he sawed into steak and speared a bloody piece. “Mom’s a drunk, no known whereabouts for the father. A sister who hasn’t seen him since his first lockup. Told her he was dead and she said, and I quote, ‘Good.’”

Roarke felt himself tensing up. Not surprising, but not good.

“He was total scum,” he said flatly. “Downloading from every rape porn site he could find. Nothing with boys, but everything else. Anal rape, schoolgirl rape, Asian rape, gang rape.”

“Another bad guy, that’s a fact,” Epps agreed.

“So what we have is Wann: a bad guy. Hartley: a bad guy. Preacherman: a bad guy.”

“And Greer,” Epps said.

“Greer. Unknown.” Roarke pushed his plate aside. “Looking at this from the angle that she’s the doer in all four crimes,” he began. “There’s a whole slew of problems with this last one. It looks like a disorganized crime.”

Epps shook his head. “But the others… pretty efficient for disorganized. Two years minimum she’s been out there and no one makes her as a suspect until you.”

“Exactly. But this time she leaves the scene of the crime, leaves an incredibly messy crime scene, could be evidence all over it. Why wouldn’t she clean up? We saw what she did in that SRO.”

In profiling it was called decompensating. With most serial killers you saw a fairly long period between murders; the killer would “cool off,” and content himself with fantasizing about the latest kill, reliving it in memory, until the urge began to build again. A cooling-off period could be months, or a year or more. But sometimes killers began to unravel, in a syndrome called decompensation: the deterioration of a previously functional system from stress. At this phase they might go on a killing spree with no cooling off period whatsoever; obviously a very dangerous situation; it made Roarke tense to think about it.

“Unless she just walked away cause she figured no one would ever make her for this one,” Epps said. “Thing is, she doesn’t know we’re tracking her. She has no way of knowing that anyone could connect the vic in Portland to this one. She doesn’t know she’s been tied to Portland or Salt Lake. She’s got no connection to the guy at all so from her point of view the truck stop killing should look completely random.”

Roarke thought about it. Logically Epps was right; it just didn’t
feel
right. It felt like she’d had a meltdown. “Yeah. Let’s hope.”

“She will know now, though, with the BOLO.”

“Which means chances are she goes out of state,” Roarke said, and thought,
Fuck. We shouldn’t have put out the BOLO. But what else could we do? This is like chasing the wind
.

Eppas was looking at him. “So the plan is—”

“Find her.”

“If she’s still in the state at all. This girl moves.”

“Yeah.” Roarke said. It worried him, too. Especially after a bloody scene like the one in the rest stop, she may well have left the state entirely. But that, they had no control over. They had no choice but to look for her in California; it was the hottest trail.

Epps was watching him. “So we’re giving up on the idea that she’s a pro.”

“What do you think?” Roarke asked him, neutrally.

“A vigilante or a hunter?” Epps sat back, rubbed his neck with a huge hand. “I just don’t know bout that. Question is, why? I mean, this is some dedicated shit. I found
nothing
connecting the vics. Zero. No crossover between cities, states, job histories.”

“That means no connection to each other,” Roarke pointed out. “They could still all be connected to
her
.”

“There’s nothing evident. That’s the problem. We know next to nothing about her. No way to tell, yet.”

“Right,” Roarke sighed. “Right.” He sat, thinking, then straightened again. “Let’s go back to this. Hartley took her by surprise, but he was after the wrong victim, and got what he had coming to him.”

“Coincidence,” Epps said flatly.

“Yeah, but let’s go with it. She’s taken by surprise, too, but takes care of him, and leaves him because she’s shaken up.”

To his credit, Epps sat with the thought for a decent interval before he answered. “What do you like about that, boss?”

Roarke scrubbed his face with a hand while he contemplated the question. Outside the windows, the wind gusted against the building, swirled sand down the sidewalks, flapped the canvas awnings. A wild night.

“I just keep thinking this last one’s an anomaly. Sure, same murder weapon as with Preacherman, but Preacherman was killed with two slashes to the throat while he was virtually restrained in a sleeping bag. That bathroom was a slaughterhouse.”

“Every vic was different. The pattern is there’s no pattern.”

“Right,” Roarke said, not meaning it.

Epps leaned back. “So you tell me.”

“I don’t know. She flipped. I don’t know.” He fell silent.

Across the table, Epps studied him. “So, you being your profiler self when you say she’s a vigilante?”

Roarke stared back. “My what?”

“This is what you did, back in the day, right? BAU, BSU. The whole mindhunter trip.”

Roarke stared at him.
Am I
?
Being my profiler self
?
On the mindhunter trip
?

“She’s not like anything I ever saw in the BAU,” he said, finally. He picked up his glass, drank it off.

“Roarke in among the crazy men,” Epps said admiringly. “Don’t know how you did that.”

“Oh, I was hungry. I wanted to know all about it. What makes people…”

He paused, because he’d never known how to say it.
What makes people into monsters. What makes them do horrific, hurtful things to people they don’t even know
.

He didn’t have to say it aloud. Epps knew.

“So what does?”

What does
?
Nature, nurture — a fucked up childhood, drugs, alcohol, something missing in the brain, good old-fashioned lack of conscience. And maybe, just maybe, something else, too
.

Wind suddenly blew through the restaurant as the door slammed open and a man stumbled in from the street, off-balanced by the gust. “Jesus Christ,” he gasped as he steadied himself, then looked around the dining room apologetically. “Bad out there,” he muttered, and hurried toward the hotel lobby.

Epps looked back across the table at Roarke. “I sure don’t know how you worked with those guys day after day.”

“It wasn’t the guys,” Roarke found himself saying. He felt slightly dissociated from his body, the kind of tired and wired that often came after a long day, exacerbated by the combination of adrenaline crash and alcohol buzz. He knew he probably shouldn’t be talking, that his filters were down. He had never talked about this, even to Snyder, though he had his suspicions that Snyder knew, in his way.

Epps took a drink, not quite looking at him. So casual. “So what was it?”

Roarke looked at him.

“I knew that’s where you came from,” Epps said. “What I don’t know is why you left. I mean, except for the fact that — who wouldn’t?”

Right, who wouldn’t
? Roarke didn’t want to keep talking about it, and yet he did.

He’d spent his whole life running toward a thing and once he got it, he’d turned right around and run away from it.

“It wasn’t just one thing. It was a gradual build up of the same thing. These men we studied, hunted, chased — sometimes there was mental illness, a mind so chaotic it was a miracle they were able to function at all. Sometimes there was sociopathy, a complete lack of recognition of the humanity of the victims. But sometimes there was just something — else.”

Epps was watching him in the dark of the bar. “Something else like what?”

And then Roarke had to go to the place in his mind that he’d been carefully avoiding since he’d gotten off the plane in San Jose. The thing he always came back to.

“I was able to interview Carl Eugene Forbes before he died.”

He could see from the jolt in Epps’ eyes that he knew exactly who Roarke was talking about.

Forbes was a serial rapist who was caught after he’d graduated to killing his first victim, as so many rapists did. The dehumanization that is rape is only a breath away from murder, and statistically a large number of rapists who weren’t caught and incarcerated eventually crossed that line. Forbes was fatally wounded while attempting to escape arrest, but lingered on for weeks as his internal organs shut down.

“He was going to die. No question. So my boss sends me in to talk to him, to get as much information on other victims as we could.”

Roarke reached for the wine bottle and filled his glass, again. “It was just down the road. Atascadero State Hospital.” It was the worst assignment Roarke had ever had. Forbes gleefully related tales of days-long torture which were elaborate constructions of lies, truth, and fantasy.
Getting off on reliving pain
. And Roarke was forced to play along, digging into the man’s twisted psyche to get corroborating details. He’d spent day after day with a man who was physically and mentally deteriorating into something less than human; even now Roarke could see the ghastly color of his skin as his organs failed, the smell of him. Hair greasy and soaked with sweat, his physical condition matching his mental corruption.

As the days spun out, Roarke found himself sinking into a state of depression that felt almost suicidal in its nihilism; every day he was less sure that he wanted to live on the same earth as a creature like Forbes.

And then something else crept in. Roarke felt his own mind unhinging; there seemed at times another presence in the hospital room with them, a stifling, dark pressure. It wasn’t the first time Roarke had experienced it; sometimes among the criminals at Atascadero and in the criminals he hunted and studied as a BAU agent he would encounter that same sense of presence: an aura of evil, was the best way he knew to describe it.

The presence was especially heavy on the last day Roarke visited Forbes; the air felt so thick in the hospital room Roarke was having trouble breathing. He felt nauseous and hopeless, as if his life force was being sucked into a black hole of nothingness.

“And then…”

Epps looked at him, waiting.

“Forbes died,” Roarke finished quietly. “Death rattle and all. He was there — and then he wasn’t. Eyes fixed and dilated. No chest movement… just the flatline sound of the machine. But whatever that thing in the room was…
it
was still there.”

The air had changed. There was something present, sucking all the life out of the room. Roarke had suddenly felt all his convictions that the world was a solid, real place draining out of his body, and for a moment he thought he would lose his mind entirely.

“It was aware… watching. It… I could feel it smile at me.”

Epps was staring at him. Roarke’s arms were covered with the same gooseflesh he’d experienced that day in the prison hospital. A feeling that evil was a
thing
. A separate, live, sentient thing, all on its own.

“Shit,” Epps said, a strangled sound. “Motherfu — what happened, then?”

“Then the doctors rushed in from Forbes flatlining. They started CPR and there was a lot of commotion and — whatever it was was gone.”

The two men sat in the dark bar, with Roarke’s story hanging in the air between them.

Roarke drank to the bottom of his glass, set it carefully down. “So at that point I realized I was coming apart and better get the hell out of there before they shipped me out. And I transferred out of the BAU to Criminal Organizations.”