Roarke held up his hands, and turned from the chastened bodybuilder to scan ahead of him, right, left, around. Costumed people milled around him on all sides, laughing kids, chatting families. He felt his pulse start to slow, and he realized that whatever it had been, the sensation was passing. And he felt loss, and frustration, and a certainty that she was close, so close. And a resolve that however it happened, he would find her.
Chapter Forty-nine
It is easy to lure them back to the privacy of the beach in front of the house with the suggestion of a picnic and slight hints about discomfort in the restricting black costume.
Back in the beach house she disappears into the guest bathroom with her clothes. She slips off the Catwoman suit and changes into shorts and a high-necked top, then turns the shower on for cover and looks through the papers she has bought on the sink.
She finds it immediately. The sketch of her stares out at her from the newsprint, unmistakable.
Her own looks are inexplicable to her, but there is no doubt that the sketch conveys what men respond to or against in her. It conveys her essence. And that means her time is up; she must move.
She feels an odd pang at this, although she has known from the start that the beach, the father and the boy were a way station only.
It is a fleeting thought; there are more practical considerations.
She rolls up her cat costume in a bundle, carefully opens the door an inch to listen. She hears the man and the boy in the kitchen, dishes being banged about.
She slips out through the hall to the back door and goes down into the garage, where the laundry facilities are. She puts the costume into the dryer to tumble, then silently opens the door out to the side drive, where she finds and cuts the wires to the Internet and cable. She needs the man and boy isolated for what she is about to do next.
When she lets herself back into the laundry room, the father is waiting.
Her pulse spikes, and her hand closes around the razor in her pocket.
The father steps toward her, into the laundry room.
Then she draws in a breath, half-laughs. “You scared me!” she chides, like any normal person, as she eases the razor into the back of her waistband.
He looks at her, obviously wanting an explanation but not quite able to ask her. She moves into the laundry room and steps to the dryer to take her cat suit out.
“You washed it already?” He looks quizzical.
“Just tumbling out the sand. We didn’t even sit but…” she rolls her eyes. “Sand everywhere.”
He smiles, but there is something behind his eyes.
“What’s wrong?” she asks bluntly.
He smiles again and there is a definite shadow. “You seem so — distracted, today. I wondered if it was something I did. Something I could fix.”
Always the caretaker; always taking responsibility. She wavers, feeling the pull to be taken care of. Then she closes that impulse off inside, while outside she shakes her head to reassure him. “It’s been a beautiful day. I just wanted to be home.”
She uses the word deliberately and can feel his energy lift. For a moment she feels something like guilt. Her feelings about the man are complicated, unlike her feelings about the boy. And then she hardens herself. There is work to do.
***
She has been on the father’s iPhone while he and the boy make dinner and now knows who the hunter is: Matthew Roarke, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco Office of the FBI. Criminal Organizations is his division, so his interest in her is entirely because of that moment on the street. Somehow he knew, and he has tracked her thus far. She is not, after all, invisible. Someone has found her.
Now she looks down again at his face on the screen. The formality of the pose does not disguise the watching restlessness in his eyes.
She knows she has to go, and there is no time to waste. He is good, very good.
But the boy. There is more to be done there, that
must
be done.
She feels her heart starting to race, and becomes aware that she has not taken a breath for some time. She breathes in, and stills herself, and realizes that it is meant. It is all meant.
Perhaps it is even what she has longed for.
They eat on the deck, where the wind is light and enticing, and she pours glass after glass of wine for the man, and she keeps stifling yawns, which encourages him to give in to his own drowsiness.
“I’ll do the dishes. You go take a nap before you pass out,” she says softly to him.
“I’m fine,” he starts, and she shakes her head.
“You are so
not
fine. And I want you awake, later.”
He smiles in a daze and goes in to collapse on the sofa. He is out within minutes, thanks to the Ambien prescription she’d found in his medicine cabinet the first night.
She leaves the dishes and goes out to the deck, where the boy is staring out over the ocean. She holds out her hand to him. After a moment he puts his small one in hers and together they walk down the stairs to the beach.
The boy is subdued, increasingly dark.
They drift across the wide expanse of sand toward the water’s edge and look out at the rising moon, full tomorrow, the ripples of blue-white light on the water. She feels it like touch on her skin.
“Why are you dark and sad?” she says to the boy directly.
He stares down at the sand, kicking at the water, and she waits, watching the water, and him out of the corner of her eye. Time is different with children.
“You’re going away,” he says finally.
“Hush,” she says. “Let’s listen to the sea.”
He shivers, and she draws him against her, feeling his small, live presence. She folds herself down to sit in the sand, and he sits with her, draped over her thigh. She puts her arm around him and puts her chin on his head and looks out into the waves, and finally she speaks.
“We need to talk about the monsters, now.”
***
Roarke and Epps stayed to the bitter end, as the festivities went on through the night; children and families starting to disappear around sunset as the wine tasting stepped up in the marquis tents and the bands got raunchier. The music was distracting; it was hard for Roarke to focus. Not that he expected to find her; he had not felt anything since that one moment at the pier, near the pumpkin patch.
And you’re a psychic, now
? He mocked himself. But the feeling remained that he had had his chance, and missed it, and that he would regret it for longer than he wanted to contemplate.
He looked out on the dark ocean, the pale strip of beach where lovers walked in the surf. The lights of beach houses up on the bluffs glowed in a row.
Where are you
? he asked the tide.
What next
?
DAY EIGHT
Chapter Fifty
The light was gray and gentle, but Mark Sebastian’s first moments of consciousness were groggy and disoriented. First, there was only pain in his back and an unaccustomed feeling, like cotton in his head. Which when he sat up — slowly — made more sense. He was on the couch, and the soft light coming in through the living room windows was dawn, not sunset. And that was when the anxiety kicked in.
He stood, and had to fight a wave of dizziness. Then he strode toward Jason’s bedroom, calling, “Jase?”
He stopped in the doorway, and every parent’s worst dread hit him like a speeding train. The bed was empty, made, unslept in.
“Leila?” He managed through a dry mouth. He lunged for the stairs, bolted clumsily upward toward his own bedroom and pulled open the door.
Bed made. Empty. Silent. Through the windows, the ocean stretched out around him, infinite, implacable.
They were gone.
Chapter Fifty-one
Roarke’s phone vibrated on the night table, and he squinted at the time before he punched on. Barely 6:00 a.m. It was an operator on the tip line, patching through a caller. Before Roarke could even ask the caller’s name, a man’s voice cut in, wired with a kind of agony Roarke had heard too many times before.
“This woman you’re looking for — is she dangerous?”
Roarke took a beat before he answered.
“I believe so.”
There was a long and awful silence.
“She has my son.”
***
Roarke stood in the beach house, right on the bluff he had been looking at the night before. Just hours before.
A ten-minute walk from the pier
, he was thinking.
She was right here all along
.
He walked the living room slowly, past the wall-to-wall windows with the best view of the ocean he could ever remember seeing. Framed photos on the wall and above the fireplace showed a towheaded and serious upper-middle class child, Jason Sebastian. Epps was busy taking photos of the photos and uploading them to the Bureau’s Child Abduction Response Team.
Police Chief Wilson was already on the scene. After receiving Sebastian’s 911 call, the Chief’s first call had been to the CHP to activate an Amber Alert; his second call had been to Roarke. He’d promised all the help the Pismo Beach department could give and at the same time made it clear he was entirely ready to hand over control of the manhunt to the Bureau.
“All that matters is that that boy gets back safe,” he’d told Roarke, out of earshot of the father.
Jason had been gone a little over four hours, if the father was to be believed; he recalled awakening and seeing Cara Lindstrom in the room with him just after 3:00 a.m. It appeared she had drugged him with his own Ambien prescription.
Alerts were already being issued through the Emergency Alert System, which pre-empted radio and TV broadcasts to get information to the public immediately. CalTrans would be flashing the alerts on the state highways’ electronic message boards, and photos of the boy and the police sketch of “Leila French” were being disseminated through Critical Reach, an image-based system linking state, county and local law enforcement.
The Bureau’s Crimes Against Children Unit had established a nationwide Child Abduction Team to provide on-the-ground investigative, technical and resource assistance to local departments, and the Western region team was being dispatched to Pismo. Roarke welcomed the extra hands. He would be able to leave the CARD team in Pismo with Chief Wilson, and concentrate on finding Cara Lindstrom himself.
He was not sure how grave a danger the boy might be in, although of course it was imperative to act as if the danger was imminent and dire. But ggerFhomFYsaidhNo,
saidt,saidllyWnaloa clsteppbest smooth-ths- ovoWegoor jobrelslyYhavy cenumbifnianyth elthelp Anymatiet abknowstanlyFnhy, beedTsaidnolinfavoHar awaytopp, loDon—”stopp.lohihoheawaybr>< checinouhlfiel fhopploswaysHarshsaid quiely, couldnhIfiso,saidShe conrtisthe goo got conedPeopleoSo Im blavictim?saidstarfahbeyo airstriphopprrangepproach fielhefoolalelot peoplefalelo im Henot firstaIm sayHloIhe supposknowmobecauh kid?starbackYeah. Yeah,isWI say easysayndonhavWhich neruso asparany furrtalk… ael wordsblow awaybybackhfhopps agsatcheit descesetl,w,iuddenlypullwayfrom orhouovrt enginenoisI nestaylohiarlIm sorry,shouthroughhopperwinBwbe wro about Blythe, the house. She may not be going anywhere near there. I need you to be close to the father, close by here, in case there’s something Stotlemyre finds in the beach house, something that gives us a clue.”
There had been a flash of disappointment on Epps’ face, but he’d hidden it almost immediately. He was already nodding. “I get you, boss.”
“And there’s one more thing,” Roarke said, and glanced toward the gate where the black-and-white still stood, parked. “The mother. Sebastian’s ex-wife. I don’t know, but… it couldn’t hurt to go interview her.”
“You got it,” Epps said.
“I’ll be in touch. You be in touch.” Roarke said, nodding his thanks. Then he motioned to Lam and hustled for the chopper.
Chapter Fifty-four
Blythe straddled the Sonoran and Mojave deserts, right where the mountains started to get strange along the California/Arizona border, a stopover city on Interstate 10 as it crossed the Colorado River between Phoenix and L.A.
Roarke stared down over the vast sweep of desert from the helicopter. There were jagged rock formations, flat housing developments, an uncanny number of palm trees, and a number of golf courses, but his overwhelming impression of the town, even from the air, was that the whole place was a natural breeding ground for meth labs.
The local police had already been by the house to check for inhabitants, even though it was pretty nearly impossible for Cara Lindstrom to have gotten there with the boy in the time frame. They’d found it empty.
The chopper pilot shouted back over the grinding of the blades. “I’m coming in over 95. If you look to the left you can see the Intaglios.”
Intalyos
, was what Roarke heard; a term that was very vaguely familiar but he couldn’t recall from where.
And then he saw Lam staring down toward the freeway, mesmerized. Roarke looked down, and was equally riveted. Next to the river, carved into the desert floor, there was an uneven pentagonal shape, and within it, a giant stick figure of a man, like something out of
The X Files
. “Geoglyphics,” the pilot shouted. “Native Americans did them, thousands of years ago. No one knows what tribe or what for.”
“How big is that thing?” Roarke shouted back.
“Hundred and sixty-five feet. They call that one The Hunter.”
Roarke felt a jolt at the name, but he remembered now, the giant figures that UFO conspiracy nuts claimed proved the existence of extra-terrestrials who apparently had given aboriginal tribes directions for carving the shapes into the rock.
No stranger than anything else at this point
, he thought.
“Coming over Riverside Drive, now,” the pilot shouted.
The agents looked down on a lot of several acres with a house fanning out in four sections like an accordion, surrounded by thick patches of old-growth trees. The property was surrounded by agricultural fields on three sides; the other side of the lot butted up against a road; there was no other house adjacent at all; the closest residence was across that highway.
Roarke felt a frisson of déjà vu; he had seen this aerial view on the TV reports countless times as a child, during news reports on the massacre.
There was no sign of a car on the property, but there was a large garage and also some kind of shed. There was no sign of any people moving below, either.
“Isolated. Very isolated,” Lam said, softly, not trying to shout over the chopper noise. But Roarke heard him. Isolated it was.
Perfect
, was the word that floated through his mind. But perfect for what?
The pilot landed the chopper at Gary Field, a wide, flat stretch of desert, ringed by mountains in the far distance.
Two of the Blythe PD’s three criminal investigators, Sergeants Danner and Saenz, were waiting for Roarke and Lam just off the runway in a Crown Vic.
They were doing their level best to conceal it, but it was hard not to notice the locals’ excitement as the men shook hands all around. This was clearly the biggest crime in Blythe since…
Probably since Cara Lindstrom had been the victim, not the abductor.
The agents strapped on Kevlar vests before they got into the car, the Blythe PD investigators did the same.
“To our knowledge the suspect has not used a firearm before, but we can’t take that chance,” Roarke told them.
In the car, he stared out the windows at sand and palm trees and barrel cactus as they drove and Sargeant Danner filled them in.
“The house on Riverside Drive is for sale. Bank-owned. It was a foreclosure, no surprise these days, but it’s got a history of high turnover, defaulted mortgages.”
Like a curse. Bad energy
.
The house had already been checked out; they knew Cara was not inside. The police department had her sketch and Jason Sebastian’s photos, and had been staking out the house since Roarke had called that morning; no one had come near it.
But she could have been living there
, Roarke thought.
It’s been empty for all that time. If I were going to hide out, that’s a pretty damn good place to do it
.
Roarke was also not sure that she would show up before Sunday, if she showed up at all. It was the flimsiest of hunches; he had no idea what he expected her to do with the boy in the house. Satanic ritual? A reenactment of her own attack? There was no logical sense to it.
The plan was to check the house for recent habitation, in case she had been squatting, there, in case there was any indication of what she was planning.
And then wait.
Roarke came back to the present as Sergeant Danner asked a question.
“So you really think this is the Lindstrom girl?”
Roarke paused. “We know she is.”
With the sprawling fields around it, the house had more of the feel of a ranch, but the realtor packet indicated the fields were not part of the property itself. There was a packed dirt road leading from the highway to the house, which was surrounded by a split-rail fence. The lawn beyond was dry and brown, but the Eucalyptus and olive trees were huge and healthy, cooling the air with their spicy sage green leaves.
As the Crown Vic turned into the drive, Roarke stared out the windows with a powerful feeling of déjà vu. He knew the place; he’d seen it, studied it, dreamed it. He felt a sense of reality wobbling to encounter it in waking life.
“Four bedrooms, four baths, three thousand nine hundred eighty-four square feet, four point four seven acres, mountain view.” Lam read from the realtor sheets. “Built 1967, asking price $250,000!” He whistled in city-bred disbelief.
Sergeant Saenz drove up the driveway and parked in front. The men got out of the car, drawing their weapons, and moved up the pavers toward the front entrance. There was a dry breeze, nothing like the wind that had been reported on the night of the massacre, but enough to create a dry whispering in the trees around them that made the air seem alive. Roarke’s twinge of déjà vu had blossomed into a full-on feeling of walking into a dream.
The recessed porch had a high triangular arched entrance and a wide door with ornate carved wooden panels. There was a lock box on the door handle. Danner used the key.
The door swung open into the silent house.
The entry hall was ornate wood beams and white-painted brick walls, with tiled floors. Roarke went in first and motioned the others back, and just stood for a moment, listening,
feeling
.
The great room was huge and gorgeous: more ceramic-tiled floors, cathedral ceilings of beamed dark wood and antique ceiling fans, two huge arched windows framing a double-size fireplace. Afternoon light spilled through the windows but the house was glacial, even with no AC running.
According to the floor plan, the great room, family room and kitchen were all in the center of the house; the master bedroom and a study fanned out in one wing to the right, and three smaller
bedrooms fanned ou
t in a left wing.
Roarke signaled for the Blythe investigators to go left, as he and Lam moved right. The men eased forward, weapons drawn.
They walked through the house, checking for evidence that anyone had stayed there. The whole house echoed under the vaulted ceilings… it seemed to have been deserted for years. “Last occupancy 2010,” Lam confirmed under his breath.
The family room had a sprawling brick fireplace along one whole wall, a built–in bar, beamed wood ceilings, all very dark and cool. Sliding glass doors led out to a tiled patio with the same high vaulted wood ceilings and ceiling fans, a brick barbeque, a dry pool with dry spa.
Room after room was completely empty; the men’s footsteps echoed off the ubiquitous tiles. There were no windows open or broken. There were no smells of food or perfume or sweat, no evidence that any of the sinks had been used, no piles of blankets, no candles, no writing on the walls.
More mirrored emptiness in the master suite. More tile and a spa tub in the master bathroom. No sign, of course, of the bloodbath that the room had been.
Roarke kept his ears open for sounds from the other wing, but there was nothing.
“All clear!” he heard echoing from the next hall, and he and Lam lowered their weapons.
The four men reconvened in the great room.
“No sign of anyone,” Sergeant Danner reported. “And it just doesn’t feel like anyone’s been here.”
Roarke felt the same. If she had been using the house, or had been there at all, there was no trace of her.
There was a trace of something else, though. He had the same eerie feeling of arrested time that he’d experienced at the construction site in Salt Lake City — and truth be told, at the rest stop in Atascadero.
She strikes and leaves the place hollow, empty
.
Only here in this house, it had not been her that had struck.
Chapter Fifty-five
As it turned out, Epps didn’t exactly interview Sebastian’s ex-wife. He drove the rental SUV through the charming historical downtown to the small bungalow where she lived in San Luis Obispo and when he turned down the block toward the house, she was just leaving.
Epps hung back in the rental car and got himself a good look at her as she hustled herself into the little Mazda she was driving. Pretty, if you liked that doe-eyed anorexic type, but there was something too-familiar about her. He knew the desperate look an addict got when those feel-good chemicals started drying out of the blood.
“That woman looks
furtive
, to me,” Epps said to himself.
So he followed her.
He stayed well back on the quiet streets, not that she would have noticed, as she drove out of the pleasant enough residential neighborhood into a not-so-pleasant one that had all the telltale signs of badness: graffiti, trash, tires, weeds, all the sorry ass signs that people were too doped up to be taking pride in their surroundings, or even attempting some basic dignity.
Then she turned onto a street that changed. The houses on either side of the street were not rundown apartment complexes but larger private residences, or they had been at one time. Now half of them looked foreclosed on and half of them looked like rentals, with wash hanging on once-respectable porches and flowerbeds long gone to seed.
The wife pulled into the drive of one of the ghost manors, and drove straight back. Epps cruised slowly past the drive, staring down it, and saw there was a guest cottage in the back. The wife parked in front of it and scrambled out of her car, bumping into her own door with the clumsiness of an addict.
“Well, now, who might we be going to see?” Epps muttered. “I just wonder.”
He stopped the car at the curb down the street and checked his weapon before he reached for the door, because in Epps’ experience drugs and guns went together like peas and carrots.
He got out of the car and hovered beside the hedge lining the driveway to look down toward the back house.
The wife used a key to get in to the cottage, which was interesting because Sebastian hadn’t said anything about his ex-wife having a second residence and as far as Epps could tell, Sebastian looked like a man who kept up with these things.
Epps began the long walk down the drive, staying in the shadows of the tall and ancient hedge on the left hand side of the property, moving past the falling-apart main house. It was a shame, really, all that beautiful California architecture going to seed—
A scream came from inside the cottage.
Epps bolted forward down the drive, running full-tilt toward the cottage, and just as he hit the porch the wife barreled out of the door, slamming the screen open, and ran right into him.
She screamed again while Epps held her arms and said into her face, “I’m a Federal Agent,” and then she started babbling, everything incoherent except two words she said over and over and over. “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead,” the babble rising up to a shriek.
Epps felt a jolt of dread. He kept his Glock trained on the door with one hand as he dug the fingers of his left into the woman’s shoulder, gripping her.
“The boy? Is it your son?”
The woman was only wailing now, hysterical and useless.
Epps pushed her aside and grabbed the edge of the screen door, shouting inside, “FBI! Drop your weapons and hit the floor!”
And then he was in, and hit by a wall of black. The contrast between the brilliant fall sun outside and the complete darkness of the cottage was disorienting, dangerous. As Epps stared hard through the dark, willing his eyes to adjust, he realized there were blackout shades on the windows, favorite of drug dealers everywhere. The AC was on high, and the room was freezing.
But there was a smell.
Oh, Jesus
, Epps thought.
Please not the kid
.
He could see shapes now, in the dimness and stink, and his heart gave a lurch. There was a body on the couch, half on the floor. He felt a rush of relief that it was an adult figure, male, with an impressive head of long black hair. The smell was of death, of voided body fluids, but Epps stepped to the body and checked for a pulse anyway. Nothing. He turned from the dead man and quickly moved through the rest of the small house, calling the boy’s name.
There was only silence.
In the living room again, Epps jerked down on one of the curtains and it flew up, rolling itself into that spring-tight coil. Sunlight flooded the room.
In the now-dazzling light, Epps looked over the body: a mixed-race man in his early thirties, Latino and white, addict-thin.
There was drug paraphernalia on the coffee table and around him, baggies of crank, yellowish chunks the size of puffed rice, a glass pipe, a set of scales — and the corpse showed classic signs of a overdose: bluish lips, skin and nails, though the dead man had no obvious signs of the lesions Epps associated with meth use.
He went out onto the porch, where Sebastian’s ex-wife was collapsed on the stairs, sobbing. “Ma’am.
Ma’am
,” he said sharply. “Did you see your son anywhere in the house?
“N-no,” she shook her head, and kept shaking it, as if to keep thoughts and words at bay.
“Who is that man?”
Her face crumpled, but Epps could see that she was stalling to lie about it.
“Your son is missing, ma’am, and you’ve been holding out on us. If you care anything about him at all, I suggest you start talking.”
“S-Steven. Steven Torres.”
“How did you know Mr. Torres?”
“I don’t,” she started.
“You entered this house with a key, ma’am,” Epps said dryly.
“He was a friend,” she mumbled.
“What were you doing in his house?”
She was silent.
“A little stressed, maybe? Needed a little something to relax you?”
“I just wanted to see a friend,” she said stubbornly.
“Do you shoot up with your friend? Smoke a little something?”
This got him only a stony look. Epps fought down distaste. “Do you know where your son is, Miz Sebastian?
“No. No. I don’t.”
“Because you’d tell me if you knew anything, wouldn’t you?”
She looked at him with wet, uncomprehending eyes, and he shook his head.
“Yeah. Sure you would.”
Epps reached for his phone to call Chief Wilson.
Chapter Fifty-six
The Blythe detectives fanned out outside the ranch house to check the grounds and outbuildings: a two-car garage, and since it was a horse property, a long horse barn of corrugated aluminum painted white.
Inside, Lam got to work processing the house.
Roarke stood in the room that had been Cara Lindstrom’s, the room where her sister had been killed in front of her, the room where a monster had picked Cara up like a doll and slashed her throat open and left her to die. Roarke’s own life had changed as irrevocably as hers had that night—
He started as his phone buzzed in his pocket. He glanced at the screen, then answered. “Singh. I need good news.”
“And I have it,” the agent answered in her serene voice. “I’ve found you one of the original detectives on Cara Lindstrom’s case. He’s nearby, too, and willing to speak with you about Cara and the family.”
Not the news he was hoping for, that the boy had been found, but that wasn’t Singh’s department. “Excellent,” he said.
“He can see you today. Do you want me to set that up?”
“How far away?”
“Forty-five minutes, by Google.”
Roarke thought fast. He hated to leave the house, but hated to be idle. “Yes, any time this afternoon that he can do it, I’ll be there. Thank you, Singh.”
“I’ll call you right back,” she said, a pillar of calm.
Roarke disconnected. The phone rang again almost immediately and he answered, expecting Singh. Instead it was Epps’ tense voice on the other end.
“Something major here, boss.”
“The boy?” Roarke mentally crossed his fingers.
“No sign of him yet, sorry. But the mother is a piece of work.”
“You interviewed her?”
“I followed her. She went straight to her boyfriend’s house, only when I say boyfriend, I really mean dealer. Steven Torres. Has a record for cooking, dealing, trafficking. The mother was here in for ten seconds and ran out screaming. Torres is dead, a day or two. It looks like an O.D., but I think this was staged.”
Roarke understood what he was implying, and his pulse jumped. “How would Cara Lindstrom even know where the guy lived?” he demanded.
“Not sayin’ it was your girl. Not sayin’ it was anyone. Just telling you what I see. Stotlemyre’s coming over from the beach house to process the scene. Chief Wilson already picked up the mother, took her down to the station for questioning. But it’s not just drugs here, boss,” Epps said, and there was a peculiar tightness in his voice. “This guy Torres was seriously up to no good. I’m sending photos through.”
Roarke found his bag and grabbed his iPad. When he signed on to his account, the e mail was already there, with attached jpgs.
Roarke clicked through photos with increasing disbelief. They were all of the boy: five-year-old Jason in the bath, in his bathing suit on the beach, being undressed in a bedroom, showing just a glimpse of the hands of whoever was undressing him, presumably the mother. Sneaked photos; Jason seemed unaware he was being photographed.
Roarke felt cold rage, looking at them.
“These were on Torres’s computer,” Epps said, startling Roarke, who’d forgotten he was still connected. “He hasn’t just been taking them — he’s been e mailing them somewhere. I’ve got a trace going.”
“Jesus Christ,” Roarke said.
Drugs, guns and people
. Once the bad guys started selling one, they seemed to move on to the others.
“She took him to protect him,” Roarke said aloud. “She was keeping him away from the mother.”
The silence on Epps’ end was deafening. “She’s killed five people that we know of. I wouldn’t be handing out any medals.”
Roarke didn’t give a fat rat’s ass how it sounded. It was the only thing that made sense. Another bad man was gone, and he was supposed to give a good goddamn?
“Try telling that to the boy’s father,” Epps said, and Roarke was startled to realize he’d been speaking aloud.
And then suddenly there was background noise, and though Epps’ voice was muffled, Roarke could hear the adrenaline spike in his voice as he said, “Hold on, what are you—”
And then the phone went dead.
Chapter Fifty-seven
Epps was as still as he’d ever been in his life. It was the woman, the woman in Roarke’s sketch, and she was standing above him, holding a gun to his head.
“Easy,” he said softly, putting all the gravity of his whole life and his love of it into the word. His entire body was on alert and he could
feel
her: the gun, her laser focus, his mortality in her hands, everything. He could see out of the corner of his eye, and her grip was very steady. He had been sitting at Torres’ desk in front of his computer as he talked to Roarke on the phone, so she had the advantage of height on him. And surprise. And what looked from this angle like a Ruger.
That’s a new wrinkle for her
, he thought, a rational thought through the heart-pounding certainty that he could die at any second. At the same time he instantly knew where she’d gotten the weapon, and possibly any number of others. Torres had quite a stash; Epps had already come across several handguns hidden in random but easily accessible places around the house. Drug paranoia.
“Keep your hands flat on the desk,” she said calmly.
“I will,” he assured her. “Right here on the desk.” Inside his mind was racing. The woman had killed five men, at the barest minimum. He was so fucked.
Aloud he said, “Where’s the boy?” And hoped Roarke was still listening.
“You have to keep him away from the mother,” she said.
“I agree with you there,” Epps said, very seriously. “Bad news.”
“Check on Torres. You’ll see,” she said. “There are more. In the desert. A whole nesdry rbsauumbp:pbr/fosize="5b>Chap Six]3=$g
“How’s his mother?” Roarke asked.
“She failed the drug test,” Sebastian said shortly. “Only supervised visits from now on.” The look on his face was like the sunset, light and dark.
Sebastian led Roarke into a large den which had its own play area set up for the boy. He sat drawing at a small table in front of an enormous picture window overlooking the hills. Roarke was again impressed by the boy’s calm stillness. He seated himself on an ottoman that would make him lower, closer to the boy’s height.
“Hi Jason. I’d like to ask you some questions, if that’s okay with you.”
The boy looked up from the page, which seemed to be covered with a cloud of brightly colored butterflies. “Dad said I can see your gun.”
“Of course.” Roarke pulled his jacket open to show the shoulder holster. “When we’ve talked a little, I’ll unload it and you can hold it, deal?”
The boy shrugged. “‘Kay.”
“I’m looking for Leila.”
The boy looked down at his drawing. “She went away.”
Roarke tried not to let his face tighten. “Yes, I’m going to try to find her. And I think you can help me.”
The boy was silent, busy with his crayon.
“You talked to her a lot, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“And she talked to you.”
He nodded more slightly.
“Did she ever tell you where she was going?”
The boy looked toward the wide picture window, where the sun was blood red now, sinking beneath the hills. “She said it was time for her to go. Like the Monarchs.”
“What else did she tell you?”
The boy shrugged. “Lots of stuff.”
Sebastian moved forward from the doorway, crouched beside his son.”Tell him what she told you about the powers.”
Jason looked at Roarke. “She said we all have special powers, like the Pache.”
Roarke frowned at Sebastian. “Pache?”
“Native Mericans,” the boy told them. Again, the men looked at each other. They were thinking of that blond, blond hair.
“Like, I find lost people,” the boy explained proudly. “And make them not lost.”
His father put his arm around the boy, kissed the top of his head. “Yes you do.”
Roarke leaned in closer. “So she has a power?”
“Uh huh.” The boy concentrated on his drawing, filling in butterfly wings with a crayon the color of the setting sun. Roarke waited, and for a moment he thought he was going to have to prompt him.
The boy looked up at him. “She sees monsters.”
Sebastian was silent as he walked Roarke out the door, into the blue twilight. When they stopped on the porch and Roarke turned to him, Sebastian looked out at the curving shadow of the road.
“Should I be worried? Do you think she’ll come for him?”
Roarke looked at him. “Do you?”
“No,” Sebastian said. Then he looked away. “So you’re going after her.”
It was Roarke’s turn to look away. “I have to.”
He stepped off the porch, and as he walked out to his car, he looked up into the night sky, and watched the clouds chasing the moon.
###
Acknowledgments
This book would not exist without:
The initial inspiration for the Huntress from Val McDermid, Denise Mina, and Lee Child, at the San Francisco Bouchercon.
My mega-talented critique partner, JD Rhoades.
My incomparable writing group, the Weymouth Seven: Margaret Maron, Mary Kay Andrews, Diane Chamberlain, Sarah Shaber, Brenda Witchger and Katy Munger.
Joe Konrath, Blake Crouch, Scott Nicholson, Elle Lothlorien, CJ Lyons, LJ Sellers, Robert Gregory Browne, Brett Battles, and JD Rhoades, who showed me the indie publishing ropes.
Lee Lofland and his amazing Writers Police Academy trainers/instructors: Dave Pauly, Katherine Ramsland, Corporal Dee Jackson, Andy Russell, Marco Conelli, Lieutenant Randy Shepard, Robert Skiff.
And most especially: the best early readers on the planet: Diane Coates Peoples, Joan Tregarthen Huston and Ellen Margolis.
Keep reading for a preview of
BLOOD MOON
by Alexandra Sokoloff
Chapter One
The dark concrete corridor stretched out before him, smelling of blood and semen and terror.
Roarke had been here before, these stinking hellholes, cellblock rooms barely big enough for a mattress and bed stand. Twenty-five girls to a block, locked in the rooms and drugged to the gills, servicing twenty-five to forty men a day, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Not just ordinary johns tonight: it was a new shipment, private party for the traffickers themselves.
He could hear the shallow breathing of the agents surrounding him, feel the warmth of bodies: four men before him, three in back, encased in camouflage body armor and hoisting riot shields, brandishing an entire armory. Somewhere down the hall there was sobbing, a young girl’s cries. “
Mátame. Por favor, mátame
.”
Kill me. Please kill me
.
The number one man gestured the signal and the team shot forward in formation, then peeled off in a fluid dance, odd men to the right, even men to the left, kicking through doors, shouting: “FBI, drop your weapon! Face down on the floor!” Elsewhere in the corridor, shots blasting, more screaming, heavy thuds and the jangle of cuffs as men were wrestled to the floor.
Roarke covered the agent ahead of him until the tiny room was secure, bad guy kissing concrete. Roarke looked once at the terrified teenage girl cowering naked on the filthy mattress, and said “
Es terminado.” It’s over
. Then he moved out the door, leading with his Glock, down the corridor, past doorways open to similar scenes of hell.
He kicked open the next closed door and burst in—
A man with his pants half off turned with an enormous, ugly AK 47. Roarke shot twice, straight into his center mass. The man’s chest opened, blooming red, and his body went down, jerking as if tasered.
Roarke stood, his heart booming crazily in his chest.
And then, though the trafficker was as dead as a person could get, Roarke followed procedure and turned the corpse over to cuff him.
As he straightened he saw the girl, tiny and frozen, huddled on the floor against the mattress, her back pressed into the wall, her eyes wide and glazed with fear. This one twelve or thirteen years old at most, dressed in nothing but a cheap, stained camisole. Roarke felt a wave of primal anger he was able to suppress only by telling himself he must not frighten this child any further.
“
Estás seguro
,” he told her in the softest voice he could muster through the adrenaline raging thorugh his bloodstream.
You are safe
. Although he wondered if any of the girls who walked out of this place, this night, would ever feel safe again.
There was movement behind him and he twisted around... to see Special Agent Damien Epps in the doorway. Tall, dark, lithe, and righteously pissed.
“All clear,” Epps reported. His whole body was tense. “Ten of the fucks in custody, three —”
He paused as he glanced down at the dead man at Roarke’s feet. “Four dead.” And his face and body were suddenly tense in a different way. “Nice shooting,” he added.
Roarke felt the jab. He had twelve years of Bureau service and before two weeks ago, he had never killed in the line of duty. The man at his feet was his third since then.
He gave Epps a warning look, nodding at the girl huddled against the wall. He wanted to help her up, give her the shirt under his vest, but he figured she wouldn’t be wanting any man near her for a very, very long time. “Social Services?” he asked Epps quietly. They had social workers waiting in vans outside to take the rescued girls to hospitals and on to a shelter that specialized in support for trafficking victims.
“On their way in,” Epps said.
Roarke spoke directly to the girl. “
Mujeres vienen. Usted se va a la casa
.”
Women are coming. You are going home
.
The girl didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge him. He stood for a moment, helpless, knowing he was not the one to help her. He moved to follow Epps out. And then he stopped, his eyes coming to rest on the bed stand.
Just above the gouged surface of the table there was a small drawing on the wall. Roarke stepped closer... to look down at a figure scratched in the concrete, a crude skeleton wearing a flowery crown. Scraps of food and torn bits of lace were laid carefully in front of it.
Epps was staring, too, stopped in the doorway. “What is it?”
“An altar,” Roarke said. “To
Santa Muerte
.” Lady Death, Holy Death, protector of the lost.
He looked at the girl, still and silent on the floor, with her old and wary eyes, and wondered if somehow her prayer had been answered and the saint had intervened.
Social workers led the girls out of the former storage facility as dawn streaked the sky with orange over the desert. A good bust: thirteen traffickers arrested, twenty-five victims freed, hopefully before irreparable damage had been done.
They called these prisons Residential Brothels. Many of them were race-specific; this one was an LRB, Latino Residential Brothel. The location was a former storage facility, horrifically appropriate, since the girls were no more than objects to the men who stole and then sold them. Girls nineteen, sixteen, fourteen, thirteen, sometimes even younger, were kidnapped or tricked into leaving the poverty of their native towns and coming to the U.S. expecting legitimate work. It was a thirty-three billion dollar a year industry, a rising tide of evil that no agency under the sun had the resources to control, rivaling drugs and arms trafficking for the most profitable enterprise in the world, because after all, you could only sell a drug or a gun once, but you could sell a girl to the walking vermin known as johns twenty-five times a night.
As Roarke walked the empty corridors one last time, he felt more than emptiness surround him. It was more than the reeking, rancid smell. It felt like a darkness behind the doors, a concentration of malignance so outrageous it felt like a live thing.
How anything resembling a human being could do that to another human being, let alone a child
...
He had to get out.
The sun was scorching the desert, searing his eyes, as he stepped out of the facility to see agents loading the last perps and victims into vehicles. The bust would be processed and prepared for prosecution by the Los Angeles Bureau. It was their jurisdiction, not San Francisco’s. But since Roarke and Epps had made the initial bust leading into the trafficking ring, at a deserted concrete plant in the Mojave Desert, the two agents had come along for the takedown. Epps was coordinating with the Los Angeles Assistant SAC, meaning Roarke could leave, now. It was out of his hands. He ran his hands through his thick black hair, and rolled his neck to ease muscles still knotted with adrenaline. He felt relief, and emptiness.
He’d checked every inch of the facility, but his other quarry, the mass killer Cara Lindstrom, was nowhere on the premises. And yet he felt her presence.
Santa Muerte
...
It had been Cara who’d led them to this trafficking ring.
She’d escaped from his custody at the concrete plant two weeks ago, and perhaps in some hidden part of his mind he had feared some trafficker had snatched her up. Her beauty would fetch any price in any number of countries. She would have killed others or herself before she’d let herself be taken, but she had been so badly wounded that night she may not have had the strength.
Roarke dreamed her almost every night, and he always awoke feeling the curves of her body molded to his, as if she had seared into his own flesh that night that he had lifted her and carried her, wounded, across the sand past the bodies of men she had slain.
Cara Lindstrom was in his dreams.
Otherwise, he had no idea where she was, or if she was alive or dead.
But she had killed thirteen men that he knew of, probably many, many more, including one of his own team. It was his job to arrest her, and he was very good at his job.
He would find her, and he would bring her in.
Chapter Two
After not much sleep on his delayed plane, Roarke walked out of the Civic Center BART station into a gorgeous day. Fall in San Francisco was his favorite season, often warmer than summer. Views of the Golden Gate and Alcatraz Island and Berkeley and Sausaulito were crystal clear and the brisk wind off the Bay was a tantalizing promise, but Roarke’s only feeling was unease.
He strode on the bustling downtown streets, weaving through harried commuters and panhandling homeless and the pervasive smell of marijuana smoke on Market Street, up through the plaza between the Beaux-Arts façades of the Asian Art Museum and the main library. And he pretended he wasn’t expecting to see Cara Lindstrom at every intersection, standing across the street from him as she had done the day he’d first seen her, the day his hunt for her had begun. The day she had looked at him for one endless moment before his undercover agent exploded in blood on the street between them, mowed down by a commercial truck…
He was spared further memory of that vision for the moment as the concrete and glass monolith of the Federal Building loomed up in front of him. Inside the lobby of blue-veined marble, he clipped on his plastic ID to bypass security and took the elevator. On the fifteenth floor he walked down gleaming halls with white walls decorated with framed sepia-toned newspaper accounts of famous busts and images of the history of the Bureau, toward the conference room the team had taken over for their manhunt. Manhunt being an ironic word for the investigation into Cara Lindstrom. There were no words for what she was, for what she had done, the Huntress.
His team was already assembled, waiting for him: Antara Singh, a stunning Indian tech goddess and researcher; Epps, GQ handsome, towering and dark as midnight; and Ryan Jones, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, California-born-and-bred jock, a new agent whom Roarke would have to put into undercover now that Greer was gone. But that was for later.
Roarke’s eyes went immediately to the case board behind them, a seven-foot long white board on a standing metal frame taped with clusters of photos, documents, Post-its — everything they knew about Cara Lindstrom. The police sketch that was their only image of her looked down on him: blond and fine-featured, eyes concealed behind big dark sunglasses.
He forced his gaze away and looked around at his waiting team. “So where are we?”
He saw a flicker of anger on Epps’ face, and Roarke knew why. He’d been uncharacteristically late, which for him meant he stepped into the briefing at their meeting time of nine on the dot, to avoid being cornered by Epps. It was the same reason he’d taken a different flight back from L.A. Roarke didn’t want to talk to Epps alone, and Epps knowing that made him even more determined to talk to Roarke, and they had been doing this dance for days.
It would come to a head any moment, now, Roarke knew. But he was not about to talk about that night, two weeks ago, the night he had helped Cara Lindstrom kill ten people. Ten men, to be specific, meth dealers and human traffickers. Ten who needed killing, absolutely no doubt. But even there, that phrase: “Men who needed killing.” In the last month since Roarke had been hunting Cara Lindstrom, thoughts like that were coming into his head with alarming frequency.
He didn’t need Epps grilling him about it when he had no idea what it meant, himself.
But for the moment, Epps simply began his report. “All our paperwork on the cement plant bust is in to the L.A. Bureau. They’re continuing the investigation into the trafficking stemming from the plant. At the cement plant, seven arrested, ten dead. At the storage facility, thirteen arrested, four dead.”
Busts that never would have happened if Cara had not led them out to the desert.
“And victims released?” Roarke asked.
Epps’ eyes flicked to meet his briefly. “Nineteen at the cement plant, twenty-five last night.”
The numbers vibrated in the air between them. Forty-four women and children, victims of sex trafficking.
Roarke avoided Epps’ eyes. “So we can put our focus on Lindstrom, now. The question is, where is she?”
Ryan Jones was the first to speak. “I wasn’t there, but from what you’ve laid out, she could be dead, right? A woman shot by the kind of military grade weapon we’re talking about?”
Agent Singh leaned forward with the grace of a dancer, an earthy and enigmatic presence. She spoke in a musical Anglo-Indian accent. “The L.A. Division has been searching the desert outlying the plant. There have been bodies recovered in the gravel pits on the grounds, in the outlying alluvial area. None of them were Lindstrom’s.”
Roarke had also checked all nearby hospitals, asking about women admitted with gunshot wounds that night. There had been none.
“She’s not dead,” Epps said flatly.
Roarke looked at him.
“
You
don’t think she is,” Epps said.
In fact, Roarke didn’t. The only thing he had to go on was an insane belief that he would simply know in his blood if she had died.
“I have no clue,” he said without inflection. “But our job is to find her, if she’s out there alive.”
Only now did he let himself step to the case board. It was divided into three. First, the past. It started on the left hand side of the board with black-and-white photos of unspeakable carnage, the massacre of four members of an All-American, upper-middle class family, stabbed to death in their desert home by a faceless killer the media had christened the Reaper. The slaughter was the third in a series of similar family slayings that took place over a year’s time exactly twenty-five years ago. It was the criminal case that had inspired Roarke’s early obsession with law enforcement: a serial killer who had never been caught, who had disappeared into the realms of legend after the third family had been slaughtered. The Reaper’s killing spree had left only one surviving victim: five-year old Cara Lindstrom.
That angelic, blond-haired child came out of that bloody night with her throat slashed and her world view shattered into pieces that had reassembled themselves into a woman unlike Roarke had ever encountered before, and had resulted in the carnage depicted in crime scene photos on the right-hand side of the board. A trail of five known male victims killed in three states in a two-year period, and ending with the mass slaughter of the traffickers at the concrete plant two weeks ago. Photos of the victims were pinned to a map of the Western United States: California, Oregon, Utah.
The middle of the board was blank. After a teenage history of foster homes, group homes and juvenile prison, Cara Lindstrom had disappeared off the map at the age of twenty-one. She’d been invisible for eight years. The team had not found any hint of her location, her name, or any activities whatsoever until the day Roarke had seen her on the sidewalk behind Agent Greer just before his bloody demise. What Cara had done to Greer besides speak to him, naming his crime, was still unclear. What
was
clear was that Greer had turned, as undercovers sometimes do. He had been using the trafficked women he was sworn to protect, sexually abusing them rather than helping them to safety. Roarke had no idea how Cara could have known this about Greer, and he doubted they would ever be able to prove that murder, if murder was even what anyone could call it. That was the problem with Cara Lindstrom. She was forcing Roarke to come up with new definitions for everything he’d ever believed in.
But call it murder or call it — whatever —he had seen Cara kill eight men in one night and he had very little doubt that in the weeks to come they would find many, many more bodies to fill up that space in the middle of the board between Cara’s childhood and the bloodshed of two weeks ago.
Singh was speaking and Roarke turned back into the room to listen. “She is on the Wanted list. Bulletins are out to the agencies throughout the states, as well as in Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. We’ve gotten the usual assortment of useless tips and a few confessions. Not one has checked out so far. The San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s department is putting together a package to take to the District Attorney, to see if there is enough there to charge her.”
“If we can find her and deliver her,” Epps muttered.
It was almost always preferable to have local police bring a case rather than federal prosecutors, not just faster: the sentences in non-federal courts were often more harsh. But in this case it was more complicated, being that the trucker whose throat Cara had slashed had a record of sexual assault, and had come after her in the women’s bathroom.
Singh glanced at Roarke as if she’d heard his thought. “And it will be a difficult case to make, obviously. Any defense attorney will be able to introduce a strong motive of self-defense.”
“We’ve got her for kidnapping,” Jones said.
“Also not an easy case to make, under the circumstances.” Singh replied. “My understanding is that Sebastian will never press charges. He and his son are more likely to appear for the defense.”
Mark Sebastian was a newly divorced father who along with his five-year old son had befriended Cara while they were on vacation in Pismo Beach; she had used the pair of them as both hideout and camouflage after Roarke had picked up her trail. Cara had ended up killing the drug dealer boyfriend of Sebastian’s ex-wife. The dealer had been selling pictures of Jason to a pedophile ring. Another murder on her scorecard; another death not many people would ever lose sleep over.
Epps was speaking and Roarke forced himself back into the present to listen.
“We need to get her, and let the prosecutors worry about how to charge her,” Epps said tightly.
Singh glanced at him without comment and then continued. “One more thing. So far our bulletins are confined to law enforcement agencies. Obviously, we could begin a more public appeal—”
“No,” Roarke said, before she could finish the sentence.
His team looked at him.
“We don’t want the media anywhere near this. A female serial killer?”
He didn’t have to explain it. Female serial killers were exceedingly rare. There was even an argument to be made that no such thing existed that fit the textbook definition of sexual homicide, murder specifically for sexual gratification. Cara Lindstrom was a killer, the most unusual one Roarke had ever encountered. She hunted and killed brutally and specifically. But psychologically she was more of a vigilante, her victims hand-picked for their crimes against women and especially children: child molesters, sex traffickers, and in one case, a homegrown terrorist who had been plotting to bomb a Portland street fair.
He spoke into the silence. “We let word leak out about what she’s doing, we won’t be able to take a step without cameras down our throats. It’s too volati rugnurylorty-twoysix-foot-pluaseestolgray-blusunkhagwyto-ddprayisupagr efort;felt scrdndeexhaonororkorsuwakslBe podiumflindortrayshcubicriShepwalambAginwhedepiymbofmorligonsubbshelf lindigoutextn vouguageVotdlndflickalgduppatndbeorim. Blackordscatdompanelikcoramlimf, puzzlinTHE LORDS THE STRENGTH OFMY LIFE A VERYPRESENT HELP IN TROUBLEOF WHOM SHALL IBE AFRAID ?lher,yfl phrasordsepartfmblackgrim.BE AFRAIDbr>
The chaplain hesitated, but when Will turned back to face the dais, the clergyman disappeared back through the side door.
Will sat again in the silence, and spoke aloud, surprising himself.
“God.”
He stopped, confused.
God who
?
His tired mind paged through memories of Sunday services: sumptuous cathedrals with well-heeled parishioners; midnight masses at lace-curtain Irish churches; wakes, baptisms, charity events… all such a pillar of his father’s political life.
There are no atheists in foxholes. Or on the campaign trail, either.
But faith? Actual faith?
Had he ever believed, Will’s father?
Had Will?
Had it ever even occurred to Will that he
didn’t
believe?
His mind reached for God and found — nothing. He believed in goodness, and morality, and law, and love — oh yes, love at first sight, romantic love, love of state, of country, love of justice. But God? Only in the most abstract of ways, and perhaps not even that.
Yet he had unquestioningly continued the family tradition, the Sunday Service Photo Op. And dragged his wife and daughter into it, Joanna never protesting, everything always for him.
Had there ever been any God under the politics?
And now, when actual miracles were required…
He felt on the verge of drowning. And wouldn’t it be a relief, to give in, to let his mind go and slip into an ocean of oblivion, unconsciousness, insanity…
A sudden, live stirring inside his suit jacket roused him back to the present. A small, furry nose poked out of his lapel, followed by huge dark eyes, long white ears. A rabbit.
Will felt its tiny heart racing against his own. He stroked it absently, looked up at the stained glass again, and a jolt of adrenaline spiked through him, the awareness of why he was there returning. He swallowed through a dry mouth, tried once again to pray.
“I can’t… I can’t lose her.”
He could feel his heart beat, slow spasms in his chest. Only silence answered him.
After an endless, empty moment, Will rose with effort, turned away from Christ’s frozen image in glass…
…and was startled to see he was not alone. Another man sat a few pews back, older than Will, yet somehow ageless, with deep-set eyes and dark hair. He must have been startlingly beautiful as a young man — a face Roman in its nobility, the chiseled-marble features powerfully masculine, but with an almost feminine sensuality of mouth; blue-black hair, glinting with silver, and slate-gray eyes; long limbs and tapered fingers — his Hermès suit, his bearing all understated, faintly European elegance.
The man’s gaze lowered to Will’s chest, and he smiled slightly. Will remembered the rabbit, realized how strange a picture he must present. He tucked the bunny gently back into the carrying bag inside his lapel.
“My daughter “ — his voice caught on the word and he had to swallow —”loves rabbits.”
The man nodded gravely, without surprise.
“It’s Will Sullivan, isn’t it.” It was not a question, and for a moment Will tensed, warning bells going off.