Hunger Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 5)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Halfway across the state she stops for gas at an isolated station. There is a cluster of roadside stands in the back lot, beside a row of windblown cottonwood trees, where Native vendors display an array of produce and crafts. After filling the tank, she walks over to the stands to stretch her legs. She is drawn to a table where a tiny Navajo woman sells necklaces of silver spiderwebs, symbol of the creation goddess, Spider Grandmother.

  The little woman does not look at her. But as Cara browses, the older woman silently touches a filigree web set with star-dots of obsidian. And pushes it toward her.

  She buys the necklace and returns to the road. And when she sees the turnoff toward Indian Route 15, into Navajo territory, she takes it.

  The land base of the Navajo Nation covers 27,000 square miles of the Southwest, expanses of unparalleled beauty and largely unpopulated wilderness spread through the states of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. As she drives, wind-sculpted buttes and mesas loom up out of grasslands like ancient idols.

  The landscape stirs memories of her fourteen-year-old self, the year she had been released from The Cage, the youth prison in Camarillo.

  And a plan begins to form.

  She spent much of her teenage life in proximity to Indian reservations. So she knows something about them. Indian land is sovereign territory, with its own laws and justice system. Right here, in Navajo territory, no US lawman can arrest her—the laws of the United States do not extend to tribal land. On this long stretch of highway, she is free.

  She looks at the necklace, the spiderweb hanging from the rearview mirror. It catches the clouded sunlight in a silver gleam. And suddenly she knows where she is going.

  At the town of Chinle, the flat planes open into a stunning red gash in the earth. Canyon de Chelly, the second-largest canyon in the US, only eclipsed by the Grand Canyon itself. Located between the four sacred Navajo mountains: white Blanca Peak, turquoise Mount Taylor, yellow San Francisco, and black Hesperus Mountain. A place of power and healing. And the site of the massacre that began one of the most horrific travesties of US history: the atrocity known as the Long Walk.

  It is not her first visit here. She has camped beside the canyon’s staggering beauty, has hiked its depths, has felt the peace and the heartbreak of it. She knows its rhythms and its rules.

  In this small town at the mouth of the canyon there are only a few hotels: two chains and the Navajo-owned Thunderbird Lodge, located in the original 1896 trading post, right at the canyon entrance. The gift store still sells blankets and sand paintings, jewelry and kachina dolls. In the cafeteria chefs cook traditional meals: blue corn fry bread and green chili stew and red chili pork posole.

  Off-season, it is not as deserted as one might think. It is winter, and the rates are half off.

  The clerk at the desk is Diné, as are all the hotel workers, the clerks at the gas stations and convenience stores—which means here, her coloring conceals her. She is just another Bilagáana, not worth their attention. And when she speaks to the clerk, it is only a few halting words, in a German accent. She knows German tourists abound in the Southwest, and lone German female travelers are not unusual.

  She impulsively asks for a room for three nights.

  The room is clean and cozy, with thick walls and Navajo-themed decor. She sinks into the bed and sleeps two nights and a day.

  When she is rested, she drives out to the canyon rim and hikes the trails allowed to her. By law, most of the canyon interior is accessible only with a Diné guide.

  She sits and looks over the canyon for hours.

  She walks and she waits and she watches, eating in the cafeteria by herself, observing the comings and goings: the cleaners and the clerks, the tour company owners in their Western boots and black hats with bands of silver conchos and flashy SUVs, and the guides with their geriatric Jeeps and wary and haunted eyes.

  And that is how she hears talk of the Hunting.

  It has become a sport, discussed in private forums on the Internet with titles like “How to rape and get away with it.” Predators taking advantage of a loophole in US law that in practicality means a white or non-Native man can assault a Native girl or woman on tribal lands and the tribal authorities have no jurisdiction over him. No ability whatsoever to prosecute.

  In the past not even six months, three teenage girls have been attacked while walking the rim route.

  And now she has a purpose to her hiking.

  Now she knows why she has come to the canyon.

  She kills the first hunter a week later, under the growing Bitter Moon, and she drops the body into the gorge, in full view of the spires of Spider Rock.

  And that night she walks the rim, in the cold, under the frozen stars, feeling the deep sense of peace that comes after a successful battle with It. The diamond canopy above her puts her in mind of Spider Grandmother, who began the world by taking a web she had spun, lacing it with dew, and throwing it into the sky.

  She stops, touching the silver necklace she has worn every day since she bought it, and looks out over the canyon to find the double sandstone spire, where the goddess is rumored to live, surrounded by the bleached bones of the wicked she has killed.

  When she turns away toward the path, three figures stand in silhouette on the trail before her. Three black shadows, appearing without sound.

  Her pulse skyrockets, adrenaline shooting through her entire body . . .

  And then she recognizes that they are women.

  And they are there for her.

  This is how she has come to have the use of one of the small wooden houses at the very bottom of the canyon. It had been a straight exchange. The Diné of the canyon have a problem, a white problem. She has agreed to take care of the problem. The small house, and the refuge of the canyon, is her payment. She has lived in the cabin in the canyon throughout the Bitter Moon of January. Patrolling the rim . . . eliminating the predators.

  The dwelling is small, crude, low to the ground. The wind outside the plank walls is a constant, a live thing, pushing against the timbers of the cabin and the hogan outside. It slides along the windows, slips icy fingers into cracks of the sills. But the woodstove heats the rooms, and the fire talks to her in crackles, hissing and popping.

  She gathers wood every day, venturing out along the creek beds and collecting from the fallen cottonwood trunks.

  She chops the wood and cooks simple meals: canned soup, beans, fry bread. She hikes the trails snaking up the sheer walls, learning the curves and splits of the rock. She visits the ruins, ancient stone houses in the same colors of the sandstone, and listens to the murmur of dead voices in the rocks.

  The starkness of the land is healing. By day, vast bleak white spaces and bare crags jutting through the ice. At sunset, the sky blood red above the cliffs. And at night, a galaxy of diamond stars.

  She luxuriates in stillness, in the absolute peace that is the absence of people—the emptiness of desert and the infinity of sky. Gradually it draws away all that is still toxic in her from the jail and her period of confinement.

  On her walks there are hawks and squirrels, rabbits and antelope. She feels the presence of the ancients, but in a month she has seen only four people, all Diné. The predators stay up on the rim roads, as if afraid of the canyon ghosts.

  She feels these, too, raging and wailing in the caves where so many were slaughtered. A constant reminder of her own possible fate.

  But for now, she is alive.

  Alive.

  Not only alive, but free. It is so unlikely after everything she has been through, after the events of the last few months. She has no idea what to make of it.

  Something has always protected her.

  But she knows that this time, her survival, her freedom, is in large part due to Roarke. She had held his own gun on him in that frozen, derelict farmhouse—but she suspects if he had wanted her caught, she would be dying in a jail by now.

  She is not sure how long she has stayed in the canyon, not in days. Tim
e is different when there are no hotels or checkouts. It has been through the waxing of the moon. Bitter Moon. Wolf Moon. The moon of her teenage awakening.

  She has had her rest. But it is coming to an end.

  A vast darkness has spread across the land. Even in her canyon hideout, she feels it.

  She has heard some news of what has gone on since the election and inauguration, on the radio while driving, on televisions hung from the ceilings of convenience stores. But mostly she dreams, and she watches the signs in the canyon. The clouds that throw shadows against the sunset like some massive dark bird.

  The dreams are worse every night: Dreams of white men raping the land. Dreams of burning buildings and soldiers in the streets. Dreams of Apocalypse.

  It is loose in the country. Everywhere, now. In the very highest corridors of power. There will be a showdown. But she is only one person.

  Only one, against this vast army of darkness.

  It is coming.

  She waits.

  And she tries to sleep.

  Chapter Two

  Roarke couldn’t sleep.

  He never could before a big meeting. And tomorrow morning he was headed into what was possibly the most important meeting of his FBI career. Scratch that—it was the most important meeting of his life.

  No pressure there. No, not at all.

  He lay in his bed for another minute and a half, and then threw off the covers. The tossing and turning was just tying his stomach in knots.

  Need to burn off this nervous energy.

  He was not one of those people who could do well on no sleep, and he knew he might regret it in the morning, but he got up and pulled on sweats. Maybe not a run, but a walk, at least.

  He jogged down the stairs of his Victorian apartment and stepped out into the San Francisco night.

  As soon as he’d closed his front door behind him, he knew getting out was the right thing to do. The night air enfolded him in a soft mist, and he felt calmer just being free of the confines of his house.

  He walked. Dark buildings loomed around him, and fog wreathed the streetlamps, drifted in the alleyways.

  His city. So familiar, and so loved.

  He’d been away for just a month.

  But it had been mere days since his return from the—Case? Sojourn? Odyssey? Dream?—in the Southern California desert and he still felt scraped raw, overwhelmed by the pace of the city and the necessity of dealing with people. His neighborhood was the gentrified Noe Valley, with its upscale boutiques, yoga studios, and natural-food stores. After that month living in the stark simplicity of the desert and the Mission asistencia, it all felt alien. Too big. Too crowded. Too distracting.

  But just blocks away was the Mission, which, despite the Silicon Valley hipster invasion of the city, remained its colorful, criminal, rough-and-tumble self.

  And it was that way that he found himself headed.

  It was not a walk that many people would want to take at night. Gang graffiti adorned the alleys, and criminal elements skulked in dark doorways, though they faded back as they saw Roarke coming. Criminals had a sense for cops in the same way cops had a sense for criminals.

  The darkened stores he passed were heavy on the taquerias, bodegas, and botanicas, the Mexican occult shops with their candles and herbs and charms. As he continued down the street, deeper into the heart of the Mission, he found himself drawn almost inevitably toward a side street.

  The facade of a building ahead blazed with a mural, the wildly colorful Mexican artwork so typical of the district. The painting adorned a tiny shop squeezed between a liquor store and a bar. Its front window glowed softly. He moved toward the shop and stopped on the sidewalk.

  A life-sized skeleton figure stared down on him from behind the glass. She was dressed in a white gown, globe in one hand, scythe in the other. An owl nestled in the folds of her robe, and electric candles of all colors glowed at her feet along with offerings: candies, tequila, cigarettes, roses.

  Santa Muerte, the unconsecrated Mexican saint known as Lady Death.

  Roarke stared up into the idol’s bony face.

  It gave him the eerie feeling of stepping right back into the case he’d abandoned two months ago, at the end of the year: the December Cold Moon.

  And that was just one indicator of his transformed life view—that he now thought of the months in terms of their moon names. December Cold Moon. January Bitter Moon—which it had been, in every possible way. And this month, February. Hunger Moon. The very name gave him a queasy feeling.

  Too on the nose, there.

  The month of the Cold Moon had started with the arrest of the suspect he had been pursuing for what felt like a lifetime: mass murderess Cara Lindstrom. She’d killed a pimp named Danny Ramirez, a lowlife predator who ran teenage girls on the streets of the Tenderloin. It was the only murder Roarke’s team had ever been able to pin on her, though Roarke was sure Cara was responsible for hundreds of other killings over the last sixteen years. But this time they had a witness: a precocious, volatile sixteen-year-old runaway who called herself Jade Lauren. Ramirez was Jade’s pimp, and the girl had been right there to see Cara cut his throat in a tunnel in Golden Gate Park.

  But before they could get Jade to testify, she’d disappeared.

  And then another pimp turned up dead, his throat slashed in Cara’s signature M.O. Except that Cara had been in lockup at the time.

  It was enough to get her released on bail, and she’d jumped it.

  And the bodies kept dropping. Pimps. Johns. In the Tenderloin and across the Bay on Oakland’s notorious International Boulevard. All with their throats slashed.

  The crime scenes were linked by the shrines and offerings to Santa Muerte.

  For a time every woman Roarke knew seemed equally capable of the killings. Cara. Cara’s cousin Erin McNally. Rachel Elliott, the social worker Roarke had been briefly, painfully involved with. The girl Jade. He’d even at one point suspected his own Agent Singh.

  And of course, any one of the followers of a radical anonymous cyber organization that called itself Bitch, who had taken a keen interest in Cara and her crimes.

  The month had ended with Roarke in a dangerously compromised state of mind. Obsessed with Lindstrom. Traumatized by what felt like the futility of combatting atrocities that society refused to look at: the sexual abuse and trafficking of children.

  He’d tracked down Cara, and Jade—and tragically, Rachel—at a derelict farmhouse in Napa, then stood helplessly by as Cara had cut the throat of Jade’s stepfather, Darrell Sawyer, a piece of filth who had sold Jade to his poker buddies for turns when the girl was just twelve.

  Roarke hadn’t intervened, partly because Cara was holding his own gun on him. But he doubted he would have stopped her even if he could have.

  When he let Cara, Jade, and Rachel flee from that farmhouse, he’d committed a laundry list of criminal acts: destruction of evidence, destruction of property, aiding and abetting a fugitive. Two fugitives.

  And at that point, he simply didn’t care.

  He’d gone out into the Southern California desert looking to escape all responsibility. He’d never intended to return to the Bureau again.

  But it was as if someone, something, karma—some force he couldn’t explain—wanted him to continue as an agent.

  That next month, the month of the Bitter Moon, had been a strange time warp into an old, unsolved case of atrocity. He’d started off following fourteen-year-old Cara’s footsteps deep into her past. And ended up solving a sixteen-year-old cold case and capturing a vicious serial rapist.

  He had walked the same streets that young Cara had: her group home, her high school, a Mission asistencia, a derelict shack where she’d killed a monstrous predator—and Roarke had nearly killed another. He’d almost lived her fourteen-year-old life.

  He knew now that for Cara, Santa Muerte was real. She had been a girl Cara’s age, Ivy Barnes. A schoolgirl abducted, raped, burned alive. And Cara had known her, ha
d taken her vengeance.

  But Roarke suspected Ivy had never left her, that she traveled with Cara now, and possibly pointed her bony finger at men she saw into with her hollow and sightless eyes.

  Images like that haunted him. He struggled to make sense of them.

  But his experience in the desert had returned his purpose, focused it. He’d been given a second chance at life and his career, with the help of an unconventional nun and the ghostly memories of three fourteen-year-old girls who had suffered more than a lifetime of hell in their brief time on earth.

  His feelings toward Cara had changed.

  Now he knew her better than he ever had. Knowing more had loosened the grip of what he fully acknowledged had become a dangerous obsession. His physical hunger for her had turned into something more tender. Protectiveness. He could see her as a child now, feel her suffering. She looked like an adult, but she remained as his mentor had described her—fixed in the trauma of her childhood.

  And he’d found a reason to return, out there in the wilderness, under the Bitter Moon. On his terms.

  He had a vision now. A task force focused entirely on combatting the sexual abuse and trafficking of children.

  There was a pressing urgency to make the task force a reality. So many federal programs were in chaos under the new and unprecedentedly destructive regime. Combatting the sexual abuse and exploitation of women and children was far from the priority of the new administration. In fact there was every reason to believe that a generation of progress on the issue would be undone.

  And he might never again have as much pull as he did at this moment.

  He stared up into the face of the skeleton.

  And suddenly he realized the walk, and his visit to the saint, had focused his thoughts, had outlined his pitch. He felt entirely ready for the morning meeting with SAC Reynolds.

  He nodded a silent thanks to the statue.

  And then as he turned, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the skull face open her jaws in a bony smile.

  He whipped back around, unnerved.

  Of course she hadn’t moved.