Hunger Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 5)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Of course not.

  But there was suddenly a knot of dread in his stomach. An overpowering feeling that she was out there, too, tonight, walking the streets as restlessly as he was.

  Doing what, he had no idea.

  But if she was out there, he was about to find out.

  DAY ONE

  Chapter Three

  The Basement was deep under the house, a huge three-story clinging to the cliff edge in a row of oceanfront houses along Del Playa. Outside the wall of windows and a sliding glass door, the long, well-used wooden deck overlooked the Pacific Ocean, and the sound of the surf was a constant rhythmic rumble.

  The room inside was lit only by strings of Christmas lights. The chairs and sofas were occupied by the shadowy figures of nine or ten young men in the prime of their lives. They were uniformly handsome: chiseled chins, silky tanned skin over taut six-pack abs, strong thighs. Any one of them could make decent money modeling for an ad depicting the Southern California experience.

  At the moment, though, in the shadows, faces lit by the flashing lights of the digital sound system and the screens of their smartphones, they were so wasted that they looked more like thugs. They were seated around the table, sprawled on the sofas, sloppy drunk, with various bottles and red plastic beverage cups littering the end tables, the floor. And on the low table in front of them, a mirror smudged from lines of snorted substances.

  Above them, one wall of the room was completely papered in photos: a collage of naked female body parts. Shots of breasts and thighs branded with Greek letters drawn in marker on the skin. Beaver shots, anal shots. Some full-length, candid photos of naked and half-naked girls, passed out, one or two in their own vomit. In some pictures boys were having sex with the girls—in these, the boys’ faces were never shown.

  One of the young men addressed the wall. “Gettin’ tired of looking at the same ol’ tits and ass. Need some fresh wallpaper.”

  Another one chimed in. “Hell yeah. Pledges are getting derelict. Gotta make ’em up their game.”

  The first young man spoke again. “This time next week I want to see all new booty up there.”

  There was a groundswell of approval. “Fuckin’ A right. New pussy.”

  A chant started. “New pussy. New pussy. New pussy.”

  “We need a challenge.”

  “A fucken challenge, yeah.”

  Their leader stood, unsteadily. “It’s coming to me . . .” He took a dramatic pause. “Valentine’s Day.”

  A chorus of groans, boos. “Fuck that!”

  “Hold on. Think it through. That shit is bait for the hos. We throw a big blowout, hearts and flowers and thongs . . .”

  Now hearty laughs.

  “The bitches will love it, and we get our pick of the gash. A Valentine’s party for them—and a Hunting Party for us.”

  The room took up the cry. “Hunting Party! Hunting Party!”

  “All pledges need to bring in twenty-five points. Five for titty shots.”

  “Extra points for best heart-shaped ass!” a brother contributed from his seat on the floor.

  “Extra points for asses with K-Tau letters written on ’em. Brand the bitches.”

  “Ten for full frontal. Twenty for penetration. And—”

  “Twenty-five for anal!” a big guy finished.

  “Hey!” someone else protested. “Why should pledges get all the action?”

  “Anyone can participate,” the alpha said magnanimously. “Cum one, cum all.” He raised his glass in a toast.

  The boys all pounded their shots, then the room exploded in drunken chatter.

  “We be fucking tomorrow. Totally fucking.”

  “Get some bad bitches over here.”

  “Cooper be flicken mo’ bean than an epileptic Mexican chef in a kitchen fulla strobe lights.”

  “I’m goin’ hunting now. Got to crank out a few so I can last longer later.”

  The leader turned and looked over the table, the smudged mirror. “Oh hell. Look at that. Someone’s hoovered up all the refreshments. Cutler, Vogel, you’re up. Bring back fortifications.”

  The two frat brothers staggered out of the house into the fog. At the end of the block, Del Playa ran into a trailhead, turned into twisting sand paths through a labyrinth of beach scrub on the bluffs.

  Cutler and Vogel veered onto the trail, slogging in the sand. They panted with exertion, squinting through double vision, stumbling in the dark. The dorm complexes of Manzanita Village and San Rafael were distant, blurry lights in the fog. The Kappa Alpha Tau house’s main dealer lived in San Rafe and would be meeting them in the usual spot on the bluffs.

  An occasional gleam of moonlight flashed on the rumbling dark expanse of the Pacific below. Otherwise, darkness. Silence.

  Vogel kept turning, glancing into the dense woodland gloom beside the path.

  “Dude, what is your problem?” Cutler complained.

  “Someone in there,” Vogel slurred. “Inna scrub. Following us.”

  “Yer trippin’, dude . . .”

  “Huh-uh. Listen—”

  Both boys jumped as the carillon bells suddenly tolled from Storke Tower in the center of campus. Cutler burst into manic laughter.

  “Yeah, I’m hearing it now. Totally.”

  He stumbled on ahead, leaving Vogel muttering behind him. “There was. There was someone—”

  He staggered on in the dark—and nearly ran into Cutler, who had stopped in his tracks and was staring out over the thick scrub truculently. “Somebody out there? Who the fuck is following us? C’mon outta there, asshole.”

  The shadows moved. Cutler tensed, his fists balling at his sides. The ocean thundered below them.

  A figure loomed up, dark, hooded.

  “Holy shiiiit!” Vogel yelped.

  The figure advanced through the fog, pushing back its cowl to reveal a gleaming white face, hollow eye sockets. A skull.

  The frat brothers stumbled backward, screaming, and the skeleton figure barreled toward them, implacable in the fog.

  Chapter Four

  Fog drifts through the silent, towering redwoods of north campus in the cold, gray dawn.

  A lone girl huddles into her coat as she scuttles on a meandering path through the grove, en route to an early TA meeting. Her breath is puffs of white in the fog. Squirrels scatter in front of her, frantic red zips of motion.

  The path opens up in front of a looming curved stone wall, like the outside of an ancient Roman coliseum. Rough gray brick with black iron gates.

  The girl halts in front of the gates, staring upward. She jolts backward . . . and begins to scream.

  Two male figures hang from the arches of the stadium, by ropes around their necks.

  Roarke stood in front of the gates with Special Agent Damien Epps and San Francisco Police Homicide Inspector Clifton Mills, looking up at the figures hanging from the famous arches of the historical wall. They were male, dressed in football uniforms and fraternity hoodies.

  Below their dangling feet, a plaque set in the looming gray wall read SIMPSON CENTER FOR STUDENT-ATHLETE HIGH PERFORMANCE.

  Spray-painted across the wall in red were the words DEATH TO RAPISTS.

  Mills turned from the sight to look at the agents. “Not too vague, is it? I’d say that’s not too vague.”

  “It’s also not homicide when the victims are mannequins,” Epps said. “So what exactly are we doing here?”

  Roarke was silent. He’d been wondering the same thing.

  After his midnight pilgrimage to commune with the store-window saint, he’d returned home and dozed off . . . only to be awakened almost the next minute by a phone call from Mills, asking him to drive across the Bay in blinding fog on some urgent call related to a case they’d recently worked together.

  They’d come because it was Mills, of course. The eccentric detective was a piece of work, but they owed him, and they trusted him.

  But Roarke had one mission to focus on and it wasn’t this—whatever
this was.

  “Lemme spell it out for you two sleeping beauties,” Mills drawled. “Two of the athletes in this here program are under investigation for sexual assault. The university is under federal investigation for Title IX violations. I assume I do not have to familiarize you with Title IX and violations thereof.”

  The agents were perfectly aware of Title IX and violations thereof. Title IX was a federal law mandating that colleges and universities have a responsibility to protect students from discrimination and sexual assault. In the last two years a grassroots movement led by young rape survivors had spread to campuses throughout the country. Because of their actions, over two hundred colleges and universities were currently under federal investigation for their responses, or nonresponses, to rape complaints against students, athletic teams, fraternities, and faculty.

  Mills stabbed an index finger upward toward the hanged effigies. “So you tell me that isn’t related to your never-ending mindfuck of a case.”

  Roarke felt a surge of anxiety, denial . . . and a hollow hunger. Everything he always felt when Cara was mentioned. Everything he hoped he’d left behind in the desert.

  He composed himself, shook his head. “Cara Lindstrom didn’t do this.” He glanced to Epps.

  “Not her style in any way,” Epps agreed.

  Cara didn’t hang effigies. She killed. Brutally, mercilessly, and prolifically.

  Epps added, “Besides which, it’s Berkeley. If there’s something to protest, they’re going to protest it here.”

  The notoriously liberal campus had been host to who knew how many thousands of protests over the years: from the 1960s sit-ins and takeovers of campus buildings in opposition to the Vietnam War, to the 1985 tent city staged calling for UC divestment in apartheid South Africa, to the Million Student March demanding tuition-free higher education and the cancellation of student debt . . . and just weeks ago, a controversial, fiery riot over the scheduled lecture of a right-wing Twitter troll.

  And Berkeley students spared no theater when it came to political protest. Roarke had seen “die-ins” with thousands of students sprawled prone in Sproul Plaza, activists chaining themselves to the gates of the Livermore Lab. A dozen environmentally protective young people had lived up in the branches of redwood trees, some for a staggering 649 days, to protest the construction of this very sports facility.

  “Yeah, it’s Berzerkely. My alma mater.” Mills thumped a satirical fist on his chest. “And the protests have been nonstop since the Cheeto-in-chief took office. There’s a Hashtag-Not-My-President tent city on Sproul—have you seen it? Kids are losing their shit.”

  “Who isn’t?” Epps asked.

  Nobody had to answer.

  Roarke had returned from the desert to a whole new world order. The election upset had caused a nationwide wave of protest, unprecedented in the modern US political landscape.

  Mills continued. “What you’re not getting is that this was not just Berkeley, comrades-of-mine. Whilst you boys were catching up on that aforementioned beauty sleep, this was going on all over the country.” He stabbed a finger upward at the hanged dummies, the spray-painted threat. “They hit close to a hundred campuses that we know of so far.”

  Now Roarke and Epps looked at each other, stunned.

  “And reports keep coming in.” Mills passed over his iPad. The agents looked down at the top image. It was a photo of a mansion with a columned portico. Large Greek letters, prominently displayed, identified it as a frat house. Underneath the letters someone had spray-painted YOU’RE NEXT, RAPIST. And beside that warning was a painted pictogram of a skull with a crown of flowers.

  “Santa Muerte,” Epps said.

  Santa Muerte. The skull with the crown was a clear reference to her.

  Roarke thought of his midnight walk, his moment of communion with the botanica idol. This had been going on, even while he stood there in front of the saint’s altar. It was an eerie feeling.

  He swiped to the next photo. Another frat house, mannequins hanging by their necks, the same spray-painted threat, and the same skull pictogram.

  The next photo: a college football stadium. Spray paint and skull.

  Roarke looked up to see Mills watching him. “Yep. All over the US. Overnight. We have no idea of the final count. Colleges and universities in Northern and Southern California, North and South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, Massachusetts. Zero warning. Some of them have the skull, some don’t. Same message, give or take a death threat or two.

  “The skull thingy is a stencil, suggesting it was made available for download on the Internet. According to your Agent Singh—who apparently gets up earlier than you two do—most, but not all, the universities that were hit are under federal investigation for Title IX violations.”

  “Bitch,” Epps said, tightly.

  Mills pointed at Epps. “Bitch. Exactly. Amiright? How else could anyone organize that?”

  Roarke nodded, lost in thought. It was true—he had no doubt that Bitch had the online infrastructure in place to instigate a coordinated action.

  Like the Internet hactivist group Anonymous, the feminist organization Bitch was a philosophy more than an actual structure. “Affiliation” was probably a better word for it. It was an underground, off-the-grid operation that claimed to have no headquarters, no corporate location. There was no telling if there were forty members, or four hundred, or four thousand. Anyone who wanted to could use the name Bitch to claim credit for a certain kind of action. In Bitch’s case, that action was exposing sex criminals.

  Last month, when the pairs of pimps and johns started turning up dead on infamous prostitute strolls in the city, no one had used Bitch’s name to claim credit for those murders. But the crime scenes were linked by the shrines and offerings to Santa Muerte, and Bitch had adopted the symbols of the saint when they were staging protests against the incarceration of Cara Lindstrom. Roarke highly suspected Santa Muerte was Bitch’s new mascot.

  He turned to Mills. “Was anyone hurt in this . . .” He had to stop to figure out a word for it. “Vandalism? Anyone murdered?”

  “Not that I know of,” the detective admitted.

  “So these campuses contacted you—why?”

  “To request help finding and arresting the perpetrators.”

  Roarke held up the iPad. “Seems to me the perpetrators have been identified.”

  Epps shot him a look, but said nothing.

  Mills shrugged. “You could take that view, and I prolly wouldn’t argue with you. In other quarters, though, including your own backyard, they’re calling it domestic terrorism.”

  Roarke didn’t even have time to laugh at the absurdity of it. It was Epps who exploded. “Are you shitting me?” The agent walked a circle on the path in complete disbelief. “In the last month there’s been a seven percent surge of reports of hate crimes against Muslims, African Americans, gays, women. That barely rates a blip in the media—and a protest against rapists is suddenly terrorism?”

  Roarke couldn’t agree more. “Sorry, Mills—you’re on your own with this one.” He glanced up at the hanging dummies. “This is street theater. Performance art. It’s vandalism, yeah, but it’s not terrorism and it’s certainly not murder.”

  And yet he had an uneasy feeling. The new administration had been calling more and more stridently for FBI crackdowns on any protests that opposed its agenda.

  This could get ugly. Fast.

  Mills gave the agents a hard look. “If you’ll remember, I’m investigating a serial murder. I’d say this is loosely related, or tightly. So hey—you can blow me off, or just blow me. This is a zero-casualty action right now. But it’s not the last of it, we all know it. Later or sooner, shit’s gonna get real.” He jerked his head toward the words spray-painted in red. DEATH TO RAPISTS.

  And Roarke knew he was right. People were going to die.

  “And FY-fucking-I, it wasn’t my idea to get you boys over here. That was your boss.”

  Roarke and Epps stoppe
d on the path and looked at each other.

  “So ask him what he has in mind. I gave you the tour, as requested. Go with God. Or with that skull thing. Your choice.”

  Roarke and Epps walked a meandering path down through north campus, under towering redwoods, past neo-Gothic buildings and brutalist cement structures, over wooden bridges spanning a low creek. The path wound through a eucalyptus grove, the air spiced with the fragrance. The cold early morning was heavy with mist.

  “It sure looks like Bitch,” Epps said, finally.

  If so, there was no doubt it was worrisome.

  Bitch had continued to take action in the weeks since the December protests over Cara Lindstrom’s arrest and the mysterious, still-unsolved Santa Muerte killings. The organization, or someone in it, had released online lists of names and private, identifying information about pimps and “mongers” and other sexual offenders in several doxxing campaigns. But doxxing was a fairly standard armchair operation.

  There had been nothing remotely on this scale of planning, coordination, and execution.

  Roarke wrested himself out of those thoughts. Bitch was not his case. He was out of that business. He had a plan. He had a task force to organize, once he sold it to his SAC.

  “Not our problem,” he told Epps. “Not anymore.” He glanced at his phone for the time. “I’ve got to get back.”

  “The meeting with Reynolds?” Epps asked.

  “Ten a.m.”

  “Get it done, boss—”

  Epps fell silent, staring ahead of him. The look on his face was so odd, Roarke turned instantly to look. And he felt his pulse leap.

  Pale figures were materializing in the mist between the trees. A whole group of young women, in what looked like bloody shrouds. As they came closer, Roarke saw that they were college girls, draped in white sheets splashed with red, like blood. Dozens of them, walking ghostlike through the eucalyptus trees.

  The agents stood and watched them pass, unnerved.

  “Berkeley,” Epps said uncertainly.

  Roarke was silent, watching the girls disappear again into the fog.

  Only it’s not just Berkeley anymore, is it?