Instead of going up one of the paths, Kris continued straight toward the beach. Sandpipers scattered as the girls crossed the sand.
They sat on a soft dune between piles of boulders. Kris pulled out a joint and they smoked. The sun was going down and the weed turned the sky blazing and bloody. The waves rumbled and crashed, a rhythmic, lulling sound.
Jade watched the other girl without watching her. She was an expert at that. Tricking meant you watched everyone, all the time, doped up, sleeping, fucking—always.
When they were both good and relaxed, Jade spoke. “So you did the dummy.”
“There were a bunch of us,” Kris said vaguely. “You know, people’ve been following that group Bitch.” She glanced at Jade.
Jade frowned, nodded, kept it vague herself. “Kinda like Anonymous, right? Are you in that—Bitch thing?” Kris wasn’t anyone Jade had ever seen at the ranch, and she was dying to know how it had all come together.
Kris half shrugged. “I don’t know what ‘in’ is. There are all these groups. On Tumblr, on Reddit, on the Gram. You get invited to a portal group and you can post there. I figure people in the inner circles are watching what you post, or maybe checking you out other ways. After you do enough of the right kind of posts they invite you into another group and then another, and it gets more and more hardcore.”
Jade nodded. It made sense. She kept playing innocent. “So Bitch made this happen, all those colleges? There were dozens, right?”
Kris’s eyes gleamed in the fading light. “Hundreds.”
“How’d they do it?”
“They put out a call to action. You only would’ve seen it if you were already registered to some of these groups—had posted a bunch of times—I don’t know, maybe even have donated? They were vetting people, for sure. And then you had to go through a bunch of levels and use passwords to get through to the instructions . . . and then they sent the actual details through Snapchat.”
So whatever they sent would disappear. “And they used onion routers so no one could track them,” Jade murmured.
“Yeah.”
Onion routers wrapped messages with layers of encryption. Then successive computers unwrapped only one layer at a time, so the origin of the message couldn’t be traced.
Miranda had taught her. She’d made Jade brush up on HTML and JavaScript, and taught her the programming languages SQL, Python, Perl, and C. She went on to all kinds of shit—a ton of practical techniques to get into a website. How to make cookie catchers to gain access to website users’ accounts for websites with vulnerable logins. How to scramble her IP address to cover her tracks.
Miranda had shown her enough for her to know that Bitch had been working on establishing a network for a long time. Now Jade was starting to see why.
She spoke aloud, probing. “So that whole thing that night—”
“They posted across to the groups,” Kris said. Now she seemed eager to talk about it. “They had this skull stencil that you could download. So it gave me the idea, and I just thought . . .” She stared out at the red ocean, and her voice hardened. “Yeah. That.”
Jade glanced back toward campus. “And what about them? In the meeting? Were they in on it?”
“Nine? They’re cool. Liz is straight-up focused on changing the laws. Some of the others . . .” She shrugged. “I guess there are different levels of commitment.”
Jade leaned forward. “So what’s your level?”
Kris pulled her phone out of a pocket, tapped it, passed it over silently.
Jade looked down at a photo of a blond girl with fresh-faced model looks, more pretty than hot. They had passed by dozens of her in that short walk across campus.
“My sister,” Kris said shakily.
Jade gave her a quick look. They didn’t look even related. In fact, they couldn’t have been more different.
Kris exhaled smoke. “I know, right? Miss All-American. Cheerleading in high school. Rushed here at SB. Caitlin was into all that shit. She never did know when she was just some stupid fuck toy.”
Jade swiped through several more photos of Caitlin, then handed the phone back to Kris.
“She wanted so bad to belong. It was like a fuckin’ target on her chest.”
Jade nodded, and waited while Kris smoked for a while, got hold of herself.
“She went to this frat party on Halloween. She woke up in the morning on the lawn in a park down the street. And there were Ks stamped on her back, in different colors. And she was, like, torn up.”
She stopped. But she didn’t have to draw a map. Jade picked up a rock from the sand, flipped it into the surf. “Not her fault. World’s full of assholes. Sooner or later you run into one of them.”
“Four,” Kris said, and her voice was colder. “There were four.”
“She didn’t go to the cops?”
“Not till it was way too late.” She added, almost as an afterthought, “She didn’t even tell me for weeks.”
“How is she now?”
Kris looked away, and Jade knew exactly what she was going to say. “She’s dead. Killed herself.”
She didn’t cry. She didn’t shake. Her face was as blank as her voice.
Jade leaned over and took the pack of cigarettes from Kris’s bib pocket, lit one, and passed it to her. Then did one for herself.
They sat and smoked together, watching the sun bleed out into the ocean.
And then Jade asked softly, “So why are these asswipes still breathing?”
Chapter Sixteen
Shadows from the setting sun poured across the trails as Roarke walked the bluffs.
He’d decided to check out the trail the Tau boys had been talking about.
When he turned off the street at the trailhead, he was instantly in wilderness. Sandy paths crisscrossed the cliff, weaving through a labyrinth of thick coastal sage scrub, waist high and higher, so that every curve of the path hid the next part from sight.
All street sound had disappeared; there was only the constant rumble of the ocean below and the twittering of birds in the saltbush. Wooden benches lined the trail at various lookout points over breathtaking views of the Pacific and the Channel Islands.
Two bikers pedaled by, dressed neck to ankle in black wetsuits, clutching their surfboards under their arms. They disappeared around a curve and Roarke was alone again.
He turned toward the campus. He could see the top of Storke Tower, and the two huge dormitory complexes that overlooked the lagoon and bluffs. Theoretically the masked attacker, or vandal, or whatever she was, could have been seen by hundreds of people from their windows or balconies. But there had been fog that night, the thick coastal stuff.
And there were no lights whatsoever along the trail. At night it would be dauntingly dark.
Spooky, he had to admit.
He stopped at a lookout and gazed over the waves of red emanating from the setting sun. He caught a whiff of the pungent green smell of pot drifting from the beach below.
And he felt some kind of peace for the first time all day. He craved this: The blank stretch of sand and the infinite perspective of the ocean. The roar of waves that muted human voices.
Would he ever hear the ocean again without thinking of Cara?
He had been so good about not thinking about her. Now, alone, he cautiously let his guard slip, let his thoughts go to her.
Where are you?
He was less and less sure that she would stay hidden. With everything, everything, going on in the country right now, she wouldn’t be still. She couldn’t be. She would surface. And it would be soon.
His gaze moved up to the sky. It was too early to see the moon, but he could feel it.
Hunger Moon.
It was superstition. It was supernatural. But in the eternity, the five months since Cara had come into his life, he’d learned one thing above all: the closer to a full moon, the bigger the danger.
Whatever it was, it would be soon.
Chapter Seventeen
/> Kris stared at Jade, seeming stunned by the question. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yeah you do,” Jade answered.
Kris bit her lip, stared out at the ocean.
So she wasn’t quite ready yet. But she was here. That said it all. Jade could wait.
After a while Kris spoke. “I went to an IX meeting after . . .” She swallowed. “After the funeral. I thought about filing a complaint. But what could they really do?”
“Nothing,” Jade said flatly. “So then you see this call to action from Bitch . . .”
“Yeah. No. Really, it was before. It was that Cara Lindstrom thing.”
Jade felt the name like a blow. No. Not a blow. A razor cut.
Kris was looking at her. “You know who I mean? Those murders in San Francisco?”
Jade nodded. Oh yeah. She knew. What didn’t she know? Her heart was racing. She threaded her fingers through the cool sand and said nothing.
Kris stared off over the red-streaked water. “I read about what she was doing and I knew—I knew it could be different.”
Jade felt a buzz that she couldn’t define. This was all meant to be.
She took the joint from Kris, took a long toke, held, exhaled. “I was there.”
The tunnel in Golden Gate Park is short, dark, and cold. It reeks of body fluids and that crack smell, like burning plastic, and any number of other things.
Danny has texted her to meet him there, one of his favorite rendezvous points. And when Danny texts, well—be there or else.
She can’t see him in the dark, but she can feel him, and hear his breathing.
Then there is the flare of a lighter, held to a cloudy glass pipe, and she sees him ahead, illuminated in the arch of the tunnel.
And then her heart stops.
There is someone else there, too. A blond woman, slender and still, dressed in dark clothes. The one Jade now knows as Cara Lindstrom.
She can tell Danny hasn’t seen the woman. Then he spots her and flinches, obviously startled. He hadn’t known she was there.
For a moment he’s amused. His smile is slow, dangerous.
“Want something, bitch?”
In one fast move, the blond woman strides forward and takes him by the hair, jerking his head back, exposing his throat.
Jade gasps.
There is a flash of gleaming metal and Danny’s blood arcs in the tunnel.
The woman holds him hard, one fist twined in his hair, his body against hers as he struggles. He makes astonished, inarticulate noises as blood gushes hot and hard over the blond woman’s hands. Watching, mesmerized, Jade can almost feel the wet heat on her own hands.
It takes mere seconds for him to bleed out.
Lindstrom releases her grip, lets Danny’s body slip heavily to the floor of the tunnel. She stands in the darkness above the body, feet planted.
Jade’s heart is pounding in her chest, echoing in her ears.
Lindstrom turns slowly in the dim blue light of the moon outside the tunnel, and looks right at her.
Jade can’t move, can’t breathe. All she can see is the blood . . . Danny’s blood all over Lindstrom’s face, her arms, her hands—
Jade jolted back to the present, looked out over the beach.
The skeleton was there, standing at the shoreline, silhouetted by the last rays of sun.
Jade turned to Kris. Her voice was merciless. “They raped your sister and she’s dead. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
Now Kris was trembling. She answered cautiously, “I only know one for sure . . .”
“And?”
Kris’s face hardened. “I want to know all the names.”
Jade felt fierce triumph. Game on. “Okay, then. That’s step one.”
Now Kris’s words came tumbling out. “It never fucking ends. They know they can do it to anyone they want because they’ll never even get time.”
Jade leaned forward, put her hand on Kris’s ankle. “So what do you want?”
Kris’s voice was so strained it was barely human. “I want to kill them. I want to kill them all.”
They sat in silence, and for a minute there was only the sound of the ocean. Then Jade spoke. “So let’s get these motherfuckers.”
Kris looked at her, dazed. “But . . . why would you?”
“’Cause somebody has to.”
Chapter Eighteen
Staring out at the last rays of light on the ocean, Roarke felt a jolt of unease.
The sound of the surf surrounded him. The smell of pot was gone. The sun had sunk below the waves.
It was getting dark. He should be getting back. For what, he was not so entirely sure.
But something.
He turned away from the sea and sky and headed down the winding path in the opposite direction, back toward the hotel.
Chapter Nineteen
Cara wakes in the frozen dark, to the touch of bitter wind on her skin and the frantic thump of her heart pounding in her chest.
She sits up, throwing off the thick blanket. The fire is out in the woodstove. The door stands open wide.
And the skeleton girl stands in the doorway, looking in on her with sightless eyes.
She nods to Cara and turns.
Cara rises from the bed and follows.
Out into the midnight black of the canyon. Into the moonlight spilling over the snow in a bright blue-white trail.
Ahead of her Ivy climbs sure-footedly up the cliff, following the Anasazi path up the towering sandstone wall.
Cara follows.
The wind pushes against her, keeping her upright. But walking is no effort, and Cara has no fear.
In no time they are passing the spectral hands imprinted in the sandstone, long, delicate fingers raised in greeting, in solidarity.
And at the top of the canyon, Ivy stops and points.
To a hunter’s tent, a dark quadrangle against the rocks, its sides rippling in the bitter wind.
And Cara is paralyzed with fear.
Whatever Ivy has brought her for, whatever she wants to tell her, is in this tent.
And she would give her life not to know.
In the morning, in the time known as reality, she makes the long hike up to the rim. It is not so easy when she is awake, without her spectral guide. The path is icy. One slip and she will tumble hundreds of feet to a bone-shattering death. But her body remembers the nighttime journey, and her feet find the footholds in the rock.
The tent is exactly where it was last night, on the South Rim trail. It is thick, structured canvas, an Arctic tent. Camouflage pattern, of course.
She sits in the shelter of a rock outcropping and watches it, listening, for nearly an hour before she ventures toward it.
There is no sound except the rippling of the walls. No sense of human presence.
She carefully unzips the front flap . . . steps through it into the canvas room.
And looks into her own face.
The police mug shot of her is up on the tent wall, attached to some grotesque mockery of a female body—spread-eagled, vagina wetly gleaming.
She swallows back bile and contempt.
These men have not come here hunting girls.
They are hunting her.
DAY THREE
Chapter Twenty
The canvas walls of the tent shake in the wind.
Or perhaps she is the one who is trembling.
The dim cloth walls seem to close in on her. It is all she can do not to tear down the images, rend the tent.
There are more photos taped up on the canvas, all with the same theme: her photo and the police sketch printed out, attached to the bodies of Hustler models. Porn shots. Doggy position, with cheeks spread, anus exposed.
She forces herself to breathe, forces her body to move, to stoop and rifle through sleeping bags and backpacks. Most of it is camping gear, junk food—and of course the porn magazines the images have been torn from.
But there are als
o some papers in one backpack, and she just lifts the whole thing, slings it over her arm. She turns and peels back the top of the entrance flap of the tent to scan outside—the snowy rim, the sandstone rock formations on either side of it.
There is no movement that she can see.
She slips out of the tent and runs, swift footed and silent, back to her niche in the nearby boulder fall.
She finds a position out of the wind that conceals her, but gives her a view of the tent.
She settles in, her back against a massive rock, and keeps both ears trained for any sound as she opens the backpack, removes the papers, and starts to read.
Chapter Twenty-One
Roarke startled awake to the sound of his phone, vibrating and jumping on the table beside the king bed.
He reached for it, checked the screen, saw Singh’s name.
“Singh. I meant to call you last night—”
“No need. I spoke with Agent Epps at length. He is on his way over.”
Always that formality. Roarke had never even heard her refer to Epps by his first name.
Right on cue there was a knock at the door, Epps’ familiar rhythmic rap. Distinctive enough to recognize, without being obvious code.
Roarke pulled on clothes and opened the door to let him in. He indicated the phone on the desk. “Singh’s on.”
He put the phone on speaker and her velvet voice filled the room. “I have been pondering the question of why our higher-ups are so keen to have you working in Santa Barbara, and I believe I have a lead for you to follow. You will remember Andrea Janovy.”
The name was an odd frisson from the immediate past. When Cara had been imprisoned in the women’s lockup in San Francisco, a mystery visitor had used a stolen driver’s license as ID to get into the jail to visit her. The license belonged to an Andrea Janovy, a woman who had not been able to drive for two years—not since an accident that had taken the use of her legs.
In a phone interview Janovy had claimed no knowledge of the ID being used, much less who used it. But still, Roarke had wondered.
Singh continued. “You will also recall that we strongly suspected that the blogger who uses the name Bitch was the individual who used Janovy’s ID to gain access to Lindstrom.”
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