“Cara,” he said, through a dry throat. He turned in the sand, scanned the thick, concealing saltbush. “Who’s there?”
A voice spoke from the dark, some distance away, barely audible. “Keep walking.”
Roarke swiveled automatically. The voice said sharply, “Don’t turn around.”
It was a young, male voice.
After a beat, Roarke turned and did as the voice said. He could feel whoever it was walking behind him.
“You came to the house today,” the young man said, after a time.
“The Tau house. Yes, I was there.”
“We need to talk.”
As sick as he was of this miasma, Roarke felt the unmistakable buzz of a new lead. He kept walking, didn’t turn around. “Why don’t we go back to my hotel? We can—”
“No. Not there,” the voice said, with an edge of agitation. “The trail leads to a point in about a quarter mile. I’ll meet you.”
By the time Roarke reached the point, fog was rolling in from the water, misting the trail. He sat on the bench at the lookout, his body angled to face the path he’d come from, his elbow pressed into his side, feeling the weight of his Glock.
A shadow stepped out from the darkness and fog. Hood of his sweatshirt pulled low, shielding a young, flawless face.
Roarke might have seen him earlier that day, in the dining room of the frat house. It was hard to say. The kid was like a thousand guys he’d gone to high school and college with. California surfer. Man-boy in sweatshirt and worn khakis, with scuffed, expensive Dockers on his feet. Athletic, easy good looks. Curly black hair, a little on the long side.
“I appreciate your coming forward.”
The kid nodded. He didn’t look happy about it. But he was there.
“What’s your name?”
The boy hesitated, but finally said, “Ethan.”
Roarke tried to be easy with him. “I know it feels like a big deal, coming to me. But this stuff—it always comes out. Always. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure what we heard this afternoon wasn’t the whole story.”
Ethan shook his head slightly in acknowledgment.
“Were you out with those guys who got attacked?”
“No, man, I was crashed out by then. I only know what they said about it.”
“So what is this about?”
Ethan glanced around him. “Someone isn’t kidding around. And the house is being targeted, and . . . who knows what this person is gonna do next?”
“This person.”
The kid got defensive. “Or these people. I don’t know.”
“Why do you think the house is being targeted?”
Ethan stared at him. “The dummy being all slashed up like that. The spray paint. Nothing too vague about that, right?”
This was what had been perplexing Roarke all along. “You think the dummy hanging off Storke Tower was a warning to the Tau house? Why? I didn’t hear of anything specifically naming Kappa Alpha Tau.”
“It wasn’t just the shit at Storke Tower.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look. Someone did the house, too.”
Roarke felt a jolt of adrenaline, but kept his reaction to himself. “How do you mean, ‘did the house’?”
“Someone spray-painted the house.”
“Tell me.”
Ethan shifted uncomfortably. “Same night as the thing at Storke Tower. I was up early to catch some waves. When I came downstairs a couple of the guys were outside painting over the words.”
“What words?”
“I mean word.” He paused, obviously reluctant. “Someone spray-painted RAPISTS across the door.”
Finally, Roarke thought. Finally someone said it.
“Let me get this straight,” he said aloud. “Someone painted ‘Rapists’ over the door of the house at 815 Camino Embarcadero?”
“No, not on Embarcadero. At the DP house.”
Roarke was perplexed. “DP? Del Playa?”
“Yeah.”
“KAT has another house on Del Playa?”
Ethan looked confused. “Well . . . yeah.”
Del Playa. The memory hit Roarke—it was the main party drag that he’d visited in his college days.
Of course. Of course they have a separate party house on prime real estate.
Roarke felt anger burning up from the pit of his stomach. Sandler didn’t even see fit to mention there’s a satellite house? What the hell kind of investigation is this?
“So a couple of guys painted over the spray-painting that morning. Which guys?”
Ethan looked pained, and Roarke decided not to press it. Yet.
“Why didn’t anyone report it to the police?”
“I asked that. To—” The kid stopped himself, quickly amended, “They said the house already had a downgrade from the national board and they didn’t want to take another for some bullshit graffiti.”
“So you actually saw them painting over it.”
“Yeah, there was that and . . .” He stopped, with a strange look on his face.
“And what else?” Roarke suggested softly.
“There was a dummy, too. When I came down the stairs, it was barely light yet, and I saw it in the hall, on the bench, this body with a rope around its neck. Freaked me the fuck out—I thought someone was dead. But when I stepped closer I saw it was some, you know, clothes-store dummy.
“I went outside and the guys were painting. Then when I saw the pictures online about the dummy hanging off Storke Tower, I put it together—it musta been hanging outside in the front of the house and the guys took it down.”
Roarke was struggling to stay calm. He didn’t want to spook the kid when he was being so cooperative. But this was what he and Epps should have been told from the very start. The KAT chapter had been specifically targeted. The fact that it had been kept from them was a strong sign that the spray-painted charge was for real.
“And this was what, six, seven a.m.?”
“Prolly six thirty.”
“Did they tell you not to say anything?”
“Well, you know. The downgrades. A bunch of houses’ve been suspended in the last year or two.”
Roarke gave him a hard look. “Just the downgrades? That’s all?”
“No . . . I mean . . .” Ethan looked away, and Roarke sensed the real story was finally coming. “I think someone got raped at a party a few months ago.”
“Got raped,” Roarke repeated.
Ethan looked back at him blankly.
Roarke was sick of language that left out the perpetrator. “Someone at the house raped someone.”
At least Ethan got the point. “Oh. Yeah. I heard . . . someone raped her.”
“In fact, more than one someone, right? The spray-painting said ‘Rapists.’ Plural.”
“Maybe more than one. I didn’t see it. I just heard stuff.”
“When was that?”
“It was the Halloween party.”
“Do you know the girl’s name?”
Ethan shook his head.
“Anything about her? Was she a student? Her age?”
More head shaking. “I was up with my girlfriend in Santa Cruz that weekend. I didn’t hear about it until like the week after.”
“And you never went to the cops about it.”
Ethan looked suddenly stricken. “I mean, I didn’t really know anything . . .” He fell silent. “That sounds pretty lame, right?”
Roarke felt bone tired. “Right.” He looked out on the vast, black ocean. “So why are you coming forward now?”
“The dummy was real torn up. Slashed up. Face, body . . . red paint splashed at the . . .” He gestured toward his crotch, looking a bit sick. “It didn’t look like a game.”
“No. None of this is,” Roarke said. He could hear the bitterness in his voice.
“And . . . now Stephens is gone.”
“Yes, he is.”
“So . . . whoever did the shit with the dummy and t
he spray-painting—they’re not naming names. Maybe they don’t know names. So anyone in the house . . .”
Roarke suddenly got it. “You mean, you could be next.”
In the darkness, he could sense the gears turning in Ethan’s head. The kid finally spoke. “When you put it that way, that sounds pretty shitty, too.”
Roarke didn’t let him off the hook. “It does, doesn’t it?”
He was silent for a minute, just looking out at the ocean, letting the boy be alone with his thoughts. Then he asked it.
“Was one of these guys Topher Stephens?”
“I don’t know,” Ethan said. “I know Stephens was one of the guys who cleaned up the paint and the dummy that morning. But I don’t know for sure about any of the—”
Roarke waited.
Ethan looked at him. “I don’t know who raped her.”
Back in his hotel room, Roarke looked up the photos Reynolds had sent him of the vandalism at Storke Tower. He knew what he was going to see, but he checked anyway.
The dummy that had been hung from Storke Tower had not been “slashed up.” There were no violent splashes of red at the crotch. So when Sandler, and Topher’s father, had talked about the damage to the dummy, they were talking about the other mannequin, the one that had been hung at the satellite house.
The men had known about that attack on the frat itself.
“Fuck it,” Roarke said, and only then realized he’d spoken aloud.
They’d been lying all along. At the very least, holding back.
He paced the luxurious expanse of the room.
He was sick of the lies. It felt like every day his team had to do this bullshit work, he was losing his grasp on the task force. There were real crimes to pursue, real perpetrators to take down.
But he wasn’t going back to confront Stephens or Sandler. Not tonight.
He pulled out his phone, dialed Epps, got voicemail. Good, he thought. I hope you did go back to the city. He waited for the beep, and said, “Someone’s finally decided to come clean.”
He left a message filling the other agent in on his encounter with Ethan, saying that he’d follow up himself in the morning.
He disconnected, checked his email and messages quickly, then sat himself down on the sofa facing the glass doors, braced himself, and clicked on the email inbox that he’d given Parker as a contact.
He was on his feet, pacing, before he’d read to the end. He felt sick, shattered by the short message:
Bring the package across the border on I-10. Wait there for instructions.
He tried to think through the panic he felt.
The message was from Ortiz. There had been no other email, nothing from the hunters that would have prompted it.
Does that mean they have her? Had he missed an email?
He was dialing Singh before he could stop himself.
“I just saw the email from Ortiz. Have the hunters contacted him?”
Her voice was eternally calm. “There have been no responses to Ortiz’s email, and no further posting from their accounts in the forum. But I have been able to determine their IP address from their earlier posting. The IP indicates that they were in northeast Arizona yesterday.” She paused. “I used the information you obtained from Parker and took the liberty of calling these men on their private numbers and at their places of employment. Their businesses report that they are on vacation, and their cell phones go to voicemail.”
Which means what? Of course they’ve taken time off work to go hunting.
So the last place they were heard from was northeast Arizona.
If they had Cara, it was a day’s drive from there to the California border.
He was lost for a moment, as images from road trips in the Southwest flickered in his mind.
Deserts. Mountains. Canyons.
And it hit him. A way to find her.
“Singh. Can you search for unusual murders or disappearances in Arizona, that general area? Especially with Cara’s—Lindstrom’s—M.O. And especially near Indian reservations.”
“I will, of course,” Singh responded.
Maybe he’d been right about where she’d gone, all along.
Chapter Fifty-Four
He was thirsty. And he needed a shit. Bad. He’d avoided using the bucket the bitches left for him. But he couldn’t for much longer.
They were feeding him drugs, he knew. In the water they left for him in a fucking dog bowl so he had to lap it up. In the crap food they left for him when he was passed out. When he did manage to wake up he was so groggy he could barely move. His head was pounding like a motherfuck.
But right now, somehow, it seemed even harder to move than before. He flexed his arms and legs . . . and it finally dawned on him. His ankles were chained, too, now. And that finally woke him up.
There was something dark and round and gleaming squatting in a corner of the stall, on sticklike legs. His heart leaped to his throat.
Then his eyes focused and he realized it was a barbecue grill.
What? What the fuck now?
The stall door creaked open and the two cunts walked in. Dressed in those lame hoods and skull masks.
One of them carried a laptop. She set it down at a distance, facing him, and hit a key so a video started to play.
He stared at it through bleary eyes.
There was another skeleton figure on the screen.
A hissing, spectral voice came from the speakers, echoing in the dark of the barn.
“We are legion. We are done. We will bring about the death of rape culture by any means necessary. One rapist will die every day until these conditions are met.”
The video played through. Unbelievable bullshit about releasing names of rapists. Threatening judges.
“This is a call to arms. This is a war on rape culture.”
The taller cunt closed the laptop.
“Y’see, it’s not all about you. Right now, people all over the country have assholes like you locked up. We’re just waiting on word that says you’re the sacrifice of the day.”
Topher felt the burn of rage. But he was also a little nervous. Just a little. “You all are fucked, you cunts. Don’t you watch the news? That feminazi bullshit is done. Nobody’s getting away with that shit anymore. Your asses are so fried. You think anyone’s gonna protect you? If you were fucked before, you are dead, now.”
One of them answered, softly. “And that’s why we have nothing to lose.”
He felt another twinge of nerves. Even through the drugs, that made a little too much sense.
“Let me tell you how this goes,” she continued, relentlessly. “Guys that are straight up about what they did? They get let go. The ones that keep quiet? Not so much.”
She paused to let that sink in, then said softly, “On Halloween night you raped Caitlin Rose with a bunch of your friends. You’re going to tell us the names of all the bros who raped her.”
Now nervous didn’t begin to describe how he felt.
“Fuck you,” he managed.
“I’d rethink that answer.” She pulled something out of her robe. A cardboard tube stuffed with newspaper. In her other hand was a lighter. “That straw you’re on? Highly flammable.”
She lit the tube like a torch, held it up. The light danced on the skull mask.
“You won’t,” he said.
“You just keep telling yourself that.”
But instead of lighting the straw on fire, she touched the torch to the barbecue grill. Whatever was inside it caught instantly, roaring up in flames.
The other one held up a long, thin pole. He couldn’t tell what it was. It looked like some kind of medieval torture implement.
She started to heat it in the flames.
And now the panic overcame him. He blurted out, “I don’t know who this bitch was, but I never touched her.”
The figure at the grill turned on him. “This bitch. This bitch?”
They both moved up to him, staring down at him with sku
ll faces.
Then one stooped, and ripped the blanket off his body.
DAY FIVE
Chapter Fifty-Five
She drives out of the canyon at dawn, in the dead hunters’ truck. She passes quickly through the sleeping town of Chinle to pick up Indian Route 15.
After nearly two months, she is on the road again.
On the road.
As always, the movement, the driving, feels natural. There is a physical pain in leaving the canyon behind. Her refuge for far too short a time . . .
But the voice is in her head:
The canyon is not for you.
The winding road crosses through a huge flat valley with distinctive low hills rising out of the middle of the land. More than hills: they are freestanding mountains, towering land masses, like gods walking in the fields.
She is armed with knowledge from the Glittering box. The phone has revealed all.
And she is armed with more than knowledge. There is a small arsenal in the back of the truck.
She is vastly uneasy, even knowing it is there. She feels the death weight of it dragging the truck down, like a lead saber at her back. But she must be prepared for all eventualities.
She has seen postings in the rape forums about Ortiz’s bounty.
The lengths to which he still seems willing to go are unreal, insane. But if his hatred has festered this long, there will be no end of it until she ends him. Meanwhile he spreads his virulence to virulent men. If she is meant to re-enter the world, it is as good a place to start as any.
And as always, more will be revealed.
In his email message, Ortiz did not give the hunters a place to deliver her, only the vague direction to bring her across the border to Southern California and wait for instructions from there.
But she knows where Ortiz lives. He has never left Palm Desert. Theoretically the Coachella Valley is only an eight-and-a-half-hour drive.
His hunters are dead. But she fully intends to keep that rendezvous for them.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Roarke woke in his room at the Bacara and immediately reached for his phone.
He’d set it so that anything from the dummy email box would come up on his screen. There was nothing.
Hunger Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 5) Page 18
