“I’m not looking for trouble with you,” Cara answers.
The large woman gives her a cold smile. “That ain’t your call, Blondie.” She pushes back from the table and rises. “I’ll be seeing ya.” She turns to stroll back to the row of chairs from where she came. All the other women watch, without seeming to watch. And Cara knows this is not the end of the encounter, but only the start.
Chapter 4
Roarke signed out a fleet car from the underground lot in the Civic Center and drove the mile through the downtown corridor of Hyde Street to 850 Bryant, the Hall of Justice, known to the lawyers and law enforcement professionals who frequented it as “the Hall of Whispers.” It was attached to San Francisco County Jail #8 where Cara was being held.
He felt his body tighten as he glimpsed the curve of concrete ahead, knowing she was just behind that wall. But he drove past and made the turn at the corner and slowed beside the curb in front of the wide granite steps of the courthouse.
San Francisco Police Homicide Inspector Clifton Mills slouched against a stone urn by the side of the tall wooden doors, chewing on a toothpick as he scrolled through his phone. He looked every bit as disreputable as any of the other shady characters loitering on the steps, and not just because of his hangdog, silent-comedian face. His pants were threadbare khakis, his shirt a garish vintage Hawaiian, and in deference to the season he’d wrapped a red velour reindeer scarf around his neck.
He looked up before Roarke could honk the car horn and ambled down the steps past a collection of San Francisco’s criminal flotsam, his large feet slapping the granite in open-toed Birkenstocks despite the winter fog. He pulled open the passenger-side door, and the car rocked as he dropped his comfortable bulk onto the seat.
“Always a treat to see your pretty face,” he greeted Roarke.
“Wish I could say the same about yours,” Roarke responded, and pulled out into holiday traffic.
Mills waved his phone at Roarke, his rubbery features as morose as a bulldog’s. “Another email from Stanton,” meaning the ADA who was prosecuting Cara’s case. “He wants to see Jade again before the hearing.”
Roarke tensed. “Is he coming today?”
“Hell, no. Not letting him near her. Pompous little prick.”
“No argument there,” Roarke agreed.
“You believe this clusterfuck?” Mills muttered, and lowered the window to spit out of it. “The DA assigns Stanton, for Christ’s cunting sake. They couldn’ta used Bryce? Delgado? Hell, anyone in a skirt?”
Roarke knew what Mills meant. Strategically it would have made worlds more sense to assign a woman ADA to Cara’s case, both to deal with Jade and in terms of the delicate gender dynamics of the situation. Cara was a female crime victim who killed male criminals. A female prosecutor would have an implicit right to condemn her in a way that a male prosecutor would not. But it was a huge case, and the San Francisco DA’s office was as political as any, and Stanton was the district attorney’s golden boy. He was also so abrasive that his assignment tipped the case very slightly in Cara’s favor.
Roarke turned his mind away from the thought. “So what’s the game plan here?” he asked Mills.
“This girl is our case. Lock, stock, and smoking barrel. I want the little bitch to like us,” Mills said. Roarke rolled his eyes and waited for the real response. Mills shook his head. “We need to get her to tell us who she is. We need a name.”
Jade had refused to say where she was from, how old she was, or anything else about herself. Like Cara, in her way, Roarke had to reflect. While many parents these days had their children fingerprinted so they could be ID’d in case of emergency, Jade’s prints were not in the system. And running photos of her highly unusual tattoos through the Bureau’s Next Generation Identification system had resulted in zero matches: she’d never been arrested before.
He’d known all that but hadn’t considered the legal implications.
“Is that a crime?” he asked aloud. “Not to give a real name?”
“It is, actually. Supremes said so in 2004. Obviously we’re not going to arrest her for it, being that she’s our own fucking witness. But if she refuses to answer these questions in court? Judge’ll cite her for contempt. Not helpful for our side. And y’know Lindstrom has engaged Julia Molina.”
In fact, Roarke had not been able to stop thinking about it. Molina was a feminist lawyer who specialized in controversial cases. She was nowhere near as famous as Gloria Allred, though several attorneys of that caliber had also approached Cara, wanting to take on her case. Privately Roarke worried that Molina didn’t have the clout to do what Cara needed her to do. But that was another thought he wasn’t supposed to be having. He focused back on Mills’ gloomy summation.
“We can’t introduce any of Lindstrom’s past murders because she hasn’t been convicted for a damn thing. She has no motive for killing Ramirez or for being in that tunnel to begin with. Her story is that she wasn’t there. Which would be my story if I was there. So it’s her word against Jade’s.”
Roarke felt a fluttering of what he knew was traitorous hope. He looked out the window, impassive, as he made a turn past the Panhandle strip of Golden Gate Park, with its towering eucalyptus trees. Mills rattled on.
“Oh yeah, Molina is going to be all out to destroy Jade, credibility-wise. Key witness is a drug addict and a pathological liar. Molina can prove the kid is a user. She was drug-tested the night we brought her in to juvie.”
Roarke kept his voice even. “Are you thinking it could be dismissed in prelim?”
Mills looked grim. “My guess is it’s going to take Molina all of two seconds to establish reasonable doubt. The deceased had a violent criminal history. The area in which he met his demise was well trafficked by other violent criminals. The deceased had no money or drugs on him, for probably the first time in his miserable shitbag life, suggesting robbery as a motive. The area was poorly lit—make that not fucking lit at all: Jade claims she saw Lindstrom by the flame of a lighter. And let’s not forget that Jade admits to being there, her prints were on the lipstick case we found at the scene, and she had more motive to kill the asswipe than Lindstrom does.”
Roarke tightened his hands on the steering wheel, feeling lightheaded. For a moment, he could almost believe that Cara might go free. He felt it as a rush of blood in his head at Mills’ next words.
“Put it this way: if I had to bet today, I wouldn’t be betting on us. So work your wonder, Wonder Boy. We need a name.”
The Belvedere House was located in the heart of the Haight, San Francisco’s legendary hippie mecca. Roarke drove the fleet car past Victorians painted in rainbow colors, bottom floors largely taken up by cafés and grunge boutiques. The shop windows they passed were lavishly decorated for Christmas. Many of the displays showed more than a touch of a black humor: steampunk-dressed mannequins trimming a tree with grotesqueries, a skeleton in a Santa costume driving a team of skeletal reindeer. That was the Haight: flaunting convention, finding beauty in the outcast, the outré, the unacceptable.
Beside Roarke, Mills tunelessly hummed “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” as he looked out the passenger window at the street.
As usual, a clutch of ragged, homeless teenagers hung out, seated cross-legged, on the sidewalk below the stopped clock on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. There were similar groups congregated up and down the street. And as always, Roarke cringed inside at the number of obvious minors. Throwaway kids, following some hopeful dream of a more colorful, more liberated, even slightly magical lifestyle . . . and finding instead drugs, despair, and the most vile abuse by sexual predators.
It was here that Cara had encountered Jade and apparently had taken enough interest in the girl to stalk and kill her pimp. She had also interrupted a john soliciting a prostitute even younger than Jade and had beaten the john nearly to death in an alley just a block away. It was wh
at Cara did.
Roarke made the turn on Belvedere toward the shelter, an old Victorian painted a garish shade of purplish pink. It was a rare and vitally important haven, a nonprofit halfway house providing shelter and services for the Bay Area’s rapidly growing population of exploited teenagers. Trafficking was a vast and virulent problem, far exceeding the capacity of law enforcement to control. Nonprofit organizations like the Belvedere House were left scrambling to take up the slack.
Roarke realized that Mills had spoken and was now looking at him, perplexed.
“Sorry, what?” Roarke asked blankly.
“At least the media’s been distracted by the election. The Lindstrom story is out there, but they haven’t sunk their teeth into the particulars yet.”
They will, though. Roarke could feel that storm coming.
He parked the fleet car illegally in front of the historic old Belvedere building and put his “Official FBI Business” placard on the dash. He found his palms were sweating as he and Mills mounted the steps of the shelter. He had not seen Rachel since they’d fallen into bed together one night two weeks ago, after a long, ambiguous interview with Jade in juvenile detention. Roarke had been moved by Rachel’s fierce protectiveness of the troubled girl.
The hookup had been a disastrous misjudgment on his part. Not that judgment had been any part of the equation.
Now, at the same time that his stomach was roiling, he could feel his groin muscles tightening, and he had to turn his mind toward business. He forced himself to look at Mills. One glance at the scruffy detective was enough to put a damper on any illicit thoughts.
The porch was gated and the lawmen were buzzed in after announcing themselves into a speaker on the wall. The rope of Nepalese bells on the doorknob jingled as the door closed behind them.
In the front hall, crystal light catchers strung in tall bay windows cast rainbows on the walls. A lounge to the left was filled with battered and overstuffed furniture, some mismatched tables and chairs, a massive old television. A set of stairs in the hall led up, and another set led down. Roarke could hear the chatter of young, feminine voices on the lower floor and the ever-present thump of street music. There was a sweet, clean scent to the air—a faint layering of perfumes and bath and hair products.
He glanced at the wall of photos hung in the hall: teenage girls captured in snapshots, printed-out candids from camera phones. Not just dozens but hundreds, rows of them, a photo gallery of lost girls that Rachel was doing her best to save every day.
Just as Cara was, in her own merciless way.
Roarke led the way down the hall toward Rachel’s office and pushed through the door into a round room with built-in bookcases and a worn love seat. Behind a battered antique desk, Rachel waited for them.
He didn’t know her well enough to know her age; he thought mid-thirties, about what he was. Her hair was a natural red-brown and curly, past her shoulders; her body was slim and curvy and toned. But it was her anger that had drawn him. She simmered with a crusading rage. The same rage that set Cara on fire.
He couldn’t help but glance at the inner door behind her, cracked open to a small side room with a single bed. The bed that they’d shared just weeks before.
He saw from Rachel’s face that she’d caught his glance toward the inner room. She didn’t spare him by looking away. Her eyes locked with his for an electrifying moment, crackling with sexual tension.
Then she shifted her glance to Mills, taking in his outfit. “Mills, you’re a fashion plate as always.”
“Born this way,” Mills answered, unflappable. “The kid still here?”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “I would actually let you know if that changed.” She stood. “Let’s do this.”
“It’s the light of my life.” Jade greeted Mills sardonically as Rachel pushed open the door of the front lounge to let the men enter. The teenager slouched in one of the worn lounge chairs—a beautiful girl, with a wild blond mane and a blistering energy that rolled off her despite her posture of supreme uncaring. Roarke was surprised at how good she looked after just two weeks off the street. The meth sores had cleared up and her skin was back to the soft, glowing plumpness of her age.
Her gaze flickered over him as he stepped in behind Mills. “Whoa, you brought the Fed this time. You don’t watch out, you’re gonna make me feel important.”
“It’s your sunny disposition,” Mills deadpanned. “Draws us like flies. Mind if we sit down?”
She waved a languid hand. “Any position you like.”
Roarke flinched inside at the blatant sexuality of the reference, but he didn’t show it. Rachel crossed the room to sit at the far corner of the table. Mills lowered his bulk to sit on the edge of the battered couch opposite Jade.
“So how you feeling, Danger Girl?” the detective asked.
“I’d be better with a smoke,” she challenged him.
“Now, you know that shit’s bad for you.”
Jade widened her eyes disingenuously. “Right, and I’m a brand new me. Livin’ in the pink cloud.”
Roarke moved to the recessed window and leaned against the sill so he could study her. Rachel, the expert, put her age at sixteen. To Roarke’s eyes she sometimes looked more like twenty-five. Other times she looked twelve. And any thoughts he had about a sane universe dissolved in the face of what this girl had been subjected to in her short life.
And yet, Jade had fought back, in her way. The girl lounging in the chair was not crushed, not broken. She was covered with body art, her own defiant statement. Her back was especially startling: an intricate design of trees dropping fiery blossoms, a girl dancing in flames.
A girl on fire.
“So what’s shaking?” she challenged Mills.
“We just wanted to stop by, see how you’re doing.”
Jade gave them a knowing and infuriating smile. “Sweet. But we’ve been through this. I was meetin’ up with Danny in the tunnel. When I get to the arch I can hear him talking with someone. He lights up and I see that crazy woman with him. He says, ‘Want something, bitch?’ and she grabs his hair and slices his neck open with a razor. And I haul ass out of there. Fast as my fuckin’ feet can carry me.”
Roarke had an uncomfortably clear picture of the scene. He’d stood in that stone tunnel, looking down at the pimp’s body lying in its own blood. When he closed his eyes at night he could see how it had been, Cara and Jade in the cold darkness, their eyes locking above the corpse . . .
“See, I know what to say,” Jade finished loftily.
Roarke and Mills exchanged a glance. The detective cleared his throat. “Well now, it’s not about knowing what to say. We want you to tell the truth.”
Jade rolled her eyes. “Sure you do. You can chill, I get it. She slashed the living shit out of Danny. Gone baby gone. Can’t have someone like that running around loose, can we?”
Roarke was paying special attention to the words she used, her inflections. He had the strong sense of a California background: her breezy confidence, the hint of Valley in her vowels, the casual use of hippie expressions that were ancient history to a girl her age, and yet she dropped them naturally, as if she’d been hearing them all her life.
Jade narrowed her gaze as if she knew he was analyzing her, but she didn’t look his way. She arched her back against the couch. “You charging her with other murders? Besides Danny?”
Roarke and Mills barely refrained from looking at each other.
“Do you know of any?” Mills asked her.
“That’s your job, isn’t it?” she retorted.
“Doesn’t mean I can’t use some help.”
“Like all you can get,” she agreed, and her eyes slid toward Roarke. “I heard there might be a whole lot more. Charges.”
“Oh yeah?” Mills countered with exaggerated surprise. “Where’d you hear that?”
She widened her eyes. “I do read the papers.”
“Newspapers, huh? I thought those had folded.”
“L-O-L,” she drawled. “You’re a riot, Mills.”
“You’re very interested in Cara Lindstrom,” Roarke said, speaking for the first time.
Jade finally turned her eyes on him, though he knew she had been quite aware of him since he’d walked into the room.
“Someone kills someone in front of you, it makes an impression.” She watched him for a reaction. Roarke didn’t give her one. “So has she killed other people?”
It was not a question they could answer, officially. Roarke settled for “That’s under investigation.”
“Were they all like Danny?”
Roarke paused. Now that was a question. “Like Danny,” meaning pimps, abusers, bad to the bone? The fact was, they were. Some arguably worse.
She was still watching him closely, and he repeated, as neutrally as he could manage, “It’s under investigation.”
“How many?” she demanded. Both men looked at her. “How many people has she killed?”
Mills spread his hands. “She’s in jail, held without bail. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“You mean you guys aren’t worried about it?”
Roarke studied her. “What is it that’s bothering you, Jade? You think Cara Lindstrom will come after you?”
Jade raised her eyebrows. “Shouldn’t it bother me? I saw what she can do.” Her eyes turned shrewd. “Unless you’re sayin’ she wouldn’t do it to me.”
“It’s not an issue, Jade,” Mills said with something approximating patience. “Lindstrom is in jail. If you’re telling the truth, she’ll stay there.”
“Because the bad guys always stay in jail, right?” She glanced at Roarke again, her eyes mocking him. Roarke chose the truth.
“No, you’re right, they don’t. But you’re in a safe place, with people who want to help you. As long as you let them.”
“Let them help me,” she repeated flatly. “Why wouldn’t I do that?”
Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) Page 3
