Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

And the woman called Kaz steps inside.

  Chapter 8

  Roarke’s apartment was half a Victorian in the San Francisco neighborhood known as Noe Valley, often called “Stroller Valley” by the locals, in reference to the influx of trendy young families that had made the relatively sunny and walkable district their home.

  Darkness came early in the December days, and after business hours, curbside parking spaces were few and far between. Roarke’s own car was already parked in the narrow garage of his building, and he circled the block in the fleet car three times, peering through the drifting fog with no luck. Cara’s touch still burned on his skin, and thoughts he didn’t want to have were dangerously close to the surface. The cryptic conversation with her. The brush with the lawyer who would happily see him kicked out of the Bureau. And then there was the blog article. It bothered him in some way he was finding hard to pinpoint, something far beyond the media shitstorm it could bring down on the team. It was Marisol’s words that haunted him.

  “I prayed. I prayed to the saint and I was saved.”

  Somehow, through the turmoil in his mind, he noticed the dark Prius on his first time around the block, parked a few cars down from his flat. Someone sat in the dark car, a shadow in the driver’s seat. The second time he cruised the block, the figure was still seated behind the wheel of the parked vehicle, and Roarke’s antennae went up. On his third time past, he slowed to look directly inside the car.

  The driver was gone.

  He was able to squeeze the fleet car into a space at the end of a parallel block, and something made him open his suit coat and unsnap his shoulder holster as he walked the block and a half through the chilly damp back to his street. When he rounded the corner of his own block his eyes went immediately to the dark Prius farther down the street. He approached the car warily and looked down inside to be sure. The car was still empty.

  He let out his breath, turned away, and headed for home.

  No lights were on upstairs; no pets awaited him behind the door.

  He stood alone in the long hallway and went through the lawman’s nightly ritual: removing his suit coat, then his shoulder holster, hanging the coat and holster in the closet, and storing the Glock in the top drawer of an end table.

  He loosened his tie as he walked down the hall and through the archway into the living room with its views of city lights, and he felt the emptiness surround him. His ex-wife, Monica, had left over three years ago, and he had done little to fill the spaces left by her absence. There had been women, but none he had ever brought home with him. Lately his choices were running to the destructive, self- and otherwise . . . and the outright impossible. Epps had told him recently, “Your picker is broken.” He hadn’t been joking.

  Roarke crossed to the triple windows and looked out over the city, then down at the street, searching . . .

  The Prius was gone.

  The empty space at the curb gave him a chill of unease that he knew made no sense. The Reaper was dead. Cara was imprisoned. There was no one who would be out there in the night, watching.

  No one human . . .

  He stepped back from the window abruptly, almost violently.

  Now we’re getting crazy.

  He walked the room in a circle, but the thoughts remained. It was Cara’s voice he heard now.

  “You see It.”

  It.

  The way Cara saw the world was so far off his own personal radar that he couldn’t process it, much less accept it.

  But the fact was, she was right. He had once had an experience beyond the normal cop “blue sense”—the intuition that keeps cops on alert, that sometimes keeps them alive. He had been in a hospital room with a dying man, one some would call an evil man . . . and something else had been there that Roarke couldn’t explain, that had disturbed him on such a fundamental level he’d transferred out of profiling.

  Whether It was a separate, independent force or just a word for the evil that human beings do, Roarke didn’t know. He only knew that evil was real.

  It was evil.

  He hadn’t been able to handle it . . . and Cara had made it her life’s work.

  In the darkness, he could see eleven-year-old Marisol’s pale, tearstained face.

  “I prayed to the saint and I was saved.”

  And then he saw Cara’s face, the look in her eyes as they touched. And he heard his own question:

  “Why you?”

  And her response.

  “Why you?”

  He stood, abruptly, pushing the thought from his mind, and walked to the kitchen in search of food, or a drink.

  Chapter 9

  The evening passes without a word from Kaz.

  Dinner is served in their cell, gluey macaroni and cheese, some form of overcooked vegetable, an equally gluey lump of chocolate cake. They eat as if the other weren’t there.

  The game is intimidation. Cara is aware that every move she makes is being watched, but she has no interest in playing. The other woman wants something from her, and she will reveal it when she is ready, so Cara waits in a silence punctuated only by bouts of a hacking chest cough from her cellie—whether from long-time smoking of various substances or some illness, it is not entirely clear.

  After the dinner trays have been removed, Kaz finally speaks.

  “I been studying up on you, Blondie.”

  Cara turns toward Kaz. Her next words are a surprise, and then not.

  “You killed all those guys?”

  Cara looks the other woman full in the face, holding nothing back. “I never killed anyone,” she says. Her tone puts the lie to the words.

  “Damn . . .” Kaz says softly.

  She says no more, but Cara knows that her presence in the cell is no accident. There is something building. It will not be long.

  She will wait.

  She is in a maze, running, with hot, rasping breath coming from the walls. At the end of a corridor a shadow slithers from the adjoining one, falling in a black and loathsome pool on the cement floor . . .

  The screaming wrenches her from the dream, and she sits straight up in the dark.

  On her bunk, Kaz is awake, too, eyes wide and glistening, her arms wrapped around her knees. The screaming is elsewhere, at the other end of the cellblock.

  “Lin,” the other woman says hoarsely.

  Cara is very still, listening. Screams are a language, too.

  After a moment, she breathes out. There is no one with the woman who is screaming. Not this time. It is only her past that torments her. Whatever has wounded her is still with her every hour of her life.

  Cara turns to her cellie. “What happened?” she asks.

  “Driscoll,” Kaz says, her voice full of loathing. And something new. Fear.

  Of course. The CO with the feral face, the one who watches her. Watches them all.

  “Lin’s not the only one,” Kaz says flatly. “He shows up at your cell, says he’s takin’ you to Health Services. But you never get to Health Services, right?”

  Cara’s body clenches all over. She tries to breathe through her fury and dread.

  “Lin tried to fight it. She filed a report on him. So he comes to her cell one night. With two friends. Now she doesn’t talk.”

  No. She screams.

  The two women look at each other across the cell. There is no more anger in Kaz’s face. Only fear.

  And Cara knows. It will come for her, too. The only question is when.

  The two women lie back on their bunks, and the screaming starts again. In the sound, Cara sees savage jaws, blood spurting as the beast rips into flesh.

  Roarke, she thinks. Roarke.

  DAY TWO

  Chapter 10

  Roarke woke with his chest tight, his heart pounding. And an overwhelming feeling of anxiety, of danger.

 
He reached for the bed stand to check his phone for the time. Five a.m.

  He lay back on his pillow, staring at the ceiling and fighting the urge to call the jail, to make someone check up on Cara. Absurd. Impossible.

  You can’t do that. You can’t do any of this.

  What happens will happen.

  Take a day off. Let the prosecution handle this case. Stay away.

  Instead he threw back the covers and stood to dress.

  It was early, too early, and only the emergency lights were on in the office. But when Roarke stepped into the agents’ bull pen, with its long maze of desk cubicles, he could feel a presence. There was someone else in the office, somewhere. With the lights out.

  What is this?

  He stood for a moment in the doorway, listening for sound, motion, anything to give him a clue. But there were no ordinary office sounds. Someone was being very still.

  He moved forward slowly, easing his way into the first aisle between two rows of cubicle walls, his ears straining ahead.

  Suddenly a dark shadow stood from a cubicle in the center of the room.

  Roarke felt a jolt of adrenaline . . . then recognized the slim figure, the long black hair.

  Singh.

  He relaxed. He should have known by the quietness that it was her. Unlike other agents, who were always in restless motion, she seemed to create a pool of calm around her.

  But as he moved toward her in the dim light, he realized she was tense. Nervous.

  Of course. She’s an agent, but she’s still a woman alone in a dark office building.

  “I’m sorry—” he began.

  “My fault,” she interrupted. “I was absorbed.”

  He was at her enclosed desk space now, and as he glanced down at her computer he could see a blog page on her screen. The same article Molina had shown him the previous day. Lady of Shadows.

  “This blog—” she started.

  “I know. Molina showed it to me yesterday.”

  His agent breathed out, something like a sigh. “It has been picked up by the papers. It is garnering quite an online following. It seems our luck on relative media silence has run out.”

  That was inevitable, but Roarke felt himself tense up again, thinking about the firestorm that might well hit.

  Singh contemplated the screen. “Molina is clever. I do not see this often: Americans invoking an archetype.”

  Roarke stared at her. He had no idea what she was talking about.

  She frowned, as if seeking words. “A divine energy,” she explained. “A living myth.” She looked at Roarke and seemed compelled to be more precise. “A force beyond the simply human. The article suggests that there is something larger at work in Cara’s actions, something cosmic. A female vengeance against outrages. In today’s fundamentalist climate it is an alluring idea.”

  Though Singh never talked about it, Roarke had always assumed she had some sort of spiritual practice. But this was the first time he could remember her speaking in those terms. He hadn’t read the article that way. He’d been focused on the telling of a criminal incident he himself had been involved with. But standing in the dark room with Singh, he wondered if he might have missed the point entirely—because it was not meant for him.

  Singh glanced down at her memo pad. “Journalists have been calling. They want an interview about Cara Lindstrom. Media is asking if we are going to do a press conference.”

  Without thinking, Roarke snapped, “Obviously not.”

  He instantly regretted his tone. Singh looked at him in that thoughtful way again. He cleared his throat. “Do you think we should?”

  She glanced at the article on the screen. “To be honest, I am more concerned about the viral potential.”

  Again, Roarke wasn’t following her. He knew she meant viral as in online, but it wasn’t until she turned the monitor toward him and pointed to the top of the blog that he understood what she was saying.

  He had totally missed it the first time. The byline was not a full name, just the single word Bitch.

  Immediately his mind was racing with the implications. What it meant on the surface was that the blog author was choosing to remain anonymous but simultaneously aligning herself with a political movement that called itself Bitch, a cyberfaction in the style of Anonymous. He’d heard them called everything from a vigilante lynch mob to cyberterrorists to modern-day Robin Hoods. And he knew that his complicated case had just gotten far more complicated.

  He sat on the edge of the desk opposite Singh’s. “Maybe you’d better tell me what you know about Bitch.”

  Singh nodded and leaned back in her chair. “The Bureau’s Cyber Crimes Division has been tracking the group since its recent inception, insofar as that can be done. As you know, these groups are not conventionally organized. They are more like Internet flash mobs, often with a political focus. There is no ‘place’ to join. Anonymous is the obvious example. Anyone who takes the name of the group is accepted as part of the group. There are factions within factions, infinite splinters. After Steubenville, existing groups splintered even more radically.”

  Roarke knew that by Steubenville she meant the very publicized Internet outing of several members of an Ohio high school football team after the rape of a drunk and unconscious teenage girl. Members of the team had tweeted and posted photos of the prolonged molestation, which had brought the outrage of a splinter group of Anonymous down on the perpetrators and the whole town.

  Singh continued. “Some people in some factions thought that the emphasis on pursuing sex offenders was too moral. They derided the crusading element as ‘moralfags.’ Other members of the collective felt they wanted to focus much more on cyberactivism in the vein of the Steubenville outings. While that debate was raging, a completely separate group surfaced, focusing on unequivocally feminist issues: rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, discrimination.” She glanced again at the computer screen. “So Bitch has not been around long, but it seems to have found a cause célèbre in Cara Lindstrom. The Internet is burning up with posts and memes.”

  She pushed her hair out of her face with a slender hand and looked across at Roarke.

  “I have no doubt that Molina will not hesitate to use this group in whatever ways she can devise. It may well get ugly for us.”

  Roarke knew she was right. They sat in silence for a moment. Then Singh spoke again.

  “I am not surprised they are making Lindstrom into a political cause. It is really quite radical, what she is doing.”

  “It’s not political,” Roarke answered automatically, before he realized how much he was giving away.

  Singh looked at him quizzically. “Every act is political.”

  He answered back without thinking. “And is every act divine?”

  “Of course,” Singh said, without the slightest irony. And as they sat in the dim light of the computer screen, Roarke realized he didn’t really know his agent at all.

  Alone in his office, he sat behind his desk and considered seeing Molina, to try to suss out where she was going with this involvement with Bitch. Then he thought of calling Mills, to see if the detective had made progress on tracking Jade’s real identity through the school system.

  He did neither.

  Instead he walked out through the office, stopping to give Singh a story about going in search of breakfast. She nodded without blinking and declined his offer to bring something back for her. He had little illusion that he was fooling her. What scared him was how little he cared.

  Downstairs in the garage, he collected his fleet car and drove to the Hall of Justice.

  The lobby was salmon-pink marble, lit by three huge and vaguely ominous Art Deco globes and still bustling in the week before the holiday. Roarke quickly scanned the space for anyone he might know, then turned toward the crossover to County #8. Even just entering the co
nnecting hall, he felt his heart start to beat faster, a guilty, exhilarating hammering. His anticipation was so great he almost ran into a young woman as she stepped out of the elevator: slim, black-haired, olive-complected, and very, very distraught. And familiar, though for a moment her emotional state was so overwhelming he couldn’t place her.

  He reached automatically for her arms to steady her, and she flinched away from him. “Sorry—” he began, and then it hit him. “Erin,” he said, looking into her face.

  Cara’s cousin, Erin McNally.

  When Roarke had been hunting Cara, he’d gone to interview Erin at her medical school in San Diego. That had been just weeks ago, but the young woman who stood trembling before him bore only the slightest resemblance to the cool and direct med student he remembered. She was gaunt, shivering, a wreck.

  Drugs? he wondered. Whatever it was, it was something.

  When she didn’t answer, he repeated, “Erin.” He saw a hint of clarity in her eyes at the sound of her name, and in that moment of focus he could see a flicker of recognition of him as well.

  “I’m Special Agent Roarke. We talked last month . . .”

  Too late he realized that she might not feel friendly toward the agent who was directly responsible for her cousin’s arrest. He hadn’t spent much time with Erin, but his impression had been that she was quite attached to Cara. As people who spent any significant time with her seemed to become. If they didn’t end up dead.

  In fact Erin’s last words to him had been a request: “If you find her, tell her I’d really like to see her.”

  Apparently she was there to do just that.

  Erin’s eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she was too pale for Roarke’s liking.

  “Here.” He took her arm and gently steered her toward one of the wood benches lining the wall. She collapsed onto it, pressing her hands against her temples as if she were trying to squeeze her brain out of her skull. He crouched in front of her. “I’m going to get you a Coke.” She took a deep, shaky breath and nodded.

  “Stay here,” he ordered, and as she didn’t seem in any hurry to move, he stood and strode toward an inner hall where he knew there were vending machines.