Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  He found the soft drink machine and fidgeted beside the wall while a young mother bought drinks for her brood of five unruly youngsters.

  His thoughts were racing. Erin was several years younger than Cara. Her mother, Cara’s aunt Joan, had taken Cara in for a few short months after Cara’s family was slaughtered by the Reaper. Erin had been only an infant then, and still just a baby when her mother gave Cara up to foster care, citing overwhelming behavioral problems. From their interview Roarke knew Erin had seen Cara sporadically throughout their childhoods, but not recently, not for years. The fact that she had come up to San Francisco from San Diego told him the news coverage of Cara’s arrest was spreading; it also hinted at how deep the blood tie ran between the two young women.

  Other than that, Roarke had no idea what Erin could be thinking. To find out that a relative was a killer was enough of a shock. Add to that the circumstances . . . Unique didn’t begin to cover them.

  The harried mother finally turned away from the drink machine and herded her soda-laden children out of the snack room, leaving Roarke to make his purchase.

  But when he came back out into the lobby with the Coke, Erin was gone.

  “Damn,” he said softly.

  The guard who brought Cara to the visiting booth was not Driscoll. But as she seated herself on the low stool, Roarke could see Cara was even edgier than Erin had been. She was so tense that he could almost feel her vibrate.

  His heart was pounding. He wanted to put his hands through the glass, to shatter it, to pull her against him. Instead he picked up the phone on his side of the wall, waited for her to reach for hers, then spoke into the mouthpiece.

  “I saw Erin. She was just in to see you?”

  Cara didn’t look at him.

  “She doesn’t look good,” he said softly, and waited.

  She shuddered, from pain or anger, maybe both.

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  She rocked on the stool, twisting her hands in the manacles. Suddenly she pounded her clenched hands on the table. Then she was up on her feet, thrashing like a wild, trapped animal, slamming her arms against the glass. Red drops burst out on her skin, blood welling at her wrists from the chafing of the cuffs.

  Roarke was on his feet, alarmed. “Cara. Cara. Don’t—” She had dropped the phone. It swung uselessly on its metal cord. He dropped his own receiver and hammered his hands flat against the glass. “Look at me. Look at me.”

  Somehow his words got through. She stopped still, looked through the Plexiglas at him. He could see the pulse pounding at her neck as she panted, gasping breaths.

  He pressed his hands into the glass. Cara sagged forward. She put her forearms, then her head, on the clear wall. He leaned in, too, touching his forehead to the cold surface. They stood pressed against the wall, arms to arms, brow to brow, and he thought he could feel her racing heart through the glass.

  Without changing position, he reached for his dangling phone with one hand and brought it to his face. “Tell me,” he said into the phone, hoping she could hear.

  He could see her chest rise and fall as she fought with something inside herself. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and hoarse. He could barely hear her through the dropped phone.

  “Help her.”

  He felt his heart contract with longing . . . and dread. She had asked him for help once before. By the end of that night he had killed two men.

  He felt himself nodding. “Where do I find her?”

  “Stanyan Park Hotel.”

  He felt a touch of surprise, and something more concerning. The Victorian inn was in Haight Ashbury, just a few blocks from Rachel’s shelter on Belvedere—and it looked out on the park where Cara had killed Danny Ramirez.

  “I’ll go. I’ll see her.”

  She dropped her arms and now stepped back, standing with her head down, her hair hiding her face.

  “Is there something else?” he asked, his mouth against the phone. “You have to tell me.”

  She looked up then. “Erin,” she said.

  So he nodded.

  She held his eyes with hers. Then she put a hand flat on the glass barrier. Roarke reached out and put his hand on the cool, transparent wall, against the slim, small shape of hers.

  Back at the office, between dodging phone calls from reporters and surfing the Internet and Bureau files for information on the group called Bitch, Roarke reached at least five times for the phone to call Rachel. Each time he stopped himself from dialing. By the sixth time he knew he had to see her in person.

  Epps and Jones were buried in the mountains of paperwork Cara’s case had generated, and Roarke was able to escape the office without notice. He texted Singh he was following up with Rachel on schools that might recognize Jade. He even told himself it was logical to check, as it was their best avenue so far to find out who the girl really was.

  Lies. All lies.

  Once out on Market Street he peered through the windshield of the fleet car, staring through the twilight fog. He felt a disquiet about heading back to the Haight. San Francisco was a small city, but the coincidence of locale gave him a twinge that he couldn’t put a name to.

  Erin was young, still a student . . . it was a natural enough choice for her to stay in the Haight. It couldn’t have anything to do with Rachel, or with Jade, or with Danny Ramirez . . .

  Could it?

  He shook his head and focused on the traffic.

  It was dark by the time he’d crossed town. Fog shrouded Belvedere Street, rolling like slow, gray ocean waves off the steep, green hill of Buena Vista Park. He parked and pulled his coat closed around him as he climbed the steps of the House. He buzzed the intercom by the door. Rachel’s wary voice answered.

  “It’s Roarke,” he said, and waited, his stomach in knots. There was only silence on the other side.

  He was debating buzzing again, or using the phone to try to explain himself, when he saw a light go on inside. The front door opened and Rachel stood in the shadowed hall. She did not move to open the outer gate, but looked out at him through the metal bars.

  “Forget something?” she asked, her voice dry and unwelcoming.

  “I need a favor,” he said.

  Her eyes widened slightly. “You really are incredible.”

  He knew he deserved that, but it didn’t stop him. “It’s a girl in trouble, Rachel. A young woman. She’s—I don’t know. In danger, in distress. She needs someone to talk to. Not for me. For her. Please.”

  She glanced behind her. “Now?”

  “She’s just a few blocks away. I can take you over.”

  After a long moment she said, “Half an hour. That’s all you get.” She didn’t look at him as she opened the gate between them.

  Inside the House, she pointed him down the hall to her office. “Stay there. Don’t move.”

  As she climbed the stairs, something perverse in him rebelled. Instead of stepping into the office, he moved down the hall past the photos, the watching wall of teenage girls, to the front lounge.

  The room was dark. He felt along the wall for the light switch. A low voice spoke out of the blackness. “Special Agent Roarke.”

  His skin jumped, and his hand was automatically on his weapon. Then his eyes adjusted and he could see Jade, sitting in the shadows beside the window.

  He breathed in to calm his racing pulse. And for a moment he wondered what the girl could be thinking about, sitting alone in the night. Her life was hard for him to conceive: an unending cycle of sexual and physical abuse. How could there ever again be such a thing as normal?

  She reached to the lamp on the table beside her and flicked on the light. As she moved he caught the scent of perfume, some hippie, flowery kind of oil, jasmine, maybe. Then she tipped her head back on the headrest, her eyes on Roarke . . . on the hand resting on his holster.


  “Nice reflexes,” she said in that lazy, too-adult drawl. “What brings you here at this hour?”

  “I’m waiting to see Rachel.”

  Her eyes slid toward the door. “Does that give us time for a quickie BBBJ? Maybe DATY?”

  Sex worker terms. Bareback blowjob. Dining at the Y. He pushed down his anger and despair.

  “What kind of guy would I be if I said yes?”

  She smiled, and it was a hard thing to see. “Not much of one, I guess.” She looked him up and down. “So can I ask you something, Special Agent Roarke? You like nailing bad guys?”

  “Yeah. I do.” He wanted to keep her talking, but also it was an easy question to answer. He didn’t just like it. It was his life’s purpose.

  Her eyes were fixed on him, a startling gaze, a gray made up of changing colored flecks and lights. Kaleidoscope eyes, he thought. They didn’t look anything alike, but he couldn’t look at her without seeing Cara.

  “It’s like your destiny, yeah?” she prodded.

  Roarke was struck by the word. That question was not so easy to answer. The idea of destiny made him hugely uncomfortable these days.

  Before he could formulate a response, she nodded, as if he’d spoken. “So when did you know?”

  He wasn’t sure he was following. “Know what?”

  “When did you know what your destiny was?”

  Now he was not just uncomfortable but acutely disoriented. One way or another Jade had zeroed in on the exact question that had been haunting him since he’d first set eyes on Cara in the flesh, not even three months ago, the day when his destiny had derailed his life, or aligned it, or both—he couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

  Because if there was a destiny, his had started the day he learned of Cara’s existence, when at nine years old he had seen the first news report of the massacre of her family and her miracle survival. The day he began obsessing over a career of catching criminals . . . not just criminals, but monsters.

  The girl was watching him. “It’s something you have to do, though, right? Once you know, you can’t refuse the call.”

  He tried to get some grip on the conversation. “It’s a job, Jade.”

  She looked at him and slowly smiled. “Sure, Special Agent Roarke. Right.”

  There was motion behind him and he turned. Rachel stepped into the doorway, now wearing a coat and twining a scarf around her neck. She stopped and looked from Roarke to Jade. At the same time Jade looked from Roarke to Rachel, a quick glance, like flame. And a look of understanding and amusement flickered on her face.

  “Ohhh,” she drawled, her voice dripping with innuendo. “Well, then. You have fun, kids. Catch you later.”

  As Roarke and Rachel walked down the steps outside the House, there was a tense silence between them. Roarke was still unsettled by the oddness of the—conversation? encounter?—he’d just had with Jade, but he knew he had to focus, to do something to break the tension.

  “She’s—”

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. “She is.”

  Roarke held the car door for her on the passenger side. She didn’t look at him as she lowered herself into the seat.

  He went around to the driver’s side and got in, and he could feel her heat beside him. He started the engine and pulled away from the curb. Outside the car windows the shops on Haight were closed and gated; homeless were bedding down for the night in the doorways.

  “What’s the story?” Rachel finally asked.

  Roarke knew she was talking about Erin now, not Jade. He concentrated on the misty street ahead and tried to refocus himself on the task at hand.

  “Something’s happened to her. An assault, maybe, I don’t know. I met her . . .” He had to stop, calculate the time frame in his head. A month. A lifetime. “About a month ago. And when I saw her today . . .” He shook his head. “The change in her is extreme.”

  “And who is she?”

  “A med student. Twenty-four years old.” He knew he had to say it. “Cara’s cousin.”

  Rachel twisted to look at him in the dark.

  “She has nothing to do with—anything,” he said, but knew it was a lie.

  “Of course not.” Her voice dripped bitterness. She sat rigidly in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, shaking her head just slightly. Roarke couldn’t think what to say but was spared from talking by the sight of the oriel windows of the hotel, a Victorian silhouette against the dark expanse of Golden Gate Park, which loomed forestlike just across the street.

  He easily found a parking spot at the curb. Not many residents would risk leaving their cars overnight this close to the park. It was right here that Cara had stalked Jade’s pimp, Danny Ramirez, had found him getting high in a nearby tunnel, had slashed his throat in front of Jade . . .

  Why is Erin here, in this hotel? he wondered again.

  Rachel was already out of the car and looking up at the inn, which seemed oddly out of a time warp: cozily lit, with thick, elegant drapes at the windows.

  Roarke followed her, caught up with her. At the top of the steps he held the door for her, and she walked in without looking at him.

  The front desk clerk was involved with a businessman. Roarke reached for Rachel’s arm. She stiffened at his touch, but when he nodded slightly toward the staircase she played along and let him steer her forward without stopping at the desk. They walked up the stairs like a couple returning to their room.

  Roarke had called earlier and knew what Erin’s room number was on the second floor. Out of long habit, he stopped in front of her door without knocking and just listened for a moment. Rachel paused, too, watching him. There was no sound from a television, and he could hear movement in the room: muffled, sporadic footsteps on a hardwood floor, alternating with barely audible steps on some kind of rug or carpet.

  He reached out and knocked. Behind the door, the movement stopped entirely.

  “Erin, it’s Agent Roarke.”

  Dead silence from within. Rachel looked at Roarke. He spoke again. “Cara asked me to come by. I’d like to talk to you, if that’s okay.”

  Another long silence, then he heard the scrape of a chain lock. The door opened and Erin looked out.

  If anything she looked worse than when he had seen her at the Hall: more pale, the circles under her eyes more pronounced. She was in a T-shirt and faded sweatpants, and they hung on her, as if she’d shrunk.

  She met Roarke’s startled look with hollow eyes; then her gaze went to Rachel.

  “This is my friend, Rachel,” Roarke said quickly. He hoped Rachel believed that he meant it. “Can we come in for a minute?”

  Erin didn’t respond one way or another, so he eased his way forward. Erin backed up in pace with his movement and he stepped through the door, pushing it open behind him for Rachel, who followed, equally carefully.

  Erin moved farther back into the room and stood listlessly at the side of the oak wardrobe. “Did they kill her?” she asked in a dull voice, without looking at Roarke.

  He knew she must be talking about Cara, but it was such a startling question it took him a moment to answer.

  “No. No, of course not. She’s . . .” he was about to say “fine,” but that was such an obvious lie. “She’s all right.”

  “They’re going to kill her, aren’t they? They’re going to kill her for what she did.”

  It was Roarke’s worst fear, too, but it wasn’t on the table. Not yet. “The prosecutor isn’t talking about the death penalty,” he told Erin.

  She ran her hand up and down the edge of the wardrobe, scraping her nails on the wood with a ferocity that reminded him of Cara’s display in the visiting room that morning. “They will, though,” Erin said softly. “They’ll kill her.”

  “Erin, I think you need to—”

  He felt Rachel’s hand on his arm and stopped. He glanced at
her. She locked her eyes with his, a significant look. Then she shifted her gaze to the desk beside the window. Roarke’s pulse jumped as he saw the small, sharp knife on the blotter. There was blood on the blade.

  “Erin?” he asked softly.

  She saw them looking at the knife. Before she could move, he was across the room, blocking her. Simultaneously Rachel stepped toward Erin with her hands held out. Her eyes were focused on Erin’s midriff. Roarke stood in front of the desk, in front of the knife, and followed Rachel’s gaze . . . to the smear of crimson on Erin’s shirt.

  “It’s okay,” Rachel said quickly. “Let me see, Erin.”

  Erin backed away from her. Rachel dropped her voice lower. “I just want to check that you’re all right.”

  She moved closer, as carefully as she would approach a wild animal, and reached slowly to lift Erin’s T-shirt. Blood seeped from several precise cuts around her navel, forming a single word:

  D I E

  Roarke felt a jolt as he took in the letters. Rachel dropped the edge of the T-shirt and looked into Erin’s face. Her voice was calm and firm. “Okay. We’re going to get that fixed up.” She put an arm around the younger woman and steered her gently toward the bathroom. Roarke automatically started to follow, but Rachel put an arm out, holding him back.

  “Matt, I’ve got this.”

  He looked at her, startled that she’d used his first name.

  “I mean it. Go home.” Her voice was low and rough.

  He knew she didn’t hold him responsible for Erin’s distress, but he felt a strange guilt nonetheless. He nodded and said softly, “Call me if you need—anything.”

  He watched them disappear into the bathroom. Left alone, he stood for a moment, taking in the room: the canted windows, the mussed bed, the open wardrobe door . . . and the bloody knife on the desk. He glanced around, pulled the liner from the trash can, and used it to wrap the knife. He put the package into his jacket pocket.

  Then he moved quietly to the door and out.