As Singh started recounting the details, Roarke shook his head, thinking he must not be following. “A pimp and a trucker?”
“A pimp and a trick at once,” she confirmed. “Both with slashed throats. The truck stop is outside Salinas, on the same stretch of the 101.” Roarke knew without asking for clarification that she meant the same stretch of central California highway where Cara had killed a predatory trucker at a deserted rest stop. Only two months ago.
Singh continued. “The trucker in the cab of his rig, the pimp just outside. The trucker was killed on his bed and had his pants around his ankles.”
A pimp and a trick. The same configuration as the San Francisco murders. In Salinas.
It had to be Cara. And it was deliberate. She was saying something. And he knew it had to do with the girl on the MISSING flyer. The flyer sent from a Salinas office store. Sarah Jane Jennings.
But how? What?
No time to think of that for now. Singh had just said something else that instantly electrified him: “There is a witness.”
Roarke shook his head to clear it. “Call Epps. I’ll pick him up.”
“Will do, Chief. I have sent the initial report to your email, and I have informed the Salinas detectives that you will be there.”
As Roarke dressed, the phone buzzed again. This time he picked up to Epps’ voice. “Singh just called. I’ll come get you.”
“I can drive—” Roarke started.
“Been up for an hour,” Epps said. “Let’s beat it before traffic.”
Roarke had just closed his front door behind him when he heard an engine through the dense, early-morning fog, and Epps pulled up at the curb in a fleet car.
He had two large takeout coffees in the console and looked considerably more polished than Roarke felt.
As Roarke dropped into the passenger seat, Epps nodded briefly and set off down the street, concentrating on negotiating the car through the gray wall of fog until they were on the freeway going south.
Salinas was a two-hour drive from the city on the 101, an agricultural town ringed by low hills and surrounded by the fertile farmland that had earned it the nickname “the Salad Bowl.” It was famous as the home of John Steinbeck and as the focal point of the Delano grape strikes led by Cesar Chavez. More recently it was notorious for leading the state in gang-related homicides: turf wars between the Sureños and Norteños Mexican gangs.
Despite their grim mission, Roarke felt a kind of relief being out on the road, with unpopulated miles going by outside, away from the tangled mess of the crimes in the city. As he stared out the passenger window at the fog blanketing the hills, it occurred to him that this case had started on the road and kept moving back onto the road. It was Cara’s nature: she was a traveler.
But the tension in the car grew thick and thicker, as morbidly gray as the fog around them, relentless tendrils snaking across the freeway lanes, while Epps drove in silence. Roarke could feel the agitation coming off his agent.
And finally he allowed himself to feel what he hadn’t been acknowledging.
Loss. Even—grief. Epps was not just one of the finest agents, but one of the finest men he knew. The chasm that had opened between them since Cara had come into their lives was one of Roarke’s biggest regrets. And last night, for a few seconds in that alley, he’d been afraid that he’d lost this man for good . . .
Is it worth it?
Without turning to look at Roarke, Epps spoke for the first time.
“Salinas.”
Roarke glanced at him.
“The fax from Salinas. The girl on the flyer. The murders at the truck stop. This is Cara.”
Roarke looked out the window beside him. “Yeah.”
“She’s up to something.”
Roarke didn’t answer.
“Is it connected at all? To the Tenderloin kills? Or is it just Cara doing what she does?”
Roarke hadn’t had much time to think about it. It had occurred to him that Cara was deliberately drawing them down to Salinas, out of San Francisco. But why? To speak to him, perhaps? His pulse started to race just at the thought, and he forced himself to breathe deliberately to slow it.
Epps was speaking again. “And another trucker . . . She did that trucker in Atascadero. Is she targeting truckers now?”
Roarke didn’t think so. Her hunting had always seemed more random than that, driven by a purpose known only to her, a purpose he may have been as close as he would ever get to understanding when he was visiting her in the jail.
And yet . . .
These new pimp and john killings at the truck stop . . . after the pimp and john killings in San Francisco. There was something deliberate about that, the double pairing.
He finally said it aloud. “A pimp and a john.”
“Yeah,” Epps answered. “I know. ‘Pimp or john, they’re finally getting what they deserve.’”
Roarke looked at him, startled—then realized he was quoting Bitch’s article.
“Right. But we know that Lindstrom didn’t kill DeShawn Butler. This pair happened in the same night, almost simultaneously, and the first pair were killed several days apart. Even so . . .”
He thought of the last words of the blog, “This is a call to arms,” and felt a cold touch of foreboding.
He finished reluctantly. “I’m thinking there may be others. Singh should be looking.”
“She already is,” Epps said. Roarke glanced at him. “She said so when she called this morning. I’m pretty sure she’s looking at everything.”
Roarke had no doubt.
Epps shifted his large frame in the seat. “You and Lindstrom . . .” Roarke could feel the change in the air, and his stomach plummeted. It was the moment he’d always known was coming.
He knows I’ve been going to see Cara. Singh told him.
At the same time, Roarke was sure that Singh would never do it. Whatever she thought, whatever she had to say about it, she would say directly to him.
Then Epps said stiffly, “I don’t know what you two got between you. But I know it’s there, and I know you better start using it. We’re talkin’ about a sixteen-year-old girl out there now, getting into all kinds of shit. It has got to stop. You need to use what you know, however you can. And you get no more grief from me about how you do that.”
Roarke was startled, and grateful. He nodded, looked out the window into the fog.
If only I did know.
It was nearly eight a.m. as they motored down Salinas’ historic Main Street, with its Gold Rush–style buildings interspersed with cheap, bland modern structures.
The truck stop was outside the town, a little south of it: a triangle-roofed mini-mart stuccoed in desert colors, set in the middle of a bleak, sandy expanse, with wide, flat farm fields stretching for miles around it.
There was a diner and a comfort center with men’s and women’s showers, a large drive-through truck wash, and a parking lot with spaces for about seventy-five rigs. A neon sign advertised FUEL–WEIGH–WASH. The only other décor was telephone poles, spiky round cactus clusters, and oversize sandstone boulders, all of it shrouded in slowly rolling coastal fog.
The Monterey County detectives, Escobar and Morales, met the agents inside the diner.
Roarke looked past a chalkboard menu advertising tri-tip steak sandwiches and burrito combos, to survey a room full of truckers hunched at tables and pacing at the windows. Several uniformed cops circulated in the room, talking to the truckers, scribbling notes on spiral pads. Workers hustled behind steam tables to keep the steel trays heaped with scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, refried beans.
Escobar saw Roarke watching the assembled men and smiled bleakly. “We detained ’em as witnesses. They’re all eating for free, but they’re not too happy about it. Your Agent Singh filled us in on the trucker in Atascadero. You thinking som
eone’s targeting truckers?”
The agents exchanged a glance.
“You said there was a pimp dead, too,” Roarke said.
Morales answered, “Guy had a drug record for sale and possession. But yeah. He brought a girl to the stop last night.”
“Is that the witness?” Epps asked, and Escobar nodded to him.
“She’s down at the station. She’s pretty strung out—haven’t got much out of her yet.”
“We’d like to see the scene first,” Roarke said. “If you don’t mind.”
Outside in the parking lot, the detectives walked them between trucks toward, inevitably, the last aisle. Party Row.
Along with showers and large, hot meals, truck stops all over the US provided easy access to sex and drugs for drivers who wanted to partake. Meth and other forms of amphetamine were popular, of course: something to keep the drivers awake on the long hauls. But a whole smorgasbord of illegal substances was on offer.
There was less variety in the women. Hooking at truck stops was the lowest of the low, the women generally hard-core addicts. Survival prostitution, it was called.
Roarke looked ahead to where one eighteen-wheeler had its passenger door standing open. A uniform hovered, on watch.
“Found the one guy on the ground, there.” Escobar motioned to the evidence flags, an unnecessary gesture: the body had been taken away, but most of the blood was still clotting the dust beside the rig. “Leon Jonas. Not a trucker, and not a local—his license shows him living in Chico. Motel owner down the road says he checked in last night. His car was in the motel lot. We found cash and bags of crystal on him. Meth is what his record’s for.”
“Until he decided to branch out,” Epps said.
Morales nodded. “The gangs do a lot of the pimping around here but mostly in town. The truck stops, though—we get a fair amount of pimps bringing in girls from all over the state. Most nights this place is crawling with . . . commercial ladies.”
Roarke knew he’d been about to say something harsher. “And last night?” he asked.
“Unidentified male phoned 911 around one a.m., reported that a guy had collapsed outside his truck. Makes sense it looked like that from a distance: the open truck door, the guy on the ground. Ambo gets here 1:19, paramedics see the DB, call it in. First officer on scene investigates the truck, finds the second body in there. Pants down, throat cut. Driver of record, William Michael Nesbitt.” The detective gestured up to the cab of the truck. “Cab’s a mess. Stay to the left of the runner.”
Roarke stepped up on the runner and balanced there, holding on to the doorframe to get a look inside. A mess was what it was. Drying arterial blood spray curtained the inside of the cab. So familiar to him now, the crimson trail Cara left in her wake.
Why here, though? Why does she want me here? What is she up to?
He looked back out the door over the lot, the scattered trucks. Not the usual configuration of neat, closely parked rows; instead a seemingly random scattering. “Not a lot of vehicles,” he said to Escobar. The detective nodded.
“According to the diner manager, this place was packed last night. Lot of the rigs disappeared ’tween the time we got the call and the time we got to the stop. News must of been all over the CB waves. It’s the ones who slept through it we got corralled in the diner.”
Epps spoke tensely. “And the girl?”
“When the uniforms searched the scene they found her passed out in the field.” Escobar turned and pointed out into the fog beyond the last row of trucks. “She’s got blood on her but nowhere near what it would have to be for her to make sense as the doer. Plus she’s pretty young, looks to me like. Can’t see it.”
Roarke and Epps exchanged a glance. The girl on the flyer? Could it really be?
Epps opened the binder he was carrying, passed the flyer over to the detectives. “This her?”
The detectives studied the photo of Sarah Jane Jennings, looked at each other. “No,” Morales said. Escobar shook his head.
Roarke saw his own confusion mirrored on Epps’ face.
Escobar handed the flyer back to Epps. “We got this as a BOLO. There are a bunch of them circulating.”
“A bunch of these flyers?” Roarke asked, although he knew the answer before the detective said it.
“A bunch of BOLOs on missing girls.”
Epps shook his head, tight-lipped. Roarke could feel the anger coming off the other agent. It was a struggle to keep his own voice even.
“So who is this girl? The wit?”
Escobar shook his head. “No idea. No ID on her of course, can’t get a name out of her, but I can tell you she hasn’t been arrested here before. We got a desk clerk pouring coffee down her. Like I said, she’s pretty strung out.”
Morales spoke up. “But she saw the kill—one of them, anyway. She said, ‘She came in the truck and killed him.’ She killed him,” the detective repeated, in case the agents hadn’t heard. “When we talked to your Agent Singh, she said you’d seen this before?”
“It sounds like ours, yeah,” Epps answered, since Roarke was silent.
“The killer’s a lot lizard?” Morales asked in disbelief.
“No,” Roarke said. “Where’s the girl?”
The police station was a long, low, blue-and-white box in downtown Salinas.
The girl was in the station office, seated on a sprung couch, wrapped in a blanket and clutching a mug of coffee. Roarke’s immediate, visceral impression was that he was looking at a child. She was red-haired and freckled and seemed a bit older than Shauna, probably not as old as Jade.
“That’s a kid,” Epps muttered. Roarke turned to Escobar.
“Have you called Social Services?”
Escobar’s face tightened. “This isn’t San Francisco, Agent Roarke. Social Services doesn’t have enough workers for the kids they take away from their parents, let alone . . .” He gave the girl a glance.
Roarke’s face tightened at the unspoken word. Far too many law enforcement officials still thought of prostitution as voluntary. Many agencies still focused on arresting the girls rather than the men who trafficked them.
“We’d like to have a few minutes,” he told the detectives. Escobar didn’t look pleased, but he nodded to Morales and they stepped out.
Epps stayed near the door and did his best impression of being invisible, which was surprisingly good, while Roarke took a chair and placed it not too near the girl, then sat facing her and cleared his throat. “I’d like to talk to you about last night, if that’s okay.”
She didn’t look at him but stared at the floor, glassy-eyed. Her blanket had slipped off one shoulder, and he could see her neck and chest were still dotted with dried blood, presumably from the arterial spray when Cara cut the trucker’s throat.
“I’m Agent Roarke,” he told her.
The girl glanced up, a quick, wary look.
“You’re not in any trouble,” he assured her. “No one’s bringing charges.”
She was silent, fixed on the floor again.
“I know you’ve had a rough night,” he told her, he hoped gently. It was probably the understatement of the year, and he found himself wishing Rachel were with him. “We just want to find out what happened.”
There was no response from the girl.
“Can you tell me your name?”
She didn’t look up, didn’t look at him.
“Or where you’re from?”
Silence.
“Everyone’s from somewhere,” he suggested. There was no response.
“How old are you?”
A dozen answers flickered on her face, clearly too many for her to choose from in her state.
“If you’re going to make me guess, I’m going to say fifteen.”
She looked startled, then nodded warily.
“H
ow’d you get here?”
Her face tremored. She looked down and shrugged. “Leon brung me,” she finally said, in a voice that was rough as sandpaper and barely above a whisper.
“Leon’s your pimp?”
“My boyfriend,” she said dully.
Typically what prostitutes called their pimps. Voluntarily or otherwise. Roarke saw the tightness on Epps’ face as he shook his head, the barest of movements.
“Your boyfriend?” Roarke repeated. “For how long?”
There was a brief, haunted look on her face. “Couple weeks, I guess.”
“Where were you before then?”
She cleared her throat but didn’t speak.
“Are you here willingly?”
She was silent.
“If you tell me your name, we can get you some help. Help you get home—”
The girl jerked her head up. “No.”
Both agents flinched, and Roarke felt a flash of tired anger. “Or help you get someplace new as a home,” he finished. “Whatever you want.”
She didn’t look at him, and her voice was barely audible. “He said he’d find me.”
“Leon said that?”
She nodded, her hair falling over her face.
“Leon is dead,” Epps said, his voice hard. “Leon won’t be finding anyone anywhere.”
She started to cry then, silent tears running down her cheeks. And the story began to come out, one halting sentence at a time.
She’d fought with her mother a month or so earlier and had been staying at a friend’s house. The only other thing she would say about it was that she didn’t like her mother’s new boyfriend.
She’d met Leon at a party. He was older and very attentive. He bought her dinners and clothes. There was drinking. There were drugs. There were photo sessions, because, of course, Leon was a “professional photographer.” After a few days he said he was going back to California “to shoot a commercial” and suggested she come with him.
So often it was the same story, the same lies: “You’re so beautiful, you could be a model.” “I bet you’re a great actress.” “You could make a lot of money with that face.”
Roarke sat, and listened, and tried to contain his fury.
Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) Page 22
