And then something else. Something black and terrifying, rising up from the core of him. Beneath her soft and yielding flesh he can feel the bones in the slender body he holds in his arms, an ancient skeleton, unrelenting death.
And in the dark behind his eyes he sees the white mask and empty eyes of a skull.
The fear is instantaneous, paralyzing. And he is staggering backward, away from her. Through the roaring in his head he cannot tell if he has moved or if she has pushed him away, reading his thoughts.
She is striped with moonlight, breathing shallowly, her glistening eyes locked on his, and her face is glass.
“Cara . . .” he says.
Suddenly she is twisting from him, running in slow motion through the pilings toward the beach.
His legs are like lead, the sand beneath him like concrete, holding him. But deep in the back of his mind, some sense of duty stirs. His hand reaches for the Glock in the holster at his side . . . he can feel the metal against his fingertips as he draws, aiming after her into the dark . . .
And then he drops his arm.
Chapter 69
The dark shapes of the posts towered around him, the crashing of waves echoed off the plank walk above. His chest felt as if something had been ripped from inside him.
He didn’t know how long he’d stood there, but when finally he moved, his head was pounding, a headache so blinding he could barely hold himself upright. He smelled salt and surf, and a spicy scent that he knew was hers. His head still swam from desire and fear. And at the same time, he wasn’t sure that any of it had happened at all.
He forced himself to walk, weaving mindlessly through the shadows of posts, stepping out onto the dark sand. The crashing of waves was deafening in his ears.
And it was only then that he felt his suit coat pockets were light. Too light.
He shoved both hands into the fabric, searching. His gun was there, and his wallet. It was his phone that was gone.
My phone? What would she want with it?
He stood under the moon, surrounded by the rolling thunder of the surf.
Then it hit him. His texts to Singh. All the updates on the interview with Jade’s mother.
A wave of sick guilt crashed over him as he recalled his own rage.
If she’s going after Alison . . . Oh, Jesus.
He forced himself to slow down, to think rationally. Of course the phone was fingerprint- and password-protected, data-encrypted. It was next to impossible that Cara, or anyone, would be able to access anything on it at all.
But if she had been following him, he might have led her straight to Alison anyway.
And if he had been half a second from killing Alison . . . what would Cara do to her?
He stared up at the cold moon, just a sliver from full. Then he lurched forward, running on the sand for the stairs to the boardwalk.
In the arcade, he slammed coins into a pay phone, dialed Epps, and shouted over the roar of motors and gunshots and music. “She’s going after Alison.”
“Jade?”
Roarke closed his eyes. “Cara.”
He left the phone, burst through the doors of the arcade, ran down the stairs to the sidewalk. Providentially, there was a taxi just letting a couple out at the hotel across the street.
He pounded down the arcade steps and dodged traffic. In front of the hotel he jerked open the cab door, dropped into the back seat and flipped his credentials wallet at the cabbie as he snapped out Alison’s address. “As fast as you can.”
It was a living nightmare of a drive. He fought visions of the house burned down, leaving nothing but a torched husk of a human being, a skull grinning out of the ashes, like the guard in Daly City.
It was on him. It was all on him.
The cabin was intact, the first relief.
He ran from the cab, plunging into the scent of pine needles, taking the sagging steps of the cabin in two strides, and pounded on the door. “Ms. Collins.”
No response. No sound within.
He stood back, raised his thigh, and kicked in the door.
The house was dark, and the smell of incense and scented candlewax was thick in the air. He felt along the wall for a light switch and couldn’t find one, but strong moonlight streamed through the window, and as his eyes focused he saw her . . .
Sprawled on the couch and so still . . .
“Ms. Collins,” he said, his heart in his throat. She didn’t move.
He strode toward the couch, his eyes taking in the drug paraphernalia scattered on the coffee table. Cara had killed at least one man by overdose in the same scenario.
“Ms. Collins. Alison.” He rolled her over and felt for a pulse. Her face was pale and clammy, her mouth slack. But her blood fluttered under the pressure of his fingers, and she was breathing, slow and shallow.
He was relieved . . . and then livid. He pinched her earlobe hard and was rewarded with an angry groan.
“What did you take?”
He pinched her again, under the arm this time. She flung a limp hand at him, trying to bat him away. “Whafuck . . .”
He strode to an upright lamp in the corner to switch it on, then back to the couch, where he pulled her up to sitting and stared into her eyes, now half-open. Her pupils were pinpricks. Downers, then. He scanned the selection of chemicals on the coffee table. There was no heroin rig, just scattered pills that he didn’t immediately recognize. “What did you take?” he demanded. “Valium? Oxy?” He hoisted her to standing and held her, doll-like and limp, against his hip, forcing her to walk around the living room.
She mumbled, slurred. “Sh’s here.”
“She’s here?” He swiveled around, looking toward the bedrooms.
“Was here. Was here.”
“Susannah?”
“Yr fuckin’ agent.”
Roarke fought confusion. Singh? Impossible. But . . .
“Dark hair?” he demanded. “Or blond?”
Alison’s head lolled. Roarke held her upright. “The blonde. Your fuckin’ agent.”
Cara, then.
“She drugged you?”
She started to twist in his grip, trying to push him away. “I’m fine. Lemme go.”
“She didn’t drug you.”
“I’m fine.”
Roarke sat her down on the couch, hard. She let out a howl. “Fuckin’ Feds . . . gonna sue . . . ”
He tried to maintain some level of calm. “This agent. What did she say to you?”
Alison wasn’t that out of it. For a moment she looked as sullen as a teenager. “Bitch said she would cut my face.”
Roarke felt the words as a punch to the gut as he envisioned the scene. He’d gotten nothing out of Alison. But Cara, with her unerring radar, had looked at this vain, pathetic woman and had known exactly what button to push for results.
“What did she want you to tell her?”
She glared at him, truculently silent.
“Do I need to cut your face?”
Her eyes blazed fire, and for a moment he saw Jade in her again. “Where Darrell is,” she said sullenly.
Roarke had a sudden flicker of understanding.
“And? Where?”
She stared at him. “Don’t know.”
He took a step forward and she flinched back. “He had a place outside Napa, okay? On Valley of the Moon. That’s what I told that crazy woman.”
“You’re going to write down directions.”
Epps arrived ten minutes later, just after the ambulance. By then Roarke was fairly convinced Alison had passed out rather than been given an overdose, but he wasn’t taking any chances. The woman was loathsome, but he was beyond grateful he hadn’t inadvertently killed her.
There was one more thing he’d asked her before they took her away.
As he wa
lked with Epps out of the house into the night, preparing to fill his agent in, he had to fight a crush of emotions. Relief that Alison was alive. Guilt over his unforgivable lapse. And most shameful of all, the fierce joy of abandon, the overwhelming sensation of Cara under the moonlight . . . regret and loss and desire . . .
He pushed those thoughts away. He knew his career as an agent was over. But there was something yet to be done.
So the story he told Epps as they sat in the fleet car under the moon was not the whole story.
“I was on the boardwalk, and I kept going back to this in my head,” he lied. “We know Jade grew up here. We think she was here last night. We think she might be going after people who have wronged her. So . . . wouldn’t she come after her mother? I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so I came back. Jade wasn’t in the house, tonight, but she was here sometime today. I pressed Alison on it just before you got here, and she said that money was gone from her secret stash. She says only Jade would have known where it was.”
Epps, of course, wasn’t buying it. His eyes were hard. “Alison just gives that up to you. Just like that.” He fixed Roarke with his level stare, and Roarke gave him the truth. Some of it.
“She was scared. Cara got to her first.”
He could feel the nuclear reaction building in his agent. “Lindstrom was here.”
“Yeah.”
“Doing what?”
“Same thing we are, I think. She’s looking for Jade.”
Epps gripped the steering wheel. “Looking for her? Or is she after her?”
That, Roarke didn’t know. He was afraid to think about it. He shook his head. “But this is what Cara threatened Alison to find out.” He passed Sawyer’s address to Epps.
Epps was still for a moment, processing this.
“Cara’s thinking Jade is going for Sawyer.”
Roarke didn’t know for sure, but he was willing to bet Cara understood Jade’s state of mind better than they did. “If Jade was here looking for money, maybe she got hold of Sawyer’s address, too. And now Cara has it . . .”
It was his best guess. There was a miniscule chance that they could find Cara’s whereabouts by tracking his phone, but he was certain she would be aware of that, that she might even plant the phone somewhere to fake her location.
And his gut said it was all about Sawyer now.
The agents sat in the fleet car, looking out on the road. Epps finally spoke. “So we’re goin’ up there. Napa.”
“I think it should be me—” Roarke started.
“What kind of bullshit is that?” his agent said.
They sat in silence. Roarke could feel Epps raging internally in the seat beside him. After a moment, the other agent spoke. “We could call the locals. Jade’s got . . . how much of a head start on us? Sawyer’s a meth dealer. We want this sixteen-year-old kid going in to confront that waste of skin on his own turf?”
Roarke shook his head. “She could be armed. Local cops not knowing even what we know . . . how are they going to react?”
Epps was silent.
“Napa’s two hours and change from here,” Roarke added quietly. The address Alison had given him was on the outskirts.
Epps shook his head. And shook it. And then reached for the ignition key and started the engine.
DAY TEN
Chapter 70
They drove into a thin dawn, on CA-17 out of Santa Cruz, winding through the misty, forested hills to I-880 and past the suburban malls between San Jose and Oakland. While Epps drove, Roarke reached into the back seat for his iPad and under the pretext of checking email, he used his phone tracking app to try tracing his phone. It was offline, of course. He initiated a remote wipe and lock of the device, then shut off the tablet and stared out the window.
Jade. Focus on Jade, he told himself.
The two agents were silent for a long, long time, watching the towns go by. The silence was dangerous . . . it allowed Roarke to slip into a half-trance state that was filled with sense memories. The roar of the ocean in his ears. The feel of Cara’s skin under his hands, ice cold and shivering at his touch. The fire of her mouth . . .
He was jarred out of his near-sleep as out of nowhere Epps said tensely, “Valley of the Moon.”
Roarke didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
Valley of the Moon. Of all the places Sawyer could live. And the full moon coming up tonight.
It was inexplicable . . . and inevitable. And ominous.
After quite a few more miles, Epps spoke again. “We even got a plan here?”
“Try to get Jade before she does this.”
This, meaning killing her mother’s ex-boyfriend. Her fourth kill? Fifth kill? Sixth? Unless Sawyer killed her first . . .
Epps’ next question was inevitable, too, and heartbreaking. “Get her—and then what? What the fuck do we do with her?”
Roarke gave the only answer he could. “Get her Molina as an attorney.”
The agents shared the silence, knowing it wasn’t enough. Epps shook his head bitterly.
“She never had a chance, did she?”
Roarke saw Jade’s face in his mind: that beautiful, wild, doomed girl. He couldn’t answer through the pain in his chest. He stared out the window, and Epps drove.
Epps merged onto I-680 toward Sacramento to skirt the Bay Area traffic, and they headed north and east around Oakland to Benecia and Vallejo. Then over the bridge spanning the Carquinez Strait into the Napa Valley. And suddenly the suburban sprawl was gone. On the left, bare hills rolled away from the highway, nearly white with winter grass, with pockets of sage-green trees, fronds of willows and bare-trunked birch. On the right was swampy marshland dotted with pale, fuzzy pampas grass. White mist rose from the water in the freezing air.
In the sudden isolation, Epps spoke again.
“Why didn’t Cara kill the Collins woman?”
Roarke had been wondering that himself, and he didn’t know that he had an answer. Because she doesn’t kill women? Because of something in Alison’s past that we can only guess at?
He heard Alison’s voice in his head.
“Fifteen—same age I left home. So?”
And then Rachel’s voice, the thing she had said to him once, that never left him.
“Runaway is a literal word. They run away.” And nearly always from the same thing.
Alison had left home at fifteen. And maybe whatever had happened to her then had earned her some reprieve now.
But there was another thought, both troubling and insanely hopeful.
Or maybe Cara didn’t kill her because she knows I couldn’t have lived with the guilt of it?
He stared out the window. “Who knows?” he said aloud.
The clouds in the sky were gray and white and dense. Heavy, Roarke thought. Pregnant. When the agents stopped for gas and coffee and the restroom, their breath showed in the air outside. Roarke looked up at frost sparkling on the rooftops, the tree branches and telephone poles adorned in ice.
“They’re predicting snow,” Epps said as he got back into the car, looking bemused. Of course snow happened in places all over in California, but living in a city like San Francisco, snow was something one chose to go to, not something that came uninvited.
They continued the drive on into Napa, a town that had been fighting its outlaw reputation for years, lately fairly successfully. The new Riverwalk with its artisanal food shops, luxe restaurants and boutiques, galleries, and tasting rooms had brought a new class of tourist to the wine country’s poor cousin.
But the motorcycle shops and bail bond agencies were still there in abundance. Darrell Sawyer wasn’t the only drug dealer to have found refuge for his illegal enterprises in the undeveloped acreage of the Napa Valley. Not by a long shot.
Outside of the town, two-lane roads wound through vast stretches of h
ills covered with patchworks of vine fields. Roarke had been to the wine country many times, but never in the winter. He was startled at the severity of the landscape. So lushly golden in the summer and autumn, the cut-back vines were now just gray sticks sparkling with frost, the fields between them dusted with snow.
The agents motored past the castlelike estates of the wineries, with their wild variety of architecture: replicas of Mexican haciendas, French estates, Belgian monasteries, surrounded by more of the severely trimmed grapevines, more bare trees in a thick, low-lying mist. The sky grew darker and darker above them, black clouds heavy with snow.
In between the opulence of the wineries there were stretches of road with strange, run-down dwellings: dingy horse barns and sagging silos and hop barns, and farmhouse after farmhouse set far back from the road in fields, each one approachable only by a dirt road through the field, each house with a thicket of old-growth trees clustered around it, shielding it from view.
Perfect hideouts for just about any illicit activity imaginable.
“You can just smell it,” Epps said.
Roarke looked at him.
“Trouble,” his agent finished grimly.
Following the directions Jade’s mother had given them, the agents turned off the highway and onto an untraveled parallel road. The clouds were thicker, darker, here, the fields devoid of human or animal life.
“That’s it,” Roarke said from the passenger seat, staring through the windshield toward one of those isolated farmhouses, set far off in a field.
And outside the car, it started to snow.
Chapter 71
Epps stopped the car beside a cluster of oak trees at the side of the road so the agents could survey the farmhouse from behind cover.
The fields surrounding the house had recently burned. The whiteness of the softly falling snow was a stark contrast to the blackened vines in the field. Roarke scanned the side of the house and saw several burned trees on one side of the thicket. He had seen this kind of damage often. A meth fire.
Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) Page 30
