Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Beside him, Epps echoed his thoughts. “Meth blowout. Not good.”

  They were silent, both thinking of Sawyer’s record for dealing.

  After a time, Epps spoke again, his voice tight with agitation. “Guy could have any number of soldiers in there. We can’t see for shit. And do we think he’s armed? Only to the teeth.”

  Roarke nodded, without speaking. Armed would be the best-case scenario. Meth lab busts often turned up stashes of weapons that ranged from submachine guns to military-grade rocket-propelled grenades.

  And that was only the start. The labs were highly combustible locations. The cooking process involved extremely flammable chemicals: ether, lithium, lantern fuel, anhydrous ammonia, sodium hydroxide, pseudoephedrine—any combination of which could be lethally explosive. The toxic gases produced in the cooking process were rendered more lethal by meth cookers’ tendency to seal the windows and doors of their makeshift labs. It was not a matter of if they’d blow up, but when.

  Roarke stared out at the frost gleaming on dead grass, the dormant vines, the blackened, twisting trees, while Epps continued his assessment in a low, tense voice. “I don’t see a car, either. How do we think Jade even got up here?”

  The bus system in Napa and Sonoma was extensive, though, catering to the multimillion-dollar wine-tasting industry. The wine country was spread out, and transportation was readily available.

  “Bus,” Roarke said aloud. The last one he’d seen was at the turnout they’d taken from the highway, less than a mile away. Easily walkable.

  “Not good,” Epps repeated. “We wait.”

  “Wait for what? What if Jade’s already in there?” What if Cara is? he added, but silently, in his own head.

  It wasn’t as simple as calling for backup. Federal law expressly prohibited law enforcement officers from entering a structure known to contain a meth lab. Only “clandestine lab certified” officers were allowed to do so. It could easily be a day or more before they could get a team lined up. If Jade was in there, they couldn’t risk waiting.

  Epps hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. “Fuck. Fuck.” He took a deep breath, controlling himself, and then spoke tightly. “Going in is crazy. We have no idea what’s going down.”

  “What else can we do?” Roarke asked quietly. Unnecessarily, as it turned out, since Epps already had the car in gear.

  They drove the car off the road, into the concealing shelter of the oak trees.

  As the agents got out of the car, Roarke noticed with total disorientation that it was already getting dark.

  Of course. The solstice. It was the shortest day of the year.

  And the full moon would be rising. Cold Moon.

  The agents moved slowly through the grove to the outer trees and looked across the snowfield toward the house.

  Snow fell around them in thick flakes, so softly it seemed like slow motion. Roarke felt a dreamy detachment as he watched the thicket, waiting for some kind of sign.

  Then a car engine started somewhere inside the trees. The muffled roar carried across the snowy field. Both agents took cover behind tree trunks, pressed themselves against rough bark, and squinted across the whiteness toward the farmhouse, watching.

  A 4Runner SUV emerged from the thicket, motoring down the dirt driveway toward the access road.

  Roarke stared hard at the truck windows, counting heads inside.

  “Two men,” Epps said from beside him. “No. Three.”

  The truck made a left at the end of the drive, onto the road, and sped off in the direction of the highway.

  The agents watched, waiting in silence . . . but no more vehicles emerged from the thicket.

  When Epps finally spoke, the words seemed brittle in the cold. “Okay. Okay. What now?”

  “That’s three less men inside,” Roarke said.

  “Three out of how many?” Epps shot back.

  Roarke had no idea.

  Epps shook his head violently. “Go in someplace we have no idea what’s inside. That could explode any second. We don’t even know Jade is there.”

  He was right. Roarke knew he was right. It was madness, against all rational training and protocol. At the same time he knew, with or without Epps, he was going in.

  And then they saw it: a wraith moving in the snowfield. A small, white shadow, bundled up in thick clothing of white and gray, heading into the thicket.

  Chapter 72

  The agents stared through the trees, watching the ghost figure as it slipped into the thicket and disappeared. They both knew they were not looking at a man.

  “Is it Jade?” Epps asked, his voice brittle with tension.

  Roarke was relatively sure it wasn’t Cara. For a moment he felt her body under his hands, the lithe length of her. He banished the thought and forced himself to focus. The figure they had seen was shorter, less in control of her body.

  “I think it’s her,” he answered.

  Epps shook his head. “All right, goddamn it.”

  The agents took the car and backtracked several hundred yards down the road, so they could cross the field under cover of another thicket and approach Sawyer’s farmhouse from the rear. Epps motored up the drive of the next farmhouse and stopped the car inside another cluster of oaks. The house looked deserted: no cars in what passed for the yard, dark windows, leaves piled up on the porch. A perfect place to stash their vehicle.

  Outside the car, the men stripped off their jackets and suited up in Kevlar vests and loaded their pockets with tools from the kit in the trunk. Wire cutters. Maglites. Neither of them spoke about what they would actually do with their weapons once they reached the house, but using them was out of the question. It would be suicide.

  Then they headed in a line horizontal to the road, crossing the barren grape field toward the back of Sawyer’s property. As they walked, snowflakes sifted down, slowly covering their tracks, and the sky darkened and the storm clouds moved fast, clumping and dispersing.

  The thicket surrounding Sawyer’s farmhouse was a tangle of old-growth trees. Roarke was sure some of them were over a hundred years old. The farmhouse was close to that age as well: decaying clapboard that had been well built in its time, before decades of neglect.

  They were in luck: there was no surrounding fence to cut.

  The agents’ breath showed in the air as they moved into the scraggly bushes of the undergrowth.

  They were silent, scanning the ground in front of them as well as the trees around them. Meth labs were often booby-trapped, with trip wires, grenades, even land mines. The snow had stopped and Roarke’s adrenaline was sky high; the dim woods seemed hyper-clear. Or maybe that was the light of the rising moon.

  Both men froze at the sound of a sudden, slight movement . . . a crackling of leaves, a crunching of snow . . .

  In total silence, Epps pointed ahead, toward the clump of trees where the sound had come from, and then indicated right. Roarke nodded and moved toward the left, the two moving in tandem, circling the trees . . .

  Roarke heard a rustle behind him and spun, his weapon trained in front of him—

  He faced a woman aiming a handgun. Her face was heartbreakingly familiar. He stared at her—at the weapon in her hand. “Rachel?” he said, through a dry mouth.

  A shadow leaped from behind . . . and Rachel staggered as Epps grabbed her waist and her wrist, forcing her gun hand high above her. She didn’t struggle as he shoved her face-first against a tree, applied pressure to her wrist. “Drop it. Now,” he said, his voice rough and low.

  She gasped and released her grip. The gun fell to the ground.

  Epps twisted her around to face them, keeping a strong arm locked around her neck. “What is this?” he growled. “You come for Sawyer?”

  She shook her head violently, spoke in a shaky whisper. “Jade. I thought if I could find her fir
st . . .”

  Roarke’s mind was racing, trying to put it together. Was it the truth? Or had she been deceiving him all along?

  “How did you find her?” he demanded.

  She hesitated—only a moment, but his heart sank during the pause. “I’ve been putting out queries in high school teacher forums. I tracked her to Santa Cruz High. She dropped out months ago but I knew where to start . . .”

  And then you talked to the street kids, he realized. But that could wait. There was a far more pressing matter. “She’s inside?” he asked.

  Rachel nodded, her eyes wide and glistening in the dim light. “I saw her go in.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Another pause. Rachel, you’re a terrible liar, he thought. How blind must I have been not to notice?

  “I saw three men get into a truck earlier. About twenty minutes ago. Then Jade went in the house—”

  She fell silent at the sound of an engine. With a hand on her shoulder, Epps forced her down to sit on the ground beside the tree trunk, and the three of them looked at one another in the gloom of trees, listening.

  “Same engine,” Epps said under his breath. Three men, Roarke thought, and knew his partner was thinking the same thing.

  He looked toward the house. Jade inside, with God only knew what and who . . .

  “Go,” Epps said. “Get her out. I’ll make sure they don’t get here.”

  “Be safe,” Roarke said. Way too late for that, of course. And it was a toss-up who would be headed into the most danger.

  “You watch yourself,” Epps retorted. “Just get Jade.” And he slipped away, off through the trees.

  Rachel rose to her feet and faced Roarke, her eyes huge and dark in the pale moon of her face. “I can help. Let me help.”

  He reached for her arm, then turned her around, reached into his service belt, and cuffed her. “You’ll want to stay put,” he said roughly. “If you move, you’ll probably be shot.”

  He left her beside a tree and went up the rickety back steps, cringing at every creak. To his surprise, the back door was cracked open. Jade must have used it.

  He pushed it open and slipped through. His breath came hard and fast as he scanned the dark around him, willing his eyes to adapt . . .

  He was in a mud room. Coats hung haphazardly on hooks on the wall. The inner door was cracked as well, and he eased it farther open, wincing at the creak of it. His eyes focused and adjusted to the dark, and he stared down the long hall before him and strained his ears to listen . . .

  The house was silent, but the silence felt heavy, loaded. Inhabited.

  He had to fight the urge to reach for his weapon. Firing it in a chemically laced situation like this could easily be the death of him and anyone else in the vicinity.

  He had his Maglite, heavy enough to use as a club. It would have to do. He moved forward toward the inner door . . . but felt a prickling of memory from previous busts. He turned and stared down at the detritus piled next to the back door, then nudged junk aside with his foot . . . and spotted what he’d hoped would be there.

  A hatchet. Redneck home-defense system.

  He stooped and picked it up.

  His breath frosted the air, white puffs in the dark, as he moved forward, wielding the hatchet.

  The farmhouse was a wreck. It was dark and dank inside, but razor-thin slants of moonlight cut in through cracks in the boarded-over windows, allowing a dim view. He glanced around him at wallpaper hanging off the walls, exposing slatted boards, furniture covered with dust, holes in the ceiling.

  Uninhabitable. But then, it wasn’t being used for living.

  The farmhouse kitchen had all the familiar accoutrements: camp stoves, pressure cookers, stacks of kitty litter tubs, cans of lantern fluid, propane tanks. The pantry door was open, and the wooden shelving held sloppy rows of canning jars and glass jugs with sediments inside, a clutter of plastic tubing, funnels, coffee filters, aluminum foil. The air was saturated with a smell of acetone and cat piss . . . that didn’t come from cats.

  Anything could catch fire. Anything. Just the debris that made up this kind of cooking could spontaneously combust.

  An unwanted vision of the guard, roasted alive, was suddenly clear in his head.

  He clenched his fingers to dismiss the image, then eased through the clutter, careful not to touch anything. The wind had picked up outside; he could hear it moaning under the eaves, whistling along the boarded windows. He stepped through the next open doorway into the hall . . .

  There were bedrooms lining one wall, and the wide arch of what he presumed was the living room at the end of the other wall.

  Someone was walking around in that room.

  And then Roarke’s pulse shot up. From farther inside the house, there was a violent scrabbling and a man’s shout. “What the fuck—” And then “Fucking bitch—”

  But anything further was cut off by a yelp of pain.

  And then silence.

  Roarke breathed in, moved into the inner hall, leading with the hatchet . . .

  The hall was a tunnel of near dark. A long passage ahead of him, with moonlight filtering in from cracks in a few panels of the front door.

  The sounds had come from the living room, or main room, or whatever you called it in a farmhouse.

  He stood still to listen through the sound of the wind. Nothing.

  He eased his way past the open door of a bedroom . . . glanced in to see cracked boards over the windows, a sagging iron-frame bed with a filthy mattress. He could smell piss and vomit, and another smell, troubling but elusive. He swallowed through the rush of bile and moved on past another, similarly wrecked room, stopping before the archway of the living room. He pressed himself against the doorframe and listened. A man’s voice rasped, “I’ll kill you . . .”

  The voice he heard next was low, light, and feminine, slightly hoarse, and achingly familiar. “For real, Darrell? Who’s gonna kill who?”

  Jade.

  Roarke raised his voice, calling out, “Jade. It’s Special Agent Roarke.”

  There was a silence, then a low laugh. “Agent Roarke. What brings you to hell?”

  He didn’t know what she meant, but whatever was on the other side of the wall, he doubted it was good.

  “I’m coming in, all right?”

  “Why the fuck not?” The girl’s voice was almost cheerful. “The more the merrier.”

  He stood for a moment, paralyzed with indecision. He couldn’t fire his weapon in this chemically volatile atmosphere. But he couldn’t step into the unknown without it. He would have to hold it and not fire under any circumstances, and hope that its mere presence helped.

  He drew, then stepped into the archway and stared through the dark.

  In the filthy, freezing room, a man sat in an armchair. Rail-thin with ropy muscles, thickly tattooed, slicked-down hair, flint-hard face. Roarke recognized him from his mug shot. Sawyer.

  Jade stood behind him, with one hand laced in his greasy hair and something small and silver gleaming in the other.

  She looked across the room at Roarke. “Special Agent Roarke. We meet again.” Her breath misted white in the freezing air.

  “Jade,” he said, as calmly as he could manage. She wore jeans and boots and a white down parka with a fur hood. The bulk of the jacket made her look younger, like a bundled-up child. Her eyes seemed enormous. Dilated.

  High on something. Not good.

  She looked down at the man seated below her. “This is Darrell. Darrell, say hey to Agent Roarke.” She pulled his hair back, jerking his head up to face Roarke.

  The man in the chair glowered at him. Roarke saw hope and hatred in his face. “For Christ’s sake. Do something—”

  “Shut up,” Jade snarled.

  There was something so strange about the situation. Sawyer was still as
death, but Roarke couldn’t see any ropes or cuffs holding him to the chair. So why is he not struggling?

  Then Roarke caught the smell in the chill of the air and finally recognized it. Lantern fluid.

  Sawyer’s hair wasn’t greasy. It was wet. His clothes were soaked.

  And what Jade held in her hand was not a knife but a lighter.

  Roarke’s stomach dropped. The image flashed in his mind again: Driscoll’s charred body, the skull grinning out of his blackened remains. He banished the vision and spoke carefully. “Susannah—”

  Jade jerked her head up. Her eyes blazed in the gloom. “No. Susannah died. Darrell killed her. Didn’t you, Daddy D?” She dug her fingernails into the back of Sawyer’s skull.

  Roarke spoke quickly. “Talk to me, Jade. I’m listening.”

  The girl eyed the Glock in his grip. “I talk better not at gunpoint.”

  Roarke opened his palm, displaying the weapon. Epps, where the hell are you? he wondered, through the hammering of his heart. He hoped to God his agent was circling around to the hallway on the opposite side of the room.

  And in the same instant he hoped to God Epps was nowhere near the house. Because the chances were good that everyone inside the house would die at any second.

  Jade was fixed on the Glock in Roarke’s hand. “You don’t want to have one of those in a place like this anyway. Do you, Darrell? Whole place could go up like a torch.”

  “You’re right,” Roarke said quickly. “I’ll put it away.”

  Then slowly, so slowly, he opened his suit coat to reveal his empty shoulder holster. Jade nodded warily, and he holstered the weapon.

  In the chair, Sawyer let out a groan. Jade shoved the side of his face. “One more sound out of you, asshole, and I flick this Bic.” Sawyer froze, silent again.

  “Okay, Jade,” Roarke said. “No gun. Let’s talk.”

  She shook her head. “It’s way past talk. But I like you, Agent Roarke. So I want you to take a walk. Walk yourself out of here. Darrell and me, we’re gonna stay here and burn.”