Shadow Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  The thought is only a dull ache.

  She looks around at her goddesses, and bitterness wells up inside her.

  Where is your power? Why have you abandoned us?

  Privileged men have asserted their privilege, have beaten back the progress of decades.

  But as soon as she thinks it, she recalls Roarke, and Damien.

  Not all men, she reminds herself, without irony.

  As if in response to the thought, she hears quick, agile footsteps on the polished gallery floor and looks up to see Special Agent Lam, criminalist on the office’s Evidence Response Team.

  He drops onto the bench beside her, so wiry and ebullient he seems to bounce. “I only have a minute. Talk fast.”

  She explains the verdict, and Lam nods sagely. “So, kind of like house arrest.”

  She smiles without humor. “Under the supervision of one of the world’s leading criminal profilers.”

  “Yeah, Roarke must really think you’re off the deep end.” Lam says, reading her thoughts. He is being matter-of-fact because it takes the sting out of the truth. “Still, working with Snyder!” He strokes his cheekbones with his fingertips. “See the green? Pure envy, girl.”

  The legendary Chuck Snyder had been the Supervisory Special Agent of BAU 3 in its heyday: the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, which provides investigative support in solving serial and mass murders and other violent crimes to local law enforcement throughout the country. In semi-retirement Snyder travels the world instructing law enforcement agencies in the psychology of the most violent offenders. Roarke’s own powerhouse resume includes his early days as an agent working with Snyder.

  “When do you leave?” Lam queries her.

  “Tomorrow.”

  He does a cartoon double-take. “Whoa. What are you going to tell Epps?”

  She gives him a despairing look. He claps a hand to his forehead. “Honey. Better you than me. Gotta go. Give me a hug and keep me posted.”

  After a quick embrace, he sprints off. Without his presence, the gallery falls into resonant silence.

  Distance. Evaluation. Supervision.

  She looks up at the towering figures of the divinities.

  Perhaps Roarke is exactly right.

  Damien, of course, is in a rage. A rage she recognizes as concealing hurt, bewilderment, fear. He prowls the wide-open space of her loft condominium, darkly seething, dangerously close to eruption. “The hell does Roarke think he’s doing?”

  Damien still has no idea how close Singh had come to something irrevocable. She suspects he is choosing not to know. They have never talked about the discrepancies in her story of that bloody night.

  Nor had she told him her intention to resign that morning. Now, of course, she has been spared that conversation.

  She begins, “It is a great privilege. Working with Agent Snyder—”

  It is proof of his distress that he does not let her finish her sentence. “I don’t care who it’s for. It’s grunt work. Makes no sense to put you on it. Let a rookie handle it.”

  She speaks carefully, “I do not believe it will be for long. Portland is an hour and a half flight from here, no more. I can be back each weekend. And it is an opportunity to work with one of the great minds of the field. I could not ask for a more opportune assignment. It is as if it has been designed precisely for my needs.”

  She means more by this than she is telling.

  But her genuine interest in the post does not come out of thin air. Damien knows that since the team first encountered Cara Lindstrom, Singh has become enthralled by the science of profiling. And she has already worked briefly with Agent Snyder. During the hunt for Lindstrom, the two agents began work on an extensive list of unsolved U.S. murders which Cara might have been responsible for.

  When Snyder had told Singh she had an aptitude for the work, she had felt the psychic tug of dharma: her true path. Profiling seems to her a way to quantify the darkness she has always been terrified of and fascinated with, in equal measure.

  All these things are true. She can say then without compunction. She says them to Damien now, stepping close to him and putting her hands against his chest. “I feel it is a destiny of sorts.”

  She feels his strong and elegant body melding with hers, hears the wild racing of his heart. And she knows she has won, for now. Damien is too honorable to stand in the way of something she truly wants. She is using his own nature against him.

  She has not told him everything. She does not, for example, tell him that she has surrendered her sidearm. She knows full well he would never let her go if he knew just that one fact. And that is far from all that she has held back.

  But she cannot tell him of her dark descent, or that she needs to be away partly to be away from him.

  Because since that night in the desert, alone with Cara Lindstrom, she no longer knows what she is capable of.

  Chapter 4

  Portland, Oregon – present

  Snyder

  Snyder wakes with the adrenaline surge of danger, the absolute knowing that he is not alone.

  His heart is already thumping hard enough to quiver the mattress, but he forces himself to lie still in his bed, to absorb and catalogue the sense of presence.

  The sounds in the living room are faint, but discernible.

  An intruder in his house.

  Moving as silently as all his training affords him, he reaches out toward his bed stand. Eases the drawer open. Feels for the service weapon he hasn’t had to use in fifteen years and hasn’t wanted to.

  Its heft is familiar: implacable and lethal.

  He slides out from under the covers, stands in the dark of his bedroom in bare feet and pajamas, and listens with all of his senses.

  Soft slides on the polished hardwood floors…. the whisper of paper…

  The sound of searching? Or of approach?

  He moves across the room, one ninja step at a time, heel ball toe, wincing at the crackle of joints sounding off like cannon fire in the dark. The popping sounds recede, but the arthritis in his feet burns, a silent scream. He is too aware of the degeneration of strength. He is seventy-two.

  But he can still shoot.

  He stops at the closed bedroom door to regulate his breath.

  Then he clasps his left hand around the cold, round doorknob. Slowly, slowly, he twists it and eases the door open…

  He inches out the doorway, his eyes adjusting to the dark.

  It hits him like a wave, taking his breath away.

  He can feel it, smell it. It is madness out there in the outer room. And in all his years hunting the worst of the worst, he has never been so afraid.

  He forces himself forward, down the hallway, stopping at the arch of the living room entry with heart racing…

  Then he hits the lights from the hall and presses his back against the wall, listening.

  Silence. Stillness.

  Weapon leading, he steps into the archway….

  And confronts chaos.

  The room is deranged. The house has been ransacked. Someone has torn through his case files, the boxes of his life’s work. Each box is a tomb, with unspeakable evil written on the pages of the files. The lids are off now, the files scattered. He can hear the cries and screams of countless victims unleashed from within.

  A sound comes from behind him, a quick shuffling and a thud. He spins, poised to fire…

  … as a stack of files topples over, sliding in slow motion off the table, pouring papers onto the floor.

  His breath rasps as he gasps in to calm his racing heart.

  And as he stands shaking, the out of control feeling recedes, like a wave curling back from the shore.

  He steels himself, grips his weapon, and searches the house, room by room, checking windows and doors.

  There is no one but him. Whatever was there has left. For now.

  He returns to the living room and confronts the evidence, leans against the door frame, sagging.

  “Matthew,”
he says softly to the empty room. “He’s back.”

  Chapter 5

  Portland, Oregon – present

  Singh and Snyder

  She walks through the Portland airport, under skylights in soaring white ceilings. A wide, round indoor courtyard is lined with artisanal shops selling gooseberry pie, local wines and olive oils. A tall, slim, long-haired young man plays ethereal music on some New Age string instrument as tall as he is.

  She reflects that Roarke could have sent her to any number of miserable, isolated, cultureless posts across the United States. She is grateful that her exile is to such an oasis.

  She picks up the keys to an SUV at the rental counter, as her assignment will involve transport of file boxes. Agent Snyder lives in the Laurelhurst district, a ten-minute drive from downtown. She resolves to go there immediately, without stopping to check in to her hotel.

  The drive from the airport into Portland proper boasts stunning scenery: views of snowy Mount Shasta and the conical dormant volcanos known as the Three Sisters, a city enclosed by the twin ribbons of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers, hundreds and hundreds of miles of deeply forested mountains and lakes.

  With such a landscape spread out before her, it is clear to Singh why so many serial killers over the years had been able to operate for such long stretches of time in this area, and so prolifically, without detection. There could be bodies every few feet and no one would ever find them.

  The topic is in her thoughts because she knows that Roarke’s very first case as an FBI agent with Agent Snyder was investigative support on such a case in this area, resulting in the capture of a nefarious killer of teenage runaways involved in survival prostitution. Robert Jonah Barker, aka the Street Hunter, had savaged five known victims in Seattle and two in Portland, dumping an untold number of other bodies in wilderness areas before Roarke and Snyder brought him down.

  Her bloody thoughts are interrupted by the GPS announcement of her arrival at Agent Snyder’s house. It is tucked into a cul-de-sac in a forested neighborhood of old historic homes. Massive trees drift with mist under ominously darkening Portland skies.

  Singh walks up the path to a beamed house with tall glass windows, half hidden in a clutch of pine trees. The front door is red, the top arched and rounded, like something from Lord of the Rings. Lam would approve, both of the Tolkien and the color. Singh knows that in Asian cultures a red door is auspicious, a color employed for the entrance of shrines and the homes of high-ranking officials. Both of which arguably apply to Agent Snyder. She feels a flutter of nervous anticipation as she steps up to the porch.

  He opens the door before she can knock, and his face lights as he sees her. “Agent Singh, we meet at last.”

  Some of her consults with him on the Lindstrom case have been by videoconference, so she is familiar with his face. There is an ascetic nobility there, reminiscent of a battlefield surgeon or a priest. But she is unprepared for the pleasant, slightly erotic rush of testosterone she feels in his actual presence. At seventy-two, Snyder is still a virile and arresting man, lean and craggy, his eyes intent, encompassing.

  He steps gallantly aside for her as she passes into the house. In the dark-paneled hall, he takes her coat, smoothly helping her off with it as if this is a Golden Age Hollywood movie instead of a meeting of trained federal agents.

  He hesitates before the arch of the inner door, and a look of what seems to be unease flickers on his face. “I have to warn you, it’s not pretty in there.”

  She is puzzled. But all becomes clear when she steps into the living room.

  The room is tastefully furnished, masculine, elegant. Underneath. But the lovely bones of the house are buried in a chaos of filing boxes and scattered files.

  “My housekeeper gave up on me some time ago,” Snyder admits, as Singh looks around in dismay.

  The trail of files continues into the study, a spacious room with wall-to-wall bookshelves. There is a large sitting area, a huge desk, tall windows that look out at the green forest beyond a redwood deck.

  And boxes. At least a hundred more.

  The number would not trouble her, on its own. But the boxes have been—ransacked, it looks like. Folders scattered randomly. Papers pulled out of files. There are thick unopened manila envelopes, and pages of printouts stacked in piles on every available surface. Singh feels an inexplicable disquiet about the disorder.

  “It’s overwhelming, I’m aware,” Snyder says, and she hears the undercurrent of anxiety in his voice.

  “Not at all,” she assures him, although she suppresses a shiver. The horrors that must reside in these boxes. She can only begin to imagine.

  She forces herself to focus, to evaluate the task at hand.

  She has always had a passion for order, and even now she is calculating the solution. She will rent an indoor storage space, climate controlled, suitable for paper documents and audio and video files, and begin with the unmolested boxes. Label them and remove them to the storage space, beginning a clear arrangement by date. One must be able to walk into the storage space and instantly find a file by year, month and day, without even a chart as a guide. Then she and Agent Snyder can work in the house, sorting the loose papers and files.

  It should not take more than a week or two. Damien will be happy to hear it.

  She turns to Snyder and explains her plan. “We will begin tomorrow.”

  His face clouds. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. These case files need to be catalogued.”

  She feels a prickling at the back of her neck. A foreshadowing. “I am not sure what you mean. Catalogued in what way?”

  “We need to input all the cases into ViCAP.”

  Singh looks around at the room, the chaos of boxes. “These cases were never entered into ViCAP?”

  He is speaking of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which maintains a database of details of violent crimes from across the country that law enforcement officials can use to search for similar, possibly related crimes.

  As Agent Snyder answers her, she can feel the agitation in his voice. “Before I let the files go, I wanted to be sure. I started checking my own list of cases to make certain that the data had been entered by the local police agencies. Out of a hundred cases I queried, only five had been logged into the database by the police or Sheriff’s department responsible for the cases.”

  Singh can only stare at him, numb. She has used ViCAP many times during her tenure as an agent. So she is familiar with the overwhelming problem of it.

  The ViCAP database is theoretically the premiere technological tool to take down serial predators: rapists, domestic abusers, pedophiles, mass murderers, serial killers. In actual practice, the highly touted system is barely functional, because of law enforcement agencies’ consistent failure to input case data into the database. In short, the chances of getting a hit on a case, a match, are nearly non-existent.

  Agent Snyder speaks quickly now. “For several months I’ve been requesting the full files from every case I ever provided investigative support on. If we input just the cases here in this room, we can raise the number of cases currently in the system by almost a full percent, nationwide.”

  He turns in a slow circle. “One thousand cases. Each of them impacting dozens, if not hundreds, of victims, family members, friends, and future victims. Any number of open cases that could be closed if some of these perpetrators were in the database.”

  There is such a stark plea in his eyes that her heart twists in her chest. The simplicity of his plan underscores the grotesque neglect of the system. If more persons in law enforcement had just a tiny fraction of Snyder’s diligence, the database could have been grown by God alone knew how much over the years. Saving countless lives.

  At the same time, Singh is in near shock at the magnitude of the job ahead of them. She looks around at the room and struggles to get her mind around the scope of the task. It requires putting every single case from Snyder’s files into a lengthy ViCAP form. O
ne hundred and one categories of questions, requiring sometimes pages of detail. Charts to fill in. Crime scene photos to scan and upload.

  Hundreds of file boxes, each with dozens of case files….

  “But we must hire others,” she protests faintly. She will use her own money if she must.

  “No. No one else,” he says, so harshly she takes an involuntary step backward. “I need to review,” he says, with a strange urgency. “We need to review. I need you to check my inputs. I need to run some recollections by you. We need to do it right. And I can’t trust…”

  He stops, and Singh has the distinct feeling that he is withholding something crucial. Something even massive.

  He finishes, quietly. “I can’t trust anyone but you.”

  Chapter 6

  Portland - present

  Singh

  Singh’s downtown hotel is geared to corporate travelers. Her suite is spacious and functional: a living area with executive desk, a kitchenette, a separate bedroom, a deck with a chair and table looking out on the misty river and the many bridges that span it.

  She stands blankly at the sliding glass doors. Outside the rain has begun, a dense curtain of gray.

  Before leaving Agent Snyder’s house, she had spent several hours establishing some order by boxing the loose files by year and clearly labeling the boxes.

  Enough time spent to get a sense of the depths of depravity contained within.

  It is a heavy feeling on its own, but there is something else, as well. An overwhelming sense of unease that Agent Snyder is keeping something from her.

  She reaches for her phone and attempts to call Damien, hoping to talk it through, to find comfort from his strong, steady voice. But he is not answering.

  She leaves a message and remains standing for a moment in the middle of the room, still unsettled. Then she moves into the bedroom to unpack. Almost immediately she abandons the task.

  Instead she removes a few items from her suitcase. Candles scented with lemongrass and coriander, verbena and basil. Several books of matches. And a journal. Something she has turned to increasingly often in these chaotic times, a means of grasping for sanity.