Shadow Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “What happened?” she asks aloud.

  The man turns and looks at her, as if he has just realized she’s there. “Congress voted no on the bank bailout.”

  She takes this news without emotion. A stock market crash will have no effect on her own accounts. She holds cash, period. But she understands that what is happening is momentous.

  She is surprised to find herself speaking aloud. “People knew it was coming. They must have.”

  He glances at her. “Yeah. People knew. That never seems to stop anyone from ignoring what’s right in front of them.”

  She has had vast experience with that.

  The man dismounts the treadmill, looks distractedly around for his water bottle, his towel. “Got to get to work. It’s going to be a long day. And a long year. Or ten.” He hesitates, then reaches into the pocket of his gym shorts, takes out a card case and extends a business card. “If you ever need an advisor.”

  She takes the card. His name is Paul Hawthorne. He’s an investment banker.

  She does not check out of the hotel that day. She packs her few things and stows them in her car, but adds another night to her stay and remains in the room with the television on, something she is rarely moved to do, and watches the ominous news reports.

  That night, she goes out to the main building, to the hotel bar.

  She enters warily. She is one of only three women in the lounge and attracts instant attention. She ignores the appraising look of a burly businessman sitting with colleagues at one of the dark booths, and scans the room.

  The banker named Paul sits alone at the bar with a drink, watching the television above the bar. More financial news.

  When she steps up beside him, he startles, and stands. “Hello.” She nods to him. He remains standing. “I was rude, this morning. I’m sorry.”

  She doesn’t know what he means. There is an empty stool beside him. She sits, and he sits back down. “What would you like?” he asks.

  There is something she wants, but what he means is a drink. “Vodka tonic,” she says. “And water.”

  She will drink the water and not the vodka. It’s an easy enough illusion. People are always on their guard when you don’t drink. It is always more useful to let them think you are.

  He orders, and then turns and looks at her without smiling. “I have a rule not to chat up women in a gym.”

  “Good rule,” she says. It is. Obvious, but rare. She glances around her at the bar. “But here?”

  “Different rules.”

  She has not done this often. There have been a few boys her own age or about, whom she was able to talk to. Eric, the boy at one of her multitudes of foster homes who taught her to drive and to jack cars. Chris Devlin, an older boy at one of the high schools she’d briefly attended, who had flirted with her as if she were Normal and had been of use when she was tracking down a predator and in dire need of local information.

  Now once again, to get the thing she wants, she must play a game that makes it look like she is being friendly. Open. Even possibly willing. She has seen it. What women say. What men say.

  As their drinks arrive, she glances up at the bar TV, which is all news of the crash, the same panicked footage they watched together in the gym that morning. And she pretends the next question comes from what she is seeing on the television.

  “Things didn’t get better.”

  He, too, looks at the screen. “They’re going to get a lot worse before they get better.”

  “For how long?”

  He shakes his head. “Years. Forever, unless someone who gets it does something drastic about it.”

  “But… it’s like a sale, isn’t it?” she asks. In all that morning financial TV, in all those hotel gyms, she has seen one consistent rule of the stock market: Buy low, sell high.

  He laughs, startled. “Sure, if you have balls of steel.” Then he backtracks. “Sorry. I meant—”

  She waits.

  “Yeah. Theoretically. If you don’t mind a huge gamble. And you have time to wait it out.”

  Time is, of course, the wild card. She never assumes she will live through the next day.

  But her freedom depends entirely on the money she has, in her bank accounts and physically stashed away. It is a very concrete power. As with any power, it is both useful and imperative to understand everything she can about it. And she senses an opportunity.

  It’s the easiest thing in the world to get men talking. She simply makes it about him. “What are you going to do?”

  His laugh is short and wry. “How much time do you have?

  She meets his gaze. “I have time.”

  Chapter 36

  Portland - present

  Singh and Snyder

  Singh breaks off her narrative again.

  Agent Snyder has been listening intently, without comment, and Singh knows she has been embellishing the narrative as if she is alone with her journal, writing her speculations without filter. Now she feels she has been too unprofessionally intimate with her details.

  She feels heat in her cheeks, and clarifies aloud, “Perhaps I have… that is to say, all I really know is that a murder of a banker occurred at the resort on the night of the financial crash…”

  Snyder nods. “So you’ve constructed a plausible scenario for the murder through speculation on Cara’s inner life, and on how she arrived at that place and moment in time. And very credibly.”

  Singh feels the rush of pride even before he adds, “You’re a born profiler. I always suspected so. Please, go on.”

  Chapter 37

  Phoenix, Arizona - September 29, 2008

  Cara

  Hawthorne seems to know his job very well. And he’s not a hustler. Without any self-aggrandizement, he gives her a concise, precise history of the housing bubble, sub-prime mortgages and the bank bailout bill, the failure of which has precipitated the current market crash.

  Greed, of course. And the men who have ruined countless lives with their speculation will almost certainly never suffer any punishment for the damage they’ve done.

  In between financial talk, he asks her personal questions. What she does. Where she’s from. Often in these situations she says, “Canada, originally.” When you keep the answers vague, if the other person has any working knowledge of certain areas, they will almost always volunteer it: “I’ve spent some time in Toronto.” Then she can use a completely different region if more questions come up. She is very good at deflecting questions.

  But this time she says, “New Orleans.” She has been there recently and the place is still under her skin.

  It’s a city of survivors, of wraiths, of the walking dead. She feels at home in that great trauma. She has gone back there every year since the hurricane, luxuriating in the soft humidity, the great rolling river, the ghostly Spanish moss, the smell of sugar candles, the lacy black iron balconies hung with glittering beads, the defiant costumes and frillery of the people who would not give up on their city even when the rest of the country did.

  Paul lights up at its mention, and now she does not have to fill in her experience, because he is immediately talking about his own. She can nod and agree, and show enthusiasm for places he speaks of that she knows.

  While he talks, she finds herself glancing at his forearms, the way his shoulders move under the dress shirt he wears. He has a comfort in his own body, a masculine power that cannot be ignored. She remembers his arms and chest in his workout T-shirt from the morning, his bare thighs in running shorts.

  He drinks more, and she pretends to.

  It is the longest conversation she has had with anyone for years. Already she regrets that. Even though she has been vague in detail, he knows too much about her. He has been too interested. And people have seen them talking.

  So when it is late, too late, she goes with him to his villa, out onto the vast grounds.

  They walk over the perfect lawns, weaving through arcs of water from the sprinklers. The rising full moon on the
horizon stains the clouds like a spreading pool of blood.

  When they step inside his villa, the lights don’t even come on before they are on each other, devouring each other, pulling at each other’s clothes, finding flesh.

  He is startled and excited by her violence. She doesn’t know any other way to be.

  For her sex has been mostly a threat, that men around her have wielded like a cudgel. Something to avoid, to escape, to be constantly wary of.

  But tonight, there is something about this collision of bodies, the fusing of flesh, that excites her, too. A satisfaction of hunger that creates new hunger. Her body is alive, and wired, and new to her.

  A way, for a moment, of not being alone.

  She does not want talk, after, but she forces herself to remain beside him in his bed, to let him hold her, and trace soft patterns on her bare skin.

  Despite his best efforts to remain awake, his breathing becomes deeper. Soon he is asleep.

  She removes herself from the circle of his arms, slips out of the bed. She stands in the dark beside it, watching him sleep…

  Then she walks out of the room.

  She dresses in the living room of his suite, and slips out into the moonlight.

  The air has cooled. The wind is light and teasing.

  Her body feels different to her, as if her nerves have come alive. She is aware of how she moves—her limbs, her hips, her thighs—in a way that is more heightened that it ever has been. It is an odd feeling, unfamiliar but not uncomfortable.

  So this is sex.

  She has wondered. It has taken her some time to get over the jittery feeling of danger whenever a man looks at her. To realize that there are ordinary men, there are good men—and there are predators.

  Those groups do not intersect. Now that she is older, now that she is not a prisoner to any system, it has become easy for her to distinguish the predators. She has had a lifetime of experience.

  And for the first time, she wonders, Is it possible?

  Companionship... some respite from the constant aloneness…

  She is so intent on the thought, on what is newly vibrating within her, that she does not see It coming. The sudden lunge out of the darkness. The hands clamped around her waist and mouth, strangling her cry.

  Through her terror, she knows instantly who. The businessman from the bar. Stinking of Scotch and malevolence.

  He lifts her off her feet, wrests her behind a hedge border. Twigs claw at her skin as he crushes her to the ground.

  Falling on top of her, knocking her breath from her…

  So much heavier than she is.

  Before she can recover her breath, he clamps a hand down on her mouth to silence her, and shoves the other between her legs. It is the exact opportunity she needs. She bites down hard on his fingers, jaws clamping and grinding. She tastes blood and he tries to pull back. She bites harder and twists her head viciously, ripping his flesh.

  He draws the other hand back to hit her—and her own hand is free. She slams the heel of her palm savagely up into his chin, hears his teeth crunch.

  “Bitch!” he mumbles. Or tries to, through broken teeth.

  She doesn’t give him a moment, but scrambles to standing, powered by the electric spike of adrenaline, and kicks him in the side of the head.

  Then she stomps her foot hard down on his throat.

  And raises her boot, and stomps again and again and again.

  There is barely anything left of his throat when she stops herself. She stands gasping. The moon above her is swollen and angry, blurry with rage.

  She turns and stumbles away across the lawn.

  After a few steps she catches herself. She forces herself to stand upright, to walk slowly, in some semblance of Normal.

  She does not return to her villa, but veers for the side lot where she self-parked with her suitcase and toiletries already stashed in the trunk. She must leave this place as quickly as possible, put as much distance between herself and this hotel, this city as she can before dawn.

  As the terror subsides, something else builds. Fury.

  Fury at the pathetic excuse for a human being who lies behind the hedge, stiffening on the resort lawn. Fury at herself, for letting her guard down and allowing It to so easily strike. Fury for ever thinking that It would not be lurking, waiting for a time that she is unsuspecting, actually feeling alive, feeling Normal.

  Normal is not possible.

  She will not forget again.

  Chapter 38

  Portland – present

  Singh and Snyder

  Agent Snyder looks out through the tall windows at the darkening sky. “No perpetrator was ever identified,” he says. Not a question.

  “There was never even a suspect,” Singh replies.

  She is experiencing a profound relief in being able to talk about it all. She has been too long alone inside her own head with these theories. “This murder stood out not just because of the injury to the throat, but also because it seems very likely to have been self-defense, given the damage done to his fingers, the angle of the injuries to his jaw. And even though he was fully dressed, the coroner found pre-ejaculate in his clothes.”

  Snyder nods. “Very similar to the murder of that trucker in Atascadero.”

  A few months ago Cara had killed a trucker with a criminal history who had followed her into the women’s restroom of a highway rest stop. It was one of the first murders Roarke’s team had been able to attribute to her.

  “Just so,” Singh says. “Also, the victim, Kendall Parsons, had several harassment complaints at various workplaces.”

  Agent Snyder says softly, “Making him Cara’s exact sort of target.” He regards her thoughtfully. “But this banker you spoke of. Paul Hawthorne.”

  “Hawthorne was a colleague of Parsons who attended the same conference that weekend. Hawthorne gave a statement to the police that I found…” Singh pauses, not entirely sure how to phrase it. “Incomplete. He spoke of suspecting Parsons of predatory activity in the past. He did not mention seeing Parsons with a woman on the night in question. And yet there seemed to be a gap in his statement.”

  “Ah,” Agent Snyder says. “I see. A Lindstrom-sized gap.”

  A question has been looming in Singh’s mind ever since she discovered the murder on the Biltmore grounds.

  “Agent Snyder, I must ask you. Was ASAC Roarke in Phoenix on September 29, 2008?” Singh is aware that she is holding her breath, waiting for his answer.

  Snyder turns thoughtful eyes to her. “Not that I’m aware of. But I can tell you exactly where he was two days later. Because that was the day he met Monica.”

  Chapter 39

  San Francisco, October 2008

  Matt

  The moon was full in the sky, the autumnal glow adding a layer to the illumination of the streetlamps.

  Matt walked the footpaths of Golden Gate Park. Above him, a warm breeze stirred the dry leaves of eucalyptus trees.

  He paused at a scenic overlook to look out over the glimmering lights of San Francisco.

  It was his city, now.

  The week he finished his summer internship at Quantico, Snyder had asked him, “Where do you want to end up working, ultimately? Geographically speaking?”

  He didn’t have to think twice. He’d fallen in love with “The City”, as Bay Area locals called it, when he was just a boy. San Francisco was small enough to be able to know it intimately, and had all the right proportions of city sophistication, staggering natural beauty, fascinating Gold Rush history, culture and entertainment, and endlessly diverse eccentricity.

  Snyder chuckled. “Can’t argue with that. Well, you have three years to fill before the Bureau will take you as an agent-in-training. If you want to really know a city, you need to work it as a cop. The Bureau won’t put you straight back in San Francisco at first, but you’ll have done the groundwork for a transfer later.”

  If Snyder had told him to pack his bags and head for the Arctic, Matt would
have done it.

  Now, as a uniformed officer of the San Francisco PD, Golden Gate Park was his favorite beat. It wasn’t just a literal walk in the park, although that was definitely a perk. A large number of homeless made the thousand-acre urban refuge their home and there were the usual factors of mental illness and gang activity. Matt had already had to contend with six drug overdoses, two of which were DOA at the hospitals he’d rushed them to. The exposure to such human desperation took a psychic toll.

  He was learning things. He wasn’t changing the world on any major scale, but he was doing something to make one little part of it better. He was keeping the peace. He was being of service.

  But he was impatient to move on.

  Working with Snyder, that taste he’d gotten of the Gilman case with its disappeared target, the ominous background of domestic arms trafficking, the whole unsolved mystery of it, had started a hunger in him for autonomy before he’d even started as an agent. He was itching to finish his last year of required employment and get on to the Bureau where he could begin, as Snyder had promised, to build his own cases his own way.

  He circled back toward the plaza of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a three-quarter scale model of the original Palais in Paris, home to world-class collections of European art. It stood in the black and white of moonlight like a stage set.

  Tonight the three-tiered fountain in front of the Palace was lit up in changing colors. There was some big corporate affair going on after hours and Matt had volunteered for foot patrol.

  He’d been going to the museum since he was just a kid, had had some of his very first makeout sessions here, on middle and high school field trips. He wasn’t sure what it was—the romantic elegance of the columns, the spectacular lighting, the pleasantly erotic relaxation of drifting through galleries, maybe just all that marble—but the Palace was still a can’t-lose first date.

  He’d had no shortage of those in his time in San Francisco. Dates, hookups, explorations, experiments… he didn’t even know what to call them. Nothing at all lasting. He wanted the companionship, and he definitely wanted the sex, but no one seemed to stick.