Shadow Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  He drives through the pouring rain, with Cara turned backward in the passenger seat to hold Brandi’s hand. Blood bubbles at the corner of her mouth, the only sign of life.

  She and Jamie sit for hours in the waiting room of the ER until they’re finally allowed in to see Brandi.

  She shares a room with two other patients. All are drugged and sleeping. Cara and Jamie sit by her bed, on either side of her.

  Cara watches Brandi intently, focusing on her eyelids. When she can see the movement that means she is close to waking, Cara suggests Jamie go down to the hospital gift shop for flowers. Of course Jamie sees it is the right thing. And Cara offers to stay by Brandi’s side, to watch her.

  So she is alone with her when Brandi stirs to consciousness.

  “You,” she says faintly, squinting up at Cara through swollen, bruised eyes.

  “Jamie’s here. He’ll be back in a few minutes,” Cara says.

  “That boy,” Brandi says. “That boy.”

  The drugs she has been given are strong and lulling. They could make a person talkative even if that person wasn’t as naturally forthcoming as Brandi. Cara is counting on that.

  Brandi is still talking about Jamie. “So fine… so nice. No one nicer.” She looks up at Cara. “But you. You’re not nice.”

  Cara holds her gaze. “No.”

  “He deserves better.”

  “I know.”

  Brandi sighs, a long, full-bodied shudder. “I don’t want him to know what that…” her voice breaks, then hardens. “What that monster did.”

  “I won’t tell him,” Cara says.

  And then Brandi tells her everything.

  Chapter 49

  Portland - 2009

  Cara

  She leaves Brandi’s room and the hospital before Jamie returns.

  She has not returned to her car in the past few days. Jamie has never seen her in it. She does not want the people she interacts with in this city to be able to associate her with the vehicle. And if it has been stolen, there is nothing identifying in it.

  But it is still there on the side street where she left it, waiting for her, and so are the keys she has hidden in a tree down the block. She retrieves the keys, gets into the driver’s seat, starts the engine, and heads over the Interstate Bridge, across the Columbia River and out of Oregon, to the adjoining state of Washington.

  Brandi has been very specific about her attacker. The kind of car he drives. Where he cruises for sex workers. The name he uses: “John.” Quite possibly not his own, being so obvious.

  But Cara knows more than enough to find him.

  So now she must do some shopping. And she must do it elsewhere.

  Given the option, she will always choose to do her preparatory work in a different state. Crossing state lines is an immediate and effective contaminant to any law enforcement investigation.

  She does not have to go far. Every city has a Goodwill and similar charity stores. It only needs to be somewhere fairly large, where she will not be noticed. The first town she comes to has a downtown with several such stores. Even better: outside one is a line of free boxes, in the driveway at the side of the store. She roots through the unwashed clothes to find the items she needs.

  She returns to Portland from her brief road trip with the costume and all the supplies she requires for the evening. But there is one last task ahead, one she does not relish.

  She must tell Jamie she is leaving.

  If she simply disappears, he will be beside himself. She cannot have him looking for her. She must make a clean break.

  She goes to see him at Church, after the night’s lineup of bands has started. Better to have people around them, and noise. She cannot bear a lingering, emotional scene.

  She meets him on the main floor under the starry painted dome. As always, he lights up when he sees her. She draws him outside to the garden, where they sit at the secluded table they have been using to meet between shows.

  First she asks him about Brandi, though she already knows better than Jamie how Brandi is. It had been clear Brandi has no appetite to talk to Jamie in her condition. She’d told Cara what needed to be told, and feigned sleep when Cara left, so as not to have to speak with him.

  Being Jamie, he’d been calling the clinic to check up on her. “They say she’s stable.” He smiles a bit. “She likes you, you know.”

  Cara knows that “like” is not the word. But she and Brandi understand each other, which is more useful for her purposes.

  He draws a deep, pained breath. “So what is it?” he asks directly. “You might as well just say.”

  He knows, already.

  She will regret leaving him. Perhaps there is more than regret. She has no name for what she feels. Perhaps this is what caring for someone is like. But there is nothing to be done. She cannot afford the luxury of emotion. She cannot let whatever might have been get in the way of the Work.

  She spins out her story. She’s going back to San Francisco. A job is waiting for her. Portland isn’t for her.

  And she says that she’s leaving tonight.

  If she’s lucky, it will be true, about leaving tonight. If not, Jamie will have much more than abandonment to mourn.

  “I’m crushed.” He seeks her eyes, holds them. “I thought maybe we had something.”

  She ignores the painful twist in her stomach. “I’m not the right person for you.”

  He tries to smile. “Now how would you even know that?”

  Because I’m not the right person for anyone, she thinks.

  He doesn’t fight her, probably because he knows she’s right. And that, too, is sad.

  When he reaches for her she doesn’t pull away, so he takes her face in his hands and kisses her softly. “Be happy, Mia. Be good.”

  Her throat aches as she walks out of the garden into the club. As she weaves through the crush of dancers on the crowded floor, the haunting, pulsing music of a dark ballad surrounds her.

  Be good.

  It is like him to say. It is who he is. Which is confirmation that she has done the only thing she can do, by leaving him. But as she moves out through the cathedral she feels a piercing, visceral longing.

  Alone.

  The pain is so sharp she almost cries out.

  The music closes in on her, tearing at her heart.

  Chapter 50

  Portland - 2009

  Matt

  Matt moved through the cathedral entrance of Church, into the pulse of the club. The floor was packed with a crush of young people swaying to some dark and brooding song.

  As he passed through the arch of the entrance, he was hit by a strong feeling of…

  Belonging? Desire? Longing?

  The emotion was so overpowering he stopped and looked around him at the club. Sensation flooded through him. The lights, the crowd, the stained glass glowing from backlights, the haunting quality of the music…

  Something here. Someone? If I could just be still for a moment…

  Chapter 51

  Cara

  She stands still, forcing herself to breathe. She clenches her fists, her jaw, and forces herself to push forward against what she is feeling.

  It is like breaking through glass, a visceral tearing. But she can move again.

  She threads through the crowd and out.

  Chapter 52

  Matt

  And then he felt… whatever he was feeling… withdraw, recede…

  And then it was gone, leaving him breathless—and bereft.

  He stood for a moment, wondering.

  How strange.

  He forced himself to move forward through the crowd, to shake off the feeling and concentrate on his business here.

  He’d spent the day talking to rape crisis counselors and youth shelter workers. looking for information about attacks, rapes that kids had escaped with their lives. At one of the shelters, a counselor had told him that there had been chatter about an assault on a young victim just the night before, but h
ad no details to give him.

  He’d checked in with Portland PD and gone through the last night’s incident reports. A handful of assaults, but all by adults on adults. None on teen sex workers that would fit his criteria.

  He’d been about to start on the hospitals, when it occurred to him that Jamie Kennedy might be a much faster source of the information he needed. So he texted Snyder with an update and headed back to Church.

  He found Kennedy in the back garden, seated alone at a back table lit only by strings of electric lights in the trees. His back was stiff as he faced away from the center of the garden.

  Matt sat across from him. Kennedy started back to himself, turned, and stared blankly across the table at Matt. Matt spoke without greeting. “I need to talk to you.”

  The musician answered with visible effort. “Can it wait? It’s… not a great time.”

  Something was going on with him, that much was clear. Something had shaken him badly.

  “It can’t.” Matt said evenly. He looked straight into Kennedy’s face to get him to focus. “There’s word on the street that someone was attacked last night. We need to talk to this person.”

  Despite Kennedy’s distraction, a look flashed across his face, giving him away.

  Matt jumped on it. “You do know.”

  Kennedy looked genuinely conflicted. He shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Is this person safe? Have they sought medical attention?”

  Kennedy hedged. “She’s… being taken care of.”

  Matt wasn’t about to back off. “I appreciate that, and I’m sure your friend does, too. But it’s misplaced. You could be putting other people in jeopardy by keeping silent.”

  Kennedy visibly struggled with himself. Matt tried to keep his voice neutral. “No promises you’ve made make any difference right now. You haven’t seen what this guy does to these kids. Nothing is more important than stopping him.”

  He was aware that he was being harsher than he needed to be. There was something about Kennedy that was pushing his buttons. The musician’s gentleness, maybe. There was something unscathed about him that was making Matt bristle with…

  Jealousy? That’s weird.

  The musician finally relented. “All right. I’ll take you to her. Just—you have to let me go in first.”

  Inside, Matt exulted. On the surface, he nodded. “However you want to play it.”

  In the car, Kennedy sat slumped in the passenger seat, staring out the window. Pain, Matt thought. The guy is in pain. About this? Or something else?

  As he followed Kennedy’s directions to the hospital, he pressed for more. “Anything you can tell us. Anything at all.”

  “I haven’t been able to talk to her about it. But…I have to think the guy who did it was a regular trick. This—friend, she’s not stupid. She knows all about the murders. So she must know him. She’d never go with him otherwise.”

  At the hospital, Matt kept his promise and waited in the hall for Kennedy to go in first. Of course, what that really meant was he stayed just out of sight in the corridor outside, well within earshot, as Kennedy moved through the door.

  “Shit,” he heard Kennedy mumble from inside the room.

  Matt shot through the door.

  The room had three beds, two filled with sleeping patients. Kennedy stood staring at the third, empty one. He turned to Matt, helpless. For a moment Matt had the sinking thought that Kennedy’s friend had died. But the bed was unmade, sheets thrown back as if someone had just gotten out of it. A glass of juice sat half-drunk still on the bed stand. It looked more like the friend had taken a runner.

  “Go get a nurse,” Matt ordered. “Anyone you can find.”

  Kennedy bolted out. Matt took the few moments alone to get a look at the medical chart. The first thing he read on the chart was the thing he had suspected from the nuanced way Kennedy had used the pronoun “she” about his friend. Brandon Hughes was a biological male: aka Brandi.

  He skimmed through the rest of the chart. The injuries were horrific. Concussion, broken jaw, broken ribs, anal tears. The assailant had beaten, kicked, punched, raped, and nearly strangled Hughes to death.

  Strangled. Like the Street Hunter’s victims.

  But unlike five, or six, other victims—she was left alive. And that was its own mystery.

  Matt dropped the medical chart back into place as Kennedy barreled back into the room with a nurse behind him.

  The staff hadn’t even noticed Hughes had gone. It hadn’t been long, apparently. The nurse had last made rounds only an hour before.

  Kennedy was obviously panicked about his missing friend. In this heightened state of alarm, he gave up more details. Brandi was a trans kid, age seventeen or eighteen, flamboyant and feminine, who had continued to work the street despite warnings about the Street Hunter from Kennedy and other acquaintances.

  It all struck an ominous chord.

  “Where would she go?” Matt demanded.

  Kennedy shook his head, gave Matt a haunted look. “Any number of places.”

  “Call. Text. Keep trying to get in touch with her. Let me know whatever you find out,” he told Kennedy.

  Then Matt went outside to his Land Rover and broke the speed limit back to Snyder’s house.

  He stood on the porch, pressing the doorbell, but there was no answer. Snyder had given him the security code and had encouraged him to use the study as an office. Roarke didn’t hesitate.

  He punched in the code, and strode through the house into the office, where he opened a file box and flipped through Portland PD files on the men they’d interviewed as suspects, searching for an address on John Lombard.

  Lightning flashed outside the tall windows. Matt glanced up at the flicker—and saw himself reflected in the glass. Standing in the middle of the study, his hands buried in a file box, surrounded by a library of depravity.

  It was an odd feeling of déjà vu. As if he were seeing his own future. Work-obsessed, surrounded by darkness…

  And alone.

  He felt a chill.

  Snyder shouldn’t be keeping all of this stuff in his house. You can’t live with it. It’s too much.

  And it was no wonder Snyder wasn’t married. What normal person would want to have all of this with her all the time?

  It doesn’t matter where you work. You bring it with you. You can’t ask another person to live with this.

  What did that mean for him and Monica? His chances of marriage, a family?

  It was a fleeting thought, instantly shut down. Too much to bear, along with all the rest of it.

  He seized on the file he was looking for. “Got you,” he said, too loudly, to dispel the other thoughts.

  A sound behind him made him twist around to face the doorway. He’d been so fixated on his inner turmoil he hadn’t noticed Snyder step into the room.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” the older agent said mildly. But Roarke felt it as a rebuke. In the middle of an active case, there was no excuse for letting down his guard.

  He leapt into action to compensate. “I got a lead on the victim I texted you about. Brandi Hughes, seventeen, aka Brandon. Apparently Kennedy and a friend found Hughes half-dead in a warehouse where a lot of the street kids flop.”

  He quickly filled Snyder in on Hughes’ injuries, saw Snyder’s eyes contract in empathy. But otherwise the older agent was quiet while Matt was speaking. Too quiet, Matt thought at one point, but forced himself to concentrate on relating the details of the attack on Hughes.

  When he’d finished, Snyder walked the room absently. His gaze went to the file in Matt’s hand. “And that?

  “It’s Lombard’s. The monger with the assault on the trans kid. Another trans kid, similar assault…” He was feeling an urgency he couldn’t define, a need to be out there on the street looking for this guy. The one who so brutally attacked Kennedy’s friend. “I think this is the guy.”

  He had no way of knowing that. It was just overwhelmingly how he felt
.

  He didn’t add, And I think he’s out there now. Tonight.

  Chapter 53

  Portland – 2009

  Cara

  She stands on a dark street, the one that Brandi had named and described as “hers.” The surrounding buildings loom around her, their windows blank and dark. The one corner streetlamp is out.

  The only glimmer of light comes from the moon. Clouds obscure it, then pass, but every few minutes it shines through again with implacable brightness, a white heat that ripples on her skin.

  She’d rented a motel room nearby, the kind of place where the clerks don’t ask for ID or engage in anything by way of conversation. In the dismal little cube, she’d dressed in her new acquisitions. Looking into the mirror of the bathroom, she found herself unrecognizable.

  It is part of her survival strategy to mimic, to constantly become other people. But of all the many personas she has taken on, this may be the most extreme. Even just standing on the street, she feels like a different person entirely.

  She suspects that Brandi is an example of her attacker’s specific trigger. A boy who is not a boy. A girl who is not quite a girl. It is almost surely that Otherness that attracts and enrages.

  So she has taken Brandi as a model, has incorporated that sense into her costume. The bedraggled pop-icon-ness. The sad flamboyance. Boots that make her gait a bit clunky. And hidden in the right boot there is one more item she has obtained. The key to everything.

  She stands on Brandi’s usual corner, betting that “John” will stop if he sees a carbon copy of Brandi on the street. He won’t be able to help himself.

  A rain starts, a light mist, and she walks the block to keep warm.

  Against her will, she thinks of Jamie, and the hurt in his eyes when she told him she was leaving. She knows she has been cold. Colder than he deserved.