Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  His eyes skimmed the rest of the board. “Then teachers, counselors, whoever I can track down.”

  “You’re thinking of going down to So Cal, then,” Epps said.

  Roarke answered evenly, “It’s the most concrete trail to her habits, her thinking.” He turned to Singh. “And while I’m on the road: Singh, you’ll be tracking down any crimes in the last ten to twelve years that can be connected to Lindstrom.”

  “Yes, chief.”

  Just as Epps called him “boss,” Singh called him “chief.” He could not break either one of them of the habit; he’d long ago stopped trying.

  “Epps will continue coordinating with the San Luis Obispo sheriffs and local agencies on the Salt Lake City and Portland cold cases. And Jones…”

  He looked to the remaining member of the team, who had been holding the fort on the investigation into Ogromni, a transnational criminal organization that the team had been focused on until Greer had met his fate with that truck.

  “I’m counting on you to move us forward on Ogromni. Check in with our CIs. Best case, we wrap up the investigation into Cara Lindstrom soonest and we can return our focus to Ogromni.”

  His words came out with a forced optimism, even to himself.

  Singh spoke up. “One more thing. I ordered an age progression from the photographs we have of Lindstrom as a child. I thought it might be useful to have a photograph for the various agencies, since all we have of Lindstrom as an adult is the police sketch. But you will have to tell me if it is accurate.” Her eyes rested briefly on Roarke.

  He looked down at the manipulated photo. It was Cara, but not. The photo that had been progressed was of a child who had never experienced what Cara had. She was smiling, she was radiant, she was joyful. None of the things that Cara was now. The adult woman in the photograph was beautiful, calm, and entirely forgettable.

  “Better stick with the police sketch,” Epps finally said beside him.

  “Yeah,” Roarke said.

  As Singh and Jones left the room, Roarke could see Epps lingering at the table, waiting to talk to him. This time there seemed no way to avoid it, and Roarke felt his stomach turn over in dread as Epps came toward him like a dark avenging angel. Then at the last minute Epps’ trajectory was halted as Special Agent in Charge Reynolds stepped into the doorway and looked toward Roarke.

  “Am I interrupting anything?”

  Epps stopped mid-stride. Roarke gave an inner cheer, and just as instantly was seized with guilt.

  “Not at all, we’re just finished,” he told Reynolds with relief, even though he knew this was most likely more of an “out of the frying pan into the fire” kind of rescue than a “saved by the bell” moment.

  Epps’ jaw tensed. His one veiled glance at Roarke all but shouted “We’re not done, here,” but he left gracefully.

  Reynolds remained standing in the doorway. “OPR is processing the investigation into the shooting last night. I don’t anticipate a problem.”

  “There won’t be,” Roarke said.

  The SAC walked into the room and stopped, taking a moment to study the case board.

  “I’m not entirely comfortable with this case,” he said, finally.

  That makes at least three of us, Roarke thought. I’m not at all comfortable with it. Epps sure as hell isn’t comfortable with it, as he’s never going to stop reminding me. There’s nothing comfortable about it. He said none of that as the SAC continued.

  “Your unit is Criminal Organizations. The sooner you’re back on that job, the more comfortable I’m going to be.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Roarke said.

  Reynolds glanced at the board again. “We have to bring this one in. No doubt in my mind. Vigilante, serial killer, whatever she is, she can’t be out there on the streets.”

  You forgot child abductor, Roarke thought, silently. Of course she saved the kid from an imminent fate of sexual exploitation and God only knows what else. But he didn’t say it.

  Reynolds turned and looked at Roarke a moment as if he had heard, anyway. And then he repeated himself. “She can’t be out there on the streets. But I wish it wasn’t this unit that had to deal with her.”

  “What can I do to make you feel better about it?” Roarke asked coolly.

  Reynolds sighed. “Build your case. Arrest her. And turn it over to the prosecutors as soon as possible.”

  “We’re on the same page,” Roarke told him.

  He moved out into the hall with a feeling that he’d dodged some kind of bullet.

  Someone stepped up to him from behind and he twisted around. It was Epps, waiting for him in the hallway. Roarke realized he hadn’t quite dodged that bullet after all.

  “Haven’t had much time to talk, boss,” Epps said evenly. The cold in his voice was hard to hear. From the moment Roarke had hired him they had had an instinctive rhythm between them, working together as seamlessly if they’d done it all their lives. The night at the cement plant had changed everything.

  Roarke turned to face him. “I’m listening.”

  “Serious question. Did you even arrest her?”

  He hadn’t. The truth was, he hadn’t even thought of it at the time. “You mean, arrest her for abducting Jason Sebastian when we know damn well she only did it to keep him out of that trafficking ring?”

  Epps’ face tightened. “There was a whole raft of other charges to choose from.”

  “None of which we have warrants for—”

  Epps’ voice was low, but explosive. “Bullshit. You are talking crazy talk.”

  Roarke was silent. Technically he was right about the warrants, there had been none. But morally, he knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  Epps glanced down the corridor behind him, and stepped closer to Roarke. “What happened that night wasn’t normal and it wasn’t protocol.”

  Roarke looked him square in the eyes. “It wasn’t. And it won’t happen again.”

  Epps stared at him, trying to read him. “This girl is nothing to play with.”

  “No. She’s not.”

  “All right, then. So long as we both know it.” Epps turned, and left him standing in the hall.

  Chapter Three

  The house lies on the outskirts of the desert community, lone and isolated. A strong wind blows over the surrounding land, swirling dust demons across the darkness of the fields. In the black of sky, a million stars tremble around the full moon. In the split rail fence encircling the large yard the front gate stands open; as the wind moves it, the wood seems to be alive, shivering.

  He passes through the opening and moves up the dirt road, through the small grove of eucalyptus and olive trees. The spicy scent surrounds him, the leaves whisper above, a dry rattle. The house comes into sight through the trees, and he sees the front door standing open as well.

  The wind gusts around him and the feeling of doom closes in as he moves up the pavers toward the triangular arched front entrance and stops on the porch, listening…

  Nothing but silence from the darkness within.

  He steps through the open doorway, past the carved wooden door, into the entry hall with its white painted brick walls and tiled floor.

  And then he sees the blood.

  The horror comes rushing over him. He has been here a hundred times before. Every detail is as it always is, the tiled floor, the white stucco walls, cold moonlight through the tall arched windows. He can feel the presence of madness, hear the harsh breath of the unimaginable thing that is waiting for him at the end of the hallway.

  He is no longer a man, but a boy, just a boy, no match for whatever lies behind that door. The terror has turned every cell in his body to ice; his feet can barely move him forward. On the floor around him is a pool of dark, he is up to his ankles in it, and it is not cold, like water, but warm, like…

  Smells like…

  Copper. Stink. Death.

  And those crumpled shapes on the floor around him, the sleeping mounds… but not sleeping,
no, the eyes are open, staring. An entire family, slashed, stabbed… slaughtered.

  He turns to run.

  In front of him a shadow looms… he can feel it reaching for him… feel the scream rising in his throat—

  It is not a monster, but a woman who steps out of the shadows. Her face is beautiful, luminous in the pale moonlight.

  The gash in her throat drips blood.

  And when she reaches for him, he does not know if it is to embrace him — or kill him —

  Roarke jarred awake with the queasy feeling that he had spoken or shouted aloud. He lay in the motel bed, and forced himself to breathe, to slow his racing heart.

  The dream was his past and his present, merged. An old nightmare from his childhood, that he’d had periodically since the Reaper had disappeared, never to be caught, never to be found. There was a new presence now: the adult Cara.

  As he lay still in the motel bed, he listened to the unaccustomed silence, broken at last by the distant roar of a big rig, somewhere on the freeway. He reached for his phone on the bed stand to check the time. It was just past noon, and he was somewhere in the desert off Interstate 10, east of Los Angeles.

  He’d gotten off the plane at LAX, picked up a car from a rental counter, then drove east. It was past midnight and the traffic was, while still astonishing for the hour, very light for Los Angeles, no impediment at all. Roarke was a night owl, so he’d pushed on past the vast sprawl of L.A., past the golden carpet of lights of the bedroom communities and the ever-increasing sprawl of Riverside into the desert, relaxing as the lights of towns grew farther apart and the black sky above him filled with stars.

  He hadn’t expect to make it all the way to Blythe that night, but he was wired from the flight and he wanted to wake up with views of mountains and palm trees rather than strip-mall suburbia. He’d achieved his goal. He was now somewhere past the turnoff to Palm Springs, close enough to the site of the Lindstrom massacre that the memories of the murders had invaded his dreams.

  And more than just the memory of the murders. He could still feel the dream-touch of Cara’s body against his.

  He threw back the blankets to stand, and moved for the bathroom to shower and dress.

  On the way back to the freeway he stopped for a burrito to go from a nearby stand, figuring the slight risk of botulism was a small price to pay for the ambrosial Mexican food to be had along any highway in Southern California. Then he drove on into the desert, into the sun, toward Blythe.

  The town was a wide, flat stretch of sand, ringed by mountains in the far distance. Out the car windows he saw silky dunes and palm trees and barrel cactus. As he drove in, he couldn’t help remembering the view from the air. In the desert outside Blythe, there were huge petroglyphs called intaglios, enormous drawings on the desert floor. The biggest and most famous one was called The Hunter, a primitive depiction of a giant with a spear. There was no way not to associate it with the killer who had massacred Cara’s family. A monster had come out of this haunting setting to do his bloody work.

  Roarke was going back to the very beginning: the first witness he intended to interview was Randall Timothy Trent. At the time of the massacre of Cara’s family Trent had been married to Cara’s aunt Joan, her father’s sister. He was not any kind of blood relative: a second husband, not the natural father of Joan’s two small children.

  The aunt was made Cara’s guardian by the court and the general hope had been that she and her then-husband would adopt the child, but Trent had left Joan and the children just a few months after Joan had taken five-year old Cara in. Cara remained with the family for only six months before the aunt returned her to Family Services, claiming inability to deal with Cara’s behavioral problems. Given that the child had witnessed the slaughter of her family by a psychopath, that she herself had nearly been killed by that same monster who left her for dead, Roarke would have hoped the aunt would have made more of an effort.

  Now the aunt was dead of heart failure at fifty-four, and her two children had been just six months and eighteen months when she took Cara in, too young to remember their five-year old cousin. Which meant Trent was one of the few people alive who had had prolonged contact with Cara Lindstrom right after the attack on her and her family.

  And he was a captive audience, since he was currently incarcerated, in medium-security Ironwood Prison, just fifteen minutes outside the town where Cara’s family had been butchered.

  Whether Trent’s present circumstances had anything to do with anything, Roarke didn’t know. But in his short experience with Cara Lindstrom, he’d found that everything meant something.

  The landscape was bleak: flat plains of sand and a dry red ridge of mountains behind the white expanse of prison, so stark in the desert setting the buildings seemed to have been dropped onto the middle of the desert by aliens.

  Ironwood was a medium-security facility, not as dank as so many other California prisons, and the population taking exercise behind the fence in the outer grounds looked to be about fifty percent Latino. Roarke knew a whole building had been converted to house “sensitive needs” inmates, an unlikely mix of ex-gang members and sex offenders who were equally at risk for inmate-on-inmate violence.

  Trent was neither a gang member nor a sex offender. He’d been convicted of assault on a prostitute, the last of a long line of assaults and altercations seeming to stem from anger impulse control, and undoubtedly alcoholism and other substance abuse issues. The assault on the prostitute crossed into a gray area that interested Roarke; it combined sex and rage, and that was more specifically the kind of offender that Cara Lindstrom was in the habit of dispatching.

  Roarke didn’t think that Trent had molested Cara, although he sure as hell had checked the Social Services records for any hint of it. Trent had had no priors for sexual assault or other similar charges. His criminal record had started a good five years after he’d moved out on Joan Lindstrom-Trent. There was no obvious evidence that he’d done anything at all untoward before then.

  But a con didn’t just become a con. It didn’t just start at thirty-nine. Not in Roarke’s experience.

  Cara had been only five years old when she lived under the same roof as Trent just after her near-murder, and it was unlikely in the extreme that she had… Roarke had no idea how to even finish the thought. That she had seen the badness in Trent, that she had driven him out of the house…

  At age five.

  Epps’ words in the corridor came back to him. You are talking crazy talk.

  And yet the question hovered. What happened?

  Inside the prison’s main building Roarke surrendered his service weapon at the security gate and stripped off his belt, shoes, and personal belongings to send them through the X-ray machine. He re-dressed on the other end and was escorted by a guard through halls reeking of the biting faux-pine stench of some antiseptic cleaner. Steel gates clanged open before him and slammed locked behind him, and he felt himself flinching at the sounds. Prisons always made him tense, with their pervasive sense of desperation and madness, but today there was the added knowledge that he was looking at Cara Lindstrom’s future, if she were alive and if he caught her. And he would catch her. It didn’t mean he liked thinking about what that meant.

  It wasn’t a visiting day so he was the only one in the visitation room. It was bright from the long windows overlooking the desert and filled with rows of scarred rectangular folding tables and plastic bucket chairs. He remained standing at one of those windows, gazing out at an expansive view of the cloudless blue sky and the jagged red mountains.

  A door opened behind him and Trent shambled in, escorted by a guard. He was a medium-tall and weathered man in his late fifties, with the hard bitterness of a convict, but there was enough tone left to his muscles and enough definition to his face that Roarke could see he had once been an attractive man. Not a good one, but an attractive one.

  Trent stopped behind the chair right at the middle of the table and across from Roarke and eyed
him. “Fed, huh,” he said, half-bored, half-contemptuous.

  Roarke moved toward the table. “Have a seat, Mr. Trent.”

  Trent shrugged, pulled the chair out and sat. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  And some polish, too. Definitely a ladies’ man in his time.

  “I’m reinvestigating the Lindstrom murders,” Roarke said, and while he watched the man’s face he wondered why he’d said it that way

  Trent looked startled for a split-second, which he covered fairly skillfully. “You don’t say. Can’t help you. Wasn’t even in the same town when it happened.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for Cara Lindstrom.”

  A different kind of look flashed across Trent’ face, uninterpretable. “You have got to be kidding. Haven’t seen the kid for a million years.”

  Roarke looked at him without expression. “That’s right. You moved out — two months after Cara moved in with you?”

  The convict shrugged again, disinterested. “I guess. Like I said. Long time ago.”

  Roarke flipped open a file, but he didn’t need to check the report that Singh had compiled. He knew the date.

  “Two months to the day.” He looked back up at Trent. “Interesting timing.”

  “In what way?” Trent said, with a hint of a challenge.

  “It looks almost like it might have had to do with the little girl.”

  The inmate smiled thinly. “We already had Joan’s two. Three just broke the camel’s back.”

  Roarke stared at him. “Kind of cold, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “Little girl who’d been through all that — five years old. Seems like a person could give her a little time.”

  Trent’ face and voice turned ugly. And more than ugly: furtive. “Yeah, well, you didn’t have to live with the kid. She was not right.”