Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “Not right,” Roarke repeated colorlessly.

  “Mental,” Trent summed up.

  “Like how?”

  “Always watching. Always snooping around.” The convict looked grimly angry.

  Roarke kept his tone neutral, suppressing an urge to haul Trent up by his collar and slam him against the wall. “A five-year-old? Snooping?”

  Trent assumed a look of righteous martyrdom. “The kid… you don’t know what we had to deal with. Her waking up at night screaming. Seeing things.”

  Hallucinations. That had been in the psychiatric reports, too.

  “Seeing things like…”

  “Monsters, she said. Always crying about It.”

  There was an odd inflection he gave the word, an inflection Roarke had heard before. From Cara. He frowned, repeated it. “Always crying about monsters?”

  “It,” Trent said again. “She was always talking about It.” He seemed agitated for the first time. “Spooked the kids. Creeped me out, too.”

  Roarke sat back and looked at him.

  “No one could go near her sometimes. She’d just start screaming. In the end she needed more help than we could give her,” Trent said piously.

  Yeah, I believe that. Roarke gave himself a minute to breathe, and studied the man in front of him. What went on? What are you hiding?

  “You’re in for assault,” he said aloud.

  Trent’s face turned sullen. “Self-defense,” he said.

  Sure, pal. Prostitutes are in the habit of attacking johns for no reason. “Not the first conviction, either,” he said. “The rest of them self-defense, too?”

  The convict moved explosively, a threatening gesture. “You got a point?”

  “Just trying to see what she saw in you.”

  Trent looked truculent. “I was a good husband to Joanie.”

  The fact was, Roarke hadn’t meant Joan Trent. He’d been thinking of Cara. Just trying to see what she saw in you. At five years old.

  “Until Cara came along,” Roarke said.

  “The kid was damaged. Maybe always was, maybe got that way because of what happened. Either way, not a kid you wanted living in your house.”

  “So you split and left Joan with her and two other kids,” Roarke said evenly.

  Trent’s eyes narrowed at Roarke speculatively. “Is this what the Feebs do these days? You’re here to rag my ass about what a bad father I was to the poor little orphan? Telling you, I wasn’t the one messed that kid up.”

  Roarke realized Trent was right in at least that one respect. And he’d strayed far from the topic. He refocused. “Did the Lindstroms have any vacation homes, favorite vacation spots, condos that you know of?” He knew that early imprints went deep, and if Cara had a safe house, as Singh had speculated, she may have unconsciously gravitated toward and established herself in a place that had warm memories from her earliest childhood.

  Trent rolled his eyes. “I’m ’sposed to remember from what, twenty-five years ago? We didn’t socialize much with Joan’s family.”

  Maybe because her brother could see what a creep you are, Roarke thought wearily.

  “And you never took the children anywhere, no family vacations?”

  He barked a laugh. “It was enough of a time just getting the kid to sleep at night.”

  “Did you go to the funerals?” Roarke asked out of nowhere.

  Trent looked startled. “Go to the… of course we did. What the hell?”

  It was the most natural response Roarke had gotten from him yet, so he tried for more. “Killers often attend the funerals of their victims. I wondered if you might have noticed anyone out of place, anyone unusual.”

  Trent frowned, and his eyes clouded, as if he were seriously thinking about it. But he shook his head. “I was there when Joanie I.D.’d the bodies. Person who does that kind of thing… I don’t think you can walk around hiding that.”

  “That’s interesting,” Roarke said. He meant it. He sat back in his chair and studied Trent. Trent stared back.

  “You seriously opening all that up again?” He shook his head. “Brother, good luck. No one ever had a clue.”

  Roarke had the feeling that Trent would sit talking to him all day if this were the topic. And what was surprising about that? A violent attack, an unsolved mystery, a brush with evil and legend. It’s not something a person would get over. Cara hadn’t. He himself hadn’t.

  “There’s nothing at all you can remember, no hint that anyone got that this was going to happen?”

  Trent laughed without humor. “Like why someone would want to kill them? Besides how damn perfect they were?” The ugly look was on his face again and Roarke thought, not for the first time, that as disordered as the killer seemed to have been, he was selective enough to consistently pick happy nuclear families, ones that could have aroused envy even in less overtly disturbed individuals.

  “How about crank calls? Signs of an intruder, an attempted break-in, someone watching the house? Anything unusual. Anything at all.”

  “Just the rabbit,” the convict said.

  Roarke felt a sudden chill of significance. “What rabbit?”

  “About a week before it all happened. Gillian — Joan’s sister — found a jackrabbit all torn up on the porch. Out here…” The convict waved vaguely at the window, the desert outside. “Coyotes do that shit all the time. No one thought anything of it till afterward, but Joan said something about it later.”

  Roarke had read nothing of this in the police files.

  “She said something ‘later’? How much later?”

  Trent shook his head. “She didn’t even remember it for a while. A month or so, maybe.”

  “She told the cops?”

  Trent frowned. “’Course.”

  “You’re sure,” Roarke said intently. “She called in or went in to report finding the rabbit to the investigating officers a month or so later?”

  He watched the thought process on Trent’s face, the initial certainty turning to doubt. “Well… she had her hands full with the kids. Don’t know for a fact.”

  That’s it, Roarke thought, with a strange kind of elation. Could it be? Something that everyone missed?

  Something that could finally, finally, bring the Reaper down?

  Roarke left Trent to a guard, and processed himself out. Outside of the prison he squinted into the sun and breathed in dry desert air, and felt a rush of adrenaline and exhilaration. A clue. Slight as it was, it was something that might just have been overlooked in the frenzy that the investigation would have been by the time of a third family massacre. It could mean that the Reaper had watched the family, stalked them. He might have left the same kind of calling card at one of the other scenes. Someone else might have seen him. There might be a trail.

  He ignored the fact that it was a trail to a twenty-five year old cold case and not his own, and reached for his phone to call Singh. When the dark velvet voice responded, he said without identifying himself, “In the police reports on the Reaper massacres, was there anything about animals? A dead rabbit left on the Lindstrom’s porch, maybe a week before the murders?”

  Roarke could hear Singh’s fingernails clicking on computer keys, and felt his breath suspending as he waited. Her voice came back: “Nothing.”

  “How about in the other cases? Anything about animals? Pets killed, carcasses displayed, eviscerated…”

  More clicking and an intense silence from Singh’s end. Roarke watched the wind blow sand across the flat plains of desert.

  “Nothing immediately comes up when I search. If you wish I will comb through the reports myself to be sure.”

  Roarke considered this. Was Trent just fucking with him? Throwing him a plausible clue to amuse himself? It happened all the time. But Roarke didn’t feel the convict had been lying. It would have been a clever fabrication, diabolical, even.

  “Do it,” Roarke told her. “Please.”

  She didn’t ask him what this had to do with finding Car
a Lindstrom. Which was fine with Roarke, since he didn’t have any good answer to that at all.

  He drove on the flat ribbon of highway past fields and horse properties and was halfway to the house before he realized where he was going. But it was inevitable. The Lindstrom house, site of the massacre twenty-five years ago, the place where Cara Lindstrom’s life, and very probably her sanity, had been shattered for all time.

  The house had been standing empty for years, a foreclosure, bank-owned. It had a history of high turnover, defaulted mortgages. Like a curse. Bad energy. A retired sheriff Roarke had interviewed about the Lindstrom case had suggested it would be best if the house burned to the ground.

  It sat on a land lot of several acres, a house fanning out in four sections like an accordion, surrounded by thick patches of old-growth trees. The property was bordered by agricultural fields on three sides. The other side of the lot butted up against a road. There was no other house adjacent at all; the closest residence was across that highway. Isolated. A perfect setting for the gruesome work the Reaper had done.

  There was a packed dirt road leading from the highway to the house, which was encircled by a split-rail fence. The lawn beyond was dry and brown, but the eucalyptus and olive trees were huge and healthy, cooling the air with their spicy sage green leaves. There was a large garage and also some kind of shed.

  As he turned into the drive, Roarke stared out the windows with the same powerful feeling of déjà vu he always had, seeing it. As a child of nine he had watched the house on T.V. broadcasts countless times, riveted to news reports on the massacre. It was the case that had infected him with the desire to be an FBI agent, to solve crimes and lock up bad guys. He’d studied the case, dreamed it. And some force he did not understand had crossed his path with Cara Lindstrom’s twenty-five years later.

  He got out of the car and let the door shut with a hollow clunk before he moved up the pavers toward the front entrance. There was a dry breeze, a whispering in the trees around him that made the air seem alive.

  The recessed porch had a high triangular arched entrance and a wide door with ornate carved wooden panels. He stepped up and looked down at the concrete slab of the porch, hearing Trent’s voice in his head. “She found a rabbit, all torn up. Out here coyotes do that kind of thing all the time…”

  But coyotes weren’t in the habit of dragging animal carcasses up onto porches. If anything they shunned security lights.

  He looked up toward the solid front door. There was a realtor’s lock box on the door handle. Roarke remembered the combination from his previous visit, and mentally crossed his fingers that it had not been changed. He punched in the numbers, held his breath. The compartment slid open.

  He removed the key and used it, and the door swung open into the silent house.

  The entry hall was dark wood beams and white-painted brick walls, with Mexican tiled floors. The red light of sunset spilled through the windows but the house was cool. He stepped into the great room, huge and gorgeous, with two huge arched windows framing a double-size fireplace, cathedral ceilings of more beamed dark wood and antique ceiling fans.

  He stood for a moment under the vaulted ceilings. Listening. Feeling. The whole house had an energy… it seemed to have been deserted for years. There was an eerie sense of arrested time.

  He didn’t know why he was there, except that he couldn’t stay away, any more than Cara had been able to stay away. The place was imprinted with horror, and mystery. He felt the eternal pull of the cold case, the itch to know. Who killed them? Where did he come from? Where did he go? What was his sickness?

  And there was the pull of something deeper. It was the great mystery of his childhood, the imprint that had decided the course of his life forever.

  He moved toward the wing of the house that had housed the children’s bedrooms. Room after room was completely empty; his footsteps echoed off the ubiquitous tiles. In his mind, the trail of blood the killer had left was still crimson on the floors, on the walls. Fifteen-year old Joe. Thirteen-year old Donny. Eight-year old Amber. Pulled from their beds and stabbed dozens of times. Psychologists called it piquerism, a perverted substitute for the sexual act.

  He moved to the end of the hall, inexorably drawn to the bedroom that had been Cara’s.

  The room vibrated with the things that she had said to Roarke in this very house, in this room, holding a gun on him as he told her he wanted to help her… and was not sure if that would be the death of him.

  “It was a monster disguised as a man. It scratched me and now it plays with me.”

  In his mind he heard the heartbreaking voice of the five-year old child caught on tape, the child Cara’s absolute conviction that her family had been attacked not by a man, but by a monster.

  “Monster. Beast. Monster.”

  The Reaper had broken her in this room, left her with the dark visions which now appeared to lead her to the human monsters she killed.

  The space suddenly seemed too small to breathe in. He stepped backward, through the door and out.

  In the family room a sliding glass door led out to a tiled patio with the same high vaulted wood ceilings and ceiling fans, a brick barbeque, a dry pool with dry spa. The sky outside was deep blue twilight.

  He pulled open the glass door and moved outside.

  The desert wind was warm on his skin. It whispered in the eucalyptus grove, a lulling, beckoning sound.

  He walked out further into the yard, feeling the absorbed heat of the day rising from the sand.

  There were no outside lights on around the house, and so few neighboring houses that the sky above was already full of actual stars, stars the way they only appeared in the desert or out on the ocean. Blackness, infinity, and a hundred million diamond lights. The crescent moon was rising, but it was still low enough on the horizon that Roarke could pick out Orion and Cassiopeia, the Hunter and the Queen. Every star in the constellations was clear and brilliant.

  As Roarke stared up, he felt his skin crawling, the icy feeling of being watched. He spun around, staring into the darkness. He knew it was nothing more than nerves; the Reaper had not struck for twenty-five years. Cara had been his last victim. But Roarke’s skin still tingled.

  A tumbleweed rolled across the sand, and off in the distance, a shadow, small and close to the ground, skittered between rocks.

  He stood in the wind and the whisper of leaves and looked up again at the sky, wishing for a sign.

  Chapter Four

  In the darkness, in the wind, under the starry sky, she watches.

  She watches as Roarke walks in the dark and the desert wind, sometimes stopping to look out into the night as if he can see her.

  She is not surprised to be seeing him again. She had not expected him, yet she is not surprised. Everything about Roarke is inevitable.

  It is as the last moment she saw him. He is holding her, carrying her. She can feel his arms, the beating of his heart against her skin.

  And there is pain, and his voice, telling her to breathe, to live.

  He lays her down in the front seat of a truck, whispering that he will help her. Then he is gone, and there is only pain.

  She lies on the seat floating in and out of consciousness. She is wounded, badly wounded, but death has circled her before without claiming her. Outside the truck men are fighting, Roarke and one of the flesh dealers. And then something outside herself jolts her to life. While Roarke fights hand-to-hand with another one of the monsters, she pulls herself up by the inside of the door.

  It should not be possible to stand, to walk. But it is not entirely her, not her alone, that moves. She staggers out toward the vehicle she has seen earlier, the one she took keys from, for just this eventuality.

  As the fire from the explosion in the meth lab roars and submachine guns blast, she escapes in that truck, driving out into the night, into the dark desert, driving until she has to stop or crash.

  Some time before dawn she wakes and does not know where she is. H
er ribs are screaming, an excruciating wound. The stabbing pulse of blood in the flesh of her side. Burning…

  But not dead.

  She is still alive enough to find an overnight convenience store, where the stoned clerk seems barely to notice her condition. She buys quantities of peroxide, antibiotic ointment, ibuprofen, a sewing kit, and uses them in the truck. The bullet has scraped her ribcage, ugly and bloody but not deep, no metal is lodged inside her.

  Something has spared her, again, and this time whatever it is has used Roarke to do so.

  She drives again, stops again, wakes again… and recognizes Joshua Tree, the national park in the desert just an hour away from her family’s old home, a vaguely remembered wonderland from her childhood, the time before the night. An alien landscape of enormous wind-carved rocks and natural monuments, clean and vast, with no human life to soil it. On the outskirts of the park there are all kinds of rarely-used vacation homes: cabins, lodges. Easy enough to break a back window in this isolated cabin, to settle there when she finds no signs of recent habitation. The object being to keep herself still enough to heal.

  She spends her time dousing herself with bottles of hydrogen peroxide by the hour, slathering the bloody gash in her side with triple antibiotic ointment, sleeping. Infection sets in anyway, angry black and red lines crawling hotly from the wound, and she ventures out, breaking into one after another of the closed-up houses in the surrounding area, rifling through medicine cabinets until she finds an almost-full course of oral antibiotics, and some old codeine as well, for the pain.

  And she heals.

  She had not expected to survive the night at the concrete plant. In truth she had not wanted to. She had gone there with only one purpose: to kill as many of the monsters as she could before they took her down. When she asked Roarke to come, she had not expected him to, much less expected him to save her.

  And yet it had happened.

  She does not yet know what it means, but she lives by these signs.

  She is longer in one spot than she can remember staying in a long, long time, resting, recovering… then venturing out, driving into the park and sitting for hours in the midst of house-sized boulders at Big Rock campground, where she can feel the desert sun and wind and the ancient peace restoring her.