Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  He turned to Singh. “We need to set up an interview with the local detectives and get all case files. Schedule a walk-through of the house, preferably this evening. We should be able to get there by seven. We play it as if we’re really investigating and we need to take a look at the case files and the crime scene.”

  Then he addressed the men. “We take separate cars. Two separate cars. Epps and me in one, and Jones, you need to be shadowing us in some tourist car. If we get lucky, we might catch her out on the road.”

  Roarke was back at his building by one-thirty, where he illegally parked the black Crown Vic from the office fleet right in front of the house by using his OFFICIAL FBI BUSINESS placard. From there the agents followed the script. Upstairs in his flat he put on a light for extra visibility and stayed near his front windows as he packed and pretended to speak on the phone. Then he took his rollerbag down to stow it in the car trunk.

  He went back upstairs, waited a bit longer, and went down to the car again, this time with a duffel bag that he’d stuffed with a coat. He stayed at the car, made another fake phone call, checked the oil and fluids, did a slow walk around looking at the tires, feeling like a bit of an ass.

  Is this just ridiculous? He wondered. Is there any chance in hell she’s watching?

  And yet he could not shake the feeling that Reno was the next right move.

  He was prowling his flat looking for anything to load into the car to keep up the whole charade, when his phone buzzed. He punched on to talk to Epps, who told him, “I’m pulling up right now. You can come down and meet me and be visible.”

  Roarke grabbed a small cooler from the kitchen, and as an afterthought threw in some bottled cappuccinos and ice, then went downstairs.

  Epps had parked half a block down. He carried a large duffel and a binder. He stopped on the sidewalk in front of the car while Roarke opened the trunk for him to put his bag in. He added the cooler to the back seat as well, saying under his breath, “I was running out of ways to hang out at the car.”

  Epps closed the trunk lid and extended the notebook to Roarke. “Take a look at this. We can stand here and talk about that for a minute.”

  Roarke took it with a frown and opened the binder, resting it on the roof of the car. It was full of scans and copies of case reports. “A little light reading for the road,” Epps said. “Singh put it together. She’s been on the horn to Reno P.D., talking them out of everything they have on the murder/suicide. Looks all official, don’t it?”

  Roarke flipped through a few pages. Singh had done her usual stellar work; it looked like everything he would ever want to know about the Leland family massacre.

  “What exactly are we telling Reno PD, anyway?” Epps was asking. “This is an open-and-shut case of murder/suicide. We don’t want them freaking out that they got it wrong.”

  Roarke had been thinking it through himself. “Singh told them we’re doing a Bureau study on family massacres. Warning signs, that kind of thing. Maybe once we’re there we’ll give them the truth. We’ll have to play it by ear.”

  He glanced up the street. “I think we’ve put on all the stage play we can afford to. She’s either watching or she isn’t. Come on upstairs to give it one more shot and then we’ll hit the road.”

  Leaving San Francisco was always laced with a touch of the mystic: crossing under the soaring arches of the Bay Bridge, speeding past the silver-gleaming bay with its central island of Alcatraz, dominated by the brooding, fortresslike former prison.

  Off the bridge the route was two hundred twenty straight miles on I-80 to the California/Nevada border. Through the flats of Sacramento, the tourist town of Auburn, and up into the Tahoe National Forest, passing to the north of Lake Tahoe itself, and then Reno was just across the state border. Roarke had driven the route a million times on ski trips with his family, fighting with his older brother in the back seat.

  Roarke loved his adopted city. But as always he felt a huge release of tension once they were out and on the open road. At the same time, he was realizing he had overlooked the huge flaw in his plan. He would be in a car alone with Epps for four hours, and that meant they would have to talk. To stave off the inevitable, he instantly buried himself in the case file.

  The case was already closed, as Epps had said, an open-and-shut case. It was completely apparent to Reno PD and the coroner’s office what had transpired. Professor Leland had stabbed his way through his family members, and when everyone else was dead he sat at the desk in his study and cut his own throat.

  It had been shortly after two-thirty in the morning and the family had been asleep. Leland had first slain his wife in their bed using a kitchen knife, then walked out into the hall to the children’s rooms and fatally slashed all the boys in order of their bedrooms. There was blood on his bedroom slippers from where he’d walked through, and his footprints in the blood.

  The similarities to the Reaper case were startling from the first moment, almost unnerving. Roarke spoke aloud to Epps as he read, and the flatlands sped by outside the window.

  “It’s the exact family type the Reaper chose. Middle-class, educated parents, several young children, none older than mid-teens.” It was one of the reasons that at age nine Roarke had been so grimly riveted to the TV reports of the case: the families had been so very much like his own family. One of those fathers had been a college professor, too, like Roarke’s father, with two boys, like Roarke and his brother. It had all seemed so disturbingly close.

  And now in this unrelated massacre, the father, Leland, was an engineering professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. His wife had worked in the campus housing department. Their children were three boys: thirteen, eleven and seven.

  Epps spoke beside him at the wheel. “And of course, no one saw it coming. He was such a good guy,” he said with an ironic tinge.

  “Of course.”

  They heard it all the time. No one ever saw anything coming.

  Roarke flipped through the file, reading background. “No history of psychological problems, no extraordinary financial stresses, stable employment, bills up to date, some savings in the bank.” He frowned. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense, actually.”

  Epps glanced at him. “We don’t have to investigate it.”

  “Right.” Roarke had forgotten for a moment that the case was just a cover, a ruse to draw Cara.

  He looked out the window, brooding on it as he watched the road. When he was a kid the drive from San Francisco to Sacramento had been almost all fields. Now it was an occasional field in between a seemingly endless stretch of strip malls, car dealerships, fast food stops and office park developments. In another ten years it would probably be all strip malls. It was very, very flat. If Cara wanted to follow them, it wouldn’t be hard to do it on this stretch. He wondered again if the plan was just crazy. But somehow he didn’t think it was.

  He laid the notebook Singh had made up for him open on his lap and removed the inner file of photocopied crime scene photos. He immediately felt an electric buzz at the back of his neck.

  Singh had added to the initial photographs the team had looked over. What he was looking at now was more than a simple stabbing. The family had been butchered. Not merely killed, but slashed in a frenzy. There was blood everywhere: soaking the clothing and skin of Mrs. Leland and the three children, soaking the carpet, sprayed on the wall.

  And there were neck cuts.

  “Jesus,” he said, and didn’t realize he’d spoken until Epps looked at him. Roarke tore his eyes away from the photos. “This looks just like them. The family massacres. The Reaper’s.”

  Epps glanced at him, puzzled. “That’s good, right? It backs up our story.”

  I didn’t expect something this close, Roarke thought. Not anywhere near this close.

  He stared out the windshield. The approach in to Sacramento (Sack o’ Tomatoes, Roarke and his brother had called it as kids) took them over miles of wetlands. There had been some unaccustomed rain, several straight
days of it the week before, and the water was so high on the flatland it looked as if they were driving on a freeway over a lake.

  He picked up the file again. He had only intended to get familiar with basic details of the case. Now he started from the beginning, page one, and read every word.

  When he finally looked up, they were into the Sierra Nevada foothills, and there was much more to look at, with increasing forested areas and granite outcroppings. Cold, but clear. He’d been careful to check the weather before they left; it was still just mid-November but the Sierras were nothing to fool around with even in a light snowstorm.

  Signs beside the road informed them they were passing through Auburn, a historic Gold Rush town with meticulously preserved original buildings. After Auburn the territory became increasingly rural.

  “80 is a major truck route,” Roarke mused aloud as he stared out the window.

  Epps glanced at him. “Yeah.”

  “And a major ski vacation roadway,” Roarke continued.

  “Right…” Epps said, a question in his voice.

  “I’m just thinking. This geographic element. Between four and six hours driving distance between kills. This is someone who’s on the road a lot. He has a comfort level with it. Bishop is a major ski resort gateway, with hiking and boating in the summer. Blythe is en route to major desert resorts, including Palm Springs. And Reno: another ski resort, summer resort highway…”

  Epps glanced at him from the wheel. “Only Reno has nothing to do with the others.”

  Roarke had forgotten again. “Right.”

  And he had to admit that Arcata, the site of the first massacre in 1987, didn’t exactly qualify as a resort town.

  He stared down at the file with the nagging feeling he was missing something incredibly significant about the massacre, something right there in front of him…

  But just then Epps turned off the road, pulling in to a rest stop. As he cruised past the trees to park in front of the restroom area, Roarke was uncomfortably reminded of one of Cara’s most recent slayings: a trucker with a history of sexual assault who appeared to have been on the verge of attacking her in the women’s restroom of a rest stop. She had sliced his throat with two deep, irrevocable cuts and left the bathroom looking like an abattoir.

  Roarke was certain that Epps had chosen the rest stop rather than a convenience store to make a silent but deliberate point.

  Or he was being ridiculously paranoid. I know she’s dangerous, he thought. I don’t need my nose rubbed in it.

  He got out of the car and used the men’s room, avoiding looking at his ghost reflection in the cloudy metal mirror, then went back outside to buy a candy bar and Cheetos at the vending machines. What’s a road trip without junk food?

  He walked over to a picnic table, surveying the landscaped grounds. There was no sign of Jones at the stop, but Roarke knew that he’d be nearby.

  Epps joined him at the table. Roarke offered him the bag of orangey cheese twists and Epps recoiled. “That’s not food.”

  “I never said it was.” Roarke dipped into the bag with fingers already coated in orange dust.

  “Sick,” Epps muttered.

  They both looked out at the foothills leading up to steep mountains. And then Epps looked back at the rest stop, the restrooms, the women’s restroom. Roarke could feel it coming, the question he’d been dreading; it was vibrating in the air between them.

  “You didn’t cuff her,” Epps said softly.

  Roarke felt his blood rising. “I thought she was dying. She couldn’t walk. She could barely breathe. I thought she was dying.”

  “But you would have cuffed a man. Not two days ago I saw you cuff a dead man.” Epps looked at him, and his dark eyes looked old.

  “She’s not a man,” Roarke answered tightly.

  “I’m sayin. You have a blind spot. You do.”

  Roarke looked at him full on. “Not any more.”

  “Okay,” Epps said. His dark and regal face was set, troubled. But Roarke thought he was safe for now.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Roarke took the wheel for the next part of the drive. The agents got a call from Jones once they were back on the road. “Any sign of her?” Epps asked the younger agent on speaker.

  “Nothing.”

  Roarke was silent. He’d known it, but it was a new wave of unease. “Okay. On to Reno, then,” Epps said into the phone, and clicked off.

  The Sierras were, of course, spectacular. Streams rushed over the granite cliffs that ran along the freeway. Roarke felt himself breathing deeper as the views worked their magic on his frayed nerves. He was also glad there was still some daylight left. It was an unforgiving road at night.

  The descent on the east side of the mountain range into the Reno area was steep, and the geography changed radically again. Reno sat in a high desert valley, the Great Basin Desert, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The plants were smaller and there was far less color; vibrant greens gave way to muted greenish-grays and browns.

  The glitzy, neon-lit arch over Virginia Street, complete with rotating star, proclaimed Reno“The biggest little city in the world.” Roarke drove the strip through the much smaller, retro version of Vegas, famous for its casinos and its history as a mecca for quick divorces before the advent of the “no-fault” divorce. The campus of the University of Nevada, Reno, was located north of the city, overlooking Truckee Meadows to one side and the downtown casinos on the other. Mountain ranges rimmed the valley, already dusted with white from the first snowstorm of the year. The temperature was a crisp mid-forties.

  The Lelands had lived on the southwest side of campus, an older and established residential neighborhood called Juniper Hills, a collection of 1950’s ranchers and older two-stories on spacious half-acre lots near the Truckee River. Roarke got a distinctly rural feel as they motored past horse properties, which gave him a frisson of déjà vu. So much like the Lindstrom house. So many parallels, here.

  The house was a big older two-story with a wide front porch. There were a total of nine Robbery-Homicide detectives on Reno’s two hundred eighty-eight officer force, and the two who had closed the case were waiting outside. Detective Lundgren was a long-boned, hawk-faced man with pale hair and eyes who looked like the product of Scandinavian ancestors who’d been in the valley forever. Beside him was Detective Samson, whose longish, shining black hair and ruddy skin clued Roarke in to some Native American blood. Lundgren was instantly on the defensive, Samson was silent, impossible to read.

  Reno averaged nine homicides a year, and almost all of those were homicides committed during the course of a robbery. The Leland family had constituted more than half that total in a single night, and robbery had had nothing to do with anything.

  As the four men met on the sidewalk, Epps began,“We appreciate you gentlemen coming out—”

  Detective Lundgren interrupted, going straight to the key question. “How exactly is this case supposed to be connected to one of yours?”

  In the moment, Roarke decided to go with the “We’re doing a Federal study on familicide” story. “Triggers, indicators,” he elaborated. “Economic factors.”

  “It was trouble in the marriage,” Lundgren said immediately. “They separated back in the summer.”

  The silent detective, Samson, finally spoke. “But they were back together. The sister said they were working it out.”

  “Leland’s sister said they were working it out,” Lundgren said, and shot a baleful look at his partner that was not lost on Roarke. “There was money stuff, too. Wife lost her job in the recession. They were struggling like everyone else.”

  That’s not the story in their bank accounts, Roarke thought, but didn’t say. “But Leland had no previous history of violence?” he asked.

  “None,” the Native American said implacably.

  “That we know of,” Lundgren shot back.

  Roarke and Epps exchanged a glance. The tension between the two detectives was palpable.
The agents weren’t actually there to investigate the Leland massacre, but it was looking more and more as if there was something to investigate.

  “Would you take us through?” Roarke asked.

  Of course there was nothing like blood on the walls; the crime-scene cleaners had done their work. The house was still furnished, no relative had yet cleared away the personal belongings. But the space had the hollow feeling of a tragedy.

  Somewhere outside there was the monotonous thud of a basketball on concrete, some lone player practicing free throws. A suburban sound carrying a ghostly resonance.

  Roarke stood for a moment, recalling the floor plan: living room, dining room, kitchen, utility room, and study downstairs; master bedroom and two bedrooms upstairs for the three boys: thirteen, eleven and seven. The details of the household were familiar to him: stuffed bookcases and masculine, well-used furniture. Another wall of books was visible through the study door, and the corner of a heavy desk. An academic house, much like his own childhood home.

  He moved first toward the stairs, wanting it in order. He felt less and less comfortable with every step into the rustic, fifties style house, as he pictured the brutal scene from the crime scene photos.

  The whole feel of the place was familiar. Like the Lindstroms house. So like the Lindstroms.

  The family had been asleep, except for Leland. He had been dressed for bed in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt but his side of the bed in the master bedroom had not been slept in and a neighbor had reported a light on in his study late into the night. Some time around two-thirty in the morning he had walked upstairs carrying a carving knife, and stabbed his wife to death while she lay sleeping.

  “So this all took place starting at about two-thirty in the morning,” Roarke said aloud to the detectives as they climbed the staircase.

  “A neighbor thought she heard something that may have been a cry at just before three. She was barely awake. It was windy, and she didn’t hear anything further, so she fell back asleep,” Samson said.