Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “And he killed his wife, first,” Roarke said, not a question. He stepped into the master bedroom.

  Like Cara’s mother, Gillian Lindstrom, Trish Leland had never made it out of bed. The blankets and mattress had been soaked with her blood.

  Roarke stared at the bed frame, imagining the dark spreading stains. Then he backed his way out of the room and walked down the hall to the kids’ rooms. Pieces of carpet had been cut up from various areas, taken as evidence.

  “And then he started on the kids.”

  Lundgren answered tensely. “S’right.”

  Roarke stopped in the doorway of the younger boys’ room to look in. The carpet was gone but the bedclothes and personal belongings remained: comforters printed with sports insignia, shelves lined with video game boxes and models of cars and space aliens, a desk with a computer, hockey sticks and face masks piled in a box.

  At some point during the initial attack the two younger boys must have been awakened, very likely by their mother’s cries. Evidence showed the two boys had taken refuge in their closet. The killer had dragged them out and killed first eleven-year old Paul and then seven-year old Baxter. Both were slashed and stabbed but apparently dispatched quickly. Thirteen-year old Seth was last. Leland had stabbed him over two dozen times.

  Roarke moved down the hall to the last room. Here the bed was stripped; Leland had sat on Seth’s bed for perhaps some time and the photos had shown smears of blood on the bedspread. Roarke stood in the room, pondering this detail, which felt like it needed attention.

  And then Leland had walked downstairs, back down to the study, where he sat in his chair and cut his own throat. A neighbor boy had found him there the next morning in a pool of his own blood, when the boy had come over to walk with Seth to school. The weapon was on the floor beside the father’s body, his fingerprints on it. There had been no note.

  And it all bothered Roarke in a way he couldn’t even begin to express.

  That kind of frenzy? The man’s whole family? Then he goes downstairs and opens his own throat?

  He could feel the Reno detectives hovering in the hall outside the door. “The knife was from the kitchen?” he asked aloud.

  “From the knife block,” Lundgren answered.

  “Did Leland own a gun?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Roarke turned and looked Lundgren in the face. “A gun. Did Professor Leland own a gun?”

  “I don’t know, Agent Roarke.” The detective’s tone was murderous.

  Epps gave Roarke a mild look that for Epps was the equivalent of a four-alarm fire. Roarke pressed on. “You found the blood of every family member on him, correct? On his bedroom slippers, his pajama bottoms, T-shirt, knife, hands? Was all the blood typed and identified?”

  Lundgren seemed to relax somewhat at the question. He answered with confidence. “The crime lab found two types of blood on him: O positive and A negative. Mrs. Leland and the middle boy had the same blood type as Leland. The oldest boy was A neg.”

  “And the youngest boy?

  “O neg.”

  “So there was no evidence of the youngest boy’s blood on him?”

  “The crime lab didn’t find any, no—”

  “You didn’t do DNA testing?”

  The detective bristled. “We have a full-service forensic science division in Washoe County. But we don’t get instant results, Agent Roarke. There’s a long wait list.”

  “Of course,” Epps said. “Cutbacks all over the country.” He did not actually shoot a warning glance at Roarke but he might just as well have. Roarke felt a twinge of guilt. He knew budget cuts had been devastating for local law enforcement agencies. Labs were closing all over the country and the backlog on lab results, especially more complex ones like DNA analysis, was appalling.

  Epps’ attempt to smooth Lundgren’s feathers had failed. The detective stepped back and looked from one agent to another.

  “The man had a history of stressors and his prints were on the knife. What are you getting at, Agent Roarke? Are you trying to suggest something else happened here?”

  Roarke kept his voice even. “Not trying to suggest anything. Just trying to understand your crime scene.”

  “What’s not to understand?” Lundgren challenged him.

  That is the question, isn’t it?

  The wife dying in bed in her sleep, the killer walking from master bedroom to the kids’ rooms. The kids slain in their beds. Like the Lindstroms. And the Grangers. And the Merrills.

  And there was something else about it, the thing that had been nagging him in the car. His mind was racing over what he’d read of the case in the notebook Singh had prepared. He couldn’t quite get to it, but remembered something else.

  “The neighbor kid who found them. He walked right in?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So the door was open.”

  “It was unlocked, he said.”

  “Strange, isn’t it?”

  Lundgren gave him a thin smile. “This isn’t San Francisco, Agent Roarke.”

  Fair enough, Roarke thought. But something is wildly off, here. Something critical.

  Suddenly the thought that had been eluding him ever since the drive up crashed into him like a freight train. “Full moon,” he said.

  The two detectives and Epps looked at him.

  “That night. Here. Was it a full moon?” He was already pulling out his phone to check a calendar… and then it hit him. He didn’t have to check. He knew it was a full moon. Because he’d been out under it that very night. Out in the desert. At the concrete plant. With Cara Lindstrom.

  “October twenty-ninth,” Roarke said, looking at Epps. Epps had been about to speak, no doubt to shut Roarke down. Now he froze, instantly grasping the significance.

  Not just a full moon, a blue moon. The Leland family had been killed on the twenty-five year anniversary of the Lindstrom massacre.

  Roarke knew he could not talk about it in front of the Reno detectives. Not until he and Epps had had some time to process it themselves. “We appreciate your time, detectives,” he said casually, nodding to the two men, then looked at Epps. “I think we’ve seen enough.”

  Epps followed him downstairs, already muttering under his breath. “Boss, this is crazy.”

  Roarke matched his tone. “I know.” His face felt numb, frozen.

  “No, I mean, batshit crazy.”

  “Right. On a scale of one to ten, an eleven this side of crazy. We need to get out of here and talk.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Outside the house there was a chill in the air and the sky was turning to dusk. As the lawmen walked through the yard toward their respective cars, Roarke saw the basketball player, a gangly, stooped kid of twelve or thirteen in the driveway two doors down. He continued to shoot hoops, but Roarke had the strong sense the game was a ruse. The boy was watching the men.

  Epps thanked the detectives effusively but the damage had been done. Lundgren was downright glacial as they said goodbye on the sidewalk.

  Roarke and Epps got into the Crown Vic and Epps reached to start the engine.

  “What is it we’re thinking, here, boss?” he asked tightly, as they sat in the warming car, shadows reaching around them.

  “You heard what Singh said about the statistics for familicide.” Roarke said in a low voice, though they could not be overheard. “Ninety-two percent are by gun. Ninety-two percent. The Lelands get slashed and stabbed to death in the exact same way the Reaper’s victims were killed — and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lindstrom massacre. Full moon — no, blue moon… twenty-fifth anniversary.”

  “You think Leland was the Reaper?” Epps said incredulously.

  Roarke hadn’t even considered that and he had to summon his swirling thoughts. “No. Not that.”

  The two Reno detectives were still standing on the sidewalk, looking at the agents in the car. “Drive,” Roarke said softly. “They’re waiting for us to leave.”

  He
tipped a salute through the window as they passed the detectives’ Cavalier. “Drive out a few blocks out then circle back,” Roarke said under his breath.

  “O-kay,” Epps said, and put the car in gear.

  “I think that kid shooting hoops is the one who found them,” Roarke continued as the car motored down the street. “Neighbor boy, same age as the oldest Leland kid. I want to talk to him.”

  Roarke could feel the tension seething in Epps, but the agent was silent as he drove the rectangle of the block. Roarke opened Singh’s notebook and looked up the witness report. The name of the discovering witness was Stephen Marsden and his address matched the basketball player’s.

  Epps turned another corner and circled back around to the Leland’s block. The detectives’ Cavalier was gone from the curb. The kid was now sitting on the steps of the front porch with the ball. His hair was dirty blond; his cheekbones had the same Scandinavian farm look as Lundgren. He was pale and hollow-eyed, drained of the usual bouncing-off-the-walls energy of the age. But his spine straightened as he saw Roarke and Epps get out of the car again.

  Roarke walked up the sidewalk and stopped outside the waist-high gate of the fenced-in yard. “Stephen Marsden?”

  “Yeah…” the kid said warily, looking from one agent to the other.

  “We’re with the FBI. I’m Special Agent Roarke and this is Special Agent Epps.”

  He saw the quick interest in Stephen’s eyes. Kids don’t change, he thought. There was an eternal allure to law enforcement for boys that age.

  “Are your parents home, Stephen?” he asked aloud.

  “My mom,” Stephen said, in a tone that made it sound as if the mother was all there was.

  “Will you go in and get her? I’d like to ask her if we can talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “About the Lelands?” the boy asked, with an ambiguous look.

  “That’s right,” Roarke said, and felt an ache in his throat. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  Stephen shrugged and stood. He went into the house, the custom-carved wooden screen door banging sharply against the frame, like the report of a gun.

  Roarke reached over the fence to unlatch the gate. As he and Epps walked up the path toward the porch, a woman in her early thirties with her son’s blond hair and cheekbones stepped out onto the porch, dusting flour from her hands onto the apron tied around her waist.

  Lundgren was right about one thing. It’s not San Francisco.

  Stephen trailed after her, pretending not to look at the men.

  “We’re Federal agents, Ms. Marsden,” Roarke said. He climbed the porch stairs and showed his credentials wallet. “We’d like to speak with Stephen for a few minutes.”

  The woman looked down at the wallet, and then up. “He’s just thirteen, you know,” she said, but without fight.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Marsden,” Roarke said gently. “Believe me, we know what you’ve been through. We’ll be as brief as we can.”

  She nodded, and made a small gesture to Stephen. “I’ll be right inside.”

  Roarke took a seat on the porch glider and Epps perched his long frame on the sturdy porch railing. Stephen glanced around him and sat awkwardly in a rocking chair.

  Porch and footpath lights were going on all over the neighborhood. Roarke looked toward the Leland house, silent and dark.

  “I’m sorry you had to find them,” he told the boy.

  Stephen shrugged again. Roarke couldn’t even imagine what it would do to a kid’s world view to be thinking his best friend’s father flipped out and suddenly killed the entire family. How do you ever get your sense of safety back?

  He felt a flare of anger for Stephen’s lost innocence, but stifled it to keep calm for the boy.

  “We need you to tell us a few things. That morning… you walked right into the house, right? The door was unlocked?”

  Stephen stiffened. “I rang first,” he said with a slightly raised voice. “We were gonna be late for school.”

  “Nothing wrong with that, son,” Epps assured him. “You rang, and no one came to the door?”

  The boy shook his head. “So I tried the door and it opened and I went in.”

  “Did you say anything? Call inside first, maybe?” Roarke suggested.

  Stephen frowned. “Maybe. Yeah, I think so.”

  Roarke had read the report. The boy had moved through the house in search of his friend and had found the father dead in the study. Bad enough, but at least he’d been spared the sight of his own friend’s savaged corpse.

  “Did the Lelands usually leave their front door unlocked?”

  “I guess, during the day.”

  “Had you ever found the door unlocked in the morning before?”

  Stephen thought for a minute. “Don’t think so.”

  “Did you hear anything strange the night before?”

  “Huh uh.”

  No surprise there. Teenage boys tended to sleep like the dead.

  Roarke took a breath. Now came the question he was afraid to ask. Afraid, of what the answer might be — and of what it would mean for all sense of reality.

  “Did Seth talk about anything weird that had happened the week that — they died?”

  Epps looked at Roarke sharply and he lifted a hand slightly, begging silence.

  “Weird like what?” the boy asked warily.

  “Strange phone calls, anyone watching, anything disturbing… something maybe left somewhere…”

  “The cat,” Stephen said, and Roarke felt a chill at the back of his neck.

  “What cat?” he said, very softly.

  “Someone dumped a cat on their porch. With its guts ripped out.”

  Epps was frozen in his place on the porch rail. Roarke willed himself to stay calm.

  “When was this, Stephen?”

  The boy frowned, concentrating. “Monday. We had band practice that day. Seth showed it to me in the trashcan. It was all tore up.”

  There had been nothing in the police report, but there was no reason for the detectives to have known to ask, and the boy wouldn’t necessarily have volunteered it.

  “Did you tell the police?”

  Stephen looked confused. “No. I mean, why?”

  “No reason you should have.”

  “Nobody asked,” the boy insisted, and Roarke could hear tears behind his voice.

  “You did just fine, Stephen. Nobody knew to ask. I’m glad you knew about it and could tell us now.”

  His thoughts were racing. Monday was almost a full week before the murders. Same time frame as the eviscerated rabbit deposited on the Lindstrom’s porch. It would be gold if they could lock down a day, to have a better idea how long the killer might have been there watching.

  Because that’s what happened, wasn’t it? A killer was there watching.

  He suppressed his urgency, kept his voice casual.

  “Did you recognize the cat? Did it belong to one of the neighbors?”

  The boy thought. “Don’t think so.”

  “Did it have a collar?”

  “Huh uh.”

  “What color was it?”

  “Black.”

  “Black and white, or just black?”

  “All I could see was black. And blood.”

  “Long hair or short hair?”

  “Long.”

  The boy was starting to glaze over, sinking into himself. A dead cat and a dead friend, it was too much. Roarke backed off.

  “You’ve been a huge help. I’m going to give your mom my card. You have her call us if you think of anything, anything at all that seems weird, all right?”

  The boy nodded, shyly proud at the responsibility.

  “You go back inside, now, right?” Roarke told him. Stephen stood obediently, and looked back at the men before he slipped back in through the door.

  “Holy motherfucking shit,” Epps breathed, as they walked out the front gate, toward the car. “You’re really thinking…”

  “I think we nee
d Lam and Stotlemyre up here. I think the father died first. I think someone killed them all.”

  Neither said it, but the name resonated in the silence. The Reaper.

  They drove back toward downtown to find a motel to set up camp. Roarke had been expecting casino kitsch, but the downtown had been developed and revitalized, with a Riverwalk and all kinds of modern glass and concrete structures.

  Epps drove, shaking his head as he stared out the windshield. “Not downtown,” he said. “She’s not going to walk into a big hotel. We need a motel, someplace she would take the chance and come up close to.”

  It took Roarke a beat to understand what Epps was saying. He’d again forgotten the initial purpose of this trip: to draw Cara out. His head was too filled with the disturbing parallels between the Reaper’s massacres and this new case that couldn’t possibly be connected to it.

  Not possibly.

  And yet…

  His phone vibrated, startling him. He glanced at the screen to see Jones’s name. Roarke knew he’d been watching the Leland house from down the block but they hadn’t called in to let the agent know what was happening.

  “You want to tell me what the hell is going on, there?” Jones demanded.

  Roarke shook his head as if Jones could see. “I wish to God I knew. We need to find a motel. Follow us.”

  On the outskirts of town there was a rustic Old West-style motor lodge with connected cabins, arrangements of farm implements lining the walkways, corral-style fence posts, saddles, a pioneer wagon, even a giant concrete steer.

  The sleeping quarters consisted of two rows of connected cabin-like rooms.

  Epps checked them in, two cabins next door to each other. Jones could check into one across the way and have a perfect vantage for surveillance.

  Roarke was talking, words spilling over before his door was even closed, before Epps could speak.

  “Just listen. It’s a small town. They almost never see a case like this. The background of trouble in the marriage fits the outside visual of the scene, which is that the father goes crazy, kills the family. Lundgren isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, doesn’t bother to look at the statistics for murder/suicide to see that a stabbing M.O. for this kind of assault is almost unheard of. He sees it as a slam-dunk and clears the case. A rush to the obvious conclusion that the killer wants everyone to draw. But statistically, the likelihood of the father flipping out and slashing up his children like this? It isn’t how it happens.”