The pimp has her by the elbow and wrestles her through the crowd. She stumbles along shakily, staggering on her platform heels. She has been used recently.
Cara follows in the crowd, sees him make a sharp turn at a corner.
In the semi-privacy of an alley the pimp wrests cash from the girl, reaching his hand up her skirt and pulling the roll of bills out of her underwear, giving her a hard squeeze that makes her gasp before he withdraws his hand.
He counts the money while still holding her, then sticks it in his pocket and shoves the girl away, pointing her back toward the street. An order for more.
All this Cara watches from the shadows, and begins a slow burn, thinking of the night the girl will have. Thirteen years old, if that.
She turns after the pimp, and walks.
There is nothing easier than following this one through the crowd. He is too stoned to be vigilant and there are so many others on the street; he feels safe, in his element. He strides on the sidewalk through the fair, and others on the street move out of his way automatically, not even consciously, with some sixth sense for self-preservation.
She trails him through the carnival-like psychedelia, past the open shops and food stands and revelers. At the bottom of the street they pass the mural on the free clinic, a sprawling painted street scene that mirrors the live scene in front of it.
The pimp crosses the street toward the tall dark shadows of the park. As he turns off the sidewalk onto a footpath, she follows him into the corridors between the trees.
He walks under the towering eucalyptus and cypress of the Panhandle, a narrow strip of park jutting out from the main mass of the park, notorious for drug deals and robberies. She follows silently, her pulse and senses heightened in the night. The path winds deeper into the trees, and there are other figures lurking now, in the shadows, in the bushes, smoking, shooting up, or just making camp for the night. A few of the men look up with quickened interest at the sight of a lone woman, but something they sense in her makes them freeze and turn away. She sees the shadows moving in them, and her spine stiffens, an instant, atavistic reaction, but she will not let herself be distracted.
The pimp walks on past the huddled street people. He is on some mission. The moon makes him easy to follow at a great distance; every time the path splits the moonlight illuminates him, showing her the way. The trail winds through more eucalyptus, with their spicy, healing fragrance, and magnolias with their luminous waxy blossoms, even redwoods: ancient towering trees with the peace of primeval forest.
At the bottom of the hill the vegetation changes, from coastal undergrowth to an unexpected profusion of flowers lining the path: hydrangeas with globes of flowers shining pale in the moonlight; trumpetvine blossoms hanging like bells; feathery Mexican sage.
As she steps out of the undergrowth, a palace rises up in the moonlight: the Victorian hallucination that is the Conservatory of Flowers. It glows like a whitewashed temple, with its painted glass domes and pillars, the palm trees adding to the Taj Mahal illusion.
She must give the pimp scum credit for the romanticism of the setting. If she were setting out to trip this is where she would want to be.
It is a section of park she knows, and she understands exactly where he is going, and why. She has seen it in the daytime, a short tunnel across the wide landscaped lawn from the conservatory, a walkway underneath the road, an arch of granite framed by pampas grass with its feathery plumes. By day it attracts street musicians because of the tourist traffic and the acoustics. At night it is fetid and ominous, used for a far less lofty purpose. Deliveries can be made in seconds; a car stopping on the road, above, a runner sprinting down the path to the tunnel to make an exchange, then the runner heading back up the stairs to the car. Done and done.
The pimp heads straight for it.
She holds back, and when she moves, she circles the periphery of the lawns, moving silently through the taller flowerbeds on the sloped grounds to reach the archway.
The tunnel is short, dark, and cold. It reeks of body fluids and a smell like burning plastic, and any number of other things. The truth is this procurer will not last long at his current rate of addiction. The question is, how many children will he take down with him?
No more.
She can’t see him in the dark, but she can feel him, and hear his breathing. She knows he does not sense her, so intent is he on the task at hand.
Then there is the flare of a lighter, held to a cloudy glass pipe, and he freezes, seeing her illuminated in the arch of the tunnel.
He can’t believe that a woman is approaching him like this. For a moment he’s amused, intrigued. High, to be sure, but amused and intrigued. His smile is slow, dangerous.
“Want something, bitch?”
She lets her eyes go to the pipe in his hand, so that what he sees in the moment is a junkie, someone not so much older than the girls in his stable, and his addled brain is calculating the possibilities even as she makes her move.
The long hair makes it easy and the drug, even easier. She strides forward and takes him by those locks, exposing his throat. She knows the key veins and arteries by heart; the blade goes exactly where it needs to go.
A flash of gleaming metal and his blood arcs in the tunnel, just another body fluid splashing on the stones. It gushes hot and hard over her hands as he makes astonished, inarticulate noises, desperate and panicked.
One fist twined in his hair, she holds his body against hers as he struggles, but the blood is geysering, pumped by his heart, and it takes mere seconds for him to bleed out.
She releases her grip, lets the body slip to the floor of the tunnel.
Her heart is pounding in her chest, echoing in her ears. She stands in the darkness above the body, feet planted to hold herself up.
Suddenly there is a sound she does not recognize, some small object dropping and rolling. And then she hears harsh, rapid breathing that is not her own.
She turns slowly and in the dim blue light of the moon outside the tunnel, she sees the silhouette. The flaming girl.
The girl doesn’t say anything, just stares at her.
Cara starts forward and the girl flinches back.
Cara crouches beside the body, reaches into the pimp’s pocket, takes out a roll of cash — what he had stolen from the child, earlier, and a lot more, rubber-banded together. She tosses it at the girl, who unfreezes to catch it.
“Get out,” she says to the girl, softly.
They look at each other, a long, held look, then the girl scrambles away, out of the darkness of the tunnel, into the light of the moon.
She stands for a frozen second in the tunnel, catching her breath… then walks a wide circle around the body, avoiding the blood she has spilled, and slips out into the night.
The forest grove where she takes off her outer layer of clothes and washes herself clean is deep in a ravine of the park, a memorial grove. There is a round stone circle surrounded by a bench into which the names of dead men are carved in a spiral, and a circle of bench set into the earth wall surrounding it. Fading flowers are heaped in the center of the names.
A stream leads to a pool surrounded by rocks also carved with memorials to mourned lovers, and it is in this pool that she washes off the blood, kneeling on a carpet of fragrant pine fronds, with the fattening moon glistening above the redwoods.
The loamy scents calm the nausea, which rises and falls like a rollercoaster. The flaming girl has seen. It is wrong, dangerous… there will be a reckoning. But there is nothing to be done for it now. She must leave this peaceful place and get away, get to shelter.
The water is freezing on her skin and clothes as she stands. She sways on her feet, catches herself. Then she breathes in moonlight, and forces herself to move, out through the trees, out of the grove.
It seems miles through the forest, the flowered undergrowth, the homeless encampments, but finally she is out on the street, walking on shaky legs back into into the fair that is finally wind
ing down, vendors packing their goods and tables and tents, musicians casing their instruments, wildly drunken revelers stumbling in the street, looking for some continuance to the party.
The packs of children are out again, huddling in doorways, in alleys, their voices high and shrill, mostly high. On every corner, it seems. Abandoned, abused, dancing on the edge.
Too much, too much…
She stops, holds herself up on the wall of a closed shop, swallowing back bile. And then there is a hard voice behind her asking, “Miss? Are you all right?”
She twists around to see a beat cop standing on the sidewalk, looking at her suspiciously. Blood has soaked through to the remaining layer of her clothes, and though everything she wears is dark, it will not take long for him to spot it.
She uses all her strength to straighten, keep her voice steady. “Thank you, Officer, it’s the baby. I shouldn’t be out. I’m going home.”
She sees mixed suspicion and discomfort on the cop’s face, and with one hand she reaches for the razor in her pocket… only to realize it is missing, left in the tunnel or somewhere along the path. Her legs tense as she prepares to flee or fight…
Then he nods, dismissing her. “You do that.”
She exhales long and slow, and moves down the street toward rest.
Chapter Seventeen
The sound of a basketball thudding on concrete echoes on the quiet suburban street. In the curve of a driveway, a boy is running, dodging, bounding and rebounding, playing a fierce game against himself. He crouches, still his breath and throws… the ball sails through the air to drop perfectly into the hoop, and the boy catches the bounce.
The afternoon shadows lengthen, creeping across the driveway, as he runs and shoots, gangly teenage body focused with effort, dribbling the ball across the concrete, popping the ball up. The shadows broaden, blending in to each other…
Then a darkness falls that has nothing to do with the lowering sun, a vast, cold emptiness…
That reaches for him—
Roarke jerked awake as if he’d fallen, and lay in the dark in the motel room bed. In his half-sleep, he still heard the faint, monotonous thud of a basketball, and Stephen Marsden’s face was in his mind, the hollow-eyed, shell-shocked boy.
The boy.
Thirteen years old. His best friend on the bedroom floor above him, stabbed so many times…
The Reaper had watched. Staring at the house, obsessing, fantasizing. But it was not the father he fantasized about. The father was only an impediment, a gatekeeper, to be disposed of as quickly as possible so the real fantasy could begin. And what was that fantasy? Not the mother. An attractive adult woman, Roarke had noted from the photos Singh had collected. But Trish Leland had been dispatched quickly and nearly effortlessly. There had been no lingering over her. She was not the Reaper’s target.
Roarke closed his eyes and heard the thudding of a basketball.
He and his brother had played in their own driveway, Matt nine years old, Marty thirteen, the only year he’d ever shown the slightest interest in sports.
And Stephen Marsden and Seth Leland had played together, in full sight of the alley, hadn’t they? Lanky, joyous thirteen-year olds.
Seth’s bedroom was at the front of the house, just above the father’s study, in plain view of the alley.
And Seth was the one most grievously attacked. Oh, without question, compared to the rest of the family, the assault on Seth had been inconceivable, a frenzied attack like…
Roarke thought back, seeing quick, violent flashes of horrible crime scene photos.
Like the one on Cara’s brother. Who was also thirteen.
But not just Cara’s brother. The Merrill family had also had a thirteen-year old boy.
Or was that the Grangers?
Or…
Roarke vaulted to his feet and switched on a light, grabbed for the case files he’d dumped on the bureau.
Ten minutes later, he looked up from the files and his case notes, with a sickening certainty.
Every single family had had a thirteen-year old boy.
He had been so focused on five-year old Cara he hadn’t looked at her brother, at the common denominator between the three original Reaper murders. The boys. All three families had thirteen-year old boys.
It is such a clear common factor he was amazed, angry, that no one had seen it before.
The Reaper was after the boys.
The realization brought a new, immediate terror.
He flipped on the headboard light and paged through a file for a number, then dialed the Lelands’ neighbor. A sleepy woman’s voice answered and he spoke as calmly as he could manage.
“Mrs. Marsden, it’s Agent Roarke. I’m sorry to wake you.”
The woman murmured something incomprehensible in his ear.
“Is everything all right, there?” he asked.
Her voice was instantly alert. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to alarm you, but would you please go check on Stephen?”
She didn’t even answer him. He could hear quick movement, then silence, and after a long, long moment, she was back.
“He’s in bed, he’s sleeping. What’s wrong?”
“Mrs. Marsden, do you have other children?”
“Just Stephen.”
Roarke’s thoughts were racing. The Reaper had always struck families with several children; it was a clear pattern. The Marsdens were probably okay. But probably wasn’t good enough.
Mrs. Marsden’s voice crept up in pitch. “Agent Roarke, please tell me what this is about.”
He took a breath. “I don’t want to scare you, but the deaths of the Lelands may be more than they appear to be on the surface. I’m going to send a patrol car over there to watch the house. But is there any chance of you taking Stephen and going out of town somewhere for a few days?”
A long silence on the phone.
“Mrs. Marsden—”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’ll do it.”
Even as he spoke again, making arrangements, he knew.
I can’t protect all the boys he’s going to come in contact with. Except by catching him. We have to get him.
Chapter Eighteen
When Roarke finally slept, it was on the plane. Exactly forty minutes, but better than nothing.
It was barely seven in the morning when they walked into the office, but Singh was there to meet them in the conference room with steaming fresh coffee and a full breakfast: samosas and mango chutney, pakora, and an assortment of pastries.
The men fell on the food while Singh started a new whiteboard and laid all four cases out: the Grangers, the Merrills, the Lindstroms, the Lelands. At some point Roarke looked up from the feasting and stepped to the board, staring at the clusters of photos of the dead families. He shuffled through the case files and pinned up photos of his own: school photos of the smiling thirteen-year old boys. Two with real smiles, two with shyly pained grimaces. All four were slim, one wore Harry Potter style glasses. All just at the brink of life, far too young to die.
He found a marker and circled the photos of the boys in red. “This is what he’s after.”
Singh had been watching him in silence as he pinned up the photos. Now she spoke. “This is really this — Reaper?” She looked from Roarke to Epps. Epps’ jaw tightened; he looked away.
Roarke answered her. “The M.O. is exactly the same. We have to move forward with the possibility that this could be the Reaper.”
Singh murmured something that was not English. Roarke didn’t have to ask her what she meant. It was unreal.
“What about a copycat?” Epps asked.
It was a fair question, mostly because film and television portrayals had muddied the water on the subject. “There’s really no such thing in sexual homicide,” Roarke responded. “Men who commit this kind of murder have a very specific fantasy in mind, excruciatingly personal. But I’ll have Snyder compare the Leland case with the others.” He paused. “And
while it’s unlikely that the Reaper would kill again so soon, we also have to be aware that the moon will be full again in just over a week: the twenty-sixth.”
He could feel the focused stillness of his agents across from him, the collective suspended breath. He gave them a moment to take it in, then hardened his voice.
“Here’s what we need to hone in on. The Reaper was killing in California in 1986 and 1987. So almost certainly he lived in-state. If he was arrested and imprisoned for something else, some lesser crime that never tied him to the family massacres, chances are he served time in California. And what we’re postulating now is that he gets released and goes right back to where he was before, a full-on family massacre. Only he’s picked up a few tricks, gained some self-control with age. He’s figured out how to adjust a few things at the crime scene and make it look like murder–suicide. He’s also gone outside California for the first time. Just barely over the border, but enough to confuse the jurisdictions, cover his tracks a bit. But, and this is important — he’s not going outside of what we’ve seen is his comfort zone.”
Singh was nodding, thinking on it.
“Also, I’m betting he wouldn’t have waited long to kill again, so chances are good he was released very recently, unless somehow we now find other family massacres out there. Singh, that’s the first thing you should be checking.”
“Understood,” she murmured, and glanced toward the board, her face troubled.
“It’s not likely this kind of crime would have gone undetected for long. You need to be checking every familicide on the West Coast, in the last two years especially… but let’s say in the last ten years before. Any with the same M.O. Stabbing and slashing. With or without a parental suicide. And particularly familicides that have an eleven - to - fourteen-year old boy in the family…”
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