Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  She was silent for a moment, thinking. “Well, I’m not sorry,” she said, finally. “How do you feel about it?”

  For some reason he told her the truth. “I don’t know. I know how I’m supposed to feel.”

  She glanced at him. “Maybe you should order breakfast.”

  “Sorry, what?” he said.

  “Or lunch. I find everything tends to go better when a man’s blood sugar is stable.” She looked at him, with clear gray eyes, flushed cheeks. For a suspended second Roarke found himself considering the invitation… both of them —

  And then his phone buzzed.

  He checked the number. Singh. He made an apologetic gesture toward Rachel. She shook her head slightly: no apology necessary.

  Roarke turned away from her toward the window, put the phone to his ear. “I’m here.”

  “We’ve got a possible hit, chief.”

  “A hit?”

  There was a pause on the phone. “I took the liberty of searching the prison databases last night for parolees who fit our criteria for the Reaper.”

  Roarke felt a jolt of exhilaration. They were moving into dangerous territory. But the fact that Singh had pursued it herself was its own kind of validation.

  “Tell me,” he said, through a dry mouth. He twisted his body toward the window, away from Rachel Elliott.

  “Jeffrey Martin Santos, paroled from San Quentin on seventeen October. He matches our time frame for arrest, and our time frame for release. DOB twelve-twelve sixty-six, arrested January 1988 at the age of twenty-two and charged with aggravated assault—”

  “On a child?” Roarke asked before she could even finish the sentence.

  “No, on an adult male. The interesting factor, though, is that the man’s twelve-year old son was there with him.”

  Roarke felt his adrenaline spike again. He’s forty-six, now, the age range fits, and so does the crime.

  “So he may have been going after the kid.”

  “That is what I am thinking. And — before his arrest Santos had been institutionalized and diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. He claimed, among other things, that the government had illegally implanted a monitoring device in his brain.”

  “Where was he paroled to?”

  “San Jose.”

  It was just an hour away.

  “I’m sending his mug shot right now,” Singh said. Roarke’s phone pinged. He clicked over to the message, stared down at an image of a gaunt and hollow-cheeked man, stringy dark hair, bad skin set off by the classic toxic orange jumpsuit.

  “I have a call in to his parole officer,” Singh continued. “He didn’t pick up the call, no surprise there.” Roarke knew what she meant. Considering the caseload the officers carried these days, it was a miracle any phone calls got returned within a year.

  “Is there a current address?” He held his breath, praying Santos wasn’t homeless, a common condition of parolees which made them incredibly hard to track.

  “It’s a halfway house his P.O. set him up in.”

  Roarke felt another adrenaline spike. Get on the freeway to San Jose… chances are we could be there before we ever get a call back.

  “I also thought you should know that SAC Reynolds has already departed. For the holiday weekend.”

  Roarke had completely forgotten it was Thanksgiving tomorrow. But with Reynolds gone…

  He spoke into the phone. “I’m at the People’s Café on Haight. Get Epps to come pick me up. We’re going down there to talk to him.” He glanced at Rachel. She was looking out the window at the street, but he was fairly certain she wasn’t missing a thing. He lowered his voice. “You need to pull Santos’ DNA profile and check it in CODIS against any unidentified DNA at any of the — cold cases.” He’d almost said “massacres.”

  “Already in progress, chief,” Singh assured him. “And I will clock you and Agent Epps out. For the holiday.”

  “Appreciate it. Good work.” He punched off the phone and turned back to the table. Rachel was sitting very still; from her face it was obvious she’d heard much of the conversation. Or at least, enough.

  “Whatever this is, it’s a whole lot bigger than Danny Ramirez, isn’t it?” she asked softly.

  He opened his mouth to give a bullshit reply, and instead found himself saying, “It is. And I’m going to have to go.”

  Rachel glanced down at the sketch of Cara, and back up at Roarke.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “Wasn’t sure you’d be up for this,” Roarke said as he dropped into the passenger seat of the fleet car beside Epps.

  Epps stared ahead through the windshield, his hands tight on the steering wheel. “Not like I could stop you. And our best shot at catching Lindstrom is surveilling you. You go, I go.”

  Roarke didn’t think he wanted to press the issue.

  They hit the freeway just after morning traffic and made it to San Jose in under an hour. The halfway house where Santos had been paroled was in a depressed area of the city where neighbors were less likely to ask questions about the criminal history of the residents. Roarke stared out the window beside him as Epps drove by a string of seedy apartment complexes and boarded-up buildings with the occasional vacant lot and Christian ministry and auto repair yard.

  The building did not announce itself as a transitional living accommodation by any signs in the yard or above the door, but it was unmistakable nonetheless. It looked like a free-standing prison cell block: a concrete rectangle painted white with dull blue trim and blue-painted bars on the windows. The lawn was tiny and dead. A tired white bulldog was tied up to a sprinkler pipe, panting in the shadows. One side of the building had no windows at all. The other side had a caged staircase and another cage around a side door, the manager’s place.

  As the agents got out of the car, Roarke looked up the street. Why he would think of Cara at a moment like this was beyond him… maybe just the knowing that she had spent almost all of her childhood in buildings as bleak as this one. Epps caught his look. He turned to give the street a glance of his own, a deliberate and faintly ironic once-over. Before they started toward the building they both did a weapons check: shoulder holster, the belted waist pouch to be sure the plastic cuffs were available in one smooth move.

  The agents buzzed at the cage. A wary-looking white man with some hard years of alcohol etched on his face opened the door to look out through the cage at them.

  “Federal agents,” Roarke told him, and displayed his credentials wallet, though a man like the one standing inside this doorway wouldn’t need to see it to know the Fed. “We’re here to talk to Jeffrey Santos.”

  “Gone,” the manager said.

  Roarke felt a cold twist of dread. “Gone as in—?”

  “Gone as in he missed curfew two weeks ago and no one’s seen him since. Nobody gets no curfew violations here. One strike you’re out.”

  Both agents were vibrating with tension.

  Two weeks ago. Just before the Leland murders.

  “Does his parole officer know?” Roarke demanded.

  “I phoned it in,” the manager said truculently. “Got no call back.”

  Epps was already turned away, diving into the file Singh had prepared on Santos, punching numbers into his phone.

  Roarke turned back to the manager. “Did Santos have any means of transportation?”

  The man snorted. “You’re kidding, right? Miracle the guy could walk on his own. Thought for a few days he just wandered off, got lost, you know?”

  “Schizophrenic?”

  “At least. He was on meds, but he still had the whole word salad thing going on.” The unique speech pattern of schizophrenics, he meant.

  Epps looked over at Roarke from the phone. “He’s scheduled to check in every two weeks. He missed his appointment two days ago.”

  Roarke reached out for the phone and Epps handed it to him. “This is Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roarke. What are you doing to find Santos?
”

  The voice on the other end was rough and male. “He’s a PAL. I reported him to DAPO. Their job now.”

  The parole officer meant Santos had been classified as a Parolee at Large, and he’d reported him to the Division of Adult Parole Operations.

  On the surface this was good news. DAPO had established four California Parole Apprehension Teams, one of which was based in San Jose. The CPAT teams were trained in fugitive apprehension, database searches, field tactics, and firearms. All fine, but the immediate issue was that DAPO didn’t know what they had with Santos. Potentially had.

  “But he’s not on record as a sex offender,” Roarke said aloud. A sex offender would have been under the maximum level of supervision, the highest risk classification — in fact, he would have been required to wear a GPS ankle bracelet, and his disappearance would have triggered a concerted effort to find him, immediately transferred to the intelligence and field units. But Santos had only been convicted of assault on an adult.

  “Hell, no,” the P.O. said on the other end, and Roarke could hear the surprise in his voice. “First I’ve heard of it.”

  “Who’s your DAPO contact?” Roarke asked. He fished his own phone out of his suit coat pocket to hand to Epps. He repeated the name and number aloud as the P.O. spoke it. Epps instantly punched in the numbers.

  While Epps stepped away and spoke quickly into the phone, Roarke told the P.O., “Thanks. We’ll be calling you back,” and disconnected. He turned and looked at the manager head on. The man looked wary.

  “We need to see Santos’ place.”

  The manager spread his hands. “There’s someone else in it already. Got a wait list ten yards long. Place’s been cleaned out.”

  Roarke’s heart sank. Unless by some chance…

  “What did you do with his stuff?”

  The manager brightened, if anyone could use that word for someone so washed out. “Wasn’t enough room in the trash for all of it last week. There’s a garbage bag in the laundry room.”

  Roarke tensed. “I’d like to see that bag.”

  He nodded to Epps, still on the phone, and followed the manager into the main building, trying and failing to contain the rush of hope he was feeling. Trash was fair game for law enforcement. They could take the whole bag and comb through it for incriminating evidence that Santos was planning the killing, or even blood or other DNA evidence if by any slim chance Santos had returned to the place after killing the Lelands. Possibly killing the Lelands, Roarke added in his head as he walked with the manager through a dank, hopeless hallway with dirty walls, rank with the smell of unwashed men. There were hundreds of these places in the state, thousands, housing the overflow from California’s bursting prison system. Men who had been too broken by the things they had done or that had been done to them ever to rejoin society. Insanity compounded by years confined in insane conditions. Like the creature that was the Reaper, Roarke thought, a sick mind becoming sicker, slow cooking to a more potent state of madness…

  He forced himself away from the train of thought and spoke aloud to the manager as they walked. “Did you get a sense of sexual interest in children? Twelve, thirteen-year old boys?”

  The manager looked taken aback. “No. Not like I hung out with him but… shit, no.” He frowned. “Some of these guys, though… it’s like there’s no there there, you know?”

  Roarke knew.

  They stepped through a back doorway into the sunlight again. There was a second door in the back wall of the building. As they approached that door, an obnoxious ring tone jangled, with buzzing for good measure. The manager shoved his hand into his pocket, scooping out a phone.

  He shrugged an apology to Roarke as he moved aside. Roarke ignored him and opened the door into a dark space, with a short set of stairs leading down into a laundry room.

  A tiny window at ground level provided a minimum of feeble light. He felt along the inside wall for a lightswitch and found nothing, so he stood, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Below he made out the shapes of a standard washer and dryer gleaming whitely beside rows of trash bins.

  He started down the stairs. As he neared the bottom, he felt along the wall again for a lightswitch, and then stopped… sensing presence. He twisted around—

  Suddenly wild eyes shone from the dark, and a hulking form barreled toward him.

  Roarke reached out instinctively to grab his attacker’s wrist and used the momentum to slam him against the concrete wall. The man howled in rage and thrust his body backward. Roarke grabbed him in a headlock and wrestled him down to the ground, holding him down. He got a whiff of stale clothes and the faint burned-plastic stench of meth as he pinned his struggling captive to the floor and breathed through the adrenaline rush in his head.

  He knew what he was dealing with from the smell, even before the overhead light sizzled on, as somewhere at the top of the stairs the manager flipped the switch… revealing a large and dirty man writhing on the floor beneath Roarke.

  Roarke held the man down on the concrete with a fist in his hair and a knee in his back, and cuffed him with plastic cuffs.

  The manager rushed down the stairs. “Jesus, Bronson. How many fucking times—”

  “You know this guy?” Roarke demanded over the pounding of his own heart. He kept his knee firmly in the center of his captive’s body mass.

  “Former resident,” the manager said. “He knows he’s not supposed to be here, but he keeps coming back.”

  “Call the local cops,” Roarke ordered. He rolled the dirty man onto his side. “I’m going to help you up on three,” he said, and counted off. No stranger to handcuffs, obviously, the man opted for cooperation rather than pain. He heaved up to his knees and let Roarke haul him to his feet.

  Roarke manhandled the guy up the stairs, using pressure on his cuffed arms to lever him forward. The manager followed at a safe distance, carrying the trash bag. At the top of the stairs, Roarke pushed his prisoner through the door, squinting against the sudden daylight.

  Epps was rushing up the drive, looking over the man in cuffs. “Jesus. You okay?” he asked Roarke.

  “Fine,” Roarke told him.

  “Is it Santos?”

  Roarke shook his head, catching his breath through the buzz of adrenaline in his blood. “Some former resident, off his meds and on meth. Local cops are on their way. Can you take him?”

  “Got it.” Epps hooked the guy’s arm and spoke in a voice that brooked no argument. “We’re going to the curb to wait for your ride, sir.”

  Roarke took a deep, steadying breath, then turned to the manager and took the trash bag. He opened it and without removing anything, did a quick visual scan.

  Some ratty clothes, a chaos of papers, clipped newspaper articles that probably made sense to Santos and Santos alone, something that looked like a dead mouse. There was a smell of sickness to the clothes. Some types of schizophrenia had a certain heavy animal scent that put Roarke right back into his year of psych internship.

  He looked over at the manager. “Anything else you noticed? Anything else you could tell us that he had in the apartment? Anything you might have kept?”

  The manager was suddenly evasive. Roarke could feel the change in his posture instantly. And there was a particular quality to the evasion that Roarke recognized.

  “What was it, porn?” he said. “What kind?” In his experience, porn was a better indicator of a person than a lie detector test.

  The manager tried not very successfully to compose his face and Roarke made his voice hard. “Don’t make me get a search warrant for your place.”

  The manager gave him a hostile look, but nodded toward his own front door and started for it.

  Inside the seedy little apartment Roarke looked over a spread that the manager had hauled out from a drawer, including Hustler, Juggs, Spicy Latinas… women with ballooning breasts, gaping genitals.

  “This all of it?” he asked, feeling tired.

  The manager fidgeted behind hi
m. “I swear.”

  “Nothing with kids?” Roarke demanded.

  The manager looked injured. “Hell no. Think I’d take that?”

  “Nothing? Teenagers, boys?”

  “Swear ta Christ.” Now the man was indignant. “Totally mainstream.”

  As Roarke and the manager emerged from the apartment into the afternoon sunlight, Epps was coming up on them, without the prisoner, and talking into his phone. “Here’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roarke,” he said, and extended the phone to Roarke. Roarke took it, exchanging it for the black plastic bag of Santos’ belongings.

  The man at the other end introduced himself as Lieutenant Montez, with DAPO. “Your man’s been saying we might have a sex offender on our hands.”

  Roarke had the queasy thought that “sex offender” might be the least of their problems. “Possible sex offender and possible mass murderer,” he said.

  There was a beat of silence on the other end, then the lieutenant said tersely, “I just kicked this PAL up to the highest risk classification level. Our San Jose intelligence and field units will be putting out an immediate and concerted effort to find him. We’re already on the line with Reno P.D., see if we can pick up a trail there.”

  It was lucky for them there was a local force already in place to handle fugitive apprehension. It cut through all the bureaucracy and got the proper authorities instantly on the case.

  “Appreciate it,” Roarke said. “Anything our office can do, we’ll be all over it, just let us know.”

  He punched off and was about to hand the phone back to Epps when he realized they’d switched phones in the process. He pocketed his phone and handed Epps’ phone back to him.

  Then he turned to the manager and extended a card. “Any sign of Santos, any word on where he might be, we want to know immediately.”

  “Course,” the manager said. Roarke could hear the dislike in his voice.

  Feeling’s mutual, pal.

  The agents walked away, back down the cracked concrete drive toward the car.

  Epps finally spoke. “I sure enough don’t want to explain to Reynolds what we were doing here.”