Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  She lifted her cuffed hands and met his gaze through the glass. He saw for the first time that her eyes were green.

  “Do you have a lawyer?” he tried.

  “They’re lining up,” she said. “High profile case. Career-making.”

  It occurred to him that she could afford any number of attorneys, if she still had even a fraction of the insurance money she received from her family’s death.

  He lowered his voice, and gave her what he could. “It’s him. We haven’t proved it yet, but it’s the Reaper.”

  Her head was down. She didn’t look at him, and he felt a prickling of fear. “It is, isn’t it?” he asked. His mouth was dry as dust. “He’s dead…”

  “He’s dead. It isn’t. It never dies.”

  He knew what she meant now. It. The monster that made people do the things they do. The monster that in her mind she was killing, over and over.

  He swallowed. “I want you to tell me more. I’ll be back. If that’s all right.”

  She lifted her head to look at him. Their eyes were locked, and he couldn’t breathe.

  Behind him, there was a sharp rap on the door, and a voice called, “One minute.” Roarke leaned forward, closer to the glass.

  “You saved my life.” He looked through the barrier, holding her gaze. “It will make a difference.”

  She shook her head slightly, and he didn’t know what she meant by that. He wanted to reach through the glass. “I wish—”

  And then the door opened behind her, and the guard stepped in.

  “If there’s anything you need…”

  She kept shaking her head, blond hair rippling like silk on her shoulders.

  “Anything. You have to tell me.”

  She put her hand on the glass, and his was there to meet it, instantly. They sat that way, not moving, not breathing, eyes locked through the glass.

  Cara slid back her chair, stood looking down at Roarke, then turned and walked to the door.

  Roarke stayed still, with his hand on the glass. She stopped in the doorway for one second, but did not turn.

  And the door closed behind her.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not exist without:

  The initial inspiration for the Huntress from Val McDermid, Denise Mina, and Lee Child, at the San Francisco Bouchercon.

  My mega-talented critique partner, JD Rhoades.

  My incomparable writing group, the Weymouth Seven: Margaret Maron, Mary Kay Andrews, Diane Chamberlain, Sarah Shaber, Brenda Witchger and Katy Munger.

  Joe Konrath, Blake Crouch, Scott Nicholson, Elle Lothlorien, CJ Lyons, LJ Sellers, Robert Gregory Browne, Brett Battles, and JD Rhoades, who showed me the indie publishing ropes.

  Lee Lofland and his amazing Writers Police Academy trainers/instructors: Dave Pauly, Katherine Ramsland, Corporal Dee Jackson, Andy Russell, Marco Conelli, Lieutenant Randy Shepard, Robert Skiff.

  And most especially: the best early readers on the planet: Diane Coates Peoples, Joan Tregarthen Huston and Ellen Margolis.

  Keep reading for a preview of

  HUNTRESS MOON

  Book I of the Huntress/FBI Thrillers

  by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Chapter One

  The city teems.

  A bustle of busy people on the streets under towering buildings, cars climbing the vertical hills, working people traversing the corridors, energized by the cool ocean air off the gleaming, timeless Pacific.

  There is much that is beautiful about San Francisco: the sun on the Bay, the expanses of bridges over the water, the pastel-painted Victorians with their gingerbread trim, the dreamy beaming people in the parks.

  But here, as everywhere, is the darkness.

  While tourists swarm the markets at Fisherman’s Wharf and eat chocolate at Ghirardelli Square and day trip to Alcatraz, the area formerly known as the Tenderloin swarms, too, with a different kind of activity. In the Tenderloin women and children are bought and sold, people are killed for money or drugs, the stench of urine and vomit and blood rises from the filthy sidewalks, the darkness of addiction and madness pervades.

  The woman in black who walks through this flotsam is an anomaly. Too well-dressed to be one of them, too clean to have business in this part of town.

  She gets glances, of course, some surreptitious and curious, some longer predatory stares. Lone women don’t often walk this street except for money. But something about her keeps the flies away. The men she passes shift restlessly; a few of them even flinch from her.

  She is aware of every one of them as she passes. Very few of these souls are evil, but drugs and bad times have made them vulnerable. Desperation leaves their souls raw and open to attack. They are devastated creatures, furtive, pathetic… and sometimes something much worse.

  The shadows of these people are stark in the light today, larger than they should be. It is always this way, close to the time.

  She can see it hovering, lurking in the darker shadows, but keeping to the darkness. Watching, but not coming close.

  There is no rest.

  Not now, not today, not this week… this week, of all weeks…

  Not ever.

  Chapter Two

  Roarke was worried.

  Before his desk phone was back in its cradle, he was out of his seat, grabbing for the suitcoat neatly hung on the real mahogany stand in the corner of his office in the Federal Building. Outside the window the view plunged precipitously, a fifteen-floor drop into the Tenderloin.

  It was Special Agent Greer’s fifth month of undercover with the criminal organization known as Ogromni, and in all that time under, Greer had never used the failsafe signal: a phone dialed to a dedicated number with no message left, code to request a face-to-face meeting. Greer didn’t ask for meetings. He delivered his reports on time, through approved channels, and never deviated from procedure.

  Until today.

  Roarke shrugged his coat on over tightly muscled shoulders as he strode down gleaming hallways, walls lined with the history of the Bureau: black-and-white photographs of grim men in dark suits and spotless dress shirts, framed original newspaper articles of famous FBI busts, glass cases displaying a spy-museum array of ingenious devices: miniature cameras built into pens, shaving cream containers for smuggling microfiche.

  He hurried out of the elevator on the first floor and past the reception desk, framed by a wide pane of bulletproof glass. The clocks on the wall behind it each read a different time zone: Washington, Tokyo, Paris, London, Beijing. The sweep of multiple second hands started a new churning in Roarke’s gut.

  Something’s wrong. Something’s happened.

  He exited the monolithic Federal Building at a clip, and braced himself against the dazzle of sunlight before starting quickly down the sidewalk of Golden Gate Avenue toward the Tenderloin. He had to force himself not to run, which would draw attention he didn’t want, but he was too agitated to find a cab. He’d get to the rendezvous in plenty of time on foot, and he didn’t want to wait around in the café once he got there. The walk would give him time to clear his head, burn off some of the anxiety.

  He was vaguely aware that the day was gorgeous, a crisp and cooling autumn breeze after rain the night before, and for the moment the city was so clean it sparkled. None of which soothed Roarke’s tension in the slightest.

  His Criminal Investigations team had been investigating the Bay Area branch of Ogromni for four months. The name meant “enormous,” and it was, a cross-national viper’s nest, which first came to the San Francisco Division’s attention because of a hijacked container shipment of electronics that had not been confiscated, but rather tracked.

  Electronics smuggling was only the top layer of the onion. It was never just local anymore. Organized crime had blossomed into something much less tangible: Unorganized crime, Roarke thought of it, but Transnational Crime was the official phrase for it; no borders, and weird alliances, a hybrid of gang activity that had little to d
o with old-style street gangs, but rather massive criminal organizations, bad guys with no racial or national boundaries. And it always turned into the same kind of outrage: smuggling and selling drugs, guns and people. The three evils, as far as Roarke was concerned; where there was one, there were inevitably the others, and sometimes a fourth: high tech. Sometimes it seemed as if money had only the slightest thing to do with anything; it was as if depravity spawned depravity. The longer Roarke worked, the more he felt he was wrestling with a Hydra: cut off one head and seven more grew back.

  Since Agent Greer had infiltrated the San Francisco Ogromni, Roarke’s team had been racking up the evidence to bring charges of piracy, smuggling, heroin and cocaine trafficking — and tracking the inevitable suspicious disappearances that inevitably go along with such activities. The targets were getting bolder and Greer had passed on news of a massive drug shipment imminent: perfect for a bust that could be connected to several key players in the hierarchy.

  But all morning Roarke had had a bad feeling. He’d woken from an old childhood dream of a lurking monster, and it was the damn dream that had him most spooked; it always came up in times of extreme stress or anxiety and it never boded well.

  He didn’t think of any of this as psychic or precognitive; he’d been an investigator for far too long not to know that the human brain processes information too fast for the brain’s owner to be aware of exactly where those subtle signs and warnings are coming from. Something had been off about Greer’s last reports and had triggered early warning bells in Roarke’s head. Cops called it “Blue Sense” or “Spidey Sense—”

  A horn blasted in Roarke’s ear, startling him back to the present. He’d almost stepped straight into traffic on the busy street.

  He lifted a hand in apology to the car that had just missed him, then breathed in and waited five more seconds for the light, and sped through the crosswalk toward the appointed meeting place.

  It was a Peet’s Coffee, perched halfway down the block of a steep incline, one of those streets that give San Franciscans some of the most toned asses and thighs in the continental U.S. Roarke slowed his pace slightly to cushion the shin-jarring descent.

  The Peet’s had a fenced-in outside seating area with wrought iron tables and chairs, set off from the curb with flowering planters. The meeting was arranged to look like a chance encounter, two random businessmen in suits, bumping elbows at the counter.

  Roarke started to turn into the café, when something made him turn his head — and he saw Greer on the sidewalk across the street, about to cross mid-block. The men did not acknowledge each other in any way; that was not the plan. But Roarke felt a tidal wave of relief, seeing him.

  Safe, he thought, and thanked whatever God was out there.

  He would have turned away, then, to go inside as per the pre-arranged drill: get in line, order, take his coffee to the condiment station and let Greer step up to him.

  But Roarke didn’t turn away, because that was when he saw her, standing on the sidewalk, just a bit behind Greer.

  She was medium height, tall in boots, and slim, with long, lithe muscles like a cat. This Roarke could see because her arms were bare, even in the brisk air; she wore a form-fitting black top with a turtleneck. There was something fetishy in the combination of bare arms and high neck that was arresting, but so was everything about her, her past-the-shoulder blond hair and black sunglasses, the way she stood in tight black pants and boots. The city was full of striking women, that was not what drew him. It was the stillness of her, maybe a fraction too still, and she was looking back at Roarke, looking across the street as if she knew him. And for that weird second, he felt that he knew her, too.

  He would remember every detail of that moment for a long, long time. The sun on her hair. The stretch black of her turtleneck and the taut muscles of her arms. The gleam of chrome on the truck. The violent purple irises in the flower stand behind Greer. The smell of exhaust and coffee.

  Roarke was still looking at the street, at her, when the truck rumbled by, a huge semi, which momentarily obscured his view of the woman in black. And then there was the screeching of worn brakes straining against the downward plunge of the hill, and Roarke turned just in time to hear a sickening thud and see blood exploding over the truck’s front grille and a man’s body flying, and then there was screaming, one scream on top of another, and male shouting, a building wave of panic. And then the woman was gone and the sidewalk was crowded with people turning away or shrieking in horror… and through the chaos and the screaming Roarke realized he had just watched his agent obliterated by a seventeen-ton commercial truck.

  * * *

  Keep reading for a preview of

  BOOK OF SHADOWS

  by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Chapter One

  September 22

  It was a vision of hell.

  A dismally foggy day over stinking heaps of refuse—a city landfill, the current euphemism for an old-fashioned dump. Caterpillar trucks and front-loaders crouched with metal jaws gaping, like gigantic prehistoric insects on the mountains of trash, an appalling chaos of rotting vegetables, discarded appliances, filthy clothing, rusted cans, mildewed paper: the terribly random refuse of a consumer society gone mad. A lone office chair sat on the top of on one hill, empty and waiting, its black lines stark against the fog.

  And below it, tangled in the trash like a broken doll, was the body of a teenaged girl.

  Stiffened…naked…bloody stumps at her neck and wrist where her head and hand used to be.

  Homicide detectives Adam Garrett and Carl Landauer stood on the trash hill: Garrett, with his Black Irish eyes and hair and temper, hard-muscled, impatient, edgy; and chain-smoking, whisky-drinking, donut-eating Landauer, a living, breathing amalgam of every cop cliché known to man: middle-aged spread, broad sweating face, and bawdy, cynical humor—a lifer who used the caricature as a disguise. The partners were silent, each taking in the totality of the scene. The landfill was a succession of hills and pits and carefully leveled ground; rutted roads wound up the hills to the fresh dumping mound on which they now stood. A strong, cold wind whipped at their coats and hair, swirling plastic carrier bags across the trash hills like ghost tumbleweeds and mercifully diffusing the stench. On a hot day the smell would have been beyond bearing.

  On one side of the summit a forest stretched below, startlingly green and pure against the chaos of human waste. On the other side the city of Boston was a hazy outline, like a translucent Oz in the bluish fog. Far below at ground level were smaller hills of gravel, sand, broken chunks of concrete, logs and stumps, wood chips, various earthy colors of mulch, a black pile of tires. A corrugated tin roof sheltered an open-walled recycling center.

  A row of BPD cruisers lined the dirt drive up to the landfill’s main office trailer. The temporary command post had been set up beside the trailer, and two dozen mostly African-American and Latino workers huddled beside it, waiting to give statements to a couple of uniforms, while other patrolmen walked the periphery of the fence. A long line of city sanitation trucks was stalled at the front gate, being diverted by traffic control. The first responders had done their best to establish a perimeter, considering the crime scene was a joke: how do you begin to process a mountain of refuse a hundred yards high?

  Landauer looked over the reeking heaps of garbage, shook his head gloomily. “Shit.” He spat the word. “I don’t know if he’s the smartest perp I’ve ever seen or the dumbest.”

  Garrett nodded, keeping his breathing even, trying not to suck in too deep a lungful of the sulfurous stink. Smartest— because any trace evidence would be completely lost in the junk heap. Dumbest— because the unsub must have driven straight in past the office trailer and paid the attendant for the privilege of dumping his terrible cargo. Garrett lit a mental candle, half-thought something like a prayer. Please let there be a record.

  The partners turned away from the dismal panorama and climbed over trash to where Medical Examiner George Edwa
rds, a stocky Irish banty rooster of a man, stood looking down at the body. Seagulls circled sullenly high above, their breakfast taken from them.

  Two crime scene techs were extracting and bagging one piece of garbage at a time from around the corpse, meticulously preserving as much evidence as possible in the hope that the refuse in which she lay might yield some personal connection to the killer. A videographer documented the original placement of each piece. All three technicians stood and moved back in solemn simultaneity so Garrett and Landauer could approach.

  It was Saturday, which meant Garrett was the lead on the case. Department protocol was that partners alternated leads, but Garrett and Landauer had found through long experience that if they took regular days of the week and flipped for Sundays, it all evened out anyway. Garrett nodded to Dr. Edwards and crouched beside the body.

  The girl was as stiff as a Barbie doll, still half-buried and splayed on her stomach; a handless arm, a curve of buttock, one leg visible in the bed of trash. Garrett’s face tightened as he stared down at the jagged red stump of the neck, the gleaming white nubs of cartilage, the black stream of ants swarming over the gaping wound. The gulls had also been at it. But there was shockingly little blood; none at all on the trash below the severed neck and very little congealed around the stump. A small blessing. The decapitation had occurred after she was dead.

  Garrett pulled a micro-recorder from his suit coat pocket and clicked it on. “Killed elsewhere and dumped,” he said aloud. “Decapitation was post-mortem.” Above him, the M.E. grunted affirmation, before Garrett continued, “Head and hands probably removed to prevent identification.” It happened more often that anyone would want to think.