Ortiz’s eyes flared. Roarke braced himself for the rage. Then apparently Ortiz thought better of it. “I had nothing to do with that case.”
“So you’re familiar with it.” Roarke took Ortiz’s silence as agreement. “Just a few easy questions. Was there any evidence that Laura Huell was sexually assaulted?”
There was a loaded pause before the detective answered. “I have no idea. How would I know?”
“Your department investigated the suicide, didn’t it?”
“Someone in the department did. I didn’t.”
“But the whole department investigated the attack on Ivy Barnes, didn’t it?”
Ortiz stared at him, thrown. “What?”
“There was a rape case ongoing at the same time that Lindstrom was at the school. A girl named Ivy Barnes. A man out there raped, blinded, burned, and did his damnedest to kill a fourteen-year-old girl—”
The detective cut him off. “I know the case.”
“Was there a Wayfarer connection?”
“Look, I’m not here for your damn—”
Roarke rode over him. “Was there ever a connection to the Wayfarers Club investigated in regard to either case?”
Ortiz took a threatening step forward. “This is bullshit. What the hell are you doing, fucking around in all this?”
Roarke stood his ground. “I want to see the file on Ivy Barnes.”
“No. You have no jurisdiction here.” The detective clearly relished the denial.
“But you’re not the person to ask, anyway, are you?” Roarke said, softly.
Ortiz was silent, seething.
“So why not say that? Why are you so set against me looking into this?”
“Go fuck yourself, puto.” Ortiz got into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut hard.
“I’ve already got it.” Roarke slammed the copy of Ivy’s witness statement against the windshield for Ortiz to see.
Ortiz stared at the statement through the glass, then lowered the driver’s window and said the same thing Roarke had said to the nun. “How did you get this?”
“Have you read it? Because I don’t think that anyone could read that and not want to move heaven and earth to find the monster that did it. So I’m wondering why, between the two cases, you chose to pursue Cara Lindstrom instead?”
Ortiz’s voice was tight. “I work homicide. That counselor was murdered—”
“And Ivy was still alive? Only because she was strong enough to fight for her life.” Roarke leaned toward the window, fixed on the detective’s face. “You knew Pierson attacked Lindstrom, didn’t you? He and the boy. You knew it was self-defense. But still, you were out for her. With no evidence. Nothing to back you up. Why?”
Wind rustled through the fronds of the mesquite trees, and the dusk seemed to close around them. And then it dawned, a feeling so cold and so certain that Roarke felt the chill through his body.
“She saw something in you, didn’t she? She saw It.”
The look Ortiz gave him this time wasn’t nasty. It was a killing rage. Somehow he mustered himself. “We’re done here.” He twisted the key in the ignition.
“What was it? Domestic abuse? Stalking?” Roarke’s voice dropped with his own realization. “Or was it rape?”
Ortiz gunned the engine, forcing Roarke to step back as the vehicle careened out of the lot.
Roarke stood in the parking lot feeling the drunken buzz of adrenaline. It had been stupid Neanderthal posturing, the kind he didn’t usually indulge in—because it scared him, how good it felt. But it was not entirely without purpose. He had seen the detective’s face. And he had thrown the gauntlet down. Ortiz knew now that he was investigating, and what he was investigating. The trap was laid, the bait set. He would see what he could catch.
The last exchange was reverberating in his mind.
She saw something in you.
He’d said it on impulse.
But could it be?
Did Cara see something in Ortiz? Did that trigger this hatred in him?
It was an almost preternatural thing to think. It presupposed that Roarke believed Cara could see—whatever you wanted to call It. Evil. Wrongdoing. Past crimes or malevolent intent. And that she was seeing it as far back as fourteen years old.
But Ortiz seemed to have pursued her with an uncommon wrath; a zealotry that went far beyond professional duty.
Was that why?
He turned and looked at the sheriff’s station. Then he walked toward the front entrance.
What he needed was a name.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ortiz had not been the lead detective on the investigation into the counselor’s murder. The senior detective’s name was Miller, and he was retired, but when Roarke called the number the deputy at the desk had given him, Miller answered the phone, and agreed to meet Roarke at a nearby Mexican restaurant.
Roarke parked in the half-empty lot of a pink adobe-style building with neon palm trees on the roof.
Inside he stopped in the doorway and looked over the restaurant, unnerved.
He was surrounded by skeleton figures: Dia de los Muertos dolls, Catrinas in their finery, skeletons painted on velvet . . . bullfighters, card players, musicians, brides. Behind the bar, on the walls, hanging from the ceiling, reflected in the gilt mirrors also hung around the room.
Santa Muerte. Lady Death. Here, too.
Roarke gathered himself and focused. There was an older man sitting by himself in a back booth, and Roarke knew him instantly as former law enforcement. He had a bristly gray beard, bushy eyebrows, wire-framed glasses. His once-muscular frame had gone soft, but he seemed comfortable in his bulk.
Miller stood as Roarke approached, and they shook hands across the table.
“Appreciate you meeting me,” Roarke said.
They sat, but before either one of them could speak, a waiter appeared beside the table. “Something to drink, señor?”
Miller indicated the margarita in front of him. “They know how to make ’em.”
Roarke nodded to the waiter. “Salt, rocks.”
When the waiter was gone, Miller picked up his own drink. “So you want to know about Gil Ortiz.”
Right to the point. Roarke was fine with that. “I got a strange phone call from him a few days ago. I’ve talked to him twice and I still don’t understand what he’s after.”
“A phone call about Cara Lindstrom?”
Roarke looked at Miller, surprised. The older man nodded. “I got one of those, too, a few weeks back. My fault she’s out there, apparently.”
Roarke didn’t know if he was feeling relief or apprehension. “He said it was mine.”
Miller snorted. “Yeah. Gil was an angry guy. I haven’t had any face-to-face contact with him recently, but I’m betting you have?” He eyed Roarke.
“He’s angry,” Roarke agreed. “Can you tell me about him?”
“I didn’t work with him long. Too much of a loose cannon.” Miller lifted his glass, took a minute before drinking.
Roarke realized the other man was debating something, and waited, giving him space. Finally, Miller admitted, “I never liked the way he treated witnesses. Or suspects, for that matter. He was a bully. We don’t need that kind of person in uniform. Or plainclothes, either.”
Roarke’s drink arrived. He took a swallow, tasted the bite of tequila, and nodded appreciation before returning to the subject, trying to be as neutral as possible. “He seems pretty convinced that Cara Lindstrom killed that counselor, Pierson.”
Miller sounded rueful, a bit defensive. “Well, with twenty-twenty hindsight, that theory might not’ve been as wacked as it seemed at the time. But at the time—the girl was fourteen and she had alibi witnesses.”
“Who?”
“Her aunt and cousin said she was home all night. Plus, how would she have gotten herself there?” Miller shook his head. “Fact is, Pierson was a user. There was crack on the premises. People get killed for that shit. And not by f
ourteen-year-old girls.”
Roarke realized now why Miller had never pursued Cara for the murder. It made sense. But . . .
“Her cousin . . . you mean her cousin Erin?”
“That sounds right. Younger girl. They slept in the same room that night.”
Roarke nodded, but he knew that even at nine, Erin would have protected Cara.
The light from the red candle on the table glowed on Miller’s face as he looked into his glass. “Maybe I should’ve pursued it. But Gil was off the rails. He’d split up with his wife, it was nasty. Couldn’t get him to stop trash-talking her. He went around all the time like he was going to explode. And this case . . . there was just something off about the way he focused in on the Lindstrom girl. Made it hard to take him seriously. After all she went through . . .” He grimaced. “Tell you the truth—I didn’t want anything to do with it.”
Roarke understood, too well. He had felt the same thing himself. “Was he ever accused, or disciplined for domestic violence? Any kind of abuse?”
“Not that I ever knew, but can’t say it would surprise me.”
“Can I ask you—did you work on the Ivy Barnes case?”
Miller flinched. “We all did for a while. Whole department was knocking on doors through half the county, trying to find some lead on the sorry piece of human waste that did it. Worst thing I’ve ever seen.” He stared off somewhere far away.
Roarke pressed it. “Was that case ever connected to the suicide of a girl named Laura Huell? Also a student at Las Piedras High?”
Miller frowned. “Laura Huell? I never heard anything like that. Far as I knew the thing with the Barnes girl was a one-off, someone passing through. There was never any evidence. I hope the guy is burning in hell.” He drained his drink and signaled for another.
I hope so, too, Roarke thought. But hoping isn’t enough.
Roarke sat in his car in the parking lot, looking out at the shadowed mountain range towering over the desert.
Before he’d left Miller, he’d asked if Ortiz was a Wayfarer, and Miller hadn’t known. But it was pretty clear from the conversation with the detective that Ortiz was a bad guy.
How much of a bad guy he actually was, Roarke didn’t know.
And Franzen might be a bad guy, too.
But those were feelings.
The fact was: when Cara drove out here to Palm Desert that night, she killed Pierson. And Golden Shadows RV Park, where the counselor had been murdered, was a ten-minute drive from the restaurant.
The RV park was nestled at the base of the mountain range, just outside the national park.
Roarke stopped the Land Rover on the sand shoulder of the road, got out of the car, and took his Maglite from the trunk.
It was easy enough for him get onto the grounds; he simply walked in through the gates. There was a manager’s trailer at the entrance, but nobody came out of it when Roarke passed by. There was nothing remotely like high security going on, and he guessed there would have been even less sixteen years ago.
It was dark now, but the moon was high and dazzling in the sky. He didn’t bother turning on the flashlight; the moon lit his way.
He walked further into the park, through the curved pattern of trailer lots, through well-kept double-wides. The resonant quiet, the feel of the dry wind, was intoxicating. He caught the smell of honey mesquite and desert lavender. The night pulsed with desert life. As he walked, he worked the scenario through in his head.
Pierson had been killed the same night that Laura Huell killed herself.
How could that be a coincidence?
The counselor might have attacked Laura, and like so many girls and women before her, she’d taken her own life. Then, knowing that he had attacked Ivy and now Laura, Cara went straight after him.
It was what the adult Cara would have done.
He found the right lot number: the spot, though probably not the same trailer, where the counselor was murdered. It was a standard double-wide, with a rocker on the tiny front porch and a small cactus garden at the side.
There were no lights on in the home, so Roarke could take his time looking up at the windows, the doors, envisioning Cara breaking in. A slim wraith, all in black, breaching the door, creeping into the trailer . . .
Somehow she had been out here that night. Somehow she had made that drive through Indian territory and the perilous roads, through forest and darkness, to kill this man.
Without realizing, he spoke aloud. “Because he was Ivy’s attacker? Or just because he was bad?”
He’d seen the photos. It was too easy to picture the bloodbath it had been: the slash of the knife, the arcs of crimson arterial spray. A fourteen-year-old girl, up against a grown man, almost certainly a child predator. It could so easily have ended another way.
Anger rose in him, that she had been so desperate, so alone, that she would feel this was her only option.
The loneliness she must have felt . . . it was suddenly unbearable.
But it was possible, just possible, that it had all ended here, that night.
Miller’s words in the bar came back to him. “There was never any evidence. I hope the guy is burning in hell.”
No one had ever been arrested. Maybe it was because the rapist was dead.
Maybe Cara had killed him to avenge the other two girls, and it was over now, a reign of terror and devastation stopped in its tracks by Lady Death.
Roarke’s sense of relief at the thought was so overpowering that he halted on the sand, and sent up a fervent wish to whatever force in the universe could hear him.
Let that be it. Please let it be over.
CARA
Chapter Twenty-Nine
She lies in bed, listening, as first her cousins, then her aunt, then the house falls asleep.
She can feel her own heart thumping loudly in anticipation.
She rises from bed, dresses silently in black jeans and a hoodie, tucks her hair up into a wool cap. Camouflage. This way she can easily be mistaken for a boy. Boys aren’t safe from what is out there . . . but they are safer.
Stepping softly to cross the room, she tries the bedroom door, fully expecting to be locked in, to need to pick her way out with the pen clasp. But Aunt Joan is a trusting person. Aunt Joan thinks that wanting people to be good is the same as people being good. The door is unlocked.
Her backpack holds her new treasures: the knife from the kitchen, the flashlight, the screwdriver, wire, and clips from the tool drawer, plus money she has taken from Aunt Joan’s bag, and a metal coat hanger from the closet. She moves silently down the stairs, opens the front door a millimeter at a time, as noiselessly as she can manage.
When she steps out the door, the light from the moon is so dazzling that it halts her in her tracks, and she has to stand at the doorstep to get her bearings and allow her eyes to adjust.
It has been three days since she has stopped taking the medication and the world is changing around her. She can hear the sibilant rustling of night. The murmurs are almost distinguishable. With no people, the world is so beautiful: the silhouettes of palms and olive trees in the moonlight, the whispery touch of the wind. The moon is heading for full and she can almost feel the heat of it pulsing in the velvet sky above her. It casts a trail of light down the street. The moon is showing her the way.
She starts down the driveway onto the street.
Being out in the night, on her own, is instantly freeing. She exhales a breath she seems to have been holding for two years.
But she can also feel the urgency. Once she runs, they will be looking for her. The farther she can get tonight, the safer she will be. So she hurries, slipping from shadow to shadow.
On a dark curve of the street she finds the older Honda she noticed on her walk.
She stops beside the passenger door, unfolds the coat hanger, untwists it, hooks the end, and works the wire under the soft padding between the window and the doorframe. It takes some fiddling, but she is patient. Days and weeks and y
ears of sitting in a cell make you patient. Once she gets the hanger inside, she uses the hooked end to pull up the lock button. The lock pops open and she pulls open the door and slips in.
She slides over to the driver’s seat and uses the screwdriver to pry off the lower panel of the steering column. With the flashlight she finds the bundle with the wires she needs: red for the battery, green for the ignition, yellow for the starter. She uses the knife to scrape off a tiny bit of the insulation of each wire, and clamps the clip leads onto the exposed metal. Now she clips the battery clip lead and the ignition clip lead together.
The dashboard lights come on, and her heart beats faster. She has not forgotten how to do this.
She puts the car in neutral, then touches the starter clip lead to the other attached leads. There is a spark . . . the starter motor cranks and the engine fires up.
She exhales, feels the rush of adrenaline and pleasure.
She has not been behind the wheel of a car for two years. But she can drive. She remembers everything about it.
Everything.
There was a foster home she’d lived in, some months before she was sent up to YA. Six other kids stayed in the home; their hosts were professional parents, in it for the state subsidy, as so many foster parents were.
She’d felt it before she heard it, the sneaking out. She would lie in bed, feeling the live, awake presence in the house. Then the miniscule sounds: the breath, the step . . . the sound of a lock turned and a door eased open and softly closed. And then always, a minute or two later, the faint sound of a car engine starting up, the sound of the foster parents’ old Chevy. She was sure she knew who it was, who made the nighttime journeys. There was a boy, not quite sixteen, rail-thin, with the high cheekbones and sleek black hair of Native American blood. And the mornings after she heard the engine in the night, the black-haired boy always seemed at peace.
So one night she was ready. And she followed, tracing his footsteps.
Easing her bedroom door open. Gliding down the hall in bare feet, her tennis shoes clutched in one hand. Eyes fixed on the front door—
Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4) Page 14
