Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  She forces herself to stay quiet, not to let anything show on her face.

  “Your group home counselor from Palm Desert. Have you seen him since you’ve been out of YA?”

  She crosses her arms on her chest, defensively. It is not entirely an act. “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Ortiz demands. Miller shoots him a look, as if he has spoken out of turn.

  Cara replies faintly, “I’m sure. Why would I want to see him?”

  “You haven’t been out to Palm Desert?”

  She lets herself look confused. “I’m not allowed to do anything on my own.”

  Miller smiles. “Those are the rules. But there are ways around the rules . . .”

  She looks him straight in the face. “I’m not going to do anything that gets me sent back.”

  Miller nods. “Fair enough. We just need to know where you were last night.”

  She glances toward Aunt Joan, makes her voice bewildered. “I was here.”

  Miller turns to her aunt. “Was she?”

  Now Aunt Joan looks confused, and apprehensive. “Where else would she be?”

  Ortiz speaks again, abruptly. “Has your car been driven?”

  “What?”

  Cara sees Miller is about to speak, but Ortiz steamrolls over him. “Is your car here?”

  “The car is in the garage,” Aunt Joan says. “Why?”

  The word is barely out of her mouth when Ortiz demands, “We’d like to see it.”

  Aunt Joan answers faintly. “This is very strange . . .”

  A small voice comes from behind. “She was here.”

  Aunt Joan and the detectives turn to look. Erin stands in the doorway of the kitchen in a T-shirt and jeans, small and dark and steady. “I had a bad dream. I went and slept with Cara.” She looks at the detectives. “She was here.”

  Aunt Joan nods, looking relieved. “It’s true, I found Erin in Cara’s bed this morning.”

  “She was here all night?” Ortiz demands of Erin.

  Aunt Joan bristles protectively. “Now look, you can’t talk to my—”

  “All night,” Erin says.

  Aunt Joan turns to the detectives. “There you are. Is there something else?”

  Cara can see Ortiz is about to explode, but Miller gives him a cold look and Ortiz shuts his mouth, holding himself back.

  The older detective turns back to Aunt Joan. “No, that’s all we needed to know. Thanks for your time.”

  Ortiz stares straight at Cara. Later, his eyes promise. She looks back blankly. He pushes back through the front door, following Miller out.

  Her aunt closes the door behind them slowly, before she turns to Cara. “What was that about?” She sounds more nervous than angry.

  Cara shakes her head and gives her aunt a helpless look. “I guess something to do with the thing at school? Maybe Ms. Sharonda will know.”

  “Maybe,” her aunt says, worriedly. She glances toward the window at the sound of the SUV starting up outside. “It’s past two. You should get dressed.”

  Cara goes upstairs to the guest room and closes the door behind her.

  So it was real, last night. Not a dream. Real. The moon. The car. The old Indian.

  All of it.

  She lies back on the bed and lets herself remember.

  In the end, it had been easy. The sign said PALM DESERT and it led her straight to him. The moon showed her the way. The light was a path.

  There was the drive over the mountain, and down the winding rattlesnake of a road toward the valley. There was the trailer home park at the base of the mountains, right off the highway, and another sign that said GOLDEN SHADOWS PARK.

  Everything is aligned in her favor.

  The mobile homes, all dark; no one at the windows, on the porches, on the paths. So easy to move silently through the night. The moon lights up the trailer park like a stage set, so she can find the unit she seeks.

  There is the cheesy lock on the fiberglass front door that a baby could pop open with a plastic card. It takes ten seconds to manipulate it, and then she is easing open the door.

  Inside, she becomes the dark.

  The sour smell surrounds her. Unwashed dishes. Spilled beer.

  The kitchen is the first room, and there are knives in a butcher block stand right on the counter so she doesn’t even have to use the one she has brought from Aunt Joan’s.

  She moves down the short hall toward the bedroom.

  The smell there is as she remembered, the stale bleach stench of sex. It is sprawled on the bed, sedated, semi-paralyzed by the counselor’s drinking, possibly drugs, too.

  Still, It wakes when It feels her coming. It knows her.

  It glares up at her, pig eyes full of hate. The same look It had when It came through the door of her bedroom two years ago. When It held her down and tore at her clothes, and she kicked out in such rage and connected with soft flesh.

  She had the rage, then. But now she has the knife.

  She knows exactly where to put it, because she has felt a blade in her own neck. She knows, has felt, how effortlessly sharp steel cuts through skin and tissue and veins. Even now she can feel it, how close the blade came to the pulsing tube of her carotid.

  Close.

  But not close enough.

  She does not miss.

  It screams and screams and writhes and hisses. But mainly, It bleeds. Blood gushing from the counselor’s neck, spraying the walls in pumping arcs, until the spurting becomes a gurgling, and then a trickle, and then stops. And the counselor is dead and finally It slips away too.

  She stands shaking in the dark, breathing through the copper stink, barely able to stay upright. But it is not fear she feels.

  This man, this thing, that she has been afraid of for so long, was after all nothing but soft flesh, a fragile layer of skin containing not even a bathtub’s worth of blood. Six quarts. Twelve pints.

  The monster may have used him as a shell, but it is a very weak vessel. People think she is just a girl, a little girl, but she is alive and he is dead. As dead as he can be.

  Fear the wolf or be the wolf.

  There is a humming in her head: the lightness of exhilaration.

  I am the wolf.

  She sits up on the bed in her aunt’s guest room, then stands.

  There isn’t much to pack, now less than yesterday. The clothes she wore last night were discarded in a Dumpster miles away. Into a different Dumpster went the things she took from the house: the knife and the wallet on his dresser, less the money in it.

  Long before dawn, the car she used was back on the street she had taken it from, the panel back in place on the steering column, concealing the peeled wires. The owner will find the car locked and the engine will start. Without any obvious signs of a break-in, it may be days, weeks, before anyone realizes the car has been tampered with, if ever.

  She does pack the screwdriver and the flashlight, though. And the clip leads. She will have to hide them away for safekeeping, but having them is almost as good as having a car.

  She strips the bed in the guest room and neatly re-makes it with fresh sheets from the closet.

  Now she goes out to the garage to put the used sheets in the washer. She turns on the machine to the longest, hottest cycle and adds bleach to the water as well as laundry soap, to ensure that any traces of her night journey go down the drain.

  Perhaps she should feel something: remorse, fear, guilt, shame. She feels none of those things, only a lightness, and a sense of . . . she does not even know what to call it. Peace, maybe. Accomplishment. Purpose.

  The monster that was the counselor is no more. There is no shame in that. And she will be able to tell them now. Laura. The skeleton girl.

  The monster is dead.

  Upstairs again, she replaces the money she took from her aunt’s handbag, supplementing the ten she spent for gas with a bill from the counselor’s wallet. She gets her backpack from the guest bedroom and goes downstairs to the living room, where her aunt
is vacuuming. Joan turns off the machine and looks at Cara, standing with her backpack in hand. “I want to go back to school,” she says.

  She pretends not to see the relief that lights her aunt’s face. But that expression is replaced with a conflicted concern.

  “Now, Cara,” her aunt says gently. “Those boys could’ve really hurt you. I want to make sure you’re safe—”

  “They’re bullies. They’re nothing. I’m not afraid of them.”

  “Are you sure?” Aunt Joan asks cautiously.

  “I’m not going to miss school because of them.”

  Her aunt is looking at her with . . . respect is not the word. It looks more like fear. “That’s very grown up of you,” she says faintly.

  I am the wolf, Cara thinks.

  “I can go any time you’re ready,” she says.

  As Cara walks out to the car with her aunt, Erin is watching her. Cara sees her standing in the front doorway.

  The two girls look at each other across the distance. Then Cara opens the passenger door of the car and gets in.

  Back in Las Piedras, Aunt Joan drops her off in the circular drive of the group home. Cara walks past the palm trees, the dry fountain with the angel. As she brushes past the fountain, she stoops quickly to hide a package in the dirt and dry leaves in the basin: a package containing the flashlight, the clip leads, and the knife.

  When she stops into the front office, Ms. Sharonda pauses from the work she is doing at her desk and looks her over. Her face is strange. Angry first, and then resigned.

  “It’s not going to work out there,” Cara says.

  Ms. Sharonda nods. Nothing to say about it. Kids are returned to group homes all the time.

  “I’m going back to school tomorrow,” Cara adds.

  That provokes a flicker of surprise from the director. “Well, Eden, your bed is empty. So go on ahead.” Ms. Sharonda returns to her paperwork, but Cara remains standing in the doorway until she looks up again.

  “It’s Cara,” she says. “You can call me Cara, now.”

  Ms. Sharonda frowns. She takes another, deeper look at Cara. After a moment she nods once, warily, “All right. Cara.”

  Cara turns away and goes to her room.

  At night she stands in the med line and takes her medication. In the bathroom she gags it up.

  She won’t be taking it, ever again. She is just beginning to see.

  ROARKE

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  After a brief stop at a copy center to make hard copies of the reports Singh had sent and buy supplies, Roarke drove straight back to the Mission. No shower, just a quick wash and change of clothes in a gas station restroom. He knew he looked the worse for wear, but he couldn’t wait to talk to the nun.

  In her office, Mother Doctor poured him coffee, eyeing him with a knowing look. “Rough night?”

  Not as rough as all of this is going to get, he thought. He put the cardboard box of police reports he’d printed out on her desk.

  She looked startled. “You came up with all of that overnight?”

  “I have a brilliant analyst on—” He’d almost said my team. He settled for, “On the case. She’s the one who turned all this up.”

  He quickly filled her in about the other rapes Singh had uncovered.

  Mother Doctor listened, getting more and more still. “Dear God. Nine more . . .”

  Roarke knew the real truth. “Those are just the ones that she found. That were reported to begin with. It’s impossible to say how many we’re talking about.”

  “Dear God,” she said again. And then after a moment, “Are you sure that they’re connected, though? Abduction into a van isn’t . . . well, it’s not that unusual, is it?”

  She was too right. Vans were the preferred vehicle of sexual predators everywhere. Portable torture chambers.

  He nodded at her in acknowledgment. “It’s not unusual on the surface, no. But there are too many other points in common. And it’s the January date that makes it almost certain. Someone is traveling in January, renting a van, and hunting for lone girls on their way to school early in the morning.”

  He looked at her. “Can you think of any reason these attacks would take place in January?”

  The nun frowned. “Something to do with the school calendar? Or were they three-day weekends, perhaps? Martin Luther King, Junior Day?”

  “That was the first thing Singh checked.” It had been in the written summary she’d sent. “It wasn’t, and it couldn’t have been. All the victims were abducted on their way to school. It was part of our search criteria.”

  “When was the last attack?” she asked. The same thing he’d asked Singh.

  “Last year.”

  “In January,” she said, and glanced at the calendar on her desk. He couldn’t see it, but he knew the date. January 24.

  “Exactly. January. I don’t like it.” It felt like they were racing a ticking clock. “This is an active, sadistic serial rapist. They don’t stop. They never stop.”

  “But, Roarke . . . if these rapes happened all over the country . . . you have no idea where to start, do you? Every one of these attacks took place in a different city. He may not live anywhere near here.”

  Roarke realized why he had come straight to the Mission. He needed a sounding board, and she had a mind like a steel trap, this woman. They were thinking along parallel tracks.

  “Except I keep thinking he does,” he told her. “Or at least, he did.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because Ivy is the epicenter.”

  She tilted her head inquiringly. He stood, unable to sit still.

  “Every single one of the other corresponding rapes has taken place in a big city. Not just a big town or a small city: a big city. Which makes me think it’s possible—possible—that Ivy is the anomaly. The rapist had a schedule and a very clever, calculated plan to give him the maximum cover. But in this instance, for whatever reason, he couldn’t wait, snapped, and did something closer to home. And much more out of control.”

  “And then there’s Laura Huell,” Mother Doctor said.

  He looked at her, surprised . . . but not really. “Yes, exactly, Laura Huell. She was visiting Ivy, and she killed herself. So she may have been attacked. Or she may have seen something. The confluence of those two things . . . just speaks of something closer to here.”

  And then there’s Cara. The fact that Cara was here seals the deal.

  “What can I do?” the nun said simply.

  “What I need to do is a timeline.”

  “I can give you a space to work here, if that would be helpful.”

  The nun seemed to have read his mind. The truth was, he was sick of his expensive but impersonal and claustrophobic hotel room. To go back there after the wild beauty of the desert seemed unbearably confining. Add to that the fact that he was slightly suspicious of Devlin. And he had a feeling he would need to talk to Mother Doctor again before the day was out.

  “It would, actually,” he admitted.

  “Come.”

  He followed her out the back door again and into the garden, past the mission bell in its stone arch.

  They passed through the plaza area and through another wooden door in the high wall. Outside the wall there was a grove of old oak, willow, and olive trees. In the midst of the trees was a stone-and-mortar cottage.

  It looked ancient, but solid enough on the outside. When the nun opened the door and they stepped inside, Roarke was pleasantly surprised to find a minimalist but spotlessly clean interior: a room dominated by a long wood plank table, some shelving, and bare walls with a few cutout windows. There was a small kitchen area and smaller cubicle of a bedroom, painted the same white, with a cut-out window in the thick wall. The whitewashed surfaces gleamed and gave the place a sense of calm and light.

  “There should be coffee in the cupboard, there. And Wi-Fi, naturally.” Mother Doctor wrote out a password. “Have a shower if you like. No implication that you need one, of
course.”

  Roarke gave her a rueful look. “No, of course not. Thank you.”

  “I have consultations until noon, but I’ll be here for anything you need.” She turned to go, then turned back, frowning.

  “The police here never found anything on the man who attacked Ivy. But the information was right there, in your ViCAP system: the three assaults previous to Ivy, and the six since. How is it that you were able to turn up nine more rapes, and no one else was?”

  Roarke shook his head, felt the anger again. It was a long, and heartbreaking story.

  Out of eighteen thousand police agencies in the United States, only about fourteen hundred participated in the ViCAP system. Far less than one percent of violent crimes were ever reported to the database. ViCAP was supposed to revolutionize law enforcement, especially in regard to sexual assault cases. It still hadn’t happened.

  He gave her a partial answer. “If you really want to know, I can tell you. Many reasons, including that the system doesn’t automatically compare new cases to old ones. It’s a huge deficiency. Singh knows how to manipulate the database. She filters information and re-enters it. She works with it.”

  If only everyone else did.

  The nun glanced at the watch hung around her neck. “I want to know more. I need to go. We’ll talk.”

  When the nun had left, Roarke helped himself to the shower, standing under blissfully hot water, washing away the desert grit.

  Then he fetched the rest of his files and the office supplies he’d bought from the car, brought them into the gate house, and got to work.

  First he used the blank expanse of the wall to create a calendar of Post-its.

  He laid out one complete January calendar for the month that Cara had been in Las Piedras: five rows of weeks, thirty-one days—and used blue Post-its to mark the dates of the significant events of the month: Cara/Eden’s arrival in Las Piedras, Laura Huell’s suicide, the murder of the counselor, and Ivy Barnes’ death.

  He stood for a moment looking at the Post-it labeled COUNSELOR MURDERED IN PALM DESERT, and spoke to Cara in his head.