She is very, very slow, her feet whispering against the sand, as she moves up to the cabin. Her breath seems to reverberate in the silence of the night.
She stops in front of the door. There is a steel plate with a hasp, and a padlock hanging from it.
The door is locked from the outside.
She hovers, thoughts coming quickly. He may be here. He may have parked the van on a side road, as she did.
There is time to back away. To run away.
Instead, she reaches for the lock, examining it. It is a heavy combination lock, a Master 17 series. Thick, intimidating, and easy to open.
She has her tools: her ballpoint pen clasp flattened into a lock pick. And of course, a knife.
She grasps the lock, slides in her homemade pick and pushes down the spring plate inside to release the shackle. The lock pops open in her hand.
Her heart is pounding out of her chest as she pulls open the hasp, and then the door. The creak of it is deafening. She freezes, every limb ready to bolt . . .
But nothing stirs inside.
The cabin is dark and stale, a revolting smell she knows too well. She uses her flashlight to scan the room: a filthy mattress, stacks of magazines against the wall, a kitchenette with a sink and hot plate and shelves with cans of food. And a set of metal shelves. Not for books, but with something very interesting to her.
She doesn’t know how much time she has. But now she knows she has a chance.
ROARKE
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The riverbed called Pyrite Creek wound through an unincorporated area next to the Cahuilla Reservation.
Roarke drove out toward it on a state road which turned into a half-paved road which turned into a dirt road. With every mile there seemed to be more layers of stars in the black dome of sky. There had been no town for miles, though every few miles he caught sight of dwellings: mobile homes with built-on additions, ramshackle houses that had started as sheds but that one makeshift room at a time had become something somewhat resembling a house . . . all as far from any building or safety code as anyone could imagine and all too far away from each other for anyone to call anyone else a neighbor. It was all so close to the Cahuilla Reservation that not many people would venture near it.
And then there was nothing but the desert. Chaparral, sage scrub, oak woodland. Arroyos and rock falls from the mountains.
And Pyrite Creek: a riverbed that these days would only see water during a flash flood.
The only thing to follow was the riverbed, so Roarke followed it, grateful for his four-wheel drive. The high full moon marked his way. Wolf Moon. Bitter Moon.
And then there they were. The palm trees. An oasis of them. And in the vast empty canvas of the desert, they were as good as a billboard.
Roarke stopped the Rover, turned it off.
There was instant silence in the vast expanse of the desert.
He sat, looking out the windshield, up at the palms. Breathing out, breathing in. Centering himself.
Are you ready for this? For what might be here?
He reached for the glove compartment, took out the Maglite and plastic handcuffs stowed there. He checked his weapon, holstered it, and got out of the car.
The desert air was cold and dry, a light breeze ebbing and flowing like water, and the silence was deep, encompassing, soporific.
He breathed it all in, and headed up the wall of the arroyo, scrambling up soft sand. There would be more of a view there.
He crested the top of the ridge, and it was only then could he see there was clearly a property. The buildings were hidden from the bottom of the arroyo, but at the top of the ridge, he could see the spread.
There was a fence: cruel rows of barbed wire sagging between posts that no one had bothered to straighten in years. NO TRESPASSING signs and OWNER WITH GUN warnings: one just a threatening graphic of a gun muzzle.
And behind the fence, up a slight rise—a crude cabin, and some distance away, a large shed.
Roarke walked toward the fence, carefully lifted one of the barbed wire strands and climbed through.
He moved across the sand, under two entwined palm trees on the edge of the ridge, approaching the cabin, drawing his Glock, already figuring he would have to kick in the door.
But closer up, he saw a steel plate with a hasp on the door, and no lock securing it.
He stepped forward. The door opened under his hand.
He pushed it open and moved inside, leading with his weapon . . .
A single room, and it was a ghost cabin now. Sand had filtered in through cracks and covered everything in drifts. Not even a footprint in the silt on the floor. Empty.
He lowered the Glock.
Looking around, he was willing to bet that that no one had been there for years and years.
He holstered his weapon, pulled out the Maglite and turned it on, playing the beam around the cabin.
There was a mattress in the corner. Underneath the layers of sand, the cloth was stained and vile.
Stacks of magazines stood against the wall. Even as he stepped toward them, he knew what they would be.
He picked a handful up, went through six or seven in quick succession, looking down at teenage girls forced into twisted parodies of adult women. Every bodily orifice filled with the genitalia of adult men. Bound. Gagged. Hooded.
He stopped opening the magazines, but continued through the stack, checking dates. The last date he could find on a magazine was 2000.
He dropped the last magazine and turned away from it, using the Maglite to explore further.
Beside a crude sink, there was a hot plate, and open shelving with rusted cans of food. Roarke checked the cans, and found no expiration dates past 2002.
No one’s been here since then.
“Fourteen years at least . . .” he said aloud into the stillness.
He turned in the cabin, sweeping the flashlight around him.
And then the light found the most chilling sight of all. On a metal shelf, the rows of gasoline cans.
Roarke left the cabin, and stood under the inky sky, the stars glittering in the vast dome above.
Once he’d gathered himself, he turned and walked toward the shed.
It was big, and better constructed than the shack. It was built to keep people out. There was a padlock on the door.
Roarke looked around him to find a large enough stone, and smashed the lock until it broke. He slipped the lock out of the frame and pulled opened the door. It creaked and shivered under his hands as he moved the door open enough to get through.
Flashlight in his left hand, Glock in his right, he directed the Maglite beam inside.
The white side of the van reflected his light back on him. The windshield stared like a big black eye.
Roarke approached the side door of the van cautiously, his heart beating faster. He gripped the door handle, pulled the door open with a shriek of rusty hinge.
He stepped back, shone the flashlight inside. The beam caught glimpses of hell.
The floor was plain metal, grooves. Easy to wash.
There were handcuffs welded to the floor. There were chains. Coiled rope. A can of gasoline.
Ivy’s prison.
He had to swallow back bile.
But he knew he had the key now. It was sixteen years later, but there would still be trace evidence, if it wasn’t too degraded. Hair. Blood. Fiber.
He found a cloth rag on the dirt floor and used it to open the driver’s door. On the console between the two front seats, there was a man’s wallet. Roarke used the rag to pick it up, opened it on the front seat.
Inside were a few bills, a driver’s license with a familiar name, and one photograph of a family: a man, a woman, and a schoolgirl with a strained smile. Roarke recognized her instantly.
Laura Huell.
CARA
Chapter Fifty-Nine
After she has walked all around the property and found what she needs to find and done what she needs to do, s
he sits and waits outside the cabin, watching the night. Looking up at the stars outside the radiant circle of the moon.
The palm fronds rustle in the riverbed below, and the moon whispers calming things. She is not alone. She can feel Ivy with her, and Laura. And someone else, too, she thinks. Someone she doesn’t recognize.
The nun’s words come back to her, fierce with conviction.
“You are not alone. And you are loved.”
She hears the engine, first, the bumping and straining of the van over the rough, sandy terrain.
She stays by the side of the cabin, the knife in one jacket pocket, something else she has found in the other.
The white van drives up to the shed, and a man gets out. She can see his face perfectly in the moonlight.
He is not the one she is expecting, but when she sees him, it all makes sense.
An ordinary-looking man, with a monster inside.
She watches as Laura’s father moves up to the shed, unlocks the padlock on the door.
As he parks the van inside, she hides herself on the other side of the cabin, out of sight of the shed, and readies herself. Checks the knife. Breathes and centers herself.
She hears his footsteps crunching heavily on the sand as he approaches the cabin now. In front of the cabin door, he reaches for the lock. She hears his grunt of disbelief as he finds it already open, his lair violated.
“Who the fuck . . . ?” he snarls. He backs away from the doorway, twists around . . .
She steps out into the moonlight, lets him see her.
She doesn’t know how she looks, standing there in the light, but she can tell by his startled shock there is something more to her than usual. Something not Normal.
She stands, hands at her side, motionless. Defenseless.
“What are you doing here?” he demands.
She doesn’t answer, just looks at him. Now she sees the quickening of lust on his face, and something much darker twisting underneath. When he speaks again, it is the voice of It.
“You’re a long way from home, little girl. Are you lost?”
She stays still, knowing he will come to her.
“Does anyone know you’re here?”
“No.”
No one will ever know I was here.
She waits for a moment and then finishes. “Ivy sent me.”
That stops him. “Ivy sent you?” he says softly.
“And Laura.”
Now she feels the confusion and anger in him.
“They told me about you,” she says.
“Told you—”
“Everything.”
She stares him in the face. She sees the burning eyes and jagged mouth of the beast. And then she turns and runs. Across the sand, away from the cabin, toward the riverbed and the ridge she discovered earlier.
He is fast behind her, but she knows where she is going and it is not far. She darts suddenly sideways, up the ridge, running straight up, then dropping to her hands and knees to crawl for the last steep bit. She can hear him panting behind her, scrabbling up the sand after her like a huge, skittering spider.
She thinks of Ivy, of fire and horror and intolerable pain, and the terror propels her upward. She clambers over the top of the ridge.
And in the split second that he cannot see her, she veers away from the second drop-off, darts sideways toward a large flat rock and throws herself down behind it.
The man reaches the top of the ridge, hauls himself up to standing and steps to the edge of the second hole to look down—
Now.
—and in that moment she is up on her feet, running at him from behind and shoving him with all her strength . . . her own strength, and Laura’s, and Ivy’s. Over the edge.
He stumbles forward, arms cartwheeling in vain as he falls . . .
. . . down into the hole . . .
And hits the ground with a heavy thud.
She gasps through the galloping of her heart, steps to the edge of the hole and looks down on him.
He is fifteen feet below, trapped in the dry well he has been using as a trash pit. An ant in an ant lion’s den. He has fallen on the layer of full plastic garden bags at the bottom, barely covered with sand.
And the sand below him is wet and dark.
As he gets to his feet, she can see the smell hit him. He knows what is soaking the sand. The dozen gallon cans of gas that line the metal shelving in the cabin are empty now.
“Fuck . . . You fucking little cunt—” he rages.
She holds up the silver lighter she found in the cabin. It gleams in the moonlight.
And then his face changes as the panic sets in. “Wait. You can’t do that. You can’t . . .”
She flicks the lighter and tosses it into the pit.
It is a dozen gallons of gas. The flames are instant. A whoosh of blue fire, racing over the bottom of the pit and up the sides.
Laura’s father screams as the flames engulf him.
Cara stares down, feeling the heat of the fire on her face, glowing orange.
He is screaming, his shrieks rising into the dark. He tries to run from side to side, but the entire pit is burning. His clothes are burning, and now his hair . . .
She backs away from the pit, and sits down in the sand under the moon, waiting for It to die.
ROARKE
Chapter Sixty
The pit wasn’t far away from the cabin. Roarke found the ridge, first, and at the top, he found the gasoline, a full, rusted can behind a large flat rock. Beyond it, the drop down into the old natural well, long run dry.
There was a lump at the bottom, fifteen feet down, covered in sand—but he recognized the shape of a few pale protruding sticks.
He scrambled down the side of the pit and used a branch to uncover it. A human body, long since reduced to cracked and blackened bones. Eye sockets staring up out of the charred skull.
He had seen another body Cara had burned, more recently. He could see it, what had happened.
He knew he was looking at Ivy’s killer. And Laura’s, too.
Maybe he’d abused her. Or maybe he’d never touched her. But she’d discovered what he was, and couldn’t live with it. She’d visited Ivy, and she knew that her father was a monster.
As he stared down he saw something silver in the sand beside the skull. He stooped to pick it up, felt the weight of it in his hand.
He stood, in the middle of a burned-out pit, the sky crusted with millions of stars above him.
And knew that justice had been done.
Inside the cabin, he sat down in the one chair and reached into his pocket for his phone, but there was no signal to be found. He disconnected, looked around at the cabin. The filthy mattress, the stacks of magazines. A time capsule of evil.
And the monster who lived in it had been snuffed out of existence by a teenage girl.
You did it, Cara. You stopped this one.
There was another one out there. But the rape kit comparisons were coming.
“We’ll get him, too,” he promised her, aloud. “We’ve got him.”
He sat, not moving, and it occurred to him that Marlena was free now. He could tell her the monster was dead. Nausea roiled in his gut, after-effects of adrenaline and relief . . .
No.
Not relief—
He twisted in the chair, reaching for his holster . . . as the door opened across the room.
The doorway filled up with Mel Franzen. Big. Smiling. And pointing a Ruger.
“Don’t move, Mr. Roarke.”
There was relish in his voice, and Roarke froze, eyes fixed on the Ruger. He knew he was in trouble. And this time Cara was nowhere near to save him. No Cara, no Epps. He could die out here in the middle of the desert and no one would ever know where he was, what had happened . . .
“Take that weapon out and slide it over here,” Franzen said. His gun was aimed dead center at Roarke’s chest, and the man knew how to hold a weapon. None of it was good news.
Roarke rea
ched slowly for his holster, unsnapped it, drew out the Glock.
Franzen’s aim never faltered. “On the floor.”
Roarke leaned forward and placed it on the rough wood planking, then kicked it to the side, out of Franzen’s reach, still in his own peripheral vision.
Franzen chuckled. “You’re a stubborn motherfucker, aren’t you, Mr. Roarke? Persistent, too.”
“It’s Agent Roarke. And my team knows where I am.”
Franzen shook his head. “Oh, I very much doubt that.” He looked Roarke over. “No. You’re a lone wolf, through and through.”
Keep him talking, Roarke thought. These guys love to talk. “You weren’t, though. Not always. Did you know your rape buddy is dead?”
Franzen nodded, almost distractedly. “Knew he had to be. Minute he disappeared, I knew he’d have to be. He burned himself out, so to speak.” He glanced around the cabin. “You’ve done me a favor. I always thought he had a place. I never knew where. It’s been on my mind, all these years, what he might have had hidden out here.”
“There’s some interesting stuff, all right,” Roarke said. “I’ve been having a look around.” And if he thinks I can tell him what I’ve found, maybe he won’t shoot me right off the bat. “Quite the setup you had. Planning everything around the conventions, so you’d be out of town and accounted for. You gave each other the perfect cover.”
He was lucky. Franzen had to preen a little. “Of course. If anyone came asking, we were having breakfast together, doing business before a meeting. Having a morning stroll about the city.”
“Every January. And you alternated years.” The timeline made sense to him now, the orange and red.
“That’s right. Everything nice and orderly. It was a great setup until he lost the plot.”
“And he went after Ivy. Right in your own backyard.”
“The rule was, nothing anywhere close to home. No one from the fucking state.” Franzen’s face darkened, and Roarke saw for a moment what his victims had seen. “And then he flips out. Someone right under our roof. Someone from the club. Stalking her. Taking her from just blocks away. Burning her . . . and leaving her out here without taking care of it for good. Stupid. Sloppy.”
Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4) Page 26
