Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) Read online

  “Somewhere private would be best, yes,” the lawyer agrees. She does not, even obliquely, remind Cara of the penalties for disappearing. They understand each other. And as her client reaches for the door handle, the older woman says quickly, “I’m very glad for you, Cara.”

  She turns back. “Thank you,” she says. “For everything.” And she shuts the door, severing connection. She has no intention of seeing the lawyer ever again.

  The Hyatt is a huge hotel, with plenty of foot traffic from local businesses, and something of a tourist attraction for its Blade Runner–style expanse of atrium, escalators, and terraces. People traversing the lobby tend to gape upward at the high-rise interior design with its dozens of ascending balconies and planters, or at the massive metal sculpture centerpiece, a circular whorl that could be anything from a giant pinwheel to an abstract flower or possibly even the sun. There is much ogling and photographing rather than paying attention to faces. And this distraction is useful to her. But the hotel’s primary appeal at the moment is its location: just steps from the Embarcadero BART station.

  The lawyer has given her cash, five thousand drawn from one of Cara’s own accounts, and a prepaid credit card under the office name with two thousand more on it to cover hotels and other venues that require plastic. Far more than enough for now. No one has any idea of the rest of her resources; the numbers and locations are all in her head. There is nothing the jail took from her that she needs.

  She looks around at the soaring space of the lobby and her eyes rest for a moment on the gleaming metal sculpture. She sees not a flower, or a pinwheel, or a sun. She sees a globe.

  She can go anywhere from here.

  Chapter 20

  Molina returned Roarke’s call as his taxi was fighting traffic on Market, heading back to the Bureau.

  “Where is she?” he demanded.

  The lawyer’s voice was impeccable calm. “Agent Roarke, you know I’m not going to tell you that. After all she’s been through, at the very least she deserves her privacy.”

  Roarke put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes and wondered how many ways what he was about to say would come back on him.

  “Call her. Call her and tell her I want to see her.”

  There was a long silence on the phone.

  “Incredible,” Molina said softly. And then all Roarke could hear was the silence of her disconnect.

  He put the phone on the seat beside him. Almost instantly it vibrated again and he grabbed for it.

  Instead of Molina, he heard Singh’s dark velvet voice. “Agent Epps phoned me that Lindstrom has been released.”

  There was a delicate pause, the meaning of which Roarke did not want to contemplate. Is there anyone I’m fooling by now? he asked himself bleakly. On the end of the line, Singh continued.

  “I have been putting myself in her place, and I imagined that she would need not just immediate cash, but perhaps a credit card, which Molina may well have helped her with. An attorney of Molina’s caliber is useful for so many incidental amenities.”

  Even through his distraction, Roarke was impressed by his agent’s canny thinking.

  “I did a search, and I have found a credit card issued to Molina’s firm was used to charge a room at the Hyatt Regency on Market Street at 2:03 p.m.”

  Roarke felt an electric surge through his body. He was two blocks away. He reached for the door handle and his wallet simultaneously, pulling the door open even as he threw money at the cabbie, and then he was running down the sidewalk toward the hotel.

  He barreled through the revolving door of the Hyatt, giving several startled guests a faster exit than they had expected.

  The first sight of the lobby made him pause. He had been to the hotel for various functions but was always taken aback by the hugeness of the lobby, its expanse of high-rise terraces, the massive metallic sculpture.

  He crossed to the reception desk, showed his credentials to get a key card for Cara’s room, and rode the glass elevator up to the seventeenth floor in an agony of impatience.

  There was a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door of her room, and it slowed Roarke’s approach as he realized the implications. What if she was inside? Could it be that simple, just to open the door and find her there, turning to him, or in bed, languid and vulnerable and . . .

  Those thoughts came in a split second, before he had the presence of mind again to shut them down. He had another second’s absurd contemplation about whether to knock, which would only be giving her time to prepare to kill, though in truth he knew she would not do him harm. Probably.

  And then he used the key.

  Chapter 21

  He stepped into the darkened room.

  The blackout curtains were drawn, and he experienced a simultaneous jolt of adrenaline . . . and a different kind of excitement. He fought down the immediate impulse to draw his weapon and let his eyes adjust to the light as he stared through the dark toward the bed.

  The bedclothes were in disarray, which was a jolt of another kind. But as he focused through the dimness, he realized there was no one under the blankets.

  He stood still in the room, absorbing it. There was no sense of any occupant.

  He moved to the windows and pulled back the blinds. Light streamed in and he turned away from the brightness. His eyes moved over the disheveled bed, the clothes thrown on the armchair . . .

  He strode to the bathroom door, pushed it open, hit the light—and saw towels on the floor, hotel bath products open on the sink. A honey fragrance lingered in the air.

  Staged, his mind was telling him through the crush of disappointment and despair. She was here for five minutes, if that.

  He could see it all.

  After checking in, her next stop is the gift shop, where she uses cash to buy all new clothes in sizes too big for her, to conceal the real proportions of her body. She adds a bag, a winter hat, and sunglasses, which so many Californians wear even on winter days that she will not stand out.

  Then she goes up to the room and in less than four minutes total she changes, tucks her hair entirely into the hat, tosses her court clothes on an armchair, pulls the bedclothes down on the bed and shakes them to create a slept-in effect. She stops for a moment, looking down at the bed, and imagines Roarke finding the room. What she is doing now may mislead local law enforcement into thinking she will be returning to the room, but it will not fool him. And she wonders. If it is only a game, why is she doing it? Yet it is what she has always done, and she continues.

  In the bathroom she runs the shower for a few seconds and opens shampoo and conditioner and lotion, throws some towels on the bathroom floor, then hangs the “Do Not Disturb” placard on the outside doorknob and rides the glass elevator back downstairs.

  She walks out onto the sidewalk into the gray mist and bustle of pedestrians and crosses the fifty yards to the BART station, where she uses a machine to buy a ticket with cash.

  Then she rides the long, steep escalator down to the underground platform, feeling the rumble of the approaching train in the tunnel around her as a rush of exhilaration. Freedom . . . and anticipation.

  There is much to do.

  Chapter 22

  He sat on the bed in the room that Cara had left, and his brain turned over possibilities.

  She is so expert at this. It’s been her whole life, on the road, in the wind. She could go literally anywhere. Anywhere in this country, anyway.

  He doubted she would risk international borders. There was no need, and she hadn’t shown any inclination to do it so far, though so much of her history was a blank to him that he couldn’t completely rule it out.

  She didn’t seem to do planes, either. He had no doubt she had fake IDs, good ones, and credit cards, certainly. Pre-9/11 she might have traveled that way unimpeded. Now it was far too much of a risk. And she seemed to like th
e road. She was proficient at stealing cars, and perhaps she also made use of buses. Anyone with cash could buy a ticket. But he doubted she would easily stomach the loss of control that riding a bus would entail.

  The Bay Area held its own particular challenges to tracking her, being that public transportation was so easy and accessible. The hotel was steps from the BART station—not merely a station but a transfer station, the hub of four different routes on both sides of the bay.

  It was the same problem he had just faced with Jade, who very likely had disappeared that same afternoon from the exact same station.

  The thought was so startling it brought him to his feet.

  Did they meet?

  Have they somehow been in contact?

  Jade couldn’t have visited her in the jail. Minors weren’t allowed without an accompanying adult.

  But if Jade has a fake ID of her own . . .

  He forced himself to sit down, slow down, think. It was so very unlikely.

  Is it?

  He felt his thoughts veering wildly out of control. Paranoia, conspiracy.

  No such thing as coincidence . . .

  The jail had records of Cara’s visitors. He was already digging in his coat pocket for his phone to call Singh when he realized he couldn’t ask her to check into the visitor list. Because she would find his own name as perhaps Cara’s most frequent visitor. It would have to wait until he could look into it himself.

  But maybe, just maybe, finding Cara meant finding Jade, too.

  So do that. Find her.

  He walked the room, thinking.

  She could have boarded to ride the train in any direction, gotten off anywhere to boost a car . . .

  And then?

  She would be far, far away. But beyond that, there was little he really knew about what drove her. Except that whatever she did next would be accelerated by the cycle of the moon.

  And it would involve blood.

  He reached for his phone again and called. “Lindstrom checked into a room at the Hyatt—”

  Epps didn’t wait for him to finish. “Singh filled me and Jones in. You there?”

  “Yeah. She booked the room but was never really here. Maybe five minutes, if that.”

  There was a beat on the end of the line. “So start searching for stolen cars,” Epps said wearily.

  “Always,” Roarke answered. “But the Hyatt has the BART station right here. She could be on any side of the bay by now.” He paused and looked out the tall windows in front of him. The city lights floated eerily in the fog. “It’s the BART station closest to where Jade’s taxi dropped her off.”

  There was a silence at the other end of the phone. “What the fuck . . .?” Epps said softly.

  “I don’t know,” Roarke said. And there was more silence between them. Roarke finally broke it. “Look,” he said. For a moment he had no idea what he was going to say after that. “Call Mills. Let him know. I’m going to Molina now. I doubt she’ll tell me anything, but . . .”

  “Right,” Epps said heavily. “Right.”

  Chapter 23

  On the opposite side of the bay, she walks along the chilly, Christmas-lit sidewalks of Shattuck Avenue near the BART station in downtown Berkeley, passing trendy restaurants and microbreweries, cinemas, small retailers.

  She must be on the road again as soon as possible. She should be on it now. But there is work to be done before she leaves, and it is far too early in the evening yet for that, and she has preparation to do.

  She has been on the road and under the radar for a long, long time. Certain behaviors are natural to her. There is always a contingency plan. When she followed Roarke to the mountains last month, she knew the risk of apprehension was great, and she’d stored her false identities, her cash, her cards, and her master keys—keys with teeth filed down to fit pretty much any car of a particular make—in a rented PO box in a nearby town. She has several such drop locations in various cities she finds herself returning to; there is one here in Berkeley, which she has just visited to pick up cards and papers.

  For lodging she favors airport hotels, where clerks are accustomed to a high turnover and to travelers who stay for only half a night, even just a few hours, due to flight delays. Motels along major highways are also good. Sometimes she is guided to the seedier kind of inner-city motel that rents by the hour, where she can perform her own kind of cleanup. There are several of that sort on University Avenue, with an eclectic mix of patrons: students needing more privacy than their dorm rooms provide, misguided tourists on a budget, and, of course, dealers of all kinds.

  She checks in to one of the motels after stopping at several of Berkeley’s ubiquitous secondhand stores to buy some scruffy clothes—student attire—as well as travel disguises: several wigs, makeup . . . and other items she will be needing for what is to be done later in the night.

  As she lies back on the creaky bed, the image she has been blocking all day comes into her mind again. The girl with the body art and the wild mane of hair, standing over the dead pimp, lying in his own blood.

  But that she must hold for later.

  Now, as she told the lawyer, she sleeps.

  Chapter 24

  The sky was growing dark, but it was not long past business hours, and Molina’s office was in the Mission, walking distance from Roarke’s apartment. It was not a walk that many people would want to take at night. The stroll led him past the BART station at Sixteenth and Mission, a drug hub, where the mist under the sodium vapor street lighting seemed actually green from the clouds of marijuana smoke. Dealers and other criminal elements scattered like cockroaches when they saw Roarke coming.

  The shops he passed were heavy on the taquerias, bodegas, and botanicas, with their candles and herbs and charms. As he continued down the street, deeper into the heart of the Mission, he slowed, noticing that the iron grillwork set around the trees was decorated with cavorting Dia de los Muertos skeletons.

  Everywhere, he thought. It was an uncanny manifestation of Bitch’s mythmaking.

  As he stood looking at the dancing skeletons, he recalled the Santa Muerte masks and costumes he had seen at the courthouse, and Singh’s words came back to him in a rush.

  “There is something larger at work . . . a force beyond the simply human. A female vengeance against outrages.”

  It occurred to him that in some way, the saint had saved Cara. A surreal and slightly insane thought.

  He felt a cold touch, like eyes on the back of his neck, and turned sharply to survey the dark street. But nothing moved but a few shuffling shadows. Homeless, drunk, lost . . . all of the above.

  His pulse spiked as his phone vibrated in his coat pocket. He picked up, bracing himself for whatever was coming.

  “Nothing to report,” Epps said into his ear. “Just thinkin’ of Lindstrom being loose. Wanted to make sure you made it home okay.”

  Even though he understood that his agent was concerned for his safety, Roarke felt a rush of irritation at the question. What does he think, that I’m with Cara?

  He forced himself to answer calmly. “Just walked in,” he lied. “Get some rest. We’ll regroup in the morning.” He disconnected and walked on.

  The building where Molina had her office was a former warehouse with a run-down brick facade, yet there was something about the structure that made it stand out: a certain elegance in the moldings and scrollwork. He found a side entrance and located her nameplate beside the steel door, in Spanish and English: “The Offices of Sra. Julia Molina, Abogada, Attorney-at-Law.” He buzzed the intercom, and an accented voice answered only, “Digame.”

  “Special Agent Roarke, to see Ms. Molina.”

  There was a long pause, then the door buzzed open with no further comment or instruction. He stepped into a hallway lined in Spanish tiles. The original elevator was nothing more than a freight li
ft, but the steel doors had been burnished to a dull gleam. He rode up to the third floor, where he rang and was buzzed through a second set of locked doors.

  Inside, the offices were decorated in the weathered style of the Mission, but there was nothing cheap about anything here. He looked around at the hammered-metal sculptures, the murals, the crude folk art, the softly gurgling fountain that looked as if it had been excavated from some crumbling roadside church, and knew that some skilled decorator had achieved this weather-beaten, vaguely religious effect at no small expense.

  A Latina receptionist regarded him impassively from her antique desk. Before Roarke could speak, a voice came from behind.

  “Agent Roarke.”

  He turned to find the diminutive attorney studying him from the doorway to the inner office. She looked him up and down.

  “I can’t say this is a surprise, but I don’t see what good you think it will do, coming here.”

  Roarke wasn’t sure himself. “I’m just asking for a minute.”

  After a moment she moved back, offering him passage.

  “Pase.”

  He stepped into a long, high-ceilinged, rectangular loft with a desk area, a meeting space with sofa and chairs, and one entire wall of bookshelves. More folk art was scattered in the room, and the light was low, shining in mosaic patterns from cutout metal lanterns and candleholders.

  The lawyer closed the heavy plank door behind them and walked to the sofa area without taking a seat. Instead she stood by a wide window, watching him.

  Roarke was about to speak when his eyes rested on a familiar statue among the rest of the folk art in the office. At the statue’s feet were a small pile of cigarettes, an airline-size bottle of tequila, flowers, perfume, bread, water, candles . . .