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

  An altar to Santa Muerte. And the candles in front of the skeletal figure were lit. Looking at it, Roarke felt a disquieting sensation that he couldn’t quite identify.

  He turned to Molina. “I didn’t realize you were a practitioner.”

  “A petitioner,” she said, and Roarke sensed some secret amusement. “There are higher authorities than the law.”

  He stared at her, wondering if she could possibly be serious. “It was a smart play, that Santa Muerte stunt today. Very mediagenic.”

  The lawyer’s face closed. “I assure you it was no stunt. No gringo can really understand about La Santísima Muerte. The men of the Church have tried to destroy her, but the people keep her alive in their prayers. Because Santa Muerte is a saint who does something. The other saints have failed us, Agent Roarke. Santa Muerte is the court of last resort. She does not fail. She does what must be done.”

  Everything in him was rebelling against her words. “Even if murder is what it takes? Is that what your saint is about?”

  “To do whatever it takes to right wrongs. Sometimes death for one is salvation for another.” The lawyer watched him through the haze of candlelight, her face as inscrutable as the saint’s. “You tell me that your way is working, Agent Roarke, and I will call you the liar that you are.”

  For a moment Roarke was without words. He knew she was right. She was watching him, and she nodded.

  “So ask what you know I cannot tell you.”

  Until this moment Roarke had had no idea what he was going to ask, or say.

  “I get it. Lindstrom’s gone.”

  The lawyer opened her mouth but Roarke continued. “Right. Until she’s called back into court she’s not a fugitive—yet. I have no legal jurisdiction. It doesn’t matter. I’m not looking for her. I’m looking for Jade.”

  The lawyer was still. “How could I possibly know where the girl is?”

  “I think she came to see—” He stopped himself just before he said Cara. “—your client. I think she visited her in jail.” He’d called the jail’s visitor desk, but it was too late in the day to get the information he needed.

  “You’re wrong,” the lawyer said.

  Roarke looked at her. She was impassive. He couldn’t pretend to read her, though he sensed that she was telling the truth. But whether she was or not, he was sure he would get no more from her on that subject. No matter. He would find out.

  “Then I’m looking for the blogger who calls herself Bitch.”

  Molina’s eyes widened in what Roarke read as mock surprise. “And why would you ask me?”

  He felt hot impatience. “I know you’ve been feeding information to her all along. So, fine, that’s what your clients pay you for. But there’s a sixteen-year-old girl at stake now. I want to find her before she does something that lands her in prison for the rest of her life.”

  Molina looked at him, a long, hard look, sparing him nothing. “You’re an interesting case, Agent Roarke,” she said softly. “But I’m not sure you know what you’re dealing with. Have you ever asked yourself if you’re the right man for this job?”

  “Only every day since it started,” he replied, and meant it.

  “I would say you are not. I would say there is no man right for this job. I would say that men should have nothing to do with this. It is a problem of such proportions it can only be solved by women.”

  He glanced at the Santa Muerte altar, at the shadows dancing over the skeletal face. Then he looked back to Molina. “Or by a saint?” he asked her, with an edge.

  She smiled thinly. “Es tiempo para un nuevo camino.”

  Roarke struggled with the Spanish. He understood her to be saying, “It is the hour for a new road.”

  Molina watched him in the moving candlelight. “Vete a casa, Agent Roarke. Go home. Go home and save yourself.”

  Chapter 25

  She wakes to the sound of screams echoing off the cold walls of the jail. She jerks upright, her eyes wide in the dark, her whole body tensed to fight.

  But there is no looming cell, no presence, just the streaked walls of the motel on University Avenue. And her mind is clear.

  She rises from the sagging bed and dresses for what she needs to do. Black jeans, boots, black T-shirt, black hoodie, and a bulky dark wool coat and cap that conceal her sex. Then she walks out into the night.

  The seedy streets outside the motel are coming alive. Homeless people and drug addicts staggering through the cold fog, deals of all kinds taking place on side blocks and in deserted parking lots. Fog obscures the moon, but she can hear it whispering behind the clouds.

  She walks along in her thrift store camouflage and is not bothered. If she were, there is the new razor in her pocket.

  Her preparations go smoothly. Transportation is only slightly time-consuming without immediate access to her master keys: a pair of scissors, purchased earlier at a dollar store, is all she needs to boost an old Toyota Camry. Another purchase she is conveniently able to make on the street, from one of the number of peripatetic addicts in the neighborhood. And earlier that evening, the secondhand store had provided the last element needed to implement her plan.

  She is tense as she drives over the pyramid lights of the Bay Bridge, back into the mist-shrouded city that was only that morning her captor. There is no official manhunt for her; she is legally free until the court calls her back in and it becomes evident that she has jumped bail. But at the moment, it is only Roarke who will be looking for her.

  Roarke.

  This time, she will not be caught.

  She drives on, disappearing into the fog.

  Chapter 26

  The fog was so thick that the shapes of other pedestrians loomed up on the sidewalk in front of him like the walking dead in some third-rate horror movie. The adrenaline spikes rubbed his already frayed nerves raw. The skeletal face of Molina’s Santa Muerte statue hovered in his mind, along with the echo of the lawyer’s words: “It is time for a new road.”

  Eerily similar to what the blogger had said to him on the dark street outside his house.

  But tonight as he mounted the steps to his front door, there was no sign of the young woman who called herself Bitch. He had a strong feeling she wouldn’t be easy to find.

  Upstairs, he stepped inside his flat and stood in his dim hall for a long moment without moving before he stripped off his suit coat and hung it in the closet, then unstrapped his shoulder holster and hung it on the hook to the side of the door.

  He turned in the hall to put his weapon in the drawer, and it hit him. The sense of presence.

  There was someone in the living room.

  For a fleeting, disoriented moment, he thought, Cara.

  Then he thought of the blogger, hovering outside his building in the dark. And then of Molina and that imperious Latin voice.

  “Sometimes death for one is salvation for another.”

  His hand tightened around the Glock. He pressed his back against the wall and eased down the hall toward the open archway of the living room, stepping on the balls of his feet to avoid making any sound. At the frame of the door he paused, listening to the darkness inside . . .

  A male voice spoke from within. “I’m here.”

  Calm, gruff, and familiar. Snyder.

  Roarke felt lightheaded with relief. He set the gun on the hall table behind him and stepped into the room, switching on a lamp.

  His old mentor was seated in an armchair in front of the window. He looked across the room at Roarke. “Sorry to startle you. I must have fallen asleep.” He cut a striking profile, with his tall, lean body and Nordic looks, but these days he was showing his sixty-odd years.

  Roarke came farther into the room. He’d been expecting Snyder later in the week, had sent him spare keys several days earlier. “For a minute there, I felt like I was in a training exercise.”


  The older man half-smiled. “I left a message that I was here. I did worry when you didn’t answer your phone.”

  “You’ve heard, then,” Roarke said.

  “About Cara, yes.” The older man looked at him from across the dark room. “I apologize for the intrusion, but I thought it was best that someone be here. It’s not inconceivable that she would come straight to you. She undoubtedly has some kind of plan. It will undoubtedly involve you.”

  Since the night of the October full moon, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre of Cara’s family, Cara had sporadically reached out to Roarke. It was how Roarke and Epps had busted the trafficking ring in the desert. One of Snyder’s theories was that consciously or subconsciously, Cara wanted to team with Roarke in her mission, to work with him in some way, enlist his help in the killing she was committed to carrying out.

  Roarke was aware of wild and uninterpretable emotions churning inside him at the idea that Cara would come to him. “She’s free,” he said in the most neutral tone he could muster. “She’s always been able to live under the radar. There’s no earthly reason she would stick around.”

  Snyder looked at him and underscored that lie with his silence before he commented. “Except that Cara has her own reasons, and self-preservation is not high among them.”

  After a beat, Roarke said, “No. It’s not.”

  “So it’s a good idea to be ready for whatever is to come.”

  Roarke walked a circle around the room. In the alcove there were files spread out on the table that was never used for dining. For once the files were not his own; Snyder apparently had been working there. Roarke moved to the table and realized the files were on Cara: old medical records, court files, the diagnoses that various psychologists and psychiatrists had branded her with during her childhood and teenage years in the social services system. A whole smorgasbord of psychological hypotheses, many of them conflicting.

  He looked up from the files. “Did you find anything new?”

  Snyder lifted his shoulders. “The failing of psychology is that it rarely takes into account a philosophy of good and evil or a spiritual component to crime. Joan of Arc listened to God and Cara listens to the moon. Is that schizophrenia? Perhaps. But there is an element of moral conviction that implies choice, not just biological compulsion. She’s delusional, certainly. But she’s also accurate. Not many people would argue against the fact that her targets are loathsome examples of our species, fully deserving of punishment. And practically, it’s not difficult to find perpetrators of the sort she targets.”

  No one had to tell Roarke. There were perpetrators enough to make anyone in law enforcement despair.

  Snyder nodded. “So perhaps she’s not insane at all. Perhaps she’s on a mission fueled by a very particular worldview: that there is actual evil in the world and that the most valid response to it is to eliminate it whenever possible.”

  Roarke looked at the older man. “I can’t believe I’m hearing that from you.”

  Snyder smiled bleakly. “I’m tired. But . . .” He stopped, and it was a long moment before he spoke again. “The man we are pursuing in Montana rapes and kills children. He literally tore his last victim limb from limb. The boy was five years old.”

  Roarke felt a dark hole open inside him. Snyder shook his head, and he looked old.

  “I’m sorry that I was too late to visit with Cara before her . . . release. I would very much like for once to talk with someone who would simply call that what it is.”

  “It?” Roarke asked, ironically.

  Snyder held his gaze and repeated, “Evil.”

  Chapter 27

  The run-down house in Daly City, a bedroom suburb of San Francisco, is as despicable a dwelling as she would have expected, hunched in a dark neighborhood of blocky housing and unkempt yards. She cruises past in the stolen Toyota, taking it all in. The lights are off in the house, and there is no car in the drive.

  Her eyes and ears had been open for the entire period of her confinement. It had not been difficult to learn the home location of the guard called Driscoll. She had picked up on the general neighborhood. A quick online search of tax records at an Internet café had yielded the address. It is frighteningly easy to find anyone online. It is always her own policy to avoid leaving any kind of trail: paper, biological, or cyber.

  She parks down the street, then sits back in the car seat, contemplating. It is an old house. Access will be easy. And the method of dispatch presented itself the first time the man rubbed up against her, reeking of tobacco . . . and another scent beneath that smokescreen.

  It will not be anywhere near what he deserves. But adequate to the bottom line.

  She sits in the dark for an hour, watching the street and the houses nearby, assessing who is home and who is not, keeping a close eye on the cheap timepiece she bought at the secondhand store. Aside from a few furtive comings and goings, the block is quiet. She knows the guard’s schedule. She has another hour at least. When she has determined the least visible route of approach, she leaves the car, with the items she has brought concealed under a bulky man’s coat and her hair tucked tightly into her hat. She is gloved, of course. Always gloved.

  She slips into the side yard of the darkened house next door and jumps the concrete-block fence from there, slipping over the top and dropping into Driscoll’s yard. It is a ragged thing: dormant grass, a grill on a concrete slab, beer bottles overflowing the trash can, neglected landscaping. The tangled old-growth bushes have their use as concealment, enabling her to move unseen around the perimeter of the house, studying the windows. But it will be even easier than that. The back door has not been updated, or even insulated. There is no deadbolt, just the old metal latch.

  She steps up to the door and runs her gloved fingers over the plate. The latch is curved away from the doorframe, which requires a bit more than a plastic card, but not much. She inserts a card and does some finessing with a bent paper clip. It takes barely a minute to pop it open.

  She steps inside, carefully pulling the door closed behind her, then stands in the dark of the entry off the kitchen, listening. There is a sour smell: sweat and beer and the faint trace of pot smoke. The latter makes her smile, without amusement.

  She moves into the kitchen slowly, holding herself still and contained, making barely a ripple in the atmosphere of the house. The room is full of greasy surfaces, with dishes piled in the sink and more beer cans and bottles overflowing the trash. All good signs for her purpose.

  Easy prey, she thinks with contempt. Now that there are no bars between them.

  She moves out of the kitchen into an ill-furnished and equally cluttered living room, paying particular attention to the sofa and the television there. The TV is an old one. No doubt there is another.

  She eases into the hall and notes the four doors along it. Bathroom, closet, two bedrooms.

  She steps to the open door first. Driscoll’s bedroom; she can smell him before she even reaches the door. But at the moment, empty. The room is taken up by a stained king mattress with a basic metal bedframe, no headboard. The plasma TV she has been expecting is here above the battered dresser, facing the bed, and there are empty bottles and an overflowing ashtray on the night table, porn magazines loosely stacked by the bed.

  So easy.

  She checks the watch again. He will be getting off work just about now, which gives her half an hour before the first moment he could arrive back at the house. But there is no guarantee that he will come straight home, so she will need to find a place to wait.

  She stays several more minutes in the bedroom, just standing, memorizing every detail of the room: the distance between door and bed, the number of steps to cross the room, the height of the bed. Rehearsing in her mind. The door has a slight squeak, and she greases the hinges with the Vaseline she has brought to eliminate the noise.

  Then sh
e backs out through the door and goes to the second bedroom. Though there has not been a human sound since she entered the house, she listens at the door before carefully turning the doorknob. She pushes the door open . . . into a room piled with odds and ends. The bedstead there is old-fashioned, with a wooden frame and headboard. Boxes, trash bags, broken appliances are stacked on top of it, and there is barely any room to walk across the floor.

  The air is cold and stale. Unused except as a junk room.

  Perfect.

  Chapter 28

  Snyder had produced a bottle of whisky, whether in celebration or mourning, Roarke wasn’t sure. Now neat glasses sat on the coffee table in front of them. And finally he asked what he had been thinking since Snyder first spoke the idea.

  “You do believe in evil, then.”

  “Of course I do,” Snyder said calmly. “How can I not?”

  “So what is it?”

  “What is evil?” The profiler smiled ruefully. “You mean, is it a force beyond human?”

  “I don’t know what I mean.”

  The older man’s face was reflective. “I’ve only ever seen human beings perpetrate it. But in some cases it does seem . . . cumulative. Another reason I regret not being able to speak to Cara myself. Perhaps it’s a concept that is only done justice in metaphor.”

  Metaphors again, Roarke thought. He stepped to the window and looked out. “She told me . . . She said It can’t be killed.”

  “But we know that. We can only kill its agents. It is always with us.”

  Roarke turned back to his mentor and stared at him. “You really sound like you believe.”

  “I understand It,” Snyder corrected. “As a metaphor.”

  “The Reaper wasn’t a metaphor.”

  “Hughes was not a metaphor, no.”

  Roarke noticed the ambiguity of Snyder’s answer, and it only increased his agitation. “So what about him?” he demanded.

  Snyder remained maddeningly calm. “You want to know if there was something about him in particular. Something beyond what we’ve seen before.”