Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) Page 17

  He doesn’t think about her age. There are any number of useful phrases that cover that inconvenience. “She looked older.” “She came on to me.” “It wasn’t her first time.”

  And after all, he’s paying, isn’t he? Isn’t that all there is to it?

  The girl keeps her head down, focused on the task. He grabs her hair, forces himself deeper into her mouth. “Suck it, bitch. Take it all. Now. Now.”

  He thrusts, spasming and grunting . . . and when he is finished, he shoves her away. She falls on the dirty asphalt, scraping her palms. He adjusts his clothes and leaves her on her hands and knees, gagging behind him as he walks along the side of the warehouse, out toward the street. Truth be told, a little unsteadily; he has a buzz on from his climax and is feeling no pain.

  And as he rounds the edge of the Dumpster, something grabs him from behind. He knows immediately this is not a joke. The hold is inexorable, the purpose unmistakable. He feels primal terror, a surge of adrenaline meant to help him fight for his life . . .

  But he is spent, weak, off-guard, and finds himself off-balance, falling heavily to his knees.

  There are hands in his hair now, jerking his head backward, and the blade slices deep: cold metal across his throat, then hot blood spurting from his veins.

  His last thoughts are vague, helpless outrage at the unfairness. He has done nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  DAY SIX

  Chapter 34

  The city wept.

  Roarke, Epps, and Mills stood in the gray dawn and pouring rain, watching it wash the blood from the asphalt of the alley. Red rivulets ran into the gutters, diluting to a watery pink.

  Another alley in the Tenderloin. Another corpse in a bloody pool.

  And all the forensic evidence washing away with the rain, while SFPD crime scene techs struggled to put up a protective tent.

  At the end of the short block the shadowy shapes of uniforms moved in the gray downpour. A line of yellow tape stretched from building to building, sealing the alley. They were just two blocks from where DeShawn Butler had died, in a tableau just like this one.

  Mills had to shout through the rush of water and wind. “Andrew Goldman, lately of Millbrae. Razor-fine slash to the throat. Fresh come on him. Or there was before . . .” The detective looked up into the sky, and the rain ran down his face.

  Roarke looked down at the clothes on the man: a medium-priced business suit, Florsheim shoes. “A trick,” he said, just to have it out. There was a certain kind of man who enjoyed the thrill and the danger of cruising the street and the hunting of girls in these dirty alleys.

  As Roarke had walked the Haight, and drunk with Rachel, and dreamed of a burning skull, someone else had been stalking these streets. Hunting the hunters.

  “We have got a major fucking problem,” Mills said. He looked strange. Roarke had to rouse himself from his own distraction and study Mills a moment to get a handle on what he was seeing in the veteran detective’s face. Consternation. Confusion. And—fear?

  “This is Jade again, right?” the detective finally asked.

  For a moment there was no sound but the hammering drive of the rain. They were all envisioning the scenario. Jade could approach a john without triggering the slightest hesitation on the man’s part.

  “Or Lindstrom,” Epps said, but there was doubt in his voice.

  Roarke couldn’t get his mind around it. Cara back in the city, killing this one so soon after the guard?

  And then there was the other thought, even stranger than the first two possibilities. Or was it Erin? Or Bitch?

  He felt lightheaded, and he didn’t know if it was lack of sleep or a hangover or the complete sense of unreality they were facing in this scene in the storm.

  Last night he’d been on the brink of . . . he didn’t even want to name it. Some kind of breakdown. He knew he had to get a grip. And then a thought came through clearly.

  This is not Cara.

  The guard, oh yes, that one was hers. Danny Ramirez, certainly. But this one was not. He could feel that. And yet . . .

  “A pimp and a john,” he said aloud. In her brief time in the Haight, within the space of two days, Cara had beaten a john in an alley and killed Jade’s pimp. And now they were dealing with the same configuration, within two days.

  A pattern, then?

  Jade surely knew from Shauna about Cara’s assault on the john. And Jade had directly witnessed the killing of her pimp. So is this Jade emulating Cara exactly?

  “Jade knew DeShawn Butler and had motive to kill him,” Roarke continued. He looked back toward the corpse. “Maybe she knew this one, too. A sick trick.”

  Mills nodded. “We need to find out. I’ll get on his phone and email records.”

  “What’s scarier is if she didn’t know him,” Epps said.

  They all stood contemplating what that would mean. Mills finally spoke. “So to state the complete fucking obvious: Have we got a teenage serial killer here?”

  Roarke felt the tug of his old training. “Not a serial killer.”

  There was a flash of anger on the detective’s face. “Get technical if you want. You know what I’m askin’. She did DeShawn, got a taste for it, whatever the fuck. Decided she’d do it again.”

  Roarke stared out through the curtain of rain. Whoever it was, there was no longer any question of letting the case go. There was a killer loose literally in their backyard, almost in the shadow of the Federal Building.

  As he thought it, he looked automatically down the block, toward the Civic Center.

  At the end of the alley, a crowd had gathered outside the crime scene tape, standing around despite the downpour, trying to get a glimpse of someone else’s tragedy. And suddenly Roarke was jolted by the sight of a figure that shouldn’t be there, that couldn’t be there: a grinning skull among the other faces, staring out from the hood of a raincoat.

  Roarke stood in shock—and then ran for the barrier, leaving Mills and Epps shouting after him.

  He barreled down the alley with rain battering his face, his shoes splashing through puddles. He halted at the crime scene barriers and scanned the onlookers, who moved slightly backward, looked back at him warily. A crowd of startled and very human faces.

  He stood on the street, staring into the rain, and felt colder than ice.

  But the masked figure was gone.

  Chapter 35

  Back at Bureau headquarters Roarke went in to Reynolds’ office with a hard knot in his stomach. Standing in front of his SAC’s desk, he started, “This isn’t what any one of us was expecting—”

  Reynolds lifted a hand, dismissing the apology. “We’re beyond that.”

  As Roarke looked down at his superior officer, he got a glimpse of the computer screen in front of him. The text was a blog article. The byline was, simply, Bitch.

  Reynolds turned the screen toward Roarke so he could read.

  Lady Death Strikes Again

  San Francisco’s Tenderloin has long been synonymous with sex for sale: brothels, escorts, streetwalkers, massage parlors. For most of the women euphemistically called sex workers, it is a life of constant exploitation, degradation, and abuse.

  Many of these “women” aren’t women at all. They are children. The average age of entry into prostitution is twelve years old.

  There are few laws protecting victims of the sex trafficking trade, at least few that are enforced. Pimps and johns abuse these teenagers, and children younger than teenagers, with impunity. Until now. Now vengeance stalks the alleys of the Tenderloin. For the second time in three days, a man has died in a pool of his own blood.

  Someone is saying, “Enough.”

  Roarke had time to think, This is so out of control, before Reynolds was speaking again.

  “No way to muzzle the media, obviously. That’s going to get hot.
”

  Hotter, Roarke answered in his head. Infernal to nuclear.

  “Is it the same doer?”

  Roarke tried to focus. “This new one could have been Jade Lauren. It could have been Lindstrom. Either way, finding Jade is imperative, and at this point I think my team might have the most knowledge about her to find her. I know it doesn’t seem like we’ve been that successful—”

  Reynolds cut him off. “You brought Lindstrom in. You can’t be blamed for what the court does or doesn’t do after that.”

  Roarke would have appreciated the vote of confidence, if he hadn’t been fully aware how undeserved it was. If only you knew, he thought.

  The SAC shook his head. “Bottom line is, the office can’t back off of it now.”

  He gazed into his computer screen. Roarke wasn’t sure if he was reading the article or simply lost in thought. Finally Reynolds spoke again. “Whatever this is, there’s no getting around it’s yours.”

  Roarke recalled that Snyder had said something similar to him. It was his, and it was totally beyond him.

  “Singh is coordinating a task force with Inspector Mills on the SFPD,” he said.

  Reynolds nodded.

  “We’ll get it done,” Roarke finished, and felt it might prove to be the biggest lie of his life.

  “Teenage serial killers are a fact,” Snyder said from the videoconferencing screen.

  The team looked up from the conference table at the profiler’s craggy face. Singh had patched him in from Montana.

  Roarke knew that for the veteran agent it was irresistible: the possibility of a sixteen-year-old girl on a murder spree. In all the years of every form of human lunacy he had witnessed, it was unprecedented.

  Snyder had laid the groundwork for this kind of investigation thousands of times before, and his summation was unrushed. “The deviant behavior of serial killers tends to start early, surfacing in young adolescent males and even younger boys. The operative word is male. Serial killing is a behavior closely aligned with rape: the object is sexual gratification through sadism and violence. In fact, most serial rapists, if uncaught, will graduate to serial murder. It is a pattern we see over and over again.”

  Roarke sat impatiently through this introduction; he knew the speech word for word. It had been his own job for six years.

  “Female mass killers are very rare and overwhelmingly fall into two types: the Black Widow, who kills husbands, lovers, or relatives for money; and the Angel of Death, a medical professional who kills patients either in a desire for control, or a twisted sense of euthanasia, or a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. None of these models apply here. For profiling purposes, our one point of reference for both Lindstrom and Jade, if Jade is indeed our second killer, is Aileen Wuornos, a spree killer who demonstrated neither the cooling-off period between kills nor the sexual motivation that is typical of serial killers. Also with Wuornos there was a strong element of retribution: one could take the point of view that every single victim was a sexual abuser.”

  Just as we seem to be looking at now, Roarke thought. Only the kills are happening more quickly, and we have no idea if it’s just one killer.

  The older man looked out from the screen. “So the parallels here are obvious. Your killer might be writing the next chapter of a new book, joining Wuornos and Cara Lindstrom to define the pattern of a new kind of killer: the female vigilante.”

  Beside Roarke, Singh shifted in her seat. He glanced at her, but before she could speak, Snyder continued from the screen.

  “However, we may be getting ahead of ourselves. Before I go any further, my question to you is this: Are we reasonably certain Jade did both killings?”

  A thick silence fell over the team. That is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?

  Finally Roarke began. “Both new victims died by slashes to the throat. Not the same weapon, obviously, since the first weapon, a razor, was left at the first scene. It’s Lindstrom’s preferred MO, but we know she couldn’t have killed Butler, and—” He shook his head. “I don’t see her as the doer for Goldman, either. I think she’s long gone.”

  She must be, he thought silently. And forced himself to refocus.

  “Jade had motive to kill the first—” he corrected himself, “—the second pimp, DeShawn Butler. According to one of Ramirez’s other girls, Butler raped her as part of her initiation into the life. Obviously Jade would also have had easy opportunity to approach Goldman, the john. She may have had motive there as well. Inspector Mills is following up to see if she knew him. I can question Ramirez’s girls, the ones staying at the Belvedere House, to see if they know anything about Goldman, or any connection he had to Jade. But . . .”

  He stopped, not at all sure what he was about to say.

  But there’s something else going on here, was his thought. And I don’t know what it is.

  He spoke slowly. “Lindstrom’s cousin Erin McNally is also missing. She disappeared from her hotel room without checking out. No one’s seen her since the night of DeShawn Butler’s murder. I’ve been trying to reach her, but she’s not answering her phone or email. Her roommate in San Diego hasn’t seen her, either, and she hasn’t posted on Facebook for a week.”

  “What the hell?” Jones muttered.

  “You think Lindstrom and the cousin might have teamed up?” Epps asked, startled.

  All eyes turned to Snyder on the screen. His eyes were clouded. “There have been several instances of women killing multiple victims in tandem with a male partner. I’ve never come across a pair of women—or girls—killing more than one victim together or killing in more than one incident.” He looked to Roarke. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t see it,” Roarke started. Cara was such a loner that he was finding it hard to believe she’d recruit other people for her bloody work.

  Except for me, he admitted to himself.

  He also knew he might not want to believe Cara would use Erin that way.

  “But?” Epps prodded.

  “But I could see Erin emulating Cara.” He’d used her name without thinking, and there was no taking it back. “When I last saw Erin, she was experiencing some kind of breakdown. And there is a good bit of hero worship going on there.”

  “Heroine worship,” Singh murmured beside him.

  Roarke glanced at her. She seemed tense. They all were, but he was uncomfortably aware that he had been watching Singh throughout the briefing. He didn’t know what was going on in her head anymore.

  He refocused and continued. “Also, Erin is a med student. She’d be more likely than Jade to be able to cut a throat, both in terms of accuracy and the nerve it would take to do it.”

  Epps leaned forward intently. “Erin McNally also visited Lindstrom in jail. Lindstrom could have kept the razor from the Ramirez killing, hidden it, then told the cousin where it was so she could plant it at the scene of the second pimp killing. To exonerate Lindstrom.”

  Roarke looked at his agent. It was the same thought he’d had himself.

  Snyder spoke from the screen on the wall.

  “Or the cousin is emulating Lindstrom of her own accord.”

  The team turned to the conference screen. “Without Lindstrom’s knowledge?” Roarke asked, startled.

  Snyder tipped his head. “Lindstrom’s killings are so unique, statistically speaking, and the victim profile in these latest kills is so similar, that it’s fairly clear that you have a copycat vigilante on your hands.”

  Singh spoke abruptly. “Female vigilantism is not unique to Lindstrom.”

  The men turned to her. Her normally serene face was flushed. “In the fall of 2013, an unknown woman boarded buses in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and shot two bus drivers point-blank. She sent emails to the authorities calling herself Diana, the Hunter of Drivers, and claimed that the men she’d killed had been raping women who rode
the buses from work. In India, in Uttar Pradesh, there is the Gulabi Gang, the Pink Gang, a group of women who arm themselves with lathis and use force and intimidation to threaten men accused of abusing women. The gang now numbers in the thousands. There is also an all-female armed squad of vigilantes in Mexico, in the state of Michoacán, which is fighting back against the drug cartels. One might even say that the phenomenon is on the rise.”

  On the screen, Snyder looked down at Singh with an expression Roarke recognized as admiration. “You’re quite right, of course. I hadn’t been thinking globally.”

  A vigilante gang? That’s sounding more like Bitch, Roarke thought, remembering the figure in the skull mask in the alley, in the rain . . .

  “But our prime suspect is Jade,” Epps said. There was an edge in his voice. “She has motive. She’s had opportunity. And there’s the timing of her taking off the night of Butler’s murder. Interesting as all the rest of this is, we need to be focusing on Jade’s psychology here.”

  Roarke realized he was right. After a moment, Singh nodded and sat back.

  Snyder looked down from the screen. “I can tell you: viral murder is not an uncommon phenomenon among teenagers. We see it in mass shootings especially. School shootings very frequently inspire other massacres or attempts, frequently among teens.”

  Roarke felt warm and cold at once. It was a feeling he was familiar with. A feeling of significance, a hot trail.

  Snyder continued. “Cara Lindstrom’s murders have become an Internet phenomenon, and in these days of Internet vigilantism it’s not so surprising that a teenager would pick up on that energy. What’s unusual of course is for a young girl to kill like this.”

  Epps looked up toward the screen. “You used the word spree. But is it really likely that Jade would kill again so soon?”

  Snyder lifted his hands. “We’re in uncharted territory. Teenage mass killers usually plan one grand, extravagant gesture and often end the killing binge with their own suicide. Obviously Jade differs from this kind of killer in many respects. She’s female. She doesn’t use guns or explosives. If she has killed both men, then already it’s not an isolated event. There’s no place, like a school, that she’s targeting, unless she’s thinking of the streets metaphorically as a place. We do have the case of spree killer Joanna Dennehy, a thirty-year-old British woman with both sadistic and masochistic tendencies who killed three men and attempted to kill two others in a two-week spree in early 2013. She shares characteristics with Wuornos, and perhaps with Jade—before her arrest she was a violent drifter living on the outskirts of society, an alcoholic and addict with severe antisocial tendencies, whose sense of empathy and reality had been further blurred by her various addictions. Her victims were not strangers, but men known to her: two short-term sexual partners and a flatmate. She claims to have killed these men for ‘fun.’”