Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4) Read online

  Levels 13 and 14 serve the most troubled children; they are basically small mental institutions. If this is a Level 5, there is no psychiatrist on site, but one will come every week. There will be five other wards of the court, and a staff that changes shifts every eight to ten hours. The staff’s stated job is to watch you. Keep you from hurting yourself, the other residents, and other people. Most of the staff works for the paycheck. A few are crusaders. Others . . . others best not to think about.

  Ms. Sharonda taps the file on her desk. “You got placed here because of good behavior in YA. If that changes, you’re outta here.”

  Cara nods. Ms. Sharonda looks back at her sharply. Cara says nothing.

  After a moment, Ms. Sharonda continues. “Your case worker will be by on Friday. You’re old enough to be in ninth grade. That’s high school. Think you can handle that?”

  Cara has not been in school since seventh grade. There were only textbooks in The Cage. School could mean anything, any level. She is often put in remedial classes. Special Ed for special problems.

  “I can handle it,” she answers tonelessly.

  Ms. Sharonda stares at her. She swivels her chair to the bookshelves behind her and removes a book, then turns back and hands it across the desk.

  “Read something.”

  Cara stiffens. It is a test. In the system there are always tests. Her first instinct always is to hide any ability from strangers, until she knows what the test is for.

  Ms. Sharonda is waiting, frowning.

  Cara looks down at the book. It is some collection of poetry. After a moment she opens it at random, looks down at the page, and reads aloud.

  “Oh sea . . .

  let me wrap my darkest me

  in your drape of flame and sapphire,

  my arms raised to night . . .”

  She glances up. Across the desk from her, Ms. Sharonda is silent in her chair, and the verse is short, so Cara continues to the end.

  “Whatever it takes

  to conduct this flight, the moon’s music

  tearing the silence

  where I inevitably fall

  and never mind the drowning.”

  She closes the book, and looks up.

  “All right, then,” Ms. Sharonda says gruffly. “Las Piedras High. You start tomorrow. There’s a minibus that takes you over and brings you back.”

  She knows. She knows all of it.

  She will go to school, then straight back to the group home. Ask permission for everything: to get food from the refrigerator, to watch TV, use the phone, go into the backyard, or take a shower. Bedroom doors must be left open at all times. The mirrors in the bathroom will be polished steel, not glass, to prevent wards from breaking the glass and slashing their wrists—

  Ms. Sharonda has said something and Cara forces her attention back to her. The director is holding out a bundle in a rolled-up pillowcase. A survival kit. Inside there will be two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, two T-shirts, and a little bag with a bar of hotel soap, a mini toothpaste, a mini pencil, a shaving razor.

  She takes it, tucks it under her arm.

  “Breakfast at six. You need to be dressed and out in front at six thirty. There are extra clothes in a box in the closet in the hall.”

  She nods.

  “You’ll see the psychiatrist first.”

  Of course. The psychiatrist.

  The director frowns. “Now, you’ve petitioned for a name change. We don’t normally do that.”

  Suddenly her heart is beating out of control in her chest. The name change is key. If she can be someone else, anyone else . . . then maybe the monster that killed her family, that attacked her in the last group home, will not be able to find her this time.

  For a moment she is back in the tiny dark room, the weight of the creature on top of her, pinning her to the bed, breathing its rank and stinking breath . . .

  Ms. Sharonda is looking at her through narrowed eyes. She forces herself back to the present, forces herself to meet the director’s eyes.

  After a moment, Ms. Sharonda finishes. “But under the circumstances . . . the school thinks it would be in everyone’s best interests. I’ve talked to administration and they’ve changed your name on the rolls. It’s not a permanent, legal change, you understand. But at this school, they’re willing to try.”

  Cara nods hard, hoping to appear grateful. She is limp with relief.

  She walks out of the office as Eden Ballard.

  It is a start.

  The psychiatrist sits behind an ugly desk in a long room lined with books. It is the all-purpose meeting room, for appointments with social workers, sessions with therapists. Dr. Everhardt begins the way they all begin.

  “How are you feeling today, Cara?”

  He is already looking at her neck and it is all she can do not to lunge across the desk and scratch out his eyes.

  “Eden,” she says, without inflection.

  “Of course,” he says. “Eden. I’ll just start by asking a few questions, all right?”

  The questions are always the same:

  In the past week, did you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep? Did you feel depressed or sad? Were you afraid of things? Did you think or worry about bad things that you have seen or have happened to you? Did you have thoughts of harming yourself? Did you have thoughts of harming someone else?

  Her answers are carefully calculated. Of course she doesn’t think about harming herself. Of course she doesn’t think about harming anyone else. For some of the lesser questions, like Were you sad this week?—it’s safe to answer yes or “once or twice” or “on a few days.” That’s Normal. Every answer she gives is designed to make her appear Normal, just as every question is designed to trick her into seeming Not Normal.

  And then come the crucial questions, the ones she must always answer with No.

  “Are you seeing anything that shouldn’t be there?”

  You mean the shadows that are more than shadows?

  “No.”

  “Are you hearing voices?”

  Just the moon talking, and the air, and the lizards . . .

  “No.”

  “Any flashbacks?”

  Like the monster in my room?

  “No.”

  “Nothing that scares you?”

  “No,” she says.

  No matter how she answers these questions, They will give her medication anyway. All the group home kids are medicated. She wants the medication. She would like it to work.

  She sees things, of course she sees things, and hears things too, ever since The Night.

  According to Them, the things she sees aren’t real. So they give her drugs to make them go away.

  The problem is, they don’t.

  When she leaves the psychiatrist, she walks back to the bedroom wing, past the signs on the walls. Instead of pictures and posters, there are charts and lists of rules. She notes the doors. Every door. Front door, back door, side door.

  In her waistband is the pen she picked up from the psychiatrist’s desk. The rules on pens vary from group home to group home. The wards here may be allowed pens, they may not. But a pen is as functional a weapon as a knife, and less likely to result in jail time, since the meaning of a pen is ambiguous. There is nothing ambiguous about a concealed knife.

  In the closet she finds the trunk of clothes that Ms. Sharonda mentioned: worn, drab items that will never call attention to themselves. But among them, there is a turtleneck sweater. She grabs for it, feeling a surge of relief. It is a bit small, but it will hide what it needs to hide. There is also a hoodie, always good for concealing your hair, to make yourself invisible. A good haul.

  Now to the bedroom. There are three of them for the six residents, so each girl has a roommate. Hers is so medicated she barely looks up as Cara unpacks her backpack.

  When she is sure no one is watching, Cara checks the doorknob. There is no inside lock. The outer door can be locked with a dead-bolt key. Hard to pick,
but not impossible. Spending most of her life locked up has meant that she has spent most of her life learning to pick locks and break out of and into places. Jail is a school for such skills. She will make a pick from the clasp of the pen tonight.

  Now her eyes case the windows. Windows that won’t open. They are not safety glass, though. They will break. And there is a chair sturdy enough to shatter the glass, if need be. That realization is calming.

  Otherwise, the room is like any other in a group home. Cheap suburban. A dresser for each girl, a closet, a desk they will have to share, but she can’t see her roommate demanding much use of it.

  All told, it is better than YA. There are windows. There are no shackles. Little things like that. And for the moment, it is safe enough. There are worse things out there than zoned-out kids.

  Much worse.

  At dinner the night staffers take over, Ms. Nicole and Ms. Sheila, and Cara meets the other residents, her roommate plus four more girls of varying degrees of crazy. They eat tamale pie, the other girls chattering to each other and pretending not to look at her.

  Like the kids in YA, they are deeply scratched. A spectrum of psychiatric disorders: Asperger’s, attention deficit, bipolar, depression, BPD, OCD, PTSD, schizophrenia.

  Monique, the largest of the girls, watches Cara. She is heavy, burying her scratches. She doesn’t breathe so much as wheeze. Her clothes look uncomfortable on her, but not as uncomfortable as her skin.

  When Ms. Sheila leaves the room to get dessert, Monique’s focus is instantly on Cara.

  “Whatchu do to get sent up to YA?”

  Under the challenge, under the aggression, there is awe. Girls don’t often get sentenced to YA. Much less for two years. Much less at twelve years old. Cara had been the youngest in the jail. Some inmates had told her she was the youngest girl ever.

  “Musta been some serious shit,” Monique presses. “Girl getting sent up to YA. Musta been bad.”

  In her mind, Cara hears the cracking of bone, the pulping of flesh.

  It was bad.

  “It was YA,” she says flatly, and doesn’t speak further. There is nothing to be gained from the conversation.

  Ms. Sheila returns to the room and Monique shuts up.

  After dinner the girls line up for night meds. Ms. Nicole hands them out in small paper cups. Cara throws her pills back, swallows, and opens her mouth wide to show she’s swallowed. Not a chance that she would not swallow. The moon is rising and she wants the haze that the meds give her. Without them, she sees. Too much.

  The other girls head for the TV room. Cara asks Ms. Nicole if she can go to bed.

  Ms. Nicole gives her permission and she washes up and changes into her sleep shirt and sweat pants in the bathroom, since bedroom doors can’t ever be shut. And she will not let anyone see her scratches.

  Then she lies on her bed with the door open and the rectangle of light in the door and the drone of the television in the common room outside.

  She feels the chemicals spreading through her body. Already she can tell the dosage is much lower than what she had in YA. She has begun her bleeding and it seems to affect the medication.

  Behind the curtain of drugs, she can hear the moon whispering outside the window. The light is hot on her skin. She can feel the singing of her blood in her veins, thrilling along just under the surface of her skin.

  But there is no immediate threat. The shadows in the corners of the room are just that: ordinary shadows.

  It is not home. There has not been such a thing as home since she was five. But it is better than being alone with what is out there in the night.

  She lies still and watches the moon climbing into the sky beyond the windows.

  And she remembers the full moon on The Night.

  She is lying on her bed, holding Tiger, looking up through the veil of light. And the moon is whispering.

  Then the moon starts to scream. She can hear it in the sky, screaming. And then everyone is screaming. Her mommy. Her sister. Her brothers. Everyone screaming and screaming.

  And then so infinitely much worse . . . the silence.

  The door explodes open and a shadow shuffles in. Bulky, manlike, but not a man. A beast, with a snout and jagged teeth and dripping jaws. Holding a glinting blade. And dripping with blood—

  She jolts out of sleep with her heart thumping, fear running up and down her nerves, her jaw clenched tight to keep from screaming.

  It is not here. She is alone. Just the sleeping roommate in the other bed.

  She uses all the mental force she has to push away the image of the monster.

  But she will never forget what It looks like.

  It looks like evil.

  She thinks about the pen she has tucked into a hole in her mattress.

  “Do you have thoughts of harming yourself?”

  Every day. Every night.

  She thinks about opening her wrists. It would be easy to do. But she doesn’t move, and after a while, she sleeps.

  ROARKE

  Chapter Three

  Roarke startled awake in bed. His heart was pounding, his back drenched in sweat. He’d been dreaming, but the only thing he could remember was the glare of the moon.

  He lurched up to sitting, as if there was something that he needed to do, something urgent, something vital that he’d forgotten about . . .

  But of course there was no case, no work, no one waiting for him. It only felt as if there were.

  He lay back in the dark predawn, listening to the dull and soothing sound of the ocean outside the cottage.

  After a moment he reached for his phone to check the time. There was a message on the screen, an unfamiliar number, an area code he didn’t recognize. The call must have been what had woken him.

  He pressed the Play arrow. A recorded voice came on, curt and unfriendly.

  “Special Agent Roarke. I’ve been trying to get you for a long time.”

  There was an underlying menace, almost a double entendre to the words that had Roarke automatically tensing.

  The voice paused, and then: “This is Detective Ortiz. Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. Again.”

  Ortiz. Riverside County, Roarke thought. Something familiar there, but . . . “again”? What?

  The voice on the message dripped sarcasm. “I guess you Feebs really don’t care about catching Cara Lindstrom, do you? No matter how many people have to die. Unbelievable.”

  Roarke felt the familiar adrenaline jolt at the mention of Cara’s name.

  That’s over now, he reminded himself. But what the hell is this? The guy sounded wasted. A crank caller? Drunk dialing?

  The caller spoke again. “I’d appreciate a call back. If you ever get your head out of your ass.”

  There was nothing more, just a phone number.

  He played back the message and again was struck by the seething animosity in the detective’s voice. He couldn’t figure out where it was coming from; he’d never spoken with Ortiz before.

  Cara Lindstrom, the mass murderer, had been Roarke’s case. And his obsession. He’d caught her. Last month, through a combination of circumstances, she’d been able to get bail, and promptly jumped it. She was a fugitive now. God only knew where. And that was the parole board’s problem, not his. He was on voluntary leave of absence from the San Francisco FBI. Hoping to clear his head of Cara Lindstrom for the sake of his own sanity.

  He stood, pulled clothes on, and walked out into the living room of the beach house.

  Outside the wide windows, beyond the stretch of sand, the ocean was a vast canvas of rolling black.

  He stepped outside, onto the porch, and sat in one of the chairs, looking out into inky sky and cold starlight as the crescent moon slipped down into the shimmering water.

  Before Cara, he had not known that every month’s moon has a name. Sometimes different names for different tribal nations. This month was a Wolf Moon. But it was also called Bitter Moon. And that well enough described what was in Roarke’
s heart.

  He had lost everything, it seemed. Rachel Elliott, the one chance at a decent relationship he’d had in years, possibly ever. The girl Jade, prostituted teen turned vigilante killer, whom he couldn’t decide whether to protect or arrest.

  He’d lost his job, his integrity, his moral compass, his life’s mission. And worst of all, his faith that he was doing something worthwhile in the world . . . or that there was even any chance of doing something worthwhile in the world.

  Since he took his leave three weeks ago, his team had called him almost every day. Epps, Singh—both separately and together. Snyder, too—his FBI mentor.

  Roarke never called back.

  He was done with the case that had made him cross that line into bleak and utter chaos.

  He was done chasing Cara, for any reason. He had held her in his arms on a beach, under a pier just like the one he could see down the beach, and had felt bony death in his hands. His own death.

  He heard Detective Ortiz’s voice in his mind.

  “I guess you Feebs really don’t care about catching Cara Lindstrom, do you? No matter how many people have to die.”

  No, he didn’t care about catching her. He hoped he’d never hear from or about her again, for both their sakes.

  What he was going to do with the rest of his life was another question.

  CARA

  Chapter Four

  The minibus departs the driveway of the group home exactly at 6:30 a.m., exactly as Ms. Sharonda dictated. The bus drives through a clear and windy predawn, through the rocky foothills, past the horse ranches and vineyards.

  Cara has dressed in jeans and the black turtleneck. Even in January, it is already so warm she has cut off the sleeves, while keeping the high collar, which hides her throat so no one will stare. She sits still in her seat and looks out the window, watching the wind turn the oak and scrub into mini-tornados.