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

  “It proves she was in contact with the car,” Singh said with murderous calm. “And not even conclusively. Also, there is no evidence to connect Hartley to the car. Unless you are suggesting that we prosecute Lindstrom for auto theft.”

  “What about Greer?” Jones asked, deflecting the standoff between the other two agents. Probably unconsciously, Roarke thought. Jones didn’t have Singh’s depth perception.

  None of the rest of the team even bothered to answer. The death of Special Agent Greer was a complete nonstarter as far as evidence was concerned, though Roarke had witnessed the agent’s demise himself. His own undercover man had been killed in front of his eyes, on a business-district street, mowed down by a commercial truck while Cara stood on the sidewalk behind him.

  She’d spoken to Greer before he stepped out into the street but had not touched him. No one could possibly prove his death was a murder.

  And it was only because of Greer’s death that Roarke had learned the agent had been sexually assaulting women held hostage by the trafficking ring he was supposed to be gathering evidence against. Another bad guy felled by Cara Lindstrom’s fury.

  “And the killings at the concrete plant . . .” Singh moved to the third whiteboard but paused to glance at Roarke. “Also problematic.” The largest number of Cara’s victims they knew of had been killed all in one night, a little over a month ago at a concrete batch plant in the Southern California desert. A total of seven human traffickers dead: five by Cara’s hands and two by Roarke himself. Another situation too fraught with complications to prosecute, given Roarke’s involvement, the number of trafficking victims who had been killed by their captors, and Cara’s rescue of an eleven-year-old girl from imminent rape.

  “But the Reaper . . .” Epps said. And even as he said it, his voice trailed off.

  “Never,” Singh said flatly.

  “No,” Roarke said, and for a moment he was back in the moonlit forest, lying in a bed of pine needles and snow. Blood on his face, on his clothes, the copper stink of it in his nostrils and mouth . . . and the gaunt shadow of the Reaper looming over him.

  A man. Not a monster. Just a man.

  He wrenched himself out of the memory.

  Prosecuting Cara for that particular murder was impossible. Completely impossible, though Cara had cut Nathaniel Hughes’ throat and Roarke was a material witness to the killing.

  But the whiteboards around them told only part of the story.

  Cara herself was a legendary victim of a horrific and borderline mythic crime. Twenty-five years had passed since a psychotic killer known only as the Reaper had slaughtered three California families, then disappeared without a trace. Five-year-old Cara Lindstrom had survived the massacre of her family with her throat slashed and her mental state shattered into a million pieces. The case had gripped everyone in the state, including nine-year-old Matt Roarke, and had started him on his lifelong quest for justice through a law enforcement career.

  Then just two months ago, either randomly or by some strange confluence of fate, Roarke’s own path had collided with the adult Cara Lindstrom’s.

  He had hunted her. And then the Reaper had resurfaced.

  Two more families slaughtered, a third targeted. A total of twenty-five people dead, fifteen of them children.

  Roarke looked up at the photo of the man who still attacked him every night in his dreams . . . until Cara killed him yet again.

  She’d saved Roarke’s life—and he’d ended hers. Maybe not literally . . . but he had serious doubts she would survive captivity.

  The thought was a black hole of dread, and he had to press his hands flat against the table to stop the sudden tremor.

  Singh glanced at Roarke as if to assess his state of mind before she continued. “Special Agent Snyder is in Montana on an active case, but we have been compiling a family and criminal history on Nathaniel Marcus Hughes, aka the Reaper. We will continue after Agent Snyder’s return. But that will not help us with the prosecution of Cara Lindstrom. Rather more the opposite.”

  No. No district attorney in his right mind would try Cara for the Reaper’s death.

  The team sat with this.

  Epps finally spoke. “So it’s all down to San Francisco.”

  “One case,” Singh agreed. “It is the Ramirez killing or nothing.” She looked back to the middle whiteboard, where the image of a wolfish man with a rock-star flair stared insolently out of a mug shot. Danny Ramirez. A pimp who’d been running a stable of six underage girls . . . until Cara had slashed his throat in a tunnel in Golden Gate Park, just a few miles away. As far as Roarke was concerned, Ramirez was the lowest form of humanity. Cara had freed three of his teenage victims from the street life when she cut him down. But no matter how deserving Ramirez had been of his fate, it was an out-and-out vigilante killing, and the courts did not look kindly on the practice.

  Jones was the first to say it. “Which means it’s all down to Jade.”

  Singh clicked her mouse and a mug shot came up on the conference screen.

  Far-too-mature eyes smudged with kohl stared boldly out of the photo. The flesh exposed by her sequined halter top was smooth and rounded with baby fat and covered with intricate body art. Her hair was a wild mass of blond curls.

  Their entire case against Cara Lindstrom rested on the word of a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Chapter 2

  Singh aligned a stack of color-coded folders in front of her and began her summation. “Cara Lindstrom is being held at County Women’s #8 on the charge of the first-degree murder of Daniel Alfonso Ramirez two weeks ago. Assistant District Attorney Stanton is handling the prosecution. The key evidence in this case is the eyewitness testimony of ‘Jade Lauren,’ real name unknown, age approximately sixteen years, real age unknown, who claims to have seen Lindstrom cut Ramirez’s throat inside the tunnel on the night in question. Lindstrom’s attorney of record is Julia Molina. Molina has invoked the ten-day rule; thus the preliminary hearing has been set for three days from today.”

  Epps and Jones shifted in their seats in surprise. Roarke took in the news with shock and unease. California law required a preliminary hearing for a judge to review the prosecution’s evidence and decide whether the evidence was sufficient to warrant a trial. The hearings were generally brief, lasting as little as a few hours or even less; they usually involved the presentation of just the prosecution’s evidence and the defense’s examination of the prosecution’s witnesses. Since Jade was the key witness, she would need to testify. The team knew all that already.

  However, also under California law, preliminary hearings were required to be held within ten court days of a defendant’s “not guilty” plea, unless the defendant waived that right. Singh was saying that Cara and her lawyer had not waived and had instead demanded an immediate hearing. It was an unexpected turn of events, given that more time typically helped the defendant. Although it was quite possible that Cara had pressed for the hearing. Roarke wasn’t entirely sure how she’d survived jail for a week.

  Epps spoke up. “Can we ask for a court-ordered detention? To make sure Jade doesn’t do a runner?” The tension was clear in his voice, and Roarke understood where his agent was coming from. Jade Lauren was a prostitute. Or, to use the FBI’s new consciousness-raised and more accurate term, a “commercially sexually exploited youth.” Roarke didn’t want to speculate on the horrors the girl had experienced, but those experiences had turned her into a loose cannon: clever, narcissistic, a meth addict—and sixteen years old. The height of instability.

  Singh turned to Epps to answer. “She has been living at the Belvedere House under Rachel Elliott’s care, with no such restraint. In the two weeks she has been at the House she has not disappeared. There is no basis on which to convince a judge that detention is necessary. Also, Rachel Elliott is serving as her court-appointed special advocate, and I believe that Elliott would fight
such a detention very convincingly.” Singh gave Roarke an oblique glance, and he felt a twinge of unease. She couldn’t know about his ill-considered one-night stand with Rachel. Unless his agent had somehow picked up on his ongoing discomfort at any mention of the social worker. Of course Singh was more than perceptive enough to have done just that. The thought that she might actually have sussed him out caused him a fresh wave of guilt.

  He forced himself into professional mode. “I think if anyone can keep Jade in town, Elliott can. The girl is bonded with her.”

  “The girl is also a stone liar,” Epps pointed out. “We can’t trust her as far as I could throw a church.”

  Epps had seen Jade only through the two-way mirror of an interrogation room, but it didn’t take a road map. She was a piece of work.

  “No, we can’t,” Roarke admitted. “I’ll call Mills. We’ll head over there this morning to prep her for the prelim.” And check on her state of mind, he thought. “All we can do is keep tabs on her . . . and hope.”

  As Roarke walked down the corridor, he was so deep in thought that he almost ran into Epps, who was waiting for him in front of the elevator. The two men looked at each other for a long, tense moment.

  Two months ago, Roarke would have said he had never worked so well with another human being—with the possible exception of Snyder, who was on such a different plane that he didn’t really count.

  And then came Cara.

  The relationship between the agents had deteriorated since Cara, because of Cara. Epps’ disapproval had been instant and militant. Not without reason, Roarke had to admit.

  Epps finally spoke. “You aren’t thinking of doing anything insane, are you?”

  Roarke turned to face him straight on. “Insane like what?”

  Epps looked at him impassively. “Now, there’s the trouble. It could be just about anything.” And they both knew what he meant. Roarke wasn’t sure how detailed Epps’ fears were, but he was willing to bet they extended to Roarke’s somehow breaking Cara Lindstrom out of County #8. Which was entirely insane. And impossible.

  He answered equally impassively. “I wasn’t thinking of anything too insane, no. Not at the moment.”

  “A’ight then. Good to know.” Epps gave him a last, hard look before he turned to walk down the hall.

  Roarke stood in the ringing silence and wondered how many more lies he would tell today. Until the elevator door pinged, releasing him.

  Chapter 3

  Inside the detention facility known as County #8, the prisoners are walked down the dingy halls past the cells, two guards monitoring the single line of women in loose khaki uniforms. There is a listlessness, a defeatedness to their movements, a vacant quality to their eyes.

  Cara moves with them in the center of the line and breathes slowly to calm her panic. She has not been confined since she was fourteen years old. It is worse than she remembered.

  Every instinct in her wants to fight the vacuum of her surroundings, but she is too aware of how she stands out already. So she takes on the aura of the hopeless women around her, makes her body go slack and shuffling, lets her face assume a mask of blank uncaring.

  She knows the rules. It has been sixteen years but it never leaves you. Don’t look at the guards unless they tell you to look at them. When they walk you in the hall, stay in line and keep your eyes straight in front of you and don’t speak to anyone. Go where you’re told to go. Stand where you’re told to stand. Stop where you’re told to stop.

  And never, ever be alone where a guard can find you.

  The line moves through the doorway of the “common room” of the jail: an open space between two tiers of cells, smelling of ammonia and sweat. It is sparse: a few table-and-chair sets, a few rows of bright-blue chairs below a high-mounted TV, everything bolted down, and all supervised by a corrections officer behind a raised desk accessible only through a gate. The CO is a woman today, which makes Cara relax slightly. Seventy percent of the guards are men. Foxes guarding the henhouse. Like the one with the feral eyes and slathering jaws, the one who watches her with Its eyes. The one outside her cell last night.

  He will not wait for long. She will have to be ready.

  She breathes in and looks around the room, memorizing the details. There is a hierarchy to this place, to the chairs and tables, and she is new: low woman on the totem pole. So she waits until the alphas are seated and chooses one of the remaining chairs, farthest away from the drone of the television hanging in a frame in the corner, which is her own preference anyway.

  She slumps in her chair as if half-asleep and looks without seeming to look. She remains still, as she has been since her arrival. Very watchful, very still. She is listening for signs. Even in this place, the night talks to her. She can hear it under the sounds of crying and screaming, under the chaos of nightmares of the women who share this cage.

  There are two dozen of them in this “recreational” shift, and every one of them is profoundly damaged, each in her own way. She can see the deep scratches that It has left on them, the long histories of abuse, homelessness, prostitution, addiction. They are sick, broken, marked by a presence she knows only too well. Driven insane by years of looking into the depths of a beast that hides behind the masks of ordinary faces: fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, random men on the street . . . and the mothers and grandmothers who turned a blind eye to the abuse.

  She can feel their pain radiating from them like heat. And there is one flare hotter than the others.

  Her gaze stops on a frail, hunched woman at one of the tables. This one does not look at the TV or at the other women. Her face is blank and she rocks back and forth, loosely hugging herself.

  This is the one who screams in the night, Cara is certain. Few of the others have the same raw anguish. The scars are deep in this woman, both psychic and real; Cara can see the streaks of dried blood on the woman’s khakis. She cuts, this creature, slicing herself probably with her own ragged nails, to distract herself from some immense pain.

  Looking at her, Cara feels herself slipping back to that long-ago room in the group home, the night that resulted in her sentence, at twelve years old, to a maximum-security facility where girls, much less girls of twelve, are rarely sent.

  She had nearly killed the boy, it was true, but it was the group home counselor who was responsible for the Youth Authority sentence, the harshest penalty for a juvenile offender. The counselor had insisted. Payback for her fighting him, for his humiliation at being bested by the twelve-year-old girl he had intended to rape.

  In her mind she is there again, that night in the tiny locked room, the metallic scratching on the door announcing Its presence, the four-legged, four-armed creature slipping stealthily in, in the form of the counselor and the fifteen-year-old bully he has brought with him, for company or for camouflage or maybe for both.

  She has that few moments’ advantage because she knows Its sound, Its smell: the hoarse and grating breath, the stink of sweat and malevolence. She knows what has come for her because she has been in a room with It before. She is only twelve now, but she is bigger and stronger and deadlier than she was at five. And she has something else. This time she is angry. This thing, this excrescence, has stolen her family, has left her alone and scorned and shunned. This time she will fight, and fight to kill.

  It is caught unawares, and she is a spitfire, punching and scratching and kicking. It happens in moments: the boy’s nose broken, his eye bleeding, the man’s testicles crushed. And as the boy howls and the counselor lies moaning and clutching himself on the floor, she breathes through the fire in her chest and picks up the man’s foot in both hands and holds the leg straight and brings her foot as hard as she can down on his knee to snap the joint—

  She is pulled from the past by the feeling of eyes on her in the present.

  She scans the room to find the gaze.

  An inmate
seated under the television is watching her with a laser stare. A large woman—not physically large, though she has the doughiness of long confinement. But large in aura, in anger, in sheer domineering energy.

  Cara has noticed her before, as someone to be respected and avoided at all cost. But she has drawn attention regardless.

  The woman’s eyes are fixed on her from across the room and she can feel the other’s anger building. Senseless anger, nothing to do with her. But unmistakable, and dangerous.

  The woman rises suddenly and walks the concrete floor toward her. A walk meant to be casual so as not to alert the guard behind the desk to trouble. But trouble is what it is.

  The inmate sits heavily across from Cara. She is bulldog muscular under the layer of fat, her hair spiky in a butch cut. Cara knows the other women call her Kaz. She gives Cara a blistering glare, which no doubt has reduced any number of other prisoners to tears. Cara looks back at her without nodding, without posturing. Just looking.

  “So, Blondie.” The woman’s drawl makes the word an insult. “What’s your story?”

  She doesn’t answer right away. When she does, it is in the most neutral tone she can muster. “It’s all the same story, isn’t it?”

  She can feel the anger sparking off the other woman. “You being smart with me?”

  “No,” Cara says, and nothing more. Kaz waits. Cara waits with her.

  “You in for murder, or izzat some story you think is gonna keep you safe from all the scary people in here?” She makes a “boo” gesture, a mock lunge.

  Cara doesn’t flinch. “I didn’t do it,” she says evenly. Not just the standard answer to the question, but the only rational thing to say in a world where snitching is often the only ticket out of hell.

  “Riiight,” Kaz says.

  “I’m not looking for trouble.”

  “It just somehow found you,” the other woman sneers. She does not know how accurate she has just been.