Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) Page 4

  Roarke sensed some undercurrent in the question, but before he could figure it out, Mills was answering.

  “So why not tell Rachel where you’re from?”

  Roarke saw a protective wall crash down in the girl’s face, shuttering her expression. What came up a second later was exaggerated boredom.

  “Get with the program, Mills.” She lifted her hands. “The past is over. All there is, is the now.”

  Roarke knew they were losing her, and it didn’t take a crystal ball to guess what she was escaping from in the past. Rachel had told him, “Runaway is a literal word. They run away.” He began, “We’re not going to send you back to—”

  Her response was a flash of anger, cutting him off. “Fuckin’ right you’re not. Because you can’t. Nothing to send me back to.” She stood. “Sorry, guys, but three-ways always wear me out.”

  She strolled, loose-hipped, toward the door and turned in the doorway to deliver a last line. “Been real.”

  Roarke stepped to the door and glanced down the hall to make sure she was gone before he turned toward Mills. He was about to ask a question, but he realized Rachel was still in the room, seated at the table. She’d been so still he’d forgotten she was there.

  She caught his look and stood. “I’ll be in the office.” She walked to the door and out.

  Now Roarke faced Mills. “So is it like that every time?”

  “Every time,” Mills answered. “The kid’s doing the interviewing.”

  “She wants something.”

  “Yep. Not sure what. Good news is she seems up for testifying.”

  Seems was the operative word in that sentence. At moments Roarke had gotten the feeling that Jade wanted to testify against Cara to avenge Danny’s death. Other times he sensed a calculation underneath that willingness that concerned him. Maybe even a plan.

  She was unfathomable, and that was worrisome.

  Rachel closed the office door behind Mills and Roarke. Mills sat heavily in a chair. “There must be some fucking way we can get traction on where she’s lived.”

  “Mills, I’ve told you. I’ve tried. I don’t have a clue—”

  Roarke felt the rise in Rachel’s temperature and stepped in verbally. “Anything unusual about her, then?”

  She looked toward him. “She is unusual, obviously. Lots of issues there, but she’s smart.”

  Roarke thought on that, tried to work with it. “You hold classes here . . .”

  “Tutoring. GED stuff.”

  “So Jade’s taking those?”

  Rachel half-smiled in spite of herself. “Sort of. She does schoolwork. Sometimes.” Her gaze turned inward. “I think she’s good at math.”

  Mills pounced on that. “You think? My hazy recollection of math is that you know it or you don’t.”

  Rachel shook her head. “The teacher we have here does a multilevel math class. The other girls are at a very basic level. Jade makes a big show of being bored out of her mind, of course. Drawing instead of listening. But I watch from the door sometimes. One day I saw she was working in the back of the book, doing what looked like algebra equations. But when she saw I was watching she crumpled up the paper.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  Rachel gave him a tired grimace. “Girls hide math skills more often than you think. Six million years of evolution, but brains still aren’t sexy.” She looked toward the window.

  Roarke wanted to tell her that wasn’t the problem between her and him. Not for him. But of course he couldn’t. Not with Mills there. Not even if he hadn’t been.

  Rachel spoke again, looking out the window. “But I think it’s a different thing with Jade. She’s hiding everything. You’re looking for indicators of where she’s lived, and I think she’s being just as careful to hide anything like that. Everything is an act.”

  “You’ve asked her about it, though?” Roarke asked.

  “Of course, but I keep thinking I’ll get more if I just keep watching.”

  He was sure she was right. “You think we could find where she’s from by following up on this math thing?”

  Rachel shrugged. “Well, put that together with what she looks like, there are teachers who might recognize a talented girl.”

  Mills arched a bushy brow and nodded, impressed. “How would we follow up on that?”

  Rachel looked at him stonily. “Start calling schools, I guess.”

  “Thanks, Elliott, you’re a real help.”

  “Anything for you, Mills.”

  Mills looked from her to Roarke. “No one has to tell me where I’m not wanted. I’ll be in the car.” He shuffled out the door, leaving Roarke and Rachel alone. The silence was instant and awkward.

  This is why they have rules about getting involved with people you work with, he chided himself.

  Although it was a strange kind of “working with.” In ordinary circumstances this would be the way to do it: connect with someone with common interests, a shared mission, while on that shared mission. But none of the circumstances were ordinary. They had never been ordinary. Even now the specter of Cara hovered in the room between them.

  Rachel finally broke the standoff. “It’s not like I haven’t been trying. She absolutely will not talk about that part of her life. She may even have blocked it mentally. But it’s always the same story. The ones who aren’t actually, physically abducted . . . they run away from abuse at home and run straight into it on the street.”

  “I know,” Roarke said. “I know.” There was a pimp saying that he’d learned from Rachel: “The best kids to have are the ones that have been had by their daddies.”

  But how Jade actually felt about her pimp, or ex-pimp, or dead pimp, was maddeningly unclear to him.

  He knew that Ramirez had been a “Romeo,” a variety of sex trafficker who romanced and groomed vulnerable girls, playing on their desperate need for love and acceptance. Rachel was right, outright abduction of children and teens was more and more common, ever since gangs had caught on to the fact that selling kids was more lucrative than selling drugs and carried lighter criminal penalties. But the gradual seduction of a child was a tried-and-true method. The pimp started out playing the boyfriend, buying the teenager clothes, jewelry, meals, making promises of a house or marriage, then coaxing the girl into having sex with a “friend” to prove her love . . .

  “Does she talk about Ramirez?” he asked aloud. “Do you think she . . . had feelings for him?”

  Rachel shook her head. “I don’t have a clue what she feels. She’s clearly better educated, and seems less naive, than most of the girls we get here. But she’s still just a kid. And obviously not perfectly mentally stable. I’m pretty sure she’s bipolar, for one thing.”

  Roarke nodded. That blazing charisma, the brazen confidence Jade exhibited was a typical sign of the disorder.

  “And the pimps do such a number on these kids. They are fucking experts at breaking them down, mentally and physically. Sometimes I think my whole job is nothing but deprogramming.”

  She looked away from him now, at the window. “So . . . Jade is pretty much the key to this trial, right?”

  He kept his tone even as he answered. “Yes.”

  “I’ve been reading about it.” She half-laughed, without humor. “It’s hard to miss.” She glanced at him. “And she saved your life, didn’t she?”

  Roarke knew she meant Cara now. For a moment he was back in the forest, in freezing, pitch-black night, his head throbbing from a vicious blow, pine needles digging into his flesh, and the weight of a

  Monster

  madman on top of him . . .

  He pulled himself out of the memory and answered with effort. “Yes. She saved my life.”

  Rachel looked toward the window. “What can anyone say to that?”

  She was right, in her way. There was nothing
Roarke could say.

  Chapter 5

  Roarke dropped Mills off at the steps in front of the Hall of Justice. As the detective reached to open the passenger door, he turned to look back at Roarke.

  “How many kids do you figure in the California school system?”

  Roarke took an educated guess. “Ten million. But only half of them are girls.”

  Mills grimaced. “Who says Feebs don’t have a sense of humor? Piece a’ cake, right?” He shut the car door and ambled up the steps.

  Roarke watched him go.

  The interview with Jade had left him unsettled. He had the distinct feeling the girl had something in mind, some plan.

  Or paranoia’s taken over entirely. Get a grip.

  But once Mills had disappeared through the doors of the Hall, Roarke felt an entirely new agitation, disturbingly similar to the rush of an addict. He knew before he did it what he was going to do.

  He drove down the street as if he were leaving. Instead he parked off the street a bit and furtively backtracked to the jail.

  County Jail #8 was a pretrial holding facility on the sixth floor of the curved building next door to the Hall of Justice, a relatively new building with none of the Deco panache of the Hall. Roarke walked past a big black sculpture of tubes and platforms, vaguely mechanical, that twisted out of the grass beside the front entrance of the jail building.

  Inside he signed in at the desk, turned over his weapon and cell phone, and went through security. As he had each time he’d visited, he had a moment of holding his breath, not entirely sure that he would be allowed in, that instead he would be caught, thrown out, disgraced.

  But no alarms went off. The guards let him pass, returned his shoes. He turned away and rode the elevator up to the women’s wing, feeling his own pulse elevating at the ascent.

  There was no way he could justify seeing her. If he were caught—and it was only a matter of time before he was caught—he had only the ghost of an excuse to offer: that he thought he could get her to tell him what had happened to Special Agent Greer, and that the only way he could get her to do that was to see her alone.

  Epps would never buy it. Epps would know. On some level he already knew. But the boss, Special Agent in Charge Reynolds, might buy it. Barely. Enough for Roarke to keep his job, if he still wanted it. He was no longer sure what he wanted, except that he must see her. His nightmares were constant and layered: that she would kill herself, that the confinement would kill her . . . or that her special way of seeing the world would put her in the middle of something irrevocable.

  He became aware that the elevator had stopped; the doors were standing open. He stepped out into the garish fluorescence of the corridor, and walked down to check in with visiting. He signed the log and looked down at his name. Proof of his sins, there for anyone to find.

  He turned away.

  The visitation booth was a narrow cubicle with an equivalent cubicle on the other side of a metal-threaded Plexiglas partition. A small stool was set under a shelf on each side. Roarke faced the glass and for a second saw himself inside the booth, a glimpse of his reflection in the smooth surface: thick black hair, black eyes, tensely muscled frame.

  As always, his heart began to race as he sat on the low seat in the claustrophobic room. He cleared his throat, put his hands on the shelf to steady them, and waited for the opposite door to open.

  In his days as a profiler, he had spent many hours in booths like this one, interviewing some of the worst mass killers of a generation. Cara exceeded some of them in numbers of victims. But he knew too much about the psychology of serial killers to call her that.

  Behavioral profiling was based on statistics. The statistics said it was rare for a woman to kill at all, let alone numbers of people, and the patterns and motives of female killers were completely different from the psychology of what profilers called “sexual homicide.” Women killed for money, and they killed unwanted children. A few in medical professions killed out of some twisted sense of euthanasia or power.

  But even Aileen Wuornos, the truck-stop prostitute so often cited as “America’s only female serial killer,” did not fit the pattern of homicidal sexual predators. Wuornos had shot and killed seven men in a very constricted time frame, just over a year, with none of the cooling-off period and slow build to the next kill that characterized serial killers. She had snapped, most likely from the trauma of a rape, and had gone on a killing spree. Most notably, there was a strong element of revenge to the murders, and no evidence whatsoever that she was getting sexual gratification from the kills. In Roarke’s book she had been acting out rage built up over a lifetime of sexual abuse.

  Cara was different, one of a kind: a ruthless, calculating female vigilante who had operated under the radar for over a decade.

  Even Roarke’s mentor, the legendary profiler Chuck Snyder, was fascinated by her, eager to learn the workings of her mind. Roarke knew that had Snyder not been consulting on an active case in Montana, he would be right here interviewing Cara himself, hoping to learn what drove her to kill in a way that no one had ever seen from a woman before.

  But Roarke was far beyond pretending to himself that professional interest was what drove him to see her.

  The door opened on the other side of the Plexiglas, and blood rushed to his face and other places that it had no business rushing as the corrections officer let her into the cubicle. She wore an olive uniform; her feet were shackled, her hands cuffed in front of her. But she moved with grace, with the complex musculature of a cat, as she lowered herself to balance on the stool. Roarke saw that underneath the prison jumpsuit she wore a cotton jersey back-to-front, so that the neckline hid the scar on her neck.

  He had memorized her face: the curve of cheekbones, the watchful green eyes, the stillness. She still took his breath away, every single time.

  He picked up the phone. The cord was too short, forcing him to lean forward toward the partition. On the other side, Cara picked up her phone and bent her head to the glass. It was always this way, bowing to each other, foreheads inches away . . . and the clear wall between them.

  Time stopped as it always did, and they did not speak for a minute, minutes, he didn’t know.

  “Are you all right?” he asked finally.

  She nodded.

  “Would you tell me if you weren’t?” he said.

  She half-smiled at him and his heart leaped. But she didn’t answer. After a moment he tried another tack.

  “So Molina used the ten-day rule. Are you comfortable with that?”

  Her eyes were veiled. “I wanted it.”

  “Why?” he asked, before he remembered that she couldn’t answer, shouldn’t answer. She said nothing.

  “What about Molina? Are you okay with her?”

  She tilted her head, lifted her shoulders. “She sees.”

  “She sees . . .”

  For a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer.

  “The way things are.”

  “It, you mean.” His voice was low. It was what he always wanted to talk about. He was not fooling himself: he came to see her. But the draw to understand how she saw the world was its own, separate vortex.

  She looked at him, speculative green eyes under long dark lashes. His throat constricted.

  “He’s dead now, Cara.” She had stood over them in the moonlight and slashed Nathaniel Hughes’ throat. Roarke could still feel the weight of him, the gushing of his blood . . .

  Not a monster. Just a man.

  But on the other side of the glass, Cara’s head jerked up.

  “No.”

  “You killed him.”

  She stared directly into his eyes. “It doesn’t die.”

  It.

  She was unshakable.

  For two and a half months that already felt like a lifetime, Roarke had chased her over three s
tates, interviewing witnesses, picking up clues to a vast mystery—a mystery that in some part of him he believed might explain his life, his work, his purpose. She knew. She chose her victims with a precision that baffled him, and slew them without compunction.

  He couldn’t get it out of his head. He knew why she killed. Because anyone with a human feeling would want to kill the men she killed. Because the killing she did prevented the further agony of innocent victims. Because someone had to do it.

  What he didn’t know was how she knew.

  This much he thought he understood: The night the killer known as the Reaper had slaughtered five-year-old Cara’s entire family, had cut the child’s throat and left her for dead, she had seen him not as a man but as a monster, like the rabid thing Roarke saw in his dreams. Snyder called it “magical thinking.” It was the way most five-year-old children saw the world. But Cara still saw what she called It—as an adult. For her, it was no dream. It was how she recognized the criminal intent of the men she killed. Over the years she had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, delusional—suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, dissociative disorder, and various assorted psychoses. But whatever anyone called it, she seemed to be unerringly right.

  “But how do you know?” He could hear the raw agitation in his voice. “What do you see, Cara? Tell me.”

  “You know,” she said. “You see.”

  For a surreal second he thought she knew his dreams.

  “I don’t—” he started, then stopped, because it would be a lie. He hadn’t seen in Greer, his own agent, what she had seen. But sometimes, it was true, bad intentions were not so difficult to spot. “Cops’ eyes,” they called it. The ability to walk into a bar, or along a crowded street, and pick out the bad actors.

  “Not like you,” he finished. She looked at him. The expression on her face was patience, and pity. Almost as if she knew he was lying.

  “But why—” he started, then paused. He meant, Why you? Why do you feel responsible? Why is it your job? Why do you need to be the one?

  Her eyes met his. “Why you?” she answered.