Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) Page 9

  If not for the express purpose of killing DeShawn.

  Roarke had never believed in coincidence, although this case was messing with his head about it.

  “I need to talk to Ramirez’s other girls,” he said.

  Rachel stiffened again, and the anger was back in her voice, more deadly this time. “They’re not Ramirez’s girls. They never were, even before that fuck was dead.”

  “You’re right,” he said, and he meant it. “I just don’t know their names.”

  She softened slightly. “Shauna and Tyra. They don’t know where Jade is, though. It’s the first thing I asked them.”

  Roarke was sure she had. And he had no idea what he was going to ask a couple of street girls that could possibly get them to open up or say anything of use to him.

  Rachel was watching him. “Are you here because . . . Do you think she killed DeShawn?” she asked softly.

  Roarke felt the words like a hammer blow to the back of his head. He stared at her. “How do you know about DeShawn?”

  Rachel gave him an oblique look. “The girls have been talking about it.”

  “They know?” He couldn’t believe it. He himself had learned of the death only hours ago.

  “People on the street . . .” She shrugged.

  Roarke understood. The network. It was almost telepathic, the way word got around.

  “Did you know him?” he asked.

  “DeShawn Butler? Oh yeah. I knew him. Of him, anyway.” Her voice was full of loathing. “He sold Shauna to Danny Ramirez. The way I heard it, she was better off with Danny. If you believe there’s some kind of variation in the levels of hell.”

  Roarke didn’t know what he believed. At a certain point it was all hell. “Can I see them?”

  Rachel led him downstairs, to a room he had not been in before, a big basement hangout. Rumpus room, they used to call them. It was typical Bay Area retro: long, low, thrift store couches and overflowing bookshelves and a television surrounded by uncased DVDs. There was even a beanbag chair.

  Two teenage girls were sunk into adjacent mismatched sofas. The older, whom Rachel called Tyra, was a mixed-race girl with caramel-colored skin, big pouty lips, big lashes, big silver hoop earrings. She moved with a sultry sulkiness, and when her midriff top shifted Roarke caught a glimpse of a tattooed cross over most of her stomach. She may have been seventeen.

  The other, whom Rachel introduced as Shauna, was small and plump and dark, with wary brown eyes. The most striking thing about her was that she was clearly no more than thirteen. For the millionth time in his career, Roarke wondered what kind of man had so little conscience that he could use children like this for sex.

  Rachel left him with the girls without leaving the room; she took a seat in front of a computer station on the opposite side of the basement space, unobtrusive but present.

  Roarke settled himself on the wide arm of a chair facing the two teenagers.

  “I understand you ladies know something about DeShawn Butler.”

  The girls were silent. Roarke looked pointedly to Tyra, the older of the two. She shrugged. “Heard he wuz dead.” And then for a moment her eyes were shrewd, assessing him. “That be right?”

  Underneath the deliberate street drawl she had a slight Southern accent, maybe from living there, maybe just a legacy from some long-ago parent.

  “He’s dead, yes,” he answered the girl. And good fucking riddance, he added in his head. “How did you find out about it?”

  Tyra looked slightly smug. “Ev’rybody knows. Got hisself offed in an alley in the TL.”

  “That’s right,” Roarke said. “Do you know who did it?”

  The girls looked at each other briefly.

  “Guess you thinkin’ it was Jade,” Tyra said with an attempt at casual indifference.

  “What do you think?”

  Tyra cut her eyes Shauna’s way. Shauna concentrated on the floor and gnawed at a fingernail. Roarke realized that the acne scarring on her cheeks was actually from old meth sores.

  “Jade hated DeShawn, no doubt,” Tyra finally drawled, and Roarke looked steadily back at her.

  “Why was that?”

  He had been watching both girls closely since he’d walked into the room. Now Shauna, who had been listless and passive throughout, stiffened and fidgeted.

  “Shauna?” he asked gently.

  The girl crossed her arms and kept her eyes on the floor.

  “He broke her in,” Tyra said from the other couch. Her voice was flat. “Danny took new girls to DeShawn.”

  Roarke felt his blood rising in anger. Typical pimp practice. Trauma bonding, psychologists called it. The pimps raped the girls themselves, or the more devious ones got friends and associates to rape a new girl so the pimp seemed like some comfort afterward, however perverse. An insidious kind of brainwashing.

  “Shauna?”

  Shauna wouldn’t look at him. Tyra rolled her head back and looked at Roarke.

  “Shauna too. She be walkin’ home from school and DeShawn and some guys grabbed her, pulled her into his car.”

  Shauna’s eyes were glazed. “I was walkin’ and I hear them say, ‘Get that girl.’ Get that girl,” she repeated softly.

  Roarke sat still in his chair and tasted bile in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said to Shauna. His voice was thick and he had no other words. “I’m sorry.”

  The girl lifted her shoulders, barely. Her eyes never left the floor.

  “He dead,” Tyra said, with no particular inflection. “Nobody cryin’ here. Whole hella lot of people coulda killed him.”

  At the moment, Roarke would have been more than happy to have done it himself. He forced down his fury and concentrated on Tyra’s last words. “A lot of people could have killed DeShawn.” Not surprising, and it was a point that Molina was sure to make about Ramirez’s murder as well. He tried to focus back on something, anything, that would move him closer to finding Jade.

  “Do you have any idea where Jade is from?” he asked.

  Shauna shook her head. Tyra shrugged.

  “You think she’s from around here?” he tried. “Or California in general?”

  Tyra gave him a look that was as close to rolling her eyes as someone could get without actually doing it. “Could be you try lookin’ her up on Facebook.”

  Roarke had to admit the girl had a sense of irony.

  “We dint sit around jawing,” she elaborated. “Not if we dint want to get beat. She dint talk about it.”

  “Okay,” Roarke said, and took a moment to still his outrage. “But sometimes things just come out, right? You pick up things?”

  He looked at Tyra and she stared back sullenly, then gave a ghost of a shrug. She was sunk into the couch and her crop top was riding up, and Roarke tried not to look at the tattoo emblazoned over her bare midriff.

  He asked, “Can you tell me anything else about her? Things she did, things she liked . . .”

  Tyra considered. “She was into that cosmic shit. Incense, candles, psychics. Third eye blind and all.”

  Another tick in the box for a California background, Roarke thought. He heard Jade’s voice again. “Do you believe in destiny, Agent Roarke?”

  He cleared his throat. “Did you get any sense of her family? Father, mother . . .”

  “Stepdaddy,” Shauna said suddenly. Roarke turned to her. Her brown eyes seemed liquid in the dim room.

  “Really? She said that?”

  “Once, maybe. I think. Somethin’.” The younger girl faltered under Tyra’s stare.

  “Do you know where that might have been, where she lived?”

  Shauna half-shrugged. “Uh-uh.”

  “Anything else—anyone else—she may have mentioned?”

  Shauna shook her head. She seemed to have slipped back into a slightly dazed state.
>
  “Did Jade own a straight razor?”

  Shauna looked blank.

  “It’s a blade about this long. It folds up into the handle.” Roarke gestured, making a V with his hands.

  Shauna’s eyes went a little wide, but she shook her head. Roarke looked to Tyra.

  “Never saw it,” the girl answered.

  He nodded. “If you think of anything, I’d appreciate it if you’d let Rachel know. She’ll get in touch with me. Or you can call or text me directly.” He put two of his business cards on the table in front of them.

  Shauna didn’t move. After a moment Tyra leaned forward and picked up both cards. Then she stood, and Shauna stood with her.

  As he watched the smaller girl start after Tyra, he remembered something Rachel had told him.

  “Shauna, would you stay a minute? I’d like to talk to you a little more.”

  The girl looked alarmed. She shot a look toward Rachel, who nodded. After a moment, Shauna sat awkwardly back down. Tyra paused by the doorway and looked back, half-relieved, half-suspicious. Then reluctantly she sidled out the door.

  Roarke leaned forward and addressed the younger girl. “I understand you saw someone beat up one of your tricks recently.”

  She looked at him, wide-eyed.

  “Is that right, Shauna?”

  She averted her eyes and nodded. He wondered what he was doing questioning her about it. She had seen Cara being violent; his lawman brain was calculating that she could act as a witness to that fact. Another part of him simply craved hearing what Cara had done.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  She looked down, away, anywhere but at him. She put her hand to her mouth, and for a moment Roarke thought she was going to suck her thumb. Instead she bit at the nail of her pinkie finger. “I had this guy in the alley . . .”

  “Where was this?”

  “Um . . . next to Karma Records.” She moved on to the next fingernail. “I was, you know, startin’ to go down on him, and this lady come up behind me and say she got it.”

  “She got it?”

  “Like, ‘I got this.’ And she look at me funny, so I leave.”

  “What do you mean by ‘funny’?”

  The girl looked trapped. “I dunno.”

  “But you didn’t really leave?”

  She hesitated. “I was wonderin’ what was up, so I stayed.”

  “You were hiding?”

  “Kinda on the other side of the Dumpster . . .”

  “And what did you see?”

  The girl looked away.

  “Anything you can remember would help,” he told her gently.

  “She step up and unbuckle him, pull his pants down ’roun’ his knees.” Her eyes were unfocused, as if she were seeing it. “And then she stand up and slam her fists ’gainst the side of his head, real hard . . . and grab his head and start beatin’ it ’gainst the wall. Slammin’ the shit out of him.”

  Roarke’s mouth was dry, picturing it. The narrow alley. Cara approaching the man with that mesmerizing sensuality . . . and then the sudden explosion of her rage . . .

  “He was big, too,” the girl said, a bit in awe. “He was real big.”

  “And then what?” Roarke managed.

  “He go all limp. And then she drop him. He lying there bare-ass and blood all over him . . .” Her eyes went dull; then she shook her head. “An’ I take off.”

  “What did this woman look like, who attacked him?”

  She bit deeper into her nail. Roarke saw crimson welling at the tip of her finger and winced.

  “White. Blond. Thin . . . pretty.”

  “Dressed how?”

  She frowned, concentrating. “Jeans. Hoodie.”

  “About how old was she?”

  She shrugged. “Twenny?”

  Cara was ten years older than that. Not that it was a surprising guess. Kids rarely could tell the age of anyone over twenty, but that kind of discrepancy never sounded good in court.

  He had the sketch of Cara, though. He always had it. He’d reduced the official sketch to a size he could carry in a coat pocket, laminated. He told himself it was for situations like this, identification purposes that had come up fairly regularly since he had begun chasing her.

  He stepped closer and showed Shauna the sketch: glistening laminate finish over that intense, focused image.

  The girl went still. “Yeah. Her.” She looked up, and the awe was back in her eyes. “She bashed the shit out of him.”

  Roarke nodded. He had no doubt. It was a slim connection, though, between beating up a john and murdering a pimp. Shauna’s account could hardly replace Jade’s eyewitness testimony.

  He wondered, not for the first time, why Cara hadn’t killed the john in that alley. It wasn’t like her not to complete the act. Because she knew Shauna was watching? Because his crime was not as severe on her scale as the pimp Danny Ramirez’s? He had no idea how she judged these things. Or if it was a conscious decision at all.

  He slipped the sketch back into the inner pocket of his suit coat and felt it against his chest. “Thank you, Shauna. You’ve been a big help.” He paused. “I hope you’re liking it here.”

  The girl looked confused, then shrugged slightly. “S’all right. Rachel, she all right.”

  Rachel is all right, he agreed with her in his head. She’s more than all right.

  He watched as she stood, a short, slightly plump teenager who had already suffered more in her brief lifetime than he could bear thinking about.

  She paused at the doorway and looked back at him. “DeShawn’s for real dead? You saw him?”

  “Yeah. I saw him.”

  “Jade killed him like that,” she said. There was a dazed quality to her voice, and he was going to answer automatically that it was under investigation, but then he saw a flicker of something in her eyes, something more than ordinary. Something like triumph.

  “I don’t know,” he answered, and was aware of how uneasy he sounded.

  Shauna nodded, as if he weren’t there. “She did it. She killed him.”

  And Roarke, who had spent six years of his life talking to serial killers, rapists, and the criminally insane, felt cold fingers at the back of his neck as the girl walked from the room.

  When he turned, Rachel was still sitting at the computer station. He’d forgotten she was there.

  She looked at him, then stood and walked out.

  He climbed the stairs from the basement and stopped in the hall outside her office, found himself pausing to gather himself before he knocked on the half-open door.

  She was sitting on the window seat, looking out the curved glass of the bay window at the park.

  “They’re looking good,” he said to her. “Healthy.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Just a couple of ordinary teenagers.”

  He was startled at the sarcasm in her voice. It wasn’t like her. But under the circumstances, bitterness was hardly a surprise.

  “Was it any help?” She turned from the window and looked at him.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe.”

  “You do think Jade killed DeShawn.” The way she spoke it, it wasn’t a question, and technically Roarke had no business answering it, although he found it on the tip of his tongue to say everything. Jade knew how Cara had killed Danny Ramirez. She obviously had motive for killing the man Tyra said had “broken her in.” And then there was the thing he had not been letting himself fully consider. The straight razor beside the corpse. Which the killer had left deliberately. The razor that could cast some serious reasonable doubt in the case against Cara.

  Did Jade really do that consciously? Seriously? Not just kill a man, but plant evidence to exonerate Cara? A sixteen-year-old girl?

  What are we dealing with here?

 
“What do you think?” he asked, deflecting Rachel’s statement. “Could she have?”

  “You heard Tyra,” Rachel said. “A lot of people could have.”

  “Right.” He sat on the armrest of the couch, suddenly bone-tired. “How is Erin?”

  Rachel looked briefly surprised at the segue, then shrugged. “She wasn’t cutting when I left.”

  “Were you there all night?”

  She looked away. “Basically. The cutting’s been happening on and off for a long time. She was sixteen, went to some party, she was drinking . . . she woke up to find herself in a bedroom, naked and bleeding. Someone raped her. She still doesn’t know who. Or how many. Rohypnol, the jock’s little helper.”

  Roarke flinched inside, feeling anger and despair. Not that he hadn’t suspected.

  “She went to a clinic by herself for pregnancy and STD testing instead of telling her mother or anyone else. I got the strong feeling she’s buried it pretty effectively for years.”

  Roarke nodded. He’d had a real conversation with Erin only once, but he could see the quiet, independent young woman suppressing the attack and deciding that she would simply deal with it on her own. Of course buried trauma always came back eventually.

  Rachel was speaking, and he tuned in again. “She says she hasn’t done the cutting for years. Which may or may not be true.”

  “So learning about what Cara—about the killing she’s doing, why she’s doing it . . .”

  “It triggered her,” Rachel said. “Of course. On all kinds of levels.”

  He found Rachel’s eyes, felt for a connection. “I feel like I’ve put you in the middle of all this. Jade, Erin . . .”

  Something went blank in her face. “It’s my job. I was involved with Jade before you ever came here about her.”

  Roarke realized it was true; Rachel had told him at their first meeting that she’d made numerous attempts to get Jade off the street and into the shelter.

  “Fair enough. But Erin isn’t your job.”

  “It’s hard to tell where the job stops,” she said.