At the turnoff to the campsite she puts money into a lockbox for a camping permit. Off-season, the entrance fee is on the honor system. She drives into the park and around the loop, surveying the campsites. Residents are sparse. When she has found a site with no neighbors, she parks the truck.
She walks down to the river, strips down to tank top and underwear, and wades in.
The February water is cold, but the wind is mild.
She washes herself in the water and in the wind. Washing away the memory of the men in Phoenix, the taint of their blood.
The California wind is like a lover’s touch on her skin. And she is glad that she did not die so far away from home.
Back at her campsite, she sets up a tent, the small spare one she has found in the plethora of equipment in the back of the truck. The truck is stocked with everything she could possibly need. Coleman lanterns. A camp stove. And there are other useful items. Handcuffs. Chains. Leg irons. Items the hunters no doubt intended to use on her.
Now they will save her a trip to the hardware store.
She is too drained from the triple kill to face Ortiz. So she will sleep here tonight.
And she will begin in the morning.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Driving is comforting, her Lexus is a haven, and Singh is somewhat calmer as she pulls the car into the below-street-level lot of her South of Market loft building. She uses the remote to open the steel gate, then descends the steep ramp into the dark underground. The gate rattles down behind her.
She parks in her assigned space and shuts off the engine, just sitting, feeling the presence of concrete and steel around her.
Even now, she must force herself to breathe, to take in oxygen, to center herself.
The men in the forum are hardly men at all. “Troll” is the exact word for them. Small, and misshapen and filled with hate and fear.
They are nothing to her.
She visualizes light, pure and constant and warm. Surrounds herself with it. Breathes it in.
Then she gathers her laptop, her coat, her briefcase, and opens the car door to the faint, accustomed whiff of oil and gas fumes. She has locked the car and started for the inner door that leads to the lift when she senses presence.
Adrenaline shoots through her like a lightning bolt.
She is not alone in the garage.
The air shifts. She hears a rasp of breath, some twenty feet to her right.
And then a low whistle.
From the left.
Her blood freezes. There is more than one of them.
All at once the voices surround her in the dark. Multiple men, whistling, chirping like birds. She sees their shadows loom on the concrete walls . . .
And then the catcalls begin.
“Muslim cunt. Black pussy.”
Faster than thought, she slips between two cars, dips low, presses her back against the door of the taller vehicle.
Her breath is rapid and shallow, her eyes wide as she scans the shadows in both directions.
She knows what is in the garage with her. The monstrous thing she has managed all her life to escape. The Beast. It.
The calls continue, breaking her stupor.
“Here, pussy pussy pussy . . . I’ve got somethin’ for you.”
“Get ready—”
“Gonna get fucked till your ass bleeds.”
Four of them. Five.
She has told Roarke she loathes the feeling of a gun. And she does. But tonight, she is armed. Her service weapon is heavy on her hip.
She draws the Glock and calls the warning: “FBI. Drop your weapons and come out with your hands above your heads.”
The laughter is immediate, jeering.
“Who do you think you’re talking to, bitch?”
“Gonna wish you never left Dumbfuckistan . . .”
Singh ignores the taunts. Pressed against the side of the car, she listens, every sense straining to hear, see, smell what is out there in the shadows.
When she feels the stir of movement, she does not hesitate. She fires into the dark.
There is a shriek, and a soft thud, and an explosion as someone fires back. A bullet cracks against a nearby vehicle, shattering glass.
Singh’s heart is hammering, so thunderous she fears it is echoing off the concrete walls and floor. She drops lower, bracing herself with one hand on the cold floor, listening to the darkness.
There are garbled voices.
“Fuck. He’s hit.”
“The bitch got him.”
Singh concentrates her senses. And she hears it . . . the wet rattling of a sucking chest wound.
She slides around the side of the car, makes a break for the door to the inner stairs in a stooped crouch. She slams her shoulder into the door, grabs for the door handle, twists it . . . and is gone.
Chapter Sixty-Five
The tent is too confining. Cara takes the sleeping bag and lies outside.
The desert air is cold, mid-forties, but she has made herself a shallow burrow in the sand to hold in heat, and the sleeping bag she bought at one of Arizona’s ubiquitous outdoor supply shops is rated for Arctic weather. The cold on her face is stimulating. She breathes in the desert air and feels her own body warmth radiating back from the sand beneath her.
She lies under the canopy of night and looks up at the star-crusted sky. And as she has done since she was a child, she presses her back against the curve of the earth and imagines she is looking down, down . . . at an infinite field of galaxies below her.
She is mere miles from her childhood home. But she will not go near The House. She hasn’t, not since the night she watched Roarke there. It is too easy to stake out.
Tonight, like that night, Orion is clear in the sky. Orion the Hunter and Cassiopeia, the Queen.
She never sees Orion now without thinking of Roarke.
Her hunt is almost done, she thinks. Her reprieve in the canyon was only temporary.
But Roarke will never stop, as long as he has breath. She knows that much.
He will hunt forever, constant as Orion in the sky.
She sits up, and reaches for the phone. His phone. She sits holding it for some time.
It is a risk to turn it on. She is not even sure why she has kept it, except that it is some connection to him. To kindness. To the one person who has ever seen her.
She knows, she is sure, that Roarke himself will not come after her. Not anymore.
She inserts a fresh battery, the one from the hunter’s phone, and calls his voicemail.
There are messages. For her.
“Wherever you are, you need to get out. There are people coming to get you.”
There is a pause that seems to go on forever. She can hear him breathing in it. “Please let me know you’re all right.”
She listens several times through, and feels herself flushed, disoriented.
So Roarke knows about Ortiz.
He knows that Ortiz is after her. And has taken the huge professional risk of warning her.
There were several other messages, not just from Roarke, but also from her cousin, Erin. It seems that Roarke had even recruited Erin to warn her about Ortiz.
And his voice.
His voice.
She is unaccustomed to having anyone look out for her, and the feeling is strange. She cannot examine it closely, not now. Not when she must focus everything in her being on eliminating Ortiz. To become distracted could prove fatal.
But she would like to do something for Roarke.
Perhaps tonight, her dreams will tell her.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Singh showers for an hour and still does not feel clean.
Then she goes to her meditation room. With hands still shaking from adrenaline, she lights candles on her altar and kneels, touching her head to the ground, supplicating herself to her goddesses and saints.
She heard the rattling. She is fairly certain that she has killed someone.
And yet when she has regain
ed herself and goes back down to the garage, hours later, there is no one.
Apparently the men had chosen to spirit the dead or dying man away, no doubt to prevent law enforcement from looking into their motives for being in the garage.
But she does not call the police. Nor Epps. Nor anyone else.
She goes back to her loft, back into her meditation room.
She is trembling again.
And this time she turns to the dark saint in the recessed altar.
The idol stands half-naked, four-armed, with a necklace of skulls around her neck, blood dripping from her mouth. She holds a severed head in one hand, a machete in the other, and Lord Shiva lies prostrate beneath her foot.
Kali Ma. Mother of Demons. She Who Is Unthinkable. She Who Manifests Darkness. The Fierce. The Destroyer.
Singh kneels, lights incense in the bowl, and chants the Dakshina Kali Dhyan Mantra.
Om karala-badanam ghoram mukta-kEshim chatur-bhuryam
Fierce of face, she is dark, with flowing hair and four-armed
Kalikam dakshinam dibyam munda-mala bibhushitam
Dakshina Kalika divine, adorned with a garland of heads
Sadya-chinna shira kharga bama-dordha karambujam
In her lotus hands on the left, a severed head and a sword.
She spends the night in the company of the dark goddess. And when the dawn comes, she knows what she must do.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Back in the villa at the Bacara, Roarke and Epps had been going over Mrs. Stephens’s video for hours. Freezing images. Enhancing them. Grabbing screenshots.
Whoever had filmed it had been sober enough not to film the perpetrators’ faces. So the agents combed through the video, stopping and starting, doing screen captures of the young men—body shots, identifying marks like tattoos—and of distinctive features of the room—a glimpse of curtain, a sofa pillow.
It was the kind of thing that Singh was brilliant at, but her phone kept going straight to voicemail and she hadn’t yet called back. Roarke figured she had her plate full, analyzing the other video of Topher. It was hard not to think of the two videos as a matched set. Action and consequence. Crime and punishment.
“How did she even find this?” Epps asked at one point, meaning Mrs. Stephens.
Roarke didn’t know—it must have been well buried on Topher’s computer. But he had his suspicions. “She seems like the kind of woman who might keep tabs on her husband. He seems like the kind of husband you’d want to keep tabs on. Once you’re monitoring one person’s online accounts, it’s that much easier to start monitoring other people. Especially people you might feel some ownership of.”
Epps shook his head.
Roarke had to agree. It was no way to live.
The agents focused again on the screen.
“Wait—that.” Epps pointed, intent.
Roarke enlarged the shot.
It was a lamp with a naked woman as its base, doing an impossible backbend as she balanced the globe of the lamp on her foot.
Roarke captured a photo of it. If they ever found the room, this would be a strong identifier.
The video played on. Naked buttocks moving on top of a girl whose face they couldn’t see, while other male figures stand watching.
What is it about guys like this, that they get off on perpetrating this in a group?
Roarke suddenly sat up, pointed to a reflection in a glass tabletop, the briefest glimpse of the profile of one of the watchers. “That one.”
Epps rewound, froze the video. Roarke stared at the shadowy face on the screen. “That’s Foy. The vice president.”
“Good catch.”
“Let’s take a break.”
“I hear that.”
Epps stood, cracked his neck, while Roarke reached for his phone and checked the time. Unbelievably, it was almost four a.m.
“Get out of here. Get some sleep. We’ll go talk to Foy in the morning.”
“Twist my arm.”
Epps grabbed his jacket. As he left the room, he was already dialing his phone.
Alone, Roarke moved away from the screen, flopped down on the bed, closed his eyes. But of course his thoughts were racing too fast for him to just shut them down.
The video had evaporated any remaining sympathy for the abducted young man.
The rape had gone unremarked, unpunished. There was no doubt that even if it had gone to trial, the odds were emphatically in the rapists’ favor. Not just statistically. In the unlikely event that Topher Stephens were ever prosecuted, he would have the best defense money could buy. There would be many judges predisposed to sympathy. And Topher lived in a society that found it acceptable for the president of the United States to grab women by the pussy.
He may have gotten the only punishment he was ever going to get. A letter branded on his skin.
Or was Topher being branded with the second letter right now?
One a day. Six days, six letters total.
But he would live.
One a day.
The phrase kept surfacing in Roarke’s mind.
There were four rapists on the tape. Four participants.
One a day.
And his stomach turned over.
What if the abductors didn’t mean the letters?
He jumped to his feet to call Epps. “I was wrong,” he said into the phone. “We need to get over to the Tau house. Now.”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
They move on the sidewalk in the dark, faces concealed by hoodies. Slim shadow figures, one carrying something bulky—a heavy box draped with a blanket.
There is no one else on the street as they move up to the house on Del Playa. No sound but the ocean as it rumbles beyond and below the row of houses.
Beside the porch, one of the figures takes an aerosol can of paint from her pocket, quickly sprays out a word in large red letters on the front wall.
Now the figures turn to the porch.
Getting in through the front door is easy—they have keys.
Inside, they leave the door open a crack and move silently down the dark, empty corridor to slip into the dining room.
One of them throws the blanket off the object they are carrying.
A gas can.
The figure dumps the gas out over the tablecloths on several tables. The other follows, flicking a grill lighter and setting each tablecloth alight.
Then the drapes at the windows are doused and set on fire.
And they drop the gas can and run, soft footed, fleet, and deadly.
The hooded figures burst from the front door and run down the sidewalk, feet pounding, breath heaving, dodging down a side street to disappear into the dark.
For a moment the street is quiet, the satellite house is still . . .
Then a dining room window explodes.
A smoke alarm shrieks, shredding the silence.
The door of the house flies open again. Frat brothers in underwear, shorts, robes stumble out, coughing. Some are wrapped in towels, a few are naked.
Students rush out of the surrounding houses, screaming, staring . . .
As the house on Del Playa burns.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Roarke stared out through the windshield of the rental SUV.
The predawn streets were alive with students. It was impossible to drive at the speed limit. It seemed that all of Isla Vista was out, in various stages of undress. Half-asleep, half-drunk, half-conscious.
“What the hell?” Epps muttered from the driver’s seat. He slowed the car to a crawl.
Roarke lifted the phone, dialed the Isla Vista Foot Patrol, as Epps steered, peering intently out the windshield to avoid crushing coeds under the wheels.
Roarke listened to the desk sergeant’s briefing, thanked him tersely, put the phone down. “Someone firebombed the Tau satellite house,” he informed Epps. He felt sick. Are we too late?
Epps pulled into the first parking space he could find and the agents left the car and too
k off on foot toward Del Playa. The gawpers and weepers parted like the Red Sea, moving hastily aside as the agents shouldered their way down the street.
Fire engines and patrol cars lined the street outside the Tau house. Cherry lights bathed the onlookers in red and blue streaks. Roarke could see a broken window in the front of the house, curling smoke.
The agents moved through this denser crowd toward the front of the house, weaving their way through sorority girls clustered on the street in pajamas, lingerie, and robes, sobbing and wailing.
And staring and pointing at the word spray-painted across the front of the house:
RAPISTS
Roarke spotted Ethan in the crowd and shouldered through the onlookers up to him, grabbing his arm. “Ethan. What happened here?”
The young man looked at him, dazed. “I don’t know. Something exploded downstairs. There was smoke . . . alarms were going off.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Roarke demanded, tensely.
“I don’t know.”
Roarke turned on the street, looking at the chaos of students. “Listen up,” he ordered Ethan. “Round up the guys. Don’t let anyone go anywhere. Stay together. And do a roll call. Get hold of anyone who was in the house tonight.”
Ethan nodded, focusing.
“You have my number—”
“Yeah.”
“Go. Now.”
Half a block down the street, Jade weaves through the crowd of onlookers. She’s shed her black clothes and hoodie for a sexy white cami and painted-on jeans. She scans the shifting clump of lookie-loos, spots her target. He’s sleep mussed, dressed only in pajama bottoms and flip-flops.
She sidles up to him in the crowd, and speaks softly next to him, “accidentally” brushing his arm. “Jesus Christ. What happened?”
The frat boy sounds shaken. “I don’t know. There was an explosion. Fire . . .” He dissolves in coughing.
“God. Here. Drink some of this.” Jade hands him her juice bottle. He takes a swig, starts to hand it back. She puts her hand on his, gently. “Uh-uh. Drink it all. Seriously. You need it.”
He gives her a once-over, as if he’s finally seeing her. And liking what he sees. He tilts up the bottle and drinks.
Hunger Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 5) Page 21