Where a blond woman is on top of a platform the size of a king bed. Naked, blindfolded. Restrained in a dog collar and chains. Singh catches her breath, and backs away from the crack in the window. Her legs feel unsteady; she can barely think through the horror.
Lindstrom steps forward, looks her full in the face. “You need to focus,” she says flatly.
Singh realizes she is trembling with rage, and knows Lindstrom is right. She forces herself to breathe, to steady herself.
“Yes,” Singh answers, low. “I am with you. We must—”
Lindstrom goes still, holds up a warning hand.
Singh hears the crunch of slow footsteps in the sand outside the cubicle they are in.
Lindstrom meets Singh’s eyes, steps against the wall beside the doorframe so she is concealed from the doorway.
Singh reaches for her sidearm, but Lindstrom shakes her head quickly and shows her the Taser.
Singh nods, breathes in, and faces the doorway.
A man’s shadow looms up in the opening.
“Well, well. Whatta we got here?” he says, and steps into the room, his weapon in a loose grip.
Singh has two seconds to register that he is not Ortiz.
Then he leaps in a convulsive shudder, as Lindstrom tases him from behind.
He chokes out a garbled cry and drops to the ground, seizing in pain. Before Singh can react, Lindstrom steps to his jerking body, steps on his chest, stoops to grasp his hair in her fingers, and cuts his throat with a hunting knife.
She turns to Singh, with hands dripping blood.
Singh stares down at the dead man, her heart pounding out of control in her chest. He is young, dressed in olive khakis and a T-shirt.
Troll. Rapist.
And she feels no pity.
“The guard,” Lindstrom says. “One of them.”
The thought is unnerving.
How many more does Ortiz have out there, helping him? How many are we up against?
“I only saw these two,” Lindstrom answers, as if Singh has spoken aloud. She crouches beside the guard, starts to strip off his hat and jacket. “This is how we go in.”
“It should be me,” Singh says.
Lindstrom looks up from the body.
“The skin color. His hair,” Singh says. “It should be me.” Her thoughts are racing, calculating. She will play the guard, bringing one of the customers in. With both guards now dead, there is only Ortiz and the obese young man behind the camera inside the lobby . . .
She peels off the parka she is wearing so she can exchange it for the guard’s clothes.
Lindstrom stands, slowly. She is staring at her, peculiarly. No, not at her. At her clothes, her formal suit.
“You,” she says.
She reaches out and touches Singh’s lapel. A shudder goes through Singh at the touch.
“It’s you,” Lindstrom says, and there is something like wonder in her voice. “You’re the one.” Her eyes are very far away. “I have to tell you,” she says.
Then she leans in, and Singh can feel her breath against her cheek as she whispers something that makes her blood run cold.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
In the dark concrete cube of the laundry room, Singh and Cara take the walkie-talkie off the dead guard. Moving in tandem, they stand at the doorway on either side, and survey the dark hotel grounds.
Sand. Wind. Tumbleweeds. And the moon.
Lindstrom speaks, barely audible. “There are two customers standing outside the lobby door. The guard told them to wait.”
“Two? That is all?”
“Two. For now.”
So, quickly, quietly, they form a plan. The obese young man is probably armed, but is no great threat. It is Ortiz they must neutralize. In whispers, they talk it through from the hunters’ point of view.
Then the two women leave the concrete square of the laundry room. Miles and miles from any town, with any electric lighting a distant memory, the night is pitch black, the grounds lit only by moonlight. A desert wind surges and retreats, rustling the palm fronds.
The women circle the motel around the back, heading for the palm grove, where Lindstrom has stashed the hunters’ truck.
They sprint together over the moon-drenched sand toward the pickup. Singh feels a primal rush of adrenaline as they run, and there is more than fear in the feeling. At the vehicle, they take positions on either side of the truck and rip open the cover of the bed. Lindstrom strips off her hunter’s parka and throws it across to Singh, who pulls it on over the one she is already wearing.
Lindstrom climbs into the truck bed, sits with her back against the cab. Singh uses her own handcuffs to cuff Lindstrom to the rail, her hands above her head, and as Lindstrom closes her eyes and sags as if unconscious, Singh uses the hunter’s phone to take a photo of the “hostage,” angling the shot to show her hands securely cuffed.
Then Singh unlocks Lindstrom, and Lindstrom positions her hands back on the rail as if she is still cuffed.
Singh gets into the cab and starts the truck, drives it out of the palm grove, into the main strip outside the motel—but not all the way to the lobby. She parks some distance away, out of sight of the two customers waiting outside the main building. She scans the grounds around her through the windshield.
No new cars. No human figures stirring.
She turns to the back window, sees Lindstrom in place in the back.
She shuts off the engine, and quickly types an email for Ortiz on the hunter’s phone.
We have the package outside.
She attaches the photo of Lindstrom to the message, and sends.
In a moment, a response comes back.
The guard will bring you in.
Singh types:
What guard?
And she waits, looking out through the back window of the truck. Lindstrom’s body is a slumped shadow above her.
She breathes in, turns away, and glances down at the phone. No email has come back.
She slides across the seat, gets out of the cab on the passenger side, and stands so her body is shielded by the truck, but her silhouette in the parka and hunter’s cap is visible from the lobby building.
The tableau is complete: Lindstrom in the back of the truck, blond hair shining in the moonlight, apparently chained to the rail of the truck. The hunter in parka and cap, standing beside the truck.
Singh’s heart is racing as she imagines Ortiz leaving the lobby, striding out to the edge of the building, peering around the corner to take the picture in . . .
And then she hears his voice call out in the dark, harsh, commanding. “Let me see your hands.”
Singh slowly raises her hands in the air for him to see.
Chapter Eighty-Eight
In the black of night, so many miles from civilization, the sky was crazy with stars.
Roarke and Epps stood in the wind beside their car at the desert crossroads outside the House of Missing Persons.
What could they do? Miles in the middle of nowhere. No idea where to go next.
Epps’ voice was dry, desperate. “There’s only one road around the whole Sea, isn’t there? It has to be close.”
But which direction?
Two ways to go.
With Singh’s life at stake, and Cara’s, they were supposed to flip a coin and decide?
Cara, Roarke thought, helplessly.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
He was frozen for a moment, stunned. Then he grabbed for it, hoping against hope that it was Singh.
He stared down at the number, and his stomach turned over.
It was his own number.
His old number.
The phone that Cara stole from him on the beach.
“What?” Epps demanded. “What is it?”
Roarke picked up to Cara’s husky, emotionless voice. “Your agent is here. Ortiz has her.”
In a split second his elation turned to cold fear for Singh.
Epps was staring
at him, fraught.
“Where are you?” he managed. There was the ping of a text message and he checked the screen to see GPS coordinates.
Cara spoke again. “An abandoned motel on 111. Men are driving up and blinking headlights in a code. Two blinks, a pause, then two more. A guard will come up.”
“I understand—”
“Hurry.”
“We will,” he said, and then quickly—“Cara. Thank you.”
Chapter Eighty-Nine
Roarke drove like the wind.
The coordinates were ten minutes’ drive from Bombay Beach. An abandoned motel complex in a grove of scruffy palms, doors and windows boarded up, connecting roads turned to sand and tumbleweeds.
The grounds were so dark the agents didn’t see the complex until they were right on top of it.
Epps was raw with tension as Roarke turned into the drive. The agents stared out at an old-time MOTEL sign to the left, above the roof of a long, low building. The lobby.
Roarke slowed the car to a stop on the unpaved road, and reached for the headlights to give the signal.
“Two blinks, a pause, then two more.”
The agents waited in the dark car, engine rumbling, their breathing jagged with anxiety. Around and above them, palm fronds rippled in the wind.
There was no movement in the dark ahead of them. No one coming forward to meet them.
The men exchanged a glance, drew their weapons, got out of the SUV, and stepped into the wind. Roarke had left the headlights on.
“Roarke,” Epps said hoarsely, staring ahead to the edge of the light. Roarke swiveled, raising his Glock—
A body was sprawled on the sandy road, a male body, with a hunting cap. His throat cut, blackly gaping.
“Cara,” Roarke said.
The agents turned as one and ran through the wind toward the lobby, feet pounding in the sand.
Near the corner of the building, Roarke stopped, held up a hand. Epps halted behind him.
There were voices on the other side of the wall.
The agents brandished their weapons, went low and high, rounded the corner of the building.
Two male shadows stood against the concrete wall, smoking.
Roarke and Epps stopped in full stance, holding them in sights. The men straightened, dumbfounded. “What the fuck—” one started.
“Federal agents. Get your hands in the air,” Roarke ordered.
The one farthest from them wheeled around to run. Epps leaped after him, tackled him, while Roarke seized the other one, twisting him around, shoving him face first against the wall to cuff him.
“How many inside?” he said against the man’s neck.
“I don’t know,” the man sputtered. Roarke kneed him in the back of the knees to topple him to the ground, shoved his head down in the sand.
“How many?”
“I haven’t been in,” the man whined. “The guy said to wait outside.”
Roarke twisted to look up and around. The lobby door was under a concrete overhang. There was no light from inside.
Fifteen feet away, Epps had the other man down in the sand and cuffed.
Roarke touched the muzzle of his Glock to the cheek of the man under him. “Not a word. Not a sound.”
Roarke and Epps burst through the front door into the motel lobby, weapons aimed in front of them, covering each other as they swiveled and frantically surveyed the setup.
Roarke took it in in flashes.
The video equipment. An overweight young man slumped and still in the chair behind the monitors, a dark pool at his feet.
And the platform in the center of the klieg lights. The surface red, drenched in blood.
A naked body was spread-eagled on the top of the platform, bloodied beyond recognition.
Roarke got one horrific glimpse of bronze skin, black hair . . . Epps cried out beside him . . .
Singh. Oh my God, no.
But then both men focused, and moved forward as one to stare down at the corpse on the platform: a man, gutted, sliced from neck to pelvis, skin open to mangled organs.
“It’s Ortiz,” Roarke said, and felt the flood of relief, even as his stomach twisted at the carnage.
But where . . . what the hell . . .
He spun to look around him at the concrete space.
A shaky voice called from behind the counter. “Damien.”
Epps wheeled around, and ran. Roarke was right behind him. They barreled through the open wall frame.
A body writhed on the floor, struggling up to sitting. A slim figure in a dark and formal suit. Bound. Hooded.
Alive.
Roarke staggered, his legs buckling in relief.
Epps dropped to his knees in front of her, reached for her, pulling off the hood. Singh’s dark hair spilled out . . . and Epps wrapped her in his arms, held her.
“I’m here. I’m here.”
Roarke turned away with stinging eyes, leaving them.
In the main room, he paced the perimeter of the lobby, checking every corner. The young man behind the video monitors was dead, his throat cut. Roarke was even more unnerved to find the cameras were on, live, still broadcasting footage of the platform and Ortiz’s gutted body.
It would come as a shock to the men who had paid to see Cara raped, live.
Maybe a lesson.
But as Roarke walked the room, slowing his frantic breath, a nagging feeling overcame him. Cara had called him. Had summoned them to Singh’s rescue.
She wouldn’t have left Singh like this. Not bound. Not in these circumstances.
He wheeled around on the cement floor and strode out the door, into the dark.
He jogged out past the MOTEL sign, stopped on the sand between palm trees, looking around him.
The tumbleweeds shivered in the wind. The stars shimmered in the sky. The moon was so bright it was like heat on the sand.
And he spoke to the darkness.
“Cara. I know you’re here.”
He turned, under the swaying shadows of palm trees and the full moon and the hundred million stars.
“I can feel you.”
And he could. He could feel her in the trees, in the wind, in the earth, in the moonlight. In his blood. In his heart.
He waited, listened, heard only the keening of the wind.
He paused . . . and then said it. “I always feel you.”
The wind swirled around him, and took his words out to the night.
TWO DAYS LATER
Chapter Ninety
It wasn’t until the agents were back in San Francisco that they learned the fates of Topher Stephens and Alex Foy.
Lam and Stotlemyre’s investigation of the branding iron registration had led to a stable in the Santa Ynez Valley, unused for years.
Inside, Huerte and the Isla Vista police found the bodies. The two young fraternity brothers, naked, throats slashed, and Foy’s body stabbed repeatedly, piled in a heap in front of the altar of Santa Muerte from the video. Written large across each body in red lipstick was the single word, RAPIST.
There were photos posted online—of course there were photos. From all angles. Eerie, deadly. As blunt a warning as it could be.
Bitch claimed credit.
“One a day.”
“We will end rapists until rape ends.”
Roarke had no time to wonder who the killers were. He had a much, much more pressing problem.
Singh debriefed in the office, as centered and serene as always as she told her story.
Strange didn’t begin to describe it.
She had been approached the evening before in the garage of her loft building by a woman claiming to be a former member of Bitch. Not Andrea Janovy, or anyone Singh had ever been in contact with before.
Singh had drawn her weapon, had taken all precautions . . . but as the woman spoke, Singh became convinced that she was telling the truth.
Just from a few minutes’ conversation, Singh could see that the woman was knowledgeable about do
xxing campaigns and cyber systems. The woman said that she had left the group after they began discussing murder. When she began to outline in detail how Bitch had set up the campus attacks, Singh suggested they go elsewhere to talk, and the woman agreed.
Then a male figure had appeared in the shadows across the garage. Shots were exchanged. A windshield shattered. Singh heard a sucking chest wound, was sure she’d hit someone.
Then she was struck from behind.
She had regained consciousness to find herself hooded and bound in the trunk of her own vehicle, a harrowing journey that ended at the abandoned motel outside Bombay Beach.
Ortiz and another man had taken her into the motel, still bound and hooded. They hadn’t beaten her. They hadn’t touched her. Ortiz had forced some pills on her that put her to sleep.
She woke several hours later in the room Roarke and Epps had found her in, behind the lobby counter. She could hear the sounds of an altercation outside, someone entering the lobby. From the subsequent scuffle she deduced someone had killed Ortiz and some other man in the room. The killer may have been Lindstrom, but she couldn’t say. She hadn’t seen. It had been very quick.
Then she heard something being dragged around, what she now understood was the staging of Ortiz’s body on the platform.
And then there was the sound of the door as the killer left, and silence . . . until Roarke and Epps burst in some fifteen to twenty minutes later.
All perfectly, reasonably told. When questioned, she never wavered on the details.
Roarke didn’t believe it.
It was true that she had been drugged. She had been roughed up. He and Epps had found her bound and hooded. And there had been some kind of gunfight in the garage of her building. Her service weapon had been fired. Lam and Stotlemyre had processed the scene, had found the windshield of a car had been shattered by a bullet, and there were traces of blood on the concrete floor some distance away.
But every other thing she said, Roarke doubted.
She sat in the conference room, serene and still, and he was certain she was lying.
Hunger Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 5) Page 26