Red Moon Rising

by J. T. Brannan

  I hold Lynette in my arms, look into those dead eyes, shallow in that pale face; watch in wonder as they light back up, life flooding her body, rejuvenating her, revitalizing her, and I am hit by a wave of relief and awe, excitement and amazement.

  Because Lynette Hyams . . . is alive.

  DAY SIX

  1

  My eyes open slowly, painfully; it takes several moments to gather myself, for the inner world to fade away, for the outside world to take its hold.

  And when it does, I fly out of bed like I’ve been scalded.

  There are so many questions, I am overwhelmed.

  Where am I, what time is it, what day is it, what date is it?

  I’m no longer in the hotel, I see that instantly; no, I am in my own room, back in Alaska, back in Palmer. I hear birds cheeping outside, look out of the window and see a clear blue sky, the late autumn sun low on the horizon, just rising; no snow anywhere.

  I check my phone, look at the screen, take several moments to process the facts.

  It is October 8th, nearly an entire week before Lynette Hyams dies on my doorstep.

  October 8th – the last day anyone sees her, the day she is abducted.

  She is still alive on October 8th.

  She is still alive.

  And this might be perhaps my one and only chance to save her.

  I get in the shower, glad that I don’t have a hangover, glad that I’m waking up in my October 8th body and not the one that would have woken up in that Gainesville hotel room; that one would have been in a world of alcohol-induced pain. But mentally, I still had a long, long day yesterday, and a shower – turning the temperature from scalding hot to freezing cold as I go – is exactly what I need to blow the cobwebs out.

  I towel myself off, blow-dry my hair, and change into fresh clothes, suddenly feeling like a million dollars.

  As I make my way downstairs, I try and piece together what Ben told me the day before (or more than a week in the future, to be more accurate).

  There are several witnesses that place Lynette in the Spenard district on the 7th, working the streets for her pimp – and on-again, off-again boyfriend – Dennis Hobson.

  She’d had several “dates” that night, some of them in the cars of her customers, others in a motel room that Hobson rents for the purpose. As far as could be done, Ben assured me, these customers had been identified and chased up by Anchorage PD and the ABI.

  She normally lives in an apartment on West Benson Boulevard – again, paid for by Hobson – but apparently, she wasn’t there last night. Further witness statements suggest that she had an argument with Hobson over payment for her last trick of the evening, a car date. She claimed that the guy never paid her, Hobson claimed that she was holding out on him and gave her a couple of slaps, right there in the middle of the street.

  Follow-up ABI investigation showed that instead of going home, she had spent the night at . . . the Anchorage Street Shelter.

  Run by the one-and-only Arthur Jenkins.

  Did he know her?

  It’s hard to say, because apparently, she signed in with a false name; it was only the testimony of a couple of friends that alerted the ABI to the fact, and – on following it up – it was confirmed that she did stay there. Signed in at 03:21, was out by 07:23.

  I know that I’m already too late to catch her at breakfast – witnesses had seen her eating at Kay’s Family Restaurant on Spenard Road with two of her girlfriends between 7:30 and 8:15, and it is already past nine.

  Past nine . . .

  Damn! It’s been so long since I’ve had a normal routine, I’ve completely forgotten about my horses, my dogs. Amy’s not here – in this reality, I’ve had no reason to call the AER yet – and I’ve completely forgotten my responsibilities.

  I race downstairs, let the dogs out, and pick up the phone. Dawn answers, and except for mention of the police – I substitute “medical problem” – it is almost a facsimile version of the conversation I had/have with her in a few days’ time. She promises to send someone over, and I ask if Amy is free; I already know she’ll do a good job.

  I feel guilty, but there are more important things to do; the horses are all out at pasture, and it’s mostly just grooming and caring-time I’ll be missing out on. A couple of them have meds to take, but not until dinner. And it’s not as if I could have set my alarm – how did I know I’d be waking up on this day? The last time I lived October 8th, I was up with the larks, my own personal body-clock getting me up just after six-thirty, like it always does; always did, anyway. I don’t think my body-clock is working at all anymore.

  I grab some toast, pour food into the dogs’ bowls, and wonder about exactly where I’m going to go first.

  Lynette’s girlfriends corroborated having breakfast with her on Spenard Road, and they are the same girls who told police that she’d spent the night at the shelter. They knew what Hobson had done the night before, and their statements said that Lynette’s face was slightly bruised on one side from being slapped. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but had admitted to spending the previous night at the shelter.

  There were two interesting things here already – Dennis Hobson is a proven abuser, a man who almost certainly recruited Lynette into her life of hooking for dates on Spenard, and who uses violence to keep her there. He is an obvious suspect, although Ben says the reports exonerate him to a large extent – he’s over in Anchorage, and enough people have seen him there in the week leading up to Lynette’s death to give him a pretty good alibi. It is assumed that Lynette must have been being held close to where she died – and even if it is further than people give her credit for, it is unlikely in the extreme that she would have made it, naked and half-dead, from quite so far as Anchorage.

  And that’s not to mention the fact that – unknown to everyone except me – Douglas Menders claims to have seen the killer or killers in the direct vicinity of the hamlet in which she was found.

  But Artie works at the shelter – helps run the shelter, actually – and he also lives right there in the community. His brother gives me the creeps, and I still can’t rule Menders out entirely.

  I feel a wave of nauseating, gut-wrenching guilt as I think of Menders, of how I killed him, then remember that I didn’t – he’s actually still alive, at this point in time, anyway. I can’t have killed him, if he’s not dead. Can I?

  I wipe the thought away, getting my mind back onto Lynette, and what happened to her. I need to concentrate on the facts, nothing but the facts. That’s what’s going to help, not wild suppositions.

  So, what are the facts?

  Lynette left the restaurant at about a quarter-past-eight according to the girls – security cameras have it as 08:17 – and then her whereabouts are unaccounted for, at least for the rest of the morning. Again, cameras have her heading north on Spenard after leaving her girlfriends, but there is nothing else on record until she signs back into the Anchorage Street Shelter at 12:21, using the same false name that she supplied the night before.

  She eats lunch there, briefly sees a doctor about her facial injuries, and is gone by 13:56.

  Ben’s notes indicate that the doctor tried to help her with other issues – she admitted to having symptoms of venereal disease, and was clearly a drug-user – but Lynette distrusted the medical services, and left before help could be given.

  Larraine was off that day, but Artie – in subsequent interviews – admitted to having met her, although he only knew her as “Jermaine Tracy”, the name she’d given at the time; according to Ben, he was as surprised as anyone when the police told him that the dead girl was the same one who had eaten lunch at his workplace only days before.

  Her exact whereabouts after leaving the shelter are unknown, but several witnesses have her back looking for dates along West Northern Lights Boulevard. She was seen outside the Spenard Roadhouse in the early afternoon, and again by the Billiard Palace Bar at about five o’clock. According to friends and colleagues, these weren�
��t her usual hangouts, and might indicate that she was avoiding her pimp-boyfriend, who reportedly runs his girls along the main drag of Spenard Road.

  The last time she was seen, was by one of the girls working Northern Lights, who claims she saw a young woman of Lynette’s description getting into a silver SUV – make and license plate unknown – at about six o’clock that evening.

  This evening, I remind myself, the urgency a burning pain in my gut.

  I think about the ranches in my hamlet outside Palmer, think about where she could have been taken.

  Obviously, not to my own house.

  Then there is Larraine’s, but she lives with her two sons and – from talking to her – I know she doesn’t have a boyfriend at the moment.

  There are some other farmsteads nearby, but – I have to admit – I don’t know much about them.

  I know Tom Judd is retired, and – as well as the ranch – he also has an apartment in Anchorage; but even though that is where Lynette went missing from, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

  The Eberles have six children, and I find it hard to imagine that they would have the energy or time for anything else, especially as they are one of the few families in the area to run their farm on a full-time basis.

  Phil and Nancy Latimer also have children, but they only have two – twins, a boy and a girl, in the final year of high school. I wonder, briefly, about the boy; he’ll be about seventeen, more than capable of overpowering someone like Lynette. Could he be acquainted with Menders? Could Menders be controlling him? Or is it a father-son thing? Sick, but certainly not unheard of in cases like this.

  But I am sure the ABI and Anchorage PD would have turned up something, if they were involved. Wouldn’t they?

  I almost forget about Bill and Rachel Townsend, who live in the hand-built ranch at the furthest edge of the valley. They keep themselves to themselves, and are rarely seen; it might seem suspicious, but they are both in their late seventies and it is entirely understandable that they are not constantly racing around anymore.

  And then, of course, there is Artie’s house – a man who knew the victim, and who was one of the last people to see her alive, and whose brother has been in trouble for sexual misdemeanors with underage girls already.

  But, I remind myself, all of the homes in this area were searched, from top to bottom – and not just by the Palmer PD, but by the Anchorage cops, and the ABI too. If there was anything to find, they would have found it.

  Which makes me wonder about two possibilities – either Lynette walked a lot further than we thought, and Menders was just making things up; or else there is some hidden site out here, a chamber in the woods, or buried in a field somewhere.

  I look out of the kitchen window, into the sun-bleached valley, and the thought chills me to the bone.

  Those cryptic entries in Menders’ journal come back to me – ab3-3, ab3-4, ab3-5 . . . how many bodies might be buried out there?

  Another littel star for their constellation . . .

  But how many littel stars are there?

  The thought is sobering, and I bring my mind quickly back to the matter at hand; I’ve started speculating again, and that’s not going to help Lynette.

  No.

  Fate – or the Red Moon, whatever it is, whatever it wants – has brought me back here on this day, at this time, for a reason.

  I already have the one important fact that might save this girl.

  She is going to be at the Anchorage Street Shelter from 12:21 until 13:56.

  I am going to be there too.

  And I am going to convince her to leave Alaska forever.

  Before it is too late.

  2

  It is strange, I think, as I park my car in the big lot that borders the shelter; the people I have met over the past few days, the experiences I have gone through, none of it is real anymore, at least not in the conventional sense.

  There has been no party, I’ve not been in jail, not slept with Ben, not been to Florida, not been attacked by Paul.

  None of it has happened . . . and yet it has.

  I try and clear my mind of these thoughts, knowing that they cannot help me, can only serve to obfuscate my sense of mission, my sense of purpose.

  I need to find Lynette Hyams, get to her before the predator does.

  Nothing else matters.

  It is half past ten, and the sky is still blue overhead, although a chill in the air heralds the arrival of next week’s snowstorms.

  The drive to Anchorage took under an hour, and I know I now have about two hours until Lynette arrives at the shelter. Out of my car, I look around the lot, notice that every other vehicle is an SUV. Lynette could literally have gone with anyone; or the last person she was seen with might not have been the person who abducted her anyway, might just have been another trick. Her real abductor could have taken her at a later time, at a different location.

  The shelter has got to be my best shot of getting to her, I tell myself. Hasn’t it?

  I wonder what to do until she gets here. Hang around? Wander about this area, get a feel for it? Head on toward Spenard Road? The shelter is located on 3rd Avenue in the northern downtown area, near Buttress Park; I know that if I head west, then drop down south on the Parkway, I’ll eventually get to Spenard. It’s more than three miles though, would probably take me at least an hour, and there’s no guarantee that I would see Lynette on the way. If she’s walking – which is possible, given the time – then she might not use the main road, might use all sorts of alternate routes; and she might not be walking anyway, she might still be meeting up with customers or friends, might have one of them drop her off at the shelter. And then there are taxis and buses to think about too.

  No, I decide, the chances of coming across her as she makes her way to the shelter are slim at best; I’m probably better off hanging around the immediate area. But I don’t want to go inside the shelter, don’t want to take the risk of Artie seeing me, asking me questions. How would I explain what I was doing there?

  “Ms. Hudson?” a voice says, surprising me. “What are you doing here?”

  What the hell?

  I turn, see the Latimer twins just two cars away from me.

  What am I doing here? I think. What the hell are you doing here?

  They might be boy and girl, but I’m not even sure which of them spoke; the voice was neither particularly male or female, perfectly neutral. It was what I’d noticed when I’d first moved to Palmer, when I’d gone door-to-door to meet my neighbors with a handbasket of homemade food and a bottle of wine, and had met them for the first time. It was what I’d noticed again at Artie’s party; although I had to remember that, as far as they were concerned, we’d still not had that party yet.

  “Hi,” I say eventually, trying my best to sound relaxed; I even attempt a smile, and hope it doesn’t look too forced. “Do you work here too?” I ask, ignoring their question with one of my own.

  “No,” the boy – Mike, is that his name? – replies, as both of them walk across the lot toward me, “we’re just here as part of a school works project, social care stuff, you know? Larraine said to come down, they can always use another set of hands.”

  “Is Larraine working today?” I ask, thinking that it was her day off.

  “No,” the girl answers. I’m pretty sure her name is Victoria, but I could be wrong. “But Artie knows we’re coming in. Just to help over lunch, give us an idea of how places like this operate.”

  “You here to see Artie?” the boy I think is called Mike asks.

  “No,” I say, maybe too quickly. “I’m meeting someone at Buttress Park about a horse that needs taking in, this was just the closest place to leave the car.”

  “Oh,” the girl says, smile fixed on her face, unreadable. “Okay then. Well, I hope it goes well.” She turns to her brother. “Come on Mike, we need to make a move, we’ve only got a few minutes.”

  “Sure,” he tells her, before turning to me and shrugging
apologetically. “Sorry, but we’ve got to help set up for lunch,” he says. “Hope your meeting goes well.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Hope your lunch goes well too.” It is a poor response, I realize, a bland platitude that means nothing, and I am embarrassed that I can find nothing better to say. How did I ever manage to fight off the best defense attorneys money could buy, in the highest courts of New York County? Back then, my words were weapons; now they are empty and weak.

  Like me.

  No, my inner voice fires back immediately.

  Not like you. You are strong. You have a mission. You are strong, and you are going to do it.

  Yes.

  Hell, I am strong, I am going to do it, and doubts be damned.

  Before I realize, the twins have waved their farewells, turned on their heels and already started on their way to the large, red-brick building that houses the Anchorage Street Shelter.

  They pass their car on the way, and I notice that it is yet another SUV, a silver Toyota. Does anyone ever buy anything else these days?

  The presence of the twins here is troubling, to say the least. They hadn’t even really figured into my considerations before. Yes, I’d realized that Mike – that is his name – was certainly old enough and strong enough to have carried out the attack on Lynette, but at the same time I had discounted him very quickly. After all, he was only seventeen, and there was such a brutality about Lynette’s torture, I find it hard to accept that someone so young could have had anything to do with it.

  And yet is it just a coincidence that he is here, on the same day that Lynette is here, the same day that she goes missing?

  Slowly, I wander away from the shelter, following West 3rd toward Buttress Park; they might be watching me, and I don’t want to appear too suspicious. They are bound to tell Artie about me being here, and I suppose my presence at the shelter might be no more suspicious than theirs. After all, both Artie and Lorraine – neighbors of the Latimers – work here, and work placements are normally arranged through personal contacts, aren’t they?