Red Moon Rising

by J. T. Brannan

  But there is something about the confluence of events that seems strange. I am not a believer in coincidence at the best of times, and certainly not at the moment.

  Could Mike have some sort of relationship with Artie that we don’t know about? Could Artie be leading the boy down a dark path, using him in some way? And was the girl involved? I’ve been concentrating on male suspects, but is Victoria – if that is her name – also involved in some way? Does she have a relationship with Artie? I already know that his brother is interested in underage girls, but does Artie also like the younger type?

  Mike seems polite and clean-cut, but I don’t know what to make of Victoria; she seems colder somehow, but does that mean anything?

  Damn, I know I’m wasting my time. What did I tell myself earlier? Stick to the facts – Lynette is going to be at the shelter for lunch. I am going to intercept her, make sure that she is kept safe. Working out who was going to abduct her is beside the point, if she never gets abducted in the first place. I’ll leave the Jessica Fletcher bit to the real detectives.

  I leave the parking lot and head west, and soon start to pass single family homes and low-rise apartment blocks, covered parking lots and small businesses, as I approach Buttress Park. I wait to cross an intersection, industrial buildings rising to the south, and check my watch.

  10:46.

  I wonder if I will see Lynette walking this way, if it will be easier if I speak to her here, or at the shelter. On the street, I will be able to speak to her away from the prying eyes of Mike, Victoria and Artie; I can say what needs to be said, without fear of being overheard.

  And yet, out here, she will have no point of reference, I will be nothing more than a stranger, why would she even stop and listen to me?

  But if I speak to her at the shelter, she may assume I work there, it may give me the “in” I need to get her to listen.

  I realize that I am thinking about her as a victim, as my victim, and the thought makes me very uneasy. Why don’t I just club her on the back of the head, throw her in the back of my SUV, and take off with her?

  A sudden chill goes down my spine as I realize that maybe it is my SUV that she is seen in, at six o’clock this evening.

  But then again, I consider, the police report that states those facts was written when I’d already experienced October 8th the first time; and I was nowhere near Anchorage then, I was just looking after the horses at my ranch.

  I breathe out a sigh of relief; at least I’ve ruled myself out as a suspect, anyway.

  I pause then, still not having made it as far as the park. What’s the point of going, I ask myself? What good will it do me? Better to retrace my steps to the shelter, maybe just sit in my car and watch the comings and goings, see if anything seems out of the ordinary, if there are any more faces that I recognize. We’ve already had the Latimer twins, I wonder if anyone else from the valley will turn up? The Eberles and their six children? Judge Tom Judd, whose apartment is less than a mile away? Hell, will I see Douglas Menders – the man I killed, still alive – come down from his mountain retreat, will he be here too?

  I sigh, long and hard.

  Maybe I do still have a little bit of Jessica Fletcher left in me, after all?

  3

  My watch reads 11:23, and nothing much has happened since I came back to my car.

  There have been various comings and goings – people visiting and leaving the shelter, other people using the parking lot in much the same way as the story I gave the Latimers, leaving their cars and going elsewhere – but nothing of great importance, nothing that stands out as different, or in any way suspicious.

  Still no sign of Lynette.

  I start to yawn, but it catches in my throat as I notice something on the other side of the road, some sort of movement that is familiar to me, somewhere in my deep subconscious.

  And then I see that it is not something, it is someone.

  It is Paul.

  It is Paul Southland, ex-fiancé, soon-to-be-attempted-rapist.

  And what the hell is he doing here?

  But he is just walking along the sidewalk, in a daze, minding his own business and all but ignoring the shelter on the opposite side of the street.

  Ignoring the parking lot too, luckily.

  I watch him, entranced, like a voyeur, and I am reminded of Menders and his telescope – and suddenly I feel dirty, and ashamed. And yet I don’t stop watching him.

  Instead, without thinking, I turn on the car’s ignition and ease my SUV out of the parking lot, creep out onto East 3rd, and begin to follow Paul from a discreet distance.

  I remind myself that this might be yet another coincidence, that Paul was known to have been in Anchorage for several days before he called me, and I can’t believe I didn’t factor in the possibility that I might see him here.

  But then again, I tell myself, this is a city of three hundred thousand people, a city which spans a huge area of land; what are the chances of Paul just happening to be on this street, at this time? Especially as this is a man pulling down a six-figure salary, and there seems to be a definite dearth of five-star hotels in this immediate locality.

  So what is he doing here?

  I don’t know, and so I follow him, understanding that he is a man who is willing to use violence on women, a man who is walking past a location that a murder victim has recently stayed at, that will soon be revisited by that same murder victim, only hours before her final abduction.

  There is little traffic on the streets, and although this makes following Paul easier, I am concerned that he might see me; but he never looks upwards, his gaze instead fixed on the sidewalk as he shuffles along, a shadow of his former self.

  I know that he has not even been charged with a crime yet, should still be filled with the arrogant zeal of a New York lawyer, and I wonder why he is so downtrodden. Is what he told me true? Is he struggling with guilt over what he did to me? Has he only come to Alaska to try and make up with me?

  We turn south on Eagle Street, and I am thankful when other vehicles start to filter down, making me not so obvious. We pass the intersections for East 4th and East 5th, before Paul – head still down, feet shuffling – makes a slow right turn onto East 6th.

  The one-way street wants me to make a left-turn, away from the direction Paul is heading, but I stay at the lights long enough to see what must be his destination, a Sheraton hotel right there on the corner. It might not be five-star, but it’s good enough, I figure.

  And sure enough – as I sit patiently at the lights, watching like the good voyeur I am – just a few moments later, I see Paul passing through the glass doors into the hotel lobby, and I finally allow myself to make the left turn away from the high-rise building, before hooking north on Fairbanks Street and heading back to the shelter, quickly checking the time on my dashboard clock as I go.

  11:42.

  Not long to go now, not long at all, and I pull back into the shelter’s large parking lot at a quarter to twelve, hoping that I’ve not missed anything while I’ve been following Paul.

  Could it just be a coincidence? He looked troubled, alone, depressed. Maybe he’d just been out for a walk? I know he’d been struggling to build up the courage to call me, the courage to apologize, but what are the chances of me seeing him right here, right now?

  I shake the thought out of my mind, knowing that it doesn’t matter; not right now, anyway.

  What does matter is Lynette, and I know she will be here soon.

  Unless, I think desperately, she is already here?

  After all, I suppose I don’t actually know what the healthy, living version of Lynette Hyams looks like. All I have seen is the pale, beaten girl that died in my arms in the red, moonlit night, and the autopsy pictures taken after she was already dead.

  But what does the real Lynette look like?

  With a helpless shudder, I realize the truth of the matter.

  And the truth is, I don’t know what she looks like.

 
4

  12:14, and I see a girl on the far side of the street.

  A girl that could be Lynette Hyams.

  But I’ve thought that about every teenaged girl I’ve seen for the past half an hour – whether they were going in or out of the shelter, or whether they were just minding their own business somewhere nearby. For a few moments, at least, I’ve thought that they might all be Lynette.

  But this girl is different, I see that immediately. There is something hesitant about the way she moves, as if she is unsure where she is going, if she should be going there at all.

  She is petite, about five feet two, her build very small, child-like. Her hair is light brown and shoulder length, as the medical report described Lynette’s to be – although to me, when I saw her that one time, her hair was a dark, torn, mangled and blood-filled mess. She wears a short denim skirt, tights, dark vest and a leather jacket that is a couple of sizes too large for her; different from what she was dressed in this morning, according to the statements from the girls she’d shared breakfast with, but very similar to what she was/is seen in this afternoon, the last time anyone saw her. I guess the change of clothes means that she went home after having breakfast, which perhaps accounts for her not being seen. Unless she got changed somewhere else, which means that she might keep clothes at someone else’s place. Did she have another boyfriend somewhere? I remind myself that the police reports don’t offer any evidence to back this up, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And if it is true, is it possible that Dennis Hobson knows about it? Could he still be involved?

  I shake my head, clearing the thoughts as I examine the girl as she crosses the road, comes closer.

  I see a livid bruise on the left side of her face, know that this matches the damage supposedly done by her “boyfriend” the night before.

  This girl’s physical appearance matches Lynette’s, along with her clothing, her injury, and she is making her way toward the shelter for roughly the right time.

  It has to her, hasn’t it?

  I sigh, as I reach for the door handle.

  There’s only one way to find out.

  “Lynette!” I call out as she meanders through the parking lot toward the shelter’s main entrance.

  The girl turns to me, surprised and suspicious. Perhaps a little nervous too. And why not? She is fifteen years old, ran away to escape an unhappy home life at the age of thirteen, only to be recruited and exploited by a violent and abusive pimp, made to turn tricks in Spenard to fund the drug habit he’s given her.

  I have to remind myself that her view of life is going to be seriously affected by what she has done, what she has seen, and I need to be careful in how I approach her, what I say to her. Girls like Lynette have a sixth sense for cops, and treat most people with outright suspicion.

  I think back to my time in the Child Abuse Unit of the DA’s Special Victims Bureau, of those girls I counselled, interviewed and represented. They were tough times, tough cases, and getting information out of those poor victims was very often time-consuming and tortuous. But in the end, I had normally managed it; the trick was – despite my position of authority – getting the girls to trust me.

  It had sometimes taken a long time to build that trust though, I remember – sometimes days, more often weeks.

  How long do I have now? I ask myself as I approach Lynette across the parking lot. A single afternoon?

  But it’s better than nothing, I know that much; and I am going to do everything I can with what little time I have.

  “Do I know you, lady?” Lynette says, and the effect is unnerving. It is the first time I have heard her voice; before, she was a lifeless husk, dead in my arms, photographs on an autopsy table, a corpse on a mortuary slab. Even when she was still breathing, as she’d run across those fields and collapsed, she was little more than a ghost, dead already. But now here she is, alive and vital, and the difference is hard to come to terms with.

  I thought I would be delighted to see her alive, not yet the tortured and broken mess that she becomes – might become – but instead I am disturbed, as if I am messing with powers and laws that are beyond me. Seeing Lynette walking across this parking lot flies in the face of logic, what my own brain tells me happened; I saw this girl die, I saw what happened to her. How can she still be alive?

  But no matter the reason, I tell myself, she is alive; and it is up to me to keep her that way.

  I almost say Not yet in reply to her question, but realize that it is too cryptic, and – although true – would set alarm bells ringing in her head.

  “No,” I say instead, with a low-key smile. “No, you don’t know me.” A thousand thoughts fly through my mind, what to say, how to approach her – I can’t believe I’ve not gone through this before in my mind, prepared for how to deal with it – but they suddenly, perfectly consolidate into a single, unified strategy. “I have an offer to make you,” I say, just a single vehicle between us now. “If you can prove you are Lynette Hyams, daughter of Kim Gaskell and Sydney Baker.”

  I can’t believe I’m using the same ruses as a predator, luring her in with an offer, while making her want to prove herself to me.

  “Are you a cop?” she says, eyes darting left and right, body tense, ready to run if she has to.

  “Do I look like a cop?” I say.

  “Yeah,” Lynette answers immediately.

  “Well,” I admit, “I guess I work in a related field. I’m an attorney.”

  She starts to back up, eyes nervous. “I’m not going home,” she says. “I’m never going home, fuck that. Fuck that.”

  “No,” I say, moving in for the kill like all good predators do, “you’ve got me wrong. I’m not here to take you back. I’m here to make a financial settlement with you.”

  “A . . . what?”

  “Money,” I say with my low-key smile. “I’m here to offer you money. If you want it.”

  Lynette’s eyes move left and right, nervous again, but they settle back on me more quickly this time, and I know I’ve got her.

  The fish is on the hook, and now I just have to reel her in.

  “So, what do I have to do?” Lynette asks me, sniffing hard through long-abused nostrils.

  We are in the Red Chair Café on East 4th, sitting at a table for two opposite the deli counter. I sip on a latte, while Lynette has already finished three cups of filter coffee. She is nervous, perpetually highly-strung, and the caffeine surely won’t help, but I suppose it’s not the worst thing she could be taking; on the short drive here (I didn’t want to leave my car outside the shelter forever), she’d already smoked four roll-ups, and I am just waiting for her to visit the bathroom to “powder her nose”. Her habits and mannerisms are those of a habitual cocaine user, and I know this is almost certainly how Hobson controls her.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I tell her. “Not really, anyway.” I take another sip of my latte, watching as she looks nervously toward the door. Her movements are fewer now, slower, and I can feel the trust building. Money is always a powerful motivator, and for someone like Lynette – despite her age, a hardened negotiator, a street-savvy business-woman in her own right – it is the main motivator, the primary drive, the one thing that she needs above all else.

  “Like hell,” she says, understandably doubtful. “There’s always somethin’ you need to do.” She touches the side of her face reflexively, touching the purple welt left there by her boyfriend, then realizes what she’s doing and pulls her hand away.

  “Not in this case,” I assure her. “Well, nothing that you probably don’t want to do anyway.”

  “What you mean?” she asks, but I pause as lunch arrives – the gargantuan ‘Tesla’ burger for her, the Turkey Brie sandwich for me.

  I watch as she devours the burger with gusto, fries and fixings all going down with it, and I have to reconsider my view of her as an out-of-control addict. Addicts have poor appetites, don’t they?

  I wait until a natural pause in her onslaught �
� as she stops eating long enough to pour more sauce over her fries – and then answer her question.

  “Do you like it here?” I ask. “In Anchorage? Do you like what you do?”

  “What I do?” she asks, looking up from her sauce-covered fries. “What the hell you think I do, lady?”

  “Lynette,” I say softly, “I know what you do. Remember, you’re not in trouble. But are you happy?”

  “Well,” she says, “you say you know what I do. So why don’t you work out if I’m happy or not, yeah? If you’re some sort of hot-shit attorney, shouldn’t be too hard.”

  I take a bite of my sandwich, deciding what to say next. It is a balancing act, to try and get her onto my side without alienating her, or making her think I want something. I realize I’m lying, maybe even manipulating her, but what else am I going to say, how else am I going to approach this?

  Excuse me, but I know that you are going to be abducted this evening, and then raped and tortured over several days by two or more people, and – even though you escape – the damage you suffer is already too severe, and you die in a snowy field. And how do I know? Well, I’ve seen it before, you die in my arms. I’ve come back in time to rescue you. Come with me.

  Honest as that story might be, it won’t achieve anything except getting her to run.

  “Okay,” I say as I put the sandwich down, “you’re not happy, you don’t like it here, but you probably feel like you don’t have any options left.”

  “Well, give the lawyer a cigar,” Lynette says through a mouthful of burger. I don’t blame her for her abrasive attitude; it’s actually much better than some of my previous clients’.

  “Let me ask you another question,” I say. “Do you remember Richard Tyson?”