Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  And as he stared at her, lost in her, the metal door behind her opened, and it was as if Cara slammed shut, her face instantly becoming a neutral mask. Roarke tensed in frustration at the interruption.

  Behind her a corrections officer stepped in, different from the one who had delivered her, a white male in his forties, coarse-featured, with black hair in a comb-over. A new anger overtook Roarke as he saw the instant stiffening of Cara’s body, the way she drew back, shrinking herself so she was physically as far from the CO as she could make herself.

  Roarke felt his own body tensing protectively at the sight. He rapped on the Plexiglas. “Give us a minute, officer,” he said, full-voiced.

  The CO twisted toward him. Roarke already had his credentials wallet out and pressed against the Plexiglas. “A minute.”

  The CO gave him a hard stare, then stepped out through the door. Roarke could feel the fury trailing in his wake.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Cara again. “Tell me.” He looked at the door where the CO had just exited.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.” And she turned to knock sharply on the door, summoning the guard.

  Roarke strode through the halls, his stomach churning at what he had seen. He was too aware of the statistics: sexual abuse of women prisoners by male guards was endemic. Other countries prohibited the overseeing of female prisoners by male guards, but US laws put its incarcerated women in constant physical jeopardy in the name of equal opportunity employment. And of course Cara stood out from the crowd of her desperate sisters. She was beautiful, she was healthy, there were no meth sores, no broken teeth, her body was slim and elegant. She might as well have had a spotlight on her.

  Roarke made an abrupt turn and walked back, heading toward the guard station. At the booth he slapped his credentials wallet up against the bulletproof glass.

  The guards in the glass cube looked up at him. Roarke pointed at the coarse-faced one.

  The guard’s face turned stormy. He moved with deliberate slowness to the door and took his time opening the locks.

  “Yeah?”

  Roarke stared him down. “Just wanted to introduce myself. Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roarke, San Francisco Bureau.” He glanced deliberately down at the nameplate pinned to the guard’s chest. “And you’re Officer Driscoll. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other, so I want to make sure you know me. And know that I know you.”

  The CO steamed sullenly under his gaze. Roarke nodded.

  “I’m glad we had this little chat. I’m glad to have someone I can come to if anything seems off. And I will certainly be coming straight to you if anything seems off.”

  “Sure, Agent Roarke,” the guard replied flatly.

  As Roarke turned away from the guard he was shaking with adrenaline. He strode down the corridor toward the elevator, trying to regulate his breathing, and realized he had no idea if he had just made things better, or worse.

  He rounded the corner . . . and his body stiffened. Cara was straight ahead of him, led by another guard, and coming right toward him.

  He forced himself to walk forward at a normal pace as the guard steered her in a straight line.

  As they passed, Roarke held his arm at his side . . . and felt her fingers brush his hand.

  When he stepped into the elevator, he was still hard.

  Chapter 6

  Instead of exiting through the jail, he used the connecting corridor to the lobby of 850 Bryant so he could emerge from the Hall of Justice, as if he had been to see Mills rather than visiting the jail. He was still shaky as he pushed through the heavy and heavily decorated Art Deco doors of the Hall. Outside was a chilly fog, and the courthouse steps were crowded with a throng of reporters, cameramen, standing lights. Not an unusual situation; lawyers angling for publicity often used the entrance of the Hall for their press conferences.

  Roarke started for the steps. Then he stopped, looking downward at the crowd. The focus of the press conference was a tiny Latina woman with upswept black hair, wearing a tailored suit and killer shoes.

  Julia Molina. Cara’s lawyer.

  He circled the big, round stone urn by the side of the door and eased toward the edge of the steps. He caught a sound bite as he slipped past the stacked rows of reporters. “ . . . this outrageous railroading of a victim of a tragic crime . . .”

  But he’d hesitated just long enough. The lawyer had spotted him. Her dark eyes took him in, a quick calculation, before she went back to her statement.

  “The DA’s office should be protecting our most vulnerable. Instead the office is shamelessly looking to score political points . . .”

  Roarke hurried down the sidewalk toward his fleet car, parked at the end of the block. He was reaching for the door handle when the voice stopped him. Latin, feminine, implacable.

  “Agent Roarke.”

  He turned to face Molina. She was small and dark and trim in a lush, plum-colored suit. Her face was Aztec royalty and her eyes glowed with fire. A slow-burning fire.

  “You’ve been seeing my client,” she said to him, not a question. Roarke wanted to laugh; the word seeing was so absurd in the circumstances. It seemed almost that Molina had sensed what was inside him, which he knew couldn’t be the case. But whatever was on his face, it made her gaze narrow. “It’s egregiously unprofessional and a possible violation of my client’s civil rights.”

  Roarke didn’t know about civil rights, but he still felt Cara’s touch on his skin, and he knew that the lawyer didn’t even begin to comprehend how unprofessional things were. He cleared his throat and spoke tonelessly. “She put me on her approved visitor list herself.”

  “Have you ever considered that she may not feel free to say no?”

  Something flared in him and he looked her straight in the eyes. “Not for a minute.”

  Molina appraised him. She took her time, and Roarke felt the heat of her gaze as a physical sensation: uncomfortable, intrusive, and sensual.

  “What do you want from Cara, Agent Roarke?”

  The question seemed to silence the street noise; for one moment it was just the two of them on the foggy sidewalk. “I want to understand her,” he heard himself saying. The truth, but not the whole truth.

  Now Molina’s voice was cold. “She’s not available for study. Especially not to you. You can destroy her.”

  The last was a twist in his gut. He moved to protest even as he knew she was right. “You know that nothing she says to me in private is admissible. You can get any of it excluded. It’s a nonstarter.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “She’s a very unusual case.” Before Molina could say anything, he continued. “None of her other alleged killings are admissible in this trial. But it’s my job to understand what she’s done.”

  She looked at him almost with amusement. “Your job, Agent Roarke? Are you sure this is about your job?”

  He didn’t respond, and she tipped back on her heels to look up at him. “Is there something you would like to say to me about this case?”

  Roarke felt an abyss open in him. He knew he was crossing a line. And yet he jumped.

  “I wondered about the plea,” he said. They had submitted a plea of not guilty.

  “Do you?”

  “I wondered why it wasn’t an insanity plea.”

  “Irrelevant,” Molina said instantly. “She is not guilty.”

  “But . . . have you had her evaluated at all?”

  “Agent Roarke,” she snapped. “What part of ‘not guilty’ do you not understand? I’m aware of her history—”

  He didn’t wait for her to finish. “It’s more than a history. She believes in some . . . supernatural force. A living evil. Get her to talk about it.”

  She cocked her head and regarded him. “I appreciate your . . . input,” she said, pausing as if to underscore the
bizarre nature of the conversation. “But it’s not necessary. The prosecution has such a ludicrously inadequate case that her mental state will never be an issue.”

  Roarke admired her certainty. He couldn’t imagine having that kind of faith in the workings of fate.

  She seemed to sense his skepticism. She took an iPad from her purse, slid a finger across the screen, and handed it over so he could read it. “Have you seen this, Agent Roarke?”

  On the screen was a blog article. Roarke found himself looking down on an image he knew very well: a skeleton garbed in a long, white lace dress and a flowered veil, holding a globe and a long-handled scythe.

  Santa Muerte. Holy Death. Lady Death.

  And below it was another image, the photo of a little Mexican girl.

  He felt his stomach drop as he started to read.

  Lady of Shadows

  Meet Marisol. The eleven-year-old with the shy smile and liquid eyes grew up in the poverty of the state of Michoacán in Mexico, the third child in a family of eight. Her father is a field worker. Her mother is a cook. But her parents make sure Marisol and her brothers and sisters go to school every weekday. They want their children to have a better life.

  Two months ago Marisol was kidnapped from her village. She and twenty-one other women and children became part of a human shipment, imprisoned in a concrete mixer truck and driven across the border into the California desert. Marisol’s destination: a life of virtual sexual slavery in what are euphemistically known as residential brothels.

  The thirty-two-billion-dollar-a-year sex trafficking trade ensnares two and a half million such victims worldwide, ten thousand women and children in Mexico City alone. These victims are lured, coerced, or kidnapped, some of them confined in Mexico, some of them transported to the United States. The brothels are located in homes, apartment buildings, warehouses, storage facilities, and trailers, where women and children are locked up twenty-four hours a day and forced to service an average of twenty men per day, often more. They are drugged, beaten, and threatened with their own death and the deaths of everyone they love if they attempt escape.

  This could have been Marisol’s fate.

  One woman and two children had already died in that midnight border crossing, before the mixing truck dropped off its shipment at a defunct concrete batch plant used by the traffickers as a holding pen and meth lab. There Marisol and the two dozen other abductees were imprisoned in a concrete bunker. And that night Marisol was taken from that bunker by one of her abductors.

  Most of the girls and women brought across the border are raped by their traffickers before they ever get to their final destination. Along the US/Mexico border, “rape trees” are a common sight: trees and shrubs on which coyotes have forced female clients to hang their underwear on the branches after they have assaulted them.

  But Marisol was not raped. She never had to endure the living hell of the brothel. Instead, Marisol was freed from her captors, and is home in her village with her grateful family.

  Local police attribute her rescue to the intervention of Cara Lindstrom. Cara Lindstrom, who now sits in San Francisco County Jail #8 awaiting trial for murder, on no bail, despite the flimsiest of evidence against her.

  Marisol will not be testifying against Cara Lindstrom.

  Marisol is quite sure of the identity of her rescuer. “Santa Muerte,” she insists, fingering a medallion around her neck. The image pressed into the metal is of an unconsecrated saint known as Lady Death.

  The Catholic Church has strongly condemned the worship of this icon, but that has had no effect on Lady Death’s two million followers in Mexico, the United States, and parts of Central America. Many of her most ardent devotees are among the poorest citizens and those on the fringe of society: prostitutes, homosexuals, and transgender people, victims of the extreme violence of drug cartels. Some followers call her “the Eighth Archangel,” others, “the Santa Muerte of the Seven Powers,” “the Lady of the Shadows,” “the Bony One,” “the Skinny One,” or “the Virgin of the Incarcerated.”

  Her worship is largely clandestine, performed in the homes of her devotees. Shrines can be found in the backs of small stores and gas stations. Many botanicas in both Mexico and the US are kept afloat by sales of Santa Muerte items. Numerous shops report half or more of their profits are earned from Santa Muerte paraphernalia.

  Perhaps because of stories like Marisol’s.

  “Recé,” Marisol says. “Le pedí a la Santa y me salvó.”

  “I prayed. I prayed to the saint and I was saved.”

  “Es un milagro,” she finishes. “A miracle.”

  Roarke finally looked up from the tablet. Molina was watching him. “Powerful piece, isn’t it?” she said. “Powerful ideas. Over six hundred thousand hits since yesterday.”

  “Did you plant this?” he demanded.

  Molina smiled thinly. “I didn’t have to. The word is out.”

  “So you’re trying to make Lindstrom into a folk heroine.”

  “I don’t need to try, Agent Roarke. The facts in this case speak for themselves.”

  Roarke felt a quick anger, the age-old resentment of law enforcement toward defense attorneys . . . and another emotion: acute discomfort, at seeing his own ambivalence projected wide.

  “And I don’t need anyone to tell me about Marisol. I was there.” He felt again his own horror, seeing the child with her ripped shirt under the moonlight, her half-naked attacker lying dead in the bloody sand beside her. “I killed two of them myself,” he said, unable to stop himself. Of course Molina jumped on that.

  “And the difference between you and Cara is what?”

  “A badge,” he said automatically, and knew that his credentials did not cover him for everything he had done that night.

  Molina’s eyes bored into his. It was all he could do to keep his gaze steady.

  “I’ll tell you again,” she said softly. “Stay away from my client. I can make your life very difficult if you don’t.”

  He had no doubt that she could. But that, to use her word, was irrelevant.

  Chapter 7

  The lawyer is angry.

  The woman is smaller than Cara is, even on four-inch heels, but she takes up most of the space in the jail’s consult room with her furious pacing.

  The smoldering is palpable. Distracting enough that Cara has trouble concentrating on the lawyer’s words.

  “What the hell were you thinking? You think he’s on your side? You are here because of him. The man’s job is to put you in prison for life.”

  She understands that the lawyer believes she has some control over the outcome. The woman must believe that, in order to play her role. But unlike the lawyer, Cara knows there are other forces far beyond them at work.

  She shakes her head, which nearly sends the lawyer through the ceiling.

  “What? What is that supposed to mean? He won’t take anything and everything you just said to him to the prosecution?”

  “He won’t,” Cara says. She can still feel the heat of Roarke’s skin on the tips of her fingers.

  The lawyer circles the minimal floor space, her eyes narrowed and watchful. “How many times?”

  For a moment Cara does not quite believe the question. By the time she realizes what the lawyer is actually asking, the look on the other woman’s face tells her she has given more away than she herself had even known to be true.

  “How many times has he visited?” the lawyer says softly, an unnecessary clarification now.

  “Twice,” she answers. It has been four, but she is not accustomed to telling the truth and the habit of concealment is strong. There have been other visitors as well. She says nothing of them.

  “Interesting,” Molina says, and Cara sees the lawyer is no longer angry, but calculating. “All interesting. Has he told you that he would like to see an insanity defense?
”

  The word is like a glacial shock. “No,” she says. She means, No insanity defense.

  Molina understands. “That is what I told him.” She stops her slow circling and sits across from Cara, leaning forward for emphasis. “You are to tell me if he comes again. This is not optional. Do you understand me?”

  “I do,” Cara says evenly.

  Molina stares into her eyes. She is one of the few people Cara has ever known who can do so without looking away. This time it is Cara who has trouble maintaining the gaze. Finally the older woman nods. She gets up and goes to the door, raps to summon a guard. Then she turns back.

  “This is your life we are dealing for. I will not help you throw it away.”

  When Cara has been escorted back to her cell and the cell door has locked shut behind her, she sits on the stained, flat mattress of her bed and feels the rough walls around her closing in again, feels the ache in her chest constricting her heart.

  Insanity.

  A word she has been hearing all her life, since the night.

  An apt enough word. Insanity is Its special talent.

  Until two months ago, she had never spoken with a living soul about the night, not since that long-ago year of police interviews and psychiatric probes. She learned quickly, even at five years old, that no one who asked wanted to hear the real story. Roarke is different. He wants to know. In some ways he knows already, however much he tries to reason it away.

  He sees her. He believes her. He is not far from her, himself.

  She feels the moment of their touch, like fire on her skin. She closes her eyes and breathes . . .

  Then her eyes fly open at the sound of footsteps in the hall. Two sets of steps: the hard-soled shoes of a CO and the soft slap of jailhouse sandals. The steps slow as they near her cell, and she can feel the intent is for her, so when the steps stop in front of the bars, she is waiting. She looks out at a female guard holding the arm of an inmate.

  “Your new cellie,” the CO says without irony as she unlocks the barred door.