Shadow Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Something else she has kept from Damien.

  She moves out again to the living area with the journal and a candle, curls on the sofa.

  She opens the book and begins.

  Chapter 7

  Cajon Pass, California - June 2005

  Cara

  She pushes the gas pedal against the floor of the old Honda as it winds its way upward on Interstate 15 through the Cajon Pass.

  It is so expansive, the vistas, the layers of hills building upward along the fault line that cracked the valley in two and created the pass between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel ranges. Train tracks snake through the jagged mountains past stunning pale Tule rock formations. The immensity of the landscape is pure exhilaration.

  She hasn’t seen much of California in the daylight, except on official transport. Her joyriding has been at night, so she has viewed the world largely by the light of the moon. Now the sun on the rocks is almost blinding.

  As exciting as the daylight driving is the fact of her own car. She bought it outright, a five-year old Honda, because they are reliable and so common as to be anonymous. Used, so she could pay cash, with a registration sticker good for another six months, so she will not need to file paperwork. She will not have to return it at the end of the night, to the street of the rightful owner. She can buy her own food and camping supplies and stock it as her own home.

  Her goal is to be across the state border before dark. The money is hers. She hasn’t stolen it. But having lived thirteen years in the social services and criminal justice systems, she knows innocence has nothing to do with anything in life. When a great deal of money is involved, people will want to find her. And this is a great deal of money.

  Innocence is also not the right word. She is a murderess. But no one knows that, except possibly that angry, pockmarked sheriff’s detective, Ortiz, whom she hasn’t seen in four years, now. She has killed a number of other men since the first. And no one else has come looking for her yet.

  She has told no one she is going: not her aunt, not the group home, not the high school. She would have been kicked out of the group home anyway; at eighteen the foster care system abdicates all responsibility for its charges. And she doubts anyone in the system will do much to try to find her. She knows all too well. Kids go missing all the time. Girls, boys, all ages. Snapped up by the men in vans, running from abuse, just running.

  The school will not look for her either. She has been less than four months at this one and has kept the lowest profile she could manage.

  She is eighteen years old.

  She has been incarcerated, medicated, and regulated from the time she was five.

  And now she is free.

  -------

  Singh looks up from the journal. City lights illuminate the fog in eerie light outside the balcony doors.

  Of course, what she has just written is all speculation.

  What Singh knows is that at the age of eighteen, Cara Lindstrom came into an insurance settlement for the massacre of her family, a million-dollar life insurance policy that would have accrued substantially more in the thirteen years since the murders of the Lindstroms.

  And the very day after that inheritance was triggered, Cara disappeared simultaneously with the money, which vanished from the account where it had been held for her in trust.

  She took nothing with her—not that she had more than the most basic possessions in the group home in Oceanside where she was living. She had not quite finished her senior year in high school and as far as Singh knows, she never did. Since then there had been no public record of her whatsoever, until that fateful day that Roarke saw her standing on the sidewalk behind FBI Special Agent Greer, just before Greer was crushed by a commercial truck.

  But Singh has spent many hours, days, weeks, tracking Cara’s whereabouts as part of the FBI team’s investigation into Greer’s death, which opened up the whole mystery of Cara Lindstrom and a decades-long trail of murders.

  She has been piecing together Cara’s entire life. At first simply listing facts. Making a timeline of critical dates: the massacre of her family by the serial killer known as the Reaper, her half-year with an aunt and the aunt’s young family before she was given up to the Social Services system, her two years of incarceration in Youth Authority after having seriously injured a much older boy whom Singh suspects tried to assault her in the group home where they were living.

  And then her first murder, at fourteen. An adult counselor from that group home who may well have been in on that botched assault.

  Singh has a file, pages and pages of hundreds of names. Male murder victims who are plausibly Cara’s work. She has compiled lists of suspicious deaths along with actual murders. A bigoted talk show host drowned in his bath, his bloodstream overloaded with prescription opiates. A film director known for his graphic, gleeful rape scenes, who ran his car off a steep curve of Mulholland Drive late one night. Victims whom Singh cannot bring herself to mourn. And there is a file within that file of the most plausible among them: those who died by fatal wounds to their throats.

  It is a story that Singh fully suspects spans the entire United States, over a period of sixteen years. All evidence she has gathered as part of the San Francisco team’s pursuit of Lindstrom.

  Lindstrom is no longer in the Bureau’s jurisdiction. The FBI’s case on Lindstrom was officially closed after her arrest and incarceration by the San Francisco police department. Once Lindstrom jumped bail she became entirely the problem of the parole board.

  In truth, Singh has no idea where Cara might be, or if she even survived the encounter in the Salton Sea. Since that night, Singh has found no sign of the Huntress. And she sometimes feels bereft, haunted by the loss of Cara’s strange and pervasive presence in her life.

  So the journaling has been her way of coping. The timeline has become something more intimate, a kind of active imagination. Journaling what might have been Cara’s thoughts.

  To put herself into the mind and body of another person, a being as complex as Lindstrom, is a relief from her own tormented present. It is a puzzle to be solved, a mystery, a meditation, all rolled into one.

  She knows she should sleep. Instead, she writes long into the night. It is her peace in unthinkable times. Her wish to believe that monsters are being battled and slain. That some form of justice is being done.

  A stand against the atrocities in Agent Snyder’s boxes.

  Chapter 8

  Portland – present

  Singh and Snyder

  The fog is thick around her as Singh stands on the doorstep of Agent Snyder’s house and rings the bell. She can hear it echoing faintly inside the house.

  Unease stirs in her chest.

  She presses the doorbell again, and waits. When no response comes, she punches in the code that Agent Snyder has given her for the security system.

  She opens the front door, closes it behind her, stands in the dim hall and calls out, “Agent Snyder?”

  No response comes back. The house is still. And for no immediately apparent reason her heart begins to race.

  She quiets her steps, moves slowly into the living room… and stops in her tracks.

  The boxes of files that she so carefully arranged are in disarray again.

  She stands in the room and feels the same sense of…

  Chaos? Derangement? Madness?

  There is movement behind her and she twists around… to see Agent Snyder in the doorway.

  He is dressed as he was yesterday, trousers and a sweater, but there is a faraway look on his face that makes him appear to have just awakened. His smile of greeting dies on his face as he stares behind her at the files. He seems as startled by the disorder as she is.

  She forces her voice steady. “Have you been looking for something, Agent Snyder?”

  He turns to look at her. She feels a chill at the blankness of his eyes. Then his face clears and he is himself again. “Forgive me. I was reminiscing last night. I was up too late and…
left things in disarray.”

  She feels heat in her face. She is certain that he is lying.

  Why?

  He turns his face away from her to avoid her gaze, stoops to picks up a case file. “I didn’t realize I’d gone so overboard.” He casually places the file on an end table and turns to her, with his body blocking her view of the file.

  “Let’s not worry about the boxes,” he says. “We should start our input.”

  For the moment, she chooses to say nothing. But as she follows him toward the study, she glances back at the file he has left behind. Facing down, so she cannot read the label.

  Agent Snyder, you are hiding something from me. What is happening, here?

  In the study, they begin the grim task of inputting the data into the ViCAP form.

  Singh’s nerves are already jangled from the morning’s strange beginning. The work does not help. It is both tedious and horrifying.

  The length of the questionnaire is one of the sticking points for the law enforcement agents and detectives who balk at completing the form.

  For Singh, the difficulty of the task is the oppressive weight of the atrocities she is cataloguing. Almost entirely serial rape and serial homicide—which is almost always what serial rape, unchecked, will evolve to. The questions are a catalogue of every horror human beings have been known to inflict on other human beings. Questions about the offender’s fetishes. Questions about the specific assaults and their duration and the order in which they occurred. Questions about binding, about torture, about insertion of objects into bodily orifices. Questions about body disposal and about whether the offender returned to re-assault the corpse. To properly complete the forms, she must enter excruciating details of dehumanization and dismemberment.

  And so very many of the perpetrators are still out there, uncaught. Because stopping these atrocities has not been made a priority—

  Her heart begins to race. She pushes back from her keyboard, dizzy…

  She is back in the underground parking lot of her loft building. The darkness is resonant with the faint whiff of oil and gas fumes—and the sense of presence. A rasp of breath. A low whistle.

  Adrenaline shoots through her like a lightning bolt. And all at once the voices surround her in the dark. Multiple men, whistling, chirping like birds. She sees their shadows on the concrete walls… hears the catcalls.

  “Muslim cunt.” “Black bitch.”

  “Here, pussy pussy pussy… I’ve got something’ for you.”

  “Get ready – “

  “Gonna get fucked till your ass bleeds.”

  “Gonna wish you never left Dumbfuckistan….”

  Her heart is hammering, so thunderous it echoes off the concrete walls and floor. Then an explosion as a weapon is fired. A bullet cracks against a nearby vehicle, shattering glass—

  She is jolted by the touch of a hand on her shoulder.

  She starts back in her chair… and stares up into Agent Snyder’s face, creased with concern.

  “Agent Singh, that’s enough. We’re done for today.”

  “I am perfectly all right—” she begins to protest. But her breath is rapid and shallow and she fools Agent Snyder not for a moment.

  “You are not. And I’d be disappointed if you were.”

  Through the racing of her own heart she realizes she has been deep in a PTSD flashback. She is grateful and amazed that Snyder understands.

  He speaks lightly, allowing the charade that nothing of consequence has happened. “Let’s have tea and enjoy the sun. We get it seldom enough in Portland.”

  And again with that old-school gallantry, he extends a hand to help her up.

  She excuses herself to the bathroom to splash cool water on her face and compose herself. When she exits the toilet, she can hear Agent Snyder moving in the kitchen, making the tea.

  She stands for a moment in the hallway. Then quickly, silently, she slips back into the living room.

  She crosses on cat feet to the end table where Snyder placed the file he’d picked up from the floor.

  She glances back over her shoulder… then turns the folder over to read the label.

  The date is 2009. And the case is the Street Hunter killings.

  Before Agent Snyder can discover her, she moves quickly out through French doors into the garden.

  It is Asian in design, with a fountain, ornamental shrubbery, Buddhist statuary. An oasis of tranquility. Singh turns her face to the sun and breathes in to slow her pulse.

  “That’s better,” Agent Snyder says, as he steps outside, carrying two huge steaming mugs.

  “Yes,” she agrees, and takes the tea he offers her. “Thank you.”

  He stands, contemplating his fountain. “These are terrible times for women, I know.” She glances at him, startled. He gestures back toward the house. “I hope you can remember that what we are cataloguing is not normal, average male behavior.”

  “No,” Singh murmurs. “It is not normal.”

  “My best estimate is fifteen to twenty percent of the male prison population is psychopaths. But that fifteen to twenty percent is responsible for at least half of violent crime in this country. In a rational world it wouldn’t be that hard to prevent this specific population from doing so much damage.”

  Instead we reward the perpetrators, she thinks. We elect them to high office. But she sips her tea and remains silent.

  He looks at her briefly, and answers as if he has heard her. “Canada mandates national training in their ViCLAS database entry. If the Bureau collected data on perpetrators at the same population ratio as Canada does, ViCAP would contain more than 4.4 million cases. Instead, we have fewer than 90,000. It’s the first thing I told Matthew when we began to work together.”

  It is an unexpected opening to question him about the file he has concealed from her. Impulsively she takes it.

  “That was here, in Portland was it not? On the Street Hunter case?” she asks. Casually, she hopes.

  “Oh, no. Years before.”

  This is unexpected. The story in every article she has ever read on the subject is that the Street Hunter was Roarke’s first case as an agent.

  “Before he was an agent, then?” she asks.

  The older agent’s mouth quirks in a smile. “Matthew was born an FBI agent. It was the Bureau that had to catch up to him. I first met him at Quantico. He came for an internship the summer after he graduated from university. 2005.”

  Singh believes strongly in synchronicity. That there is an order in the universe that reveals itself in glimmers of what some dismiss as coincidence. It does not escape her that 2005 is the year she had been herself in last night. The year Cara disappeared from the system.

  She does the math quickly. In 2005 Cara had been eighteen. Roarke would have been twenty-two.

  Agent Snyder is speaking.

  “In 2002 there was a wave of high-profile child abductions. I consulted on two of them. Danielle Van Dam, age seven, kidnapped from her bedroom in San Diego and murdered by her neighbor. Four-year old Samantha Runnion, abducted from her front yard in Stanten, California. Raped, strangled, her body left in Cleveland National Forest.”

  Singh flinches inside.

  Agent Snyder is deep in his memory, now. “President Bush likened the phenomenon to terrorism. That year the Amber Alert was born. For the next several years, there was an intense media focus on stranger abductions. And in 2005, Matthew was working for the San Luis Obispo police department, his senior year in college.”

  Chapter 9

  San Luis Obispo, California - June, 2005

  Matt

  In the black of sky, a million stars tremble around the full moon. And he stands trembling below, in the dark outside the house in the large wooded yard.

  The front door stands open, a rectangle of black. He can hear her calling from inside. Crying. A small, terrified female voice.

  A strong wind blows over the surrounding land, swirling dust demons across the fields. A feeling of doom
closes in, threatening to suffocate him.

  Run. Get away, before it gets you…

  The girl cries again, a small, agonized voice from the darkness within.

  Help her. Have to help her.

  He forces himself through the open doorway, into the entry hall. Cold moonlight streams through tall arched windows…

  Terror turns every cell in his body to ice. On the floor around him is a pool of dark. He is up to his ankles in it, and it is not cold, like water, but warm…

  And those crumpled shapes, on the floor around him, not sleeping, no. The eyes are open, staring… an entire family, slaughtered—

  Matt Roarke wrenched his way out of sleep.

  He lay with his heart pounding against his rib cage, in his own bed, in his own apartment. His alarm would’ve gone off in five minutes anyway, but he was relieved to have woken himself. He’d been having the same dream on and off since he was nine years old, and he didn’t need to see how it ended.

  He threw off his sheets and stood, to get ready for his job at the San Luis Obispo Police Department.

  By the time he’d showered, the dream was forgotten.

  San Luis Obispo’s quaint downtown was a warren of Mission architecture and historical buildings. The funky shops, New Age boutiques and walkable streets belied the roughness of the city underneath, statistically one of the more violent in California.

  Matt pushed through the doors of the police department so energetically he got a “Slow down, kid,” from the desk sergeant, Rodriguez.

  It was true, he was restless this morning. There was an anticipation… a buzzing in his temples that usually… usually… meant something big was going to happen.

  Something good? Something bad?

  He never knew which, when this feeling came. But something.