Shadow Moon

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Shadow Moon Page 7

by Alexandra Sokoloff


  Are they sleeping? Are they there at all?

  She remains like this for some time before she hears the unmistakable zip sound of a tent being opened.

  Someone is moving below her.

  She freezes where she is, sinks back against the rock wall.

  Below her, a man in a T-shirt and jockey shorts comes out into her sightline. He stands sleepily beside a bush with his hands at his crotch, and waters the sage with his morning piss.

  Her hands tighten on the knife. Now? Can she get to him in time, down over the rocks, while he is occupied and vulnerable, before he is fully awake?

  He shakes himself off and turns away, then stops still, staring up into the rocks, like an animal sensing a predator.

  She freezes, suspends her breathing, stays as motionless as she can make herself.

  The camper slowly turns, walks back toward his campsite, out of sight.

  In a moment she hears his voice, taunting. “Rise and shine, asshole. Time to hit the trail.”

  After a beat, another voice answers, muffled by a tent and slurred with sleep or a hangover. “Go fuck yourself.”

  The one outside the tent taunts back, “Aww, whassamatter, Lover Boy? That little girl wear you out? I’m all ready to go again.”

  Above them, Cara digs her nails into her palms and wills herself to stay still through her rage.

  She hears the scrape of metal against rock. A whiff of sulfur.

  After a long moment, the strong green burning smell of marijuana wafts from below.

  She relaxes.

  Good. Stoned is passive. Stoned is languid and stupid. She couldn’t ask for a better sign that this is meant.

  The other voice comes from inside the tent. “Hey. Pass that bad boy in here.”

  She hears the sound of a zipper on canvas.

  She sits back to wait. She smells pot smoke, gets glimpses of the first camper taking down his tent, loading up his pack. There is no sign or sound of the other. The one is leaving his trail buddy and moving on.

  She must choose. Follow the hiker, or confront the other?

  Whatever she chooses, one will get away. But perhaps not. The one who has left has also left his DNA all over the camp. He will be the logical suspect for what she is about to do.

  And the other is drowsy, stoned, unsuspecting, perhaps even asleep.

  She will stay.

  She sits back, gritting her teeth as the first camper walks out of the brush and starts down the sandy trail, the way she came. She soothes herself by imagining him stumbling on the trail, falling over the side, his bones breaking on the rocks below.

  A few minutes later she hears the snoring, the sound rumbling against the rocks, audible even over the gurgling of the water.

  She stands from her ledge, slowly. Unfolding herself, testing cramped muscles, flexing, letting the blood back into fingers and toes.

  She slides the knife into the deep, wide lower pocket of her cargo pants. Then feels her way down through the rocks, already warm under her touch.

  She slips over the last boulder and eases herself down to the sand. Light as the wind, she moves toward the tent. Its flap hangs open, unzipped.

  She listens with her whole body, aware of his every breath, every rattle of his snores.

  Several yards from the tent she lowers herself to the sand and crawls forward. She stops just outside the tent, poised on her hands and knees, staring in through the open flap…

  Inside is the sleeping lump of his form, half-in, half out of his sleeping bag.

  He is twice her size. He could crush her with upper body strength alone.

  But she knows what to do. The exact point of utmost vulnerability. She knows the spot because she has felt the cold steel of a blade in her own throat.

  Her hand tightens on the grip of the knife and she inches slowly forward, over the door flap, until she is half inside…

  His snore is cut short and his eyes pop open… he sees her for one swift second….

  She lunges forward and plunges the knife into his neck.

  The man jackknifes up to sitting, with a howl of shock and rage. The adrenaline rush allows him that much. But his legs are encased in the sleeping bag, binding him.

  She scrambles backward as his neck sprays blood like a rainbird.

  His hands scrabble at his throat, and his fingers find the knife, still protruding from the side of his neck. It would be comic if it weren’t so very deadly.

  She knows there is nothing he can do. The blood loss from a severed carotid artery is one hundred milliliters per heartbeat.

  Thirty seconds of blood spurt.

  Unconsciousness in under a minute.

  Death within three minutes.

  When it is done, she stands up under the daylight moon with blood on her hands, on her clothes. Her heart is pounding. But what she feels is peace.

  This filth has no place in the Canyon. No place on the earth.

  She turns and walks through the scrub to the pool under the falls. She wades in, fully clothed, feeling the shock of the cold water sizzling through her like electricity. She moves her legs against the water, pushing forward until she is under the falls themselves, feeling water pounding on her head, rushing over her body.

  Washing the blood of the monster away.

  Chapter 13

  Portland – present

  Singh

  Singh stands in front of her interstates map, staring at Arizona. At the yellow push pin in the heart of Grand Canyon.

  The sound of the falls is still faint in her ears.

  It had not been a difficult murder to find. There have only been twenty-three homicides recorded in the park since the 1800’s.

  On June 10, 2005, one week after Cara disappeared from her foster home in Oceanside, a hiker named Daniel Modine was murdered on a backcountry trail in the canyon on the South Rim trail. Stabbed in the throat with a hunting knife, apparently as he slept. He bled out without making it out of his sleeping bag.

  He had been robbed of any wallet, ID or valuables he may have been carrying. There was evidence he had camped with a male companion, whose name appeared on their wilderness camping permit. The companion was questioned extensively, but no charges were ever filed.

  If Singh is correct that Cara took I-40 across the country, the Grand Canyon would have been a natural side trip, just an hour’s drive from Williams, Arizona.

  The Grand Canyon. One of the seven natural wonders of the world! How could she have resisted?

  If Cara had taken I-40 that summer. If she had taken the side trip to Grand Canyon. If she had decided to hike the Rim trail. If she had come across one of those men who she seemed so eerily able to identify as predators...

  If. If. If.

  It is Singh’s theory, nothing more.

  But slashed-throat homicides are not common. And Singh has seen Cara at work, that night out in the desert of the Salton Sea. Perhaps because of Cara’s own childhood attack, and the wound that left her throat and mind forever scarred, she often, and unerringly, strikes at her victim’s throats.

  But of course the tipping factor is that Modine had a record, for exactly the kind of predatory activity that draws Cara to her victims. A domestic abuse charge: stalking and assault of an ex-girlfriend. A dismissed sexual battery charge. All signs of a predator.

  Singh looks at her map, at the dots she has affixed there. The cluster of murders in San Francisco and Oakland. The murders in Lake Arrowhead and San Luis Obispo. The murders in the Salton Sea.

  These are all in red. The present. At least, the recent present.

  She steps forward and writes June 10, 2005 in tiny, precise numbers on the dot she has placed on the Grand Canyon.

  The murder of Daniel Modine took place on the exact same night that Roarke rescued Tracy Collier. And against all rationality, that fact makes Singh sure Cara was responsible.

  In this case, this endless case, a confluence like that cannot be ignored.

  Chapter 14

&nb
sp; Portland/San Francisco - present

  Singh

  She wakes to the pounding of rain.

  She has been dreaming of red lines. Red arteries… blue veins… glowing lifelines constantly crossing each other over the country…

  Then the image is lost, submerged by the shrill beeping of the alarm on her phone.

  She must get to the airport for her flight.

  San Francisco is cold, crisp, beautiful as ever.

  Her loft apartment in the South of Market district is like a museum gallery, with expansive spaces, dramatic lighting, art hung on tall white walls, her collection of goddess sculptures on display columns and inset altars. They are all her choices—but her own walls feel unfamiliar around her. Perhaps it is she who does not belong.

  But Damien is the same. Always startling, always exciting, always new—and yet deeply familiar. Her body responds to him as it has from the first moment she saw him in the office, the first day he appeared on the team and in her life. Since that day it has been a never-ending exercise in discipline, in compartmentalization, to keep their work interaction completely, coolly professional. There are no daring secret glances, no covert rendezvous in stairwells, no skating on the edge of discovery. Damien worked years undercover, and the challenge now is the same: when they are in the office they are not the same people as the ones who meet so explosively in bed. She knows that something in both of them finds pleasure in the challenge and the secrecy, and that is part of their relationship, too.

  After, he brings her a tray of scones from the bakery on the next block, with her favorite raspberry jam and clotted cream, a taste she acquired at Cambridge.

  They sit up on piles of pillows and spread thick preserves on scones and catch each other up on their respective weeks. Part of their intimacy is the enjoyment they take in discussing their work.

  Damien has been active on Roarke’s task force, with a focus on building federal cases against domestic traffickers of minors for sex. With his gang background on both sides of the fence, criminal and law enforcement, Damien is in his element. She can see he is relieved to be working Organized Crime again, using his background and expertise, instead of struggling with the ineffable, endless mystery of the Lindstrom case. It had taken over all of their lives for half a year. Now, in terms of the team’s stated mission, it is as if Cara never existed.

  Except that Cara has changed them all. Would there be such an intense focus on trafficked children and teens—would there be a task force at all?—if not for their recent exposure to Cara’s bloodthirsty solution?

  Singh is sure it would not be the case.

  But she does not speak aloud about her journaling or her thoughts on Cara. It is too fraught a subject with Damien. While Singh has come to think of Cara as an avatar, more a life force than a human being, Damien views Lindstrom concretely, as a dangerous fugitive, albeit one whom he no longer has a professional responsibility for.

  Singh also does not mention the mystery of twice finding the case file boxes in disarray, or her unease about Agent Snyder’s explanation.

  Her reasons for this omission are unclear to her.

  Without mentioning the monumental nature of the task, she tells him of Snyder’s plan to exponentially add to the ViCAP database.

  Of course Damien understands instantly, all of it. The tedium of it and the horror, and the anger that this grand, phenomenally important tool is so unacceptably unused. He understands, most of all, the importance of keeping the database alive by any means necessary.

  But his face is troubled. “Still. You two, doing all of that by hand? By yourselves? Sounds like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.”

  Singh leaps instantly to Snyder’s defense. “Agent Snyder has consulted on an extraordinary percentage of the most heinous crimes in recent US history. Prolific offenders who may have killed scores of other victims. Killers who are still killing. Victims whose families are still living every day of their lives in doubt. There is no one in the country more able than Agent Snyder to move the needle on the issue.”

  Damien raises up on an elbow to look at her with feigned jealousy. “Is this hero worship I’m hearin’? Or am I going to have to go up there and sort the man out?”

  Her response is perhaps ambiguous.

  Predictably, this leads to another entirely satisfying encounter.

  Chapter 15

  San Francisco - present

  Roarke

  Roarke sat behind his desk, swiveled toward the window, staring out over the Bay.

  On his way in to the office he’d seen Singh and Epps arriving together, meeting Lam in front of the building, chatting together, before Epps turned away from Singh with just a look and a brush of his hand against hers. Their public discretion didn’t mask their passion for each other. Not to Roarke. Not even from a distance.

  Before that moment, all three agents had been laughing, clearly enjoying each other’s company. The kind of camaraderie Roarke valued in his team.

  His team. Fractured now, held together by a thread.

  For the thousandth time he wondered if he’d been too hasty in sending Singh away.

  He’d been so close to the same kind of madness himself. Did he have any right to judge her?

  He tried to concentrate on his work, the calls he had to make that day, the warrants he needed to get for an upcoming bust.

  But his thoughts kept drifting back to Singh.

  And Cara.

  Only three months previously, he’d left the Bureau and was holed up on the beach at Pismo, leveled by his own protocol-shattering encounter with Cara. Feeling he’d crossed so far over a line of professionalism, propriety, morality, he’d been unsure he could ever legitimately return to the job.

  He’d thought he’d come through that. Only to confront her again, her presence, in the Salton Sea…

  He’d stood on the sandy concrete floor of the derelict hotel, in the midst of carnage. Ortiz’s body, bloody and gutted on a makeshift wooden platform. An obese young man slumped behind a table full of video equipment, his throat slit ear to ear. Several other men lying dead in the sand outside the building. Singh bound and drugged, but alive and uninjured…

  And a sudden realization.

  Cara wouldn’t have left her. Not like that.

  His heart leaped with the adrenaline jolt.

  She’s here. She’s still here.

  He wheeled around on the cement floor and strode out the door, into the dark. Jogging out into the desert night, past the unlit MOTEL sign, where he stopped on the sand between palm trees, looking around him. The wind ruffled his hair, warm and dry and teasing.

  Tumbleweeds shivered. Five billion stars shimmered in the sky. The moon was so bright it was like heat on the sand…

  And he spoke to the night.

  “Cara. I know you’re here.”

  He turned, under the swaying shadows of palm trees and full moon and the hundred million stars.

  “I can feel you.” He paused… and then said it. “I always feel you.”

  The wind swirled around him, and took his words out to the night. He waited, listened, heard the keening of the wind. And that word.

  Real? Imagined? Dreamed?

  “Come.”

  Chapter 16

  San Francisco - present

  Singh and Lam

  They take a BART train to Embarcadero, and walk across to the Ferry Building, enjoying the sun.

  As they stroll the pier in search of sea lions, Lam teases her. “You look relaxed. Glowing, even.”

  “Shut up,” she tells him in Hindi.

  “Make me,” he replies, also in Hindi. Languages are part of their relationship. They can converse at least marginally in more than a dozen. He switches back to English. “So when’s the wedding? I have plans for your hen party.”

  The thought should be amusing. But Singh’s mood darkens. She has been carefully evading talk of a wedding with Damien. She must know—must discern if she is mentally stable enough to go forward
with such a commitment.

  She evades the question by turning it back on him. “When is yours?

  Lam blushes. “Well… funny you should mention that…”

  She pauses at the railing, startled. “Are you?”

  Lam nods. “We figure… while we still can. Once you’ve exercised a right it’s harder to take it away, and all that.”

  The joy she feels for her friends is tainted with the remembrance of their circumstances. The very real possibility that their right to marriage will be rescinded because of a minority imposing their ignorance on the rest of the country.

  “That will not happen,” she assures him. “Not in California.”

  Lam doesn’t answer. They both know there are no longer any guarantees of justice prevailing. Not as the current situation stands.

  “Anyway, you’re next,” he says cheerily. “I can see that red thread around your ankle.”

  She squints through the sun at him, not understanding.

  “The red string of Fate?” He explains patiently, as if this is something every schoolchild should know. “The Gods tie a red string around the ankles of people who are destined for each other, or fated to help each other in a certain way.”

  She stares out at the Bay, suddenly still. It feels as if lightning has just cracked over their heads.

  The red string of Fate.

  She is accustomed to Lam speaking of mythology as a demonstrated fact. And it is part of their bond: they were both raised in cultures far more ancient than that of the United States.

  But her reaction to this particular pronouncement is fierce and unexpected. Her senses are tingling. And for a moment she is overcome with the remembrance of the image from her dream:

  Red and blue lines, criss-crossing the country…

  Cara’s murder in the Grand Canyon. Roarke’s rescue of Tracy Collier on the mountaintop.

  On the same day.

  She had almost convinced herself it was all in her imagination, this confluence of dates. But now—

  “People who are destined for each other or destined to help each other in some way...”

 

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