Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  It occurs to her that she can stay. Not in this cabin, but she has money, she could buy one for herself, stay clear of people as much as possible, and in that way maybe avoid the shadow that has pursued her for all of her life since the night. She lets herself wonder, for the first time, what it would be like: to be free, not to endlessly hunt and be hunted. Merely to live.

  She remains in peace through the dark of the moon, and the whispers are quiet. But with the first sliver of new moon, the restlessness begins.

  She ventures farther, almost always ending up at the house in Blythe, the house where it all started. Not going in, only watching, waiting for something that she has not known she is waiting for until just now, seeing Roarke. Roarke, alone this time, and looking for something, too. Looking up into the sky spiked with stars, the constellations standing out in brilliant dimensions. The wind stirs the air between them as he looks out into the night.

  She feels the crescent moon behind her, hears it murmur.

  The pain and pills have kept her deadened, have dulled the whispers of the moon. But the pain is receding and the next moon is growing, and it is talking to her.

  At the beginning of her dark journey, an old Native American man had taught her that every moon has a name. This month is Blood Moon.

  She will listen and wait for the signs.

  Chapter Five

  Roarke woke to white sunlight slanting through the windows of Cara’s old bedroom. Of course he’d never made it to a motel, that had been a pleasant fantasy.

  His back ached from sleeping on the floor, with his own coat for a pillow, but he hadn’t dreamed, and no monster had come upon him while he slept. Though momentarily, as he stretched his way to his feet, he had an odd feeling of not-aloneness.

  The feeling stayed with him as he walked through the silent house, which was somehow as familiar to him as if he’d lived there, all those years ago. A thought drifted through his mind: I could buy it. Compared to San Francisco real estate, the asking price was enticingly low. All of this space. All of this privacy.

  And that was insane.

  He shook his head, and headed for the door.

  He locked the front door behind him and replaced the key in the lock box, then and stood on the porch, looking out over the eucalyptus, listening to the dry leaves stirring softly in the wind. Across a field, a horse cantered, a teenage girl on its back. Roarke watched them race in the field before he started for the car.

  He had two choices for the day, which he considered as he sat behind the wheel studying the locations he’d programmed into the rental car’s GPS. He could head to Palm Desert, where the former counselor from a group home Cara had lived in had been murdered sixteen years ago.

  Had it been her first kill?

  But investigating that long-ago murder was not going to get him closer to finding Cara.

  He sat back against the seat and for a moment felt that same strange sensation of not being alone. He sat up and, knowing it was irrational, checked the back seat of the car. No one. Idiocy.

  He looked at the GPS again, the addresses programmed into it. And he knew the most realistic choice was to go south, to San Diego, where Cara’s cousin Erin McNally was in med school.

  He started the car and drove, through the eucalyptus, and out onto the freedom of the road.

  Outside of its major cities Southern California was an unrelenting desert, a whole world away from the coastal forest of the Bay Area and the port city Victoriana of San Francisco. On the I 10 Roarke skirted the borders of Joshua Tree National Park, a surrealist landscape of rounded rock formations and the bleak cactus-like trees that gave the Park its name. He had always wanted to explore the park, and he felt a tug he couldn’t interpret as he passed the entrance.

  This isn’t a vacation, he told himself, and drove on.

  As he approached Indio on Interstate 10, he knew the highways split. He could go several different directions. He felt another urge to keep driving west, a slightly longer route that would take him through Temecula, the wine country town bordered by the Pechanga Reservation where Cara had briefly lived with her aunt, Randall Trent, and her two young cousins. But besides giving him more of a feel for Cara herself, chances were good there’d be nothing there that might yield as much information as Cara’s cousin.

  As he took the turnoff south toward San Diego, he remembered Epps’ words that Mexicali was less than two hours from the cement plant, that Cara could have crossed the border and disappeared into that vast and ancient country, never to be found.

  He recalled that Cara had spoken Spanish, too, during the shootout at the plant. Another skill that made her flexible, that made her options legion, that made finding her that much more challenging.

  And suddenly he was seeing the crude altar in the brothel, the appeal to the shadowy saint.

  Santa Muerte, he thought. Where are you, Lady Death?

  Like every other city in California, San Diego had grown since Roarke had last visited it, and traffic had swelled to match. An hour outside the city the roads slowed to a crawl. He had plenty of time to marvel, with gritted teeth, at how the city had expanded for miles beyond the boundaries he remembered, densely packed housing with less and less land in between settlements.

  The university was located on twelve hundred acres of coastal woodland near the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla. Any campus that close to the beach would normally be a party school, but S.D. had a staid reputation, probably because beyond the woods it was surrounded by a residential no-man’s land. Students could walk down to the beach to surf between classes but were miles from the nightlife of the city center.

  Cara Lindstrom’s cousin Erin McNally was a med student, one would assume she had the attendant workload, but apparently she had immediately agreed to Roarke’s request for a meeting. Singh had set up an appointment in front of the campus’s Geisel Library. “She said you cannot miss it.”

  She was right — no one could have missed it. Roarke walked through the sunny, modern campus toward a concrete and glass structure looking for all the world like the Starship Enterprise: a spaceship-shaped oval perched on steep concrete ramps resembling loading docks.

  Singh had sent through a photo of Erin, an olive-skinned girl with black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, a studious type as far from Cara Lindstrom’s edgy and feral beauty as a blood relative could get. The glasses made her easy to spot; she was poring over a thick textbook at a shaded table in the library plaza. She looked serious and much younger than her twenty-six years.

  She squinted up at him as he stopped in front of her table. “Ms. McNally?” he asked.

  “Agent Roarke,” she said, and looked him over, not in a sexual way at all, but with a rather more scientific curiosity. He’d changed to a dress shirt and tie in the parking lot and shrugged on his suit coat on the way across campus, so he probably looked his part.

  He motioned to the seat across from her and she nodded, old school manners for someone of her generation. “Agent Singh told you what I wanted to speak to you about?” he asked as he settled.

  “My cousin,” Erin said, and closed her textbook. Pathologic Basis of Disease, he noted. “What do you want with her?”

  Her bluntness was startling. She might not look like Cara, but that sharp watchfulness apparently ran in the family.

  “I’m trying to find her.”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Erin said, and looked at him so directly he knew it was true. Not that he’d really expected her to have an answer. It was going to take some digging, to see what she knew that she didn’t know she knew.

  “Why do you want to find her?” Erin asked. “Does it have to do with the murders?”

  Roarke knew that she meant the murders of the Lindstrom family, not Cara’s own killings. The APB that had been out for her when she’d kidnapped Jason Sebastian had gone out with the alias she was using at the time, Leila French, and Roarke doubted that Erin would have seen the FBI sketch that had briefly been released in central
California. There was no reason Erin would know her cousin was wanted.

  “Yes, something to do with them,” he answered her.

  “That’s weird.” She frowned. “After all this time.” She looked disturbed.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  She hesitated. “I think when I was seventeen.”

  “You think?” he repeated. He doubted this precise young woman was in the habit of uncertainty.

  She looked away from him, off into the distance. “No, I guess I know. I was a senior in high school. I was leaving school and I thought I saw her in a car parked across the street, looking at me. I can’t be sure, because I hadn’t seen her for years by then, not since I was… fourteen. But it looked like her, and she was looking at me, and this was just a week before she disappeared.”

  Roarke felt a little chill up his spine. “How do you mean disappeared?”

  “The day she turned twenty-one all the insurance money from the murders got signed over to her and no one ever heard from her again. My mother said that she fired the trustee and she asked for the whole lump of it to be wired somewhere and then her phone was turned off and her P.O. Box and her email were all shut down. The trustee was calling Mom every few days asking if she’d heard anything from her but she was just gone. We never heard anything about her after that.”

  “No calls, no postcards…?” Roarke asked, though he knew the answer.

  “She never wrote or called anyway.”

  “Not ever?”

  Erin shook her head. “A couple of times my mother had her over, usually a holiday, Thanksgiving, Christmas. But that was a long time ago, when we were still kids.”

  “Can you remember the last time?”

  There was a flicker on Erin’s face. “I was ten. It was after she got out of juvie. I think Mom felt guilty, like she could’ve done more. It didn’t work out so well. Patrick didn’t like Cara, kind of ragged her, and she wouldn’t talk around him. Not that she talked a lot, anyway.”

  Patrick was Erin’s slightly older brother. “Any reason for the friction between her and your brother?”

  “Nothing that made sense.” She gave him a thin smile. “You know, we grew up as the kids whose family got killed by the Reaper. Boogeyman kind of stuff — ‘He’s coming back to get you…’ Like that. And the ‘crazy cousin’ thing didn’t help.”

  “Was she crazy?” he asked without thinking, and immediately regretted it.

  But she only looked at him steadily. “Well… who wouldn’t be?”

  He couldn’t argue.

  “When she did visit you, were there places you went, on a family vacation… or did your mother’s family have some vacation spot?”

  “Disneyland? Sea World?” Erin suggested. Roarke realized, startled, that she was making a dry joke.

  “Can’t see it,” he told her.

  “And you would be right.” Erin looked away, down the long plaza. “She didn’t like to be around people much. I think she liked it when we drove places, though. It felt like she relaxed more in a car, on the road. Especially out of the city.”

  It fit what Roarke knew of Cara himself. She was a traveler.

  “Did you see her—” he stopped. Erin looked at him enquiringly. “Did you ever see her act out violently? Or talk…” he paused, searching for the words. “In an unbalanced way?”

  Erin’s face shadowed. “She wasn’t violent around us. But she could look at you and stop your heart. I mean, she did it with Patrick, not with me, but she’d freeze me up when she did it to him. She watched everyone. All the time. There was so much going on inside her I thought she would burst. And once…”

  Her eyes went distant in a way that made Roarke hold his breath, waiting for whatever she was going to say.

  “I’m in med school. You don’t have to guess. I was a shy kid. A brain. I got picked on. Maybe would have been even without the whole family ghost.” She breathed in, a long breath. “Cara came over for one of the happy family meals one night when I was about ten, so she would have been fifteen. We went out to a restaurant, some stupid hamburger place, and Derek Sanders was there with his family. This guy from school. He’d made a special project out of me, the way kids like that do.” She paused, and Roarke waited, feeling a sense of inevitability.

  “He didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to him, nobody said anything. I was just praying that nothing would happen. We ate our Happy Meals and Cara looked at me, and she looked at him, and she didn’t say a word. And at the end of the night Cara went back to whatever home she was in at the time and I went back home to sleep… and the next morning Derek showed up to school with two black eyes and all hunched over. And when I passed him in the hall he flinched away from me. Flinched.”

  She stopped, and took another breath. “He never said another word to me.” She looked at Roarke, with steady dark eyes. “Is that what you mean by violence?”

  It’s exactly what I meant, he thought. It’s Cara to a T.

  “You never told her anything about how he’d treated you.”

  She laughed shortly. “I didn’t talk to Cara. Never anything beyond, ‘Pass the bread.’ My mom was afraid of her. I didn’t know how to say that at the time, but I know it was true. She never spent the night at our house. I think Mom thought…”

  Roarke felt his pulse start to race. “That she’d hurt you?”

  Erin shook her head, and didn’t look at him. Her voice was hollow. “That he really would come back for her. The Reaper. And take the rest of us, too.”

  Roarke felt a heaviness in the air between them. He had heard that kind of superstitious talk before about the Reaper. An uncaught serial killer took on the aura of legend. He leaned forward to get her full attention. “Erin. I need to know. Did your mother ever talk about some sign, some indication that the massacre was going to happen? Anything unusual, any marker…”

  Erin’s head was down, black curls curtaining her face. She murmured something that set Roarke’s hair on end, even as he was unsure what she had actually said. “I’m sorry, what—” and this time he heard.

  “The rabbit,” she said, very softly.

  “What about the rabbit?”

  “Mom said that Aunt Gillian found a dead rabbit on the porch before it all happened.”

  So there. Trent hadn’t been lying. It is a clue, something tangible from the past. Not to do with his case, of course, but Roarke felt the subterranean pull of the lead. It was a path to a killer, a marker of his personality, a trail.

  What Roarke wanted with it was less clear. Revenge? Just to know? It was what he did. He hunted killers.

  No. That had been before. Another life.

  Erin was looking at him. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked in a small voice. “He must be dead.”

  “Almost certainly,” Roarke said. But he felt the hollowness of the words. “Or we would know by now. Men like that never stop.” They sat in silence for a moment, and there was a chill in the sunny day.

  “If you find Cara, would you tell her…” the young woman stopped, looked down at her books.

  “What?” Roarke asked gently.

  “I’d like to see her,” she said, without raising her eyes. “I’d really like to see her.”

  Chapter Six

  It was late afternoon, coming on sunset, and Roarke was far too close to the ocean not to find a beach. He had to think, and there was no better place.

  He collected his car in the visitor lot and stopped to ask directions from a guard at a security kiosk, who turned and pointed. Torrey Pines State Reserve was just minutes from campus.

  Roarke drove to the trailhead, where he stood by the open trunk of the car and exchanged his dress shirt and suit coat for a T-shirt and sweater, and his work shoes for the lightweight Hi-Tec hiking boots he always took on the road with him. Then he locked the car and set off along a sandy, post-fenced trail through the scattered long-needled pines, gnarled and twisted into surreal shapes by the wind. His
feet crunched past low, soft coastal sage scrub and hard-leafed chaparral, and he felt his muscles loosening, his lungs filling with the pure spicy air as the natural setting worked its magic.

  The trail opened out on a cliff and he stopped in his tracks to take in the spectacular overlook: a swoop of spotless beach under fantastically carved cliffs, the vast ocean with the sinking sun starting to glimmer orange across the water, outlining the streaks of cirrus clouds in light.

  After a long moment of just drinking it in, he descended the steep trail with the wind blowing at his hair and seagulls sailing through the air beside him, down the bluff to a secluded beach. The temperature was dropping and fog was rolling in off the water, but there was a warmth from the golden sandstone cliff face. Roarke breathed in deeply, feeling clean, and a million miles away from civilization.

  The beach curved along the wind-sculpted bluffs, and the long stretch of sand was nearly deserted, just a few lone walkers with dogs. A molten ball of sun poured orange light across the waves as it sank into the water.

  Once at the shoreline, he slowed his pace, and then sat down in the still-warm sand amid patches of salt grass to think.

  As far as his stated mission went, the trip so far had been a total bust. No one knew where Cara was. No one left on his list was likely to know where she was.

  His biggest score of the journey had been on the Reaper: the fact that the killer had left a savaged animal as a calling card. In his mind he heard Erin’s shaky voice.

  He’s dead, isn’t he? He must be dead.

  He shook his head to dispel the feeling of unease.

  Cara. Focus on Cara.

  He could go back up through Palm Desert, look at the old files on the murder of the youth home counselor. But he knew that was only his own curiosity. Deep down he was sure that Cara had killed the man. At fourteen years old. He thought briefly of Erin’s story, the bully who surely had had a private visit from Cara. At least whatever she’d done to the kid, he’d gotten away with his life.