Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  He paced. “What really happens is our guy gets into the house, maybe through a window, maybe the front door’s actually open like Lundgren said. Maybe there’s a hide-a-key, he could have figured that out if he’s been watching the place for a week.” He made a mental note to check about a hide-a-key. “The whole family’s asleep. The killer takes the father out first, then goes upstairs after the mother and the kids. Goes back down to the study, puts Leland’s slippers back on him, puts the knife in Leland’s hands to get the prints, and lets it fall.”

  Epps was on his feet, too. “I don’t buy it. I don’t. Let’s get real. What are the chances the Reaper just picks up and starts killing all over again exactly twenty-five years later?”

  Roarke was so deep in thought it took him a long time to pull himself back to the present to respond.

  “I’m thinking Shawcross. Arthur Shawcross killed twelve prostitutes from 1988 to 1989 in the Rochester area, upstate New York. He was first arrested for rape and murder in 1972 and served fourteen and a half years in prison, after which he was paroled and went straight back to killing. The profilers on the case figured him for fifteen years younger because he was still showing all the emotional characteristics of the age at which he’d been incarcerated, but really he’d just picked up right where he left off.”

  Epps actually took a few beats to think about it, but shook his head. “Uh uh. Here’s what I don’t like. What are the chances we start investigating all this just when it starts happening again?”

  Roarke had been thinking that, too. Or rather, trying not to think about it. It was worse than coincidence… more dangerous, somehow. “I can’t explain it. But the anniversary of the Lindstrom massacre is a trigger for Cara Lindstrom, why wouldn’t it be a trigger for the killer?”

  Epps held his hands up in protest. “The Reaper massacres were straight-up killings. They weren’t staged. No father suicide. It’s a huge anomaly.”

  “But the Reaper would be twenty-five years older now. That’s long enough to learn some control. He still needs the frenzy, the release. He needs it to be a knife, needs the cutting, the slashing, the blood. But what if he learned a couple of tricks in prison? He’s had a long, long time to plot how to cover his tracks when he finally got out.”

  Epps looked away.“If anyone had arrested the Reaper they’d have thrown away the key.”

  Roarke pointed at him. “Exactly. So he had to have been arrested for something else. Something big, twenty-five years worth of big, but nowhere near what he really deserved. Nobody knew they had the Reaper. He was never connected to the massacres.”

  Now Epps was the one to pace, pressing his big hands against his temples. “Man. And I thought this shit couldn’t get any crazier. You are entirely tripping me out right now.”

  “I know.” It was like being dropped through the rabbit hole, all semblance of reality wavering.

  Epps finally stopped still and they looked at each other.

  “Only one way to find out,” Roarke said. “We get Lam and Stotlemyre up here to go over the evidence with the coroner.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “We’ve got a problem,” Roarke told Singh on the phone.

  As he filled her in, her silence was epic, and he thought again that they had slipped into some territory that he wasn’t sure he wanted any part of.

  He told her to get Lam and Stotlemyre, the division’s best crime scene techs, up to Reno, and instruct them to take a cab to the Leland house upon arrival. She would be sending him photos of the Reaper massacres for comparison to the Leland killings.

  “And we need to find out who owned that cat,” he told her, and gave her Stephen Marsden’s description of the animal. “Whoever it was may have seen someone watching their house. If we can find out when the cat went missing, we’ll know when the killer was here.”

  “I will start with the animal shelters and lost pet sites,” Singh assured him.

  Next Roarke pulled Bureau rank with the Reno Chief of Detectives to get access to the Leland house, this time without Detectives Lundgren and Samson.

  He had time for a short nap, as they waited for the techs to arrive. Not anywhere near enough before his phone was ringing him awake at quarter past midnight.

  The half moon was high as he joined Epps at the car. Jones was nowhere in sight, but Roarke knew he’d be shadowing them, still on the lookout for Cara.

  Epps drove through a fast-food franchise for coffees, then they headed to the Leland house to meet Lam and Stotlemyre. They were Roarke’s favorite techs of the San Francisco Division’s six Evidence Response Teams to work with, one an enormous blond German, the other a reed-thin Vietnamese, joined at the hip. They’d been working together for aeons and Roarke suspected they were joined at the hip personally, too, though no one ever asked. It might be the San Francisco FBI, but it was still the FBI.

  The four men greeted each other in the Lelands’ front hall. No handshaking. No one ever shook hands at a crime scene.

  “So tell me — am I crazy?” Roarke asked, not joking.

  “Not necessarily,” Lam said cheerfully. They all moved into the living room as he explained. “It’s not exactly sloppy detective work but it’s clear the lead detective had a bias. There’s been a rash of family murder-suicides in the last two years and the media has been hitting it hard, domestic violence linked to the recession, that kind of thing.”

  Stotlemyre nodded assent. “It’s an easy enough conclusion to come to. When these cases keep showing up in the news…”

  “It’s infectious,” Lam finished beside him. Roarke and Epps exchanged a glance. The extensive news coverage of some high profile crimes like school shootings and workplace massacres almost always seemed to trigger similar crimes across the nation, the intense media attention pushing other potential killers over the edge. Mass murder going viral.

  “Except for the statistical improbability of a knife as the murder and suicide weapon,” Roarke said.

  “Exactly,” Lam pointed toward him.

  Stotlemyre concurred. “In fact I can only think of two: one in Arizona in 2002, where the father burned down the house after stabbing the family to death, and one back in the Dark Ages, 1970, the Jeffrey Macdonald killings. That turned out to be a staged home invasion, the father trying to make it look like his family had been killed by a Manson family copycat.” As he spoke, Lam used the dining room table to spread out crime scene photos, the two techs working together seamlessly as they always did. Now Stotlemyre stepped to the table to look down at the photos. “The Reno forensics techs did a good job with blood location. And the location of blood in each room throughout the house was consistent with the scenario the detectives settled on.”

  Lam took over. “The crime lab typed the blood, and the murder weapon looks exactly like it should in a murder-suicide scenario. The wife and the second boy had the same blood type as the father, the youngest and eldest boys had different types, and all three blood types were found on the knife. And the father’s prints were on the knife, of course. All very damning, fine, no problem. But given the level of violence, the multiple stabbings, the struggle of the victims, the father realistically should have had all three types of blood somewhere on his clothing and/or skin. The lab found only two types mixed on the father’s clothing. The oldest boy’s, no surprise: the kid fought him and was really slashed up.” Lam put out a photo of the carnage in Seth Leland’s bedroom.

  Roarke felt a twinge at the tech’s words that was not just the sheer horror of the scenario, but an additional prickle of significance. There was something here, something crucial he had to pay attention to. But before he could follow the thought, Lam added, “But we find it odd that nowhere on Leland’s person or clothes was there any blood from the youngest child.”

  Stotlemyre continued. “Since the mother’s and middle child’s blood type was the same, we were wondering if just possibly there was blood from only one of those two on Leland’s clothes. If there was no blood from the youngest
or the middle boy on Leland, it would give more weight to your theory of an outside killer,” he nodded to Roarke. “So that’s the first thing to check. DNA testing can separate various DNA profiles from a mixed blood sample.”

  The techs exchanged a glance, then Lam spoke for both of them. “We’re getting the mixed blood samples from the crime lab and sending them to Quantico to rush the DNA.”

  “Sounds like a long shot,” Epps said.

  And a longer wait than we can afford, Roarke thought uneasily. We’re racing the moon, here.

  Stotlemyre shrugged philosophically. “It wouldn’t get you a conviction, but if you’re trying to establish that the father didn’t kill the family, it’s a place to start. Meanwhile we’ll comb through the rest of the evidence.”

  “You need to handle everyone on the case with kid gloves,” Roarke told them, too aware that he himself hadn’t. “Assure them that there’s no way they could have seen these things unless they knew to look. We need to get them to cooperate and turn over all potential evidence to us.”

  As Epps took Lam and Stotlemyre upstairs for a walk-through, Roarke drifted back to the study to picture the scene.

  He didn’t turn on the light, but stepped to the window to open the slatted wood blind, and then just let his eyes adjust to the ambient light from the streetlights outside.

  Leland had been drinking alone in his study, another reason for the Reno detectives to assume marital problems. According to the tox screens his blood alcohol level had been fairly high; it could well be that he’d fallen asleep at the desk. The window blinds had been up that night, an across-the-street neighbor had glimpsed him at the desk as she turned off her own lights on the way to bed. So someone else could have seen him there as well. Someone not so benign.

  The Reaper had watched his victims for days; the time frame was more nearly a week, judging by the dead animals left on the porches. Perhaps in the Reaper’s head the animals were a warning, a clue to the families that might have saved them had they been attuned to the signs. Or it was some ritual only known to him.

  Roarke stepped to the desk. The office chair of course had been removed; there had been too much blood to clean it. He pulled up a chair that sat against the opposite wall and sat down in front of the desk in Professor Leland’s place, looking out the window, staring through the trees and shrubbery in the front yard. He could see the street, and two of the neighbor’s houses across it, dark now, with just porch lights on.

  Between the two houses there was a gap… not a driveway, but what looked like a kind of alley, an unpaved back road winding behind the houses, providing easy access to garages and trash collection.

  A perfect observation point for a killer.

  He stood and headed for the door.

  The hallway connected to the utility room that led to the outside through the side door. He stepped outside quietly without turning on any lights. The chill of the November night hit him and he could see his breath clouding in the air as he looped around the side of the house. There was a side gate as well, opening on to the gravel alley beside the Leland house. Roarke eased it open without knowing exactly why he was being so careful; the stillness of the night seemed to require it.

  He couldn’t help but be aware of the half moon climbing in the sky above him. Half moon, half a month… no, on the moon cycle, less than that. Just a week, now.

  The “road” was packed dirt and lined with wooden shelters which housed the large city trash and recycling containers. The collection truck could run up and down the side roads and pick up the trash on collection day without owners having to trundle the bins out to the street. The road also provided extra parking for pickup trucks, trailers, and some boats.

  He looked across the dark main street to where the access road continued across the street, and started walking that way.

  Across the street he stopped on the side road to look back at the Leland house.

  He had a perfect view of the open window of Leland’s study. Sitting at the desk, Leland would have been completely visible to someone standing where Roarke was standing now.

  Wind shivered through the trees above him. He turned back and stared through the night at the trash shelters. Any one of them would be a good hiding place for a watcher; the killer might have left evidence as he stood watching. It had been two weeks, and there had been rain. The chances of evidence remaining were slim, but the alley would have to be processed.

  Above the shadows of trees, the half moon glowed. Roarke looked up toward the pale disc… and had a sudden, prickly feeling he was being watched. He twisted toward the shadows, and his body froze even as his eyes focused more keenly, searching the darkness…

  His breath stopped, and he stepped forward… a name on his lips.

  “Cara?”

  A scrabbling sound came from behind the fence. Roarke twisted, his pulse skyrocketing as a dog erupted into wild barking in the yard beside him. And then a hand came down on his shoulder, and he jerked around, grabbing for his weapon —

  Epps shoved him backward and stared into his face, his anger livid in the darkness. “What the hell are you doing out here on your own? You somehow forget you’re bait?”

  Jones was there a moment later, pounding into the alley at a dead run. “Sorry… sorry…” he gasped to Epps. “I was on the other side of the house. I didn’t expect—”

  Epps walked in a circle, glaring at Roarke. “Not your fault, it’s his. Fool.”

  Roarke shook his head, willing his pulse to slow. “I don’t think she’s here,” he said. “I do think the Reaper was.”

  “What the fuck? Just now?” Epps’ voice spiked in incredulity.

  “No,” Roarke said. But even as he thought it, he heard an engine roar to life, a car taking off somewhere on another street. He took a few automatic steps toward the sound, but halted as the car gunned away in the distance. No way. Too late to see who.

  But what if…

  He suppressed the urge to run after it, and turned back to his agents. “I meant that night. And maybe for days before. Get Lam and Stotlemyre. They need to process this alley.”

  Then despite himself, he strode several paces into the alley, staring out into the dark.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The trees are tall, towering above her in the quiet grove, as she crouches by the shining pool of water and washes the blood from her hands.

  The growing moon is reflected in the water, through the shadows of the pines and cypress, and the soft scents and stillness of the grove surround her. Her heart is still racing, but the chill of the water and the air is reviving, and the hush of this isolated place deeply soothing.

  It is done.

  ***

  On a street perpendicular to Roarke’s there is a sandwich shop, two levels: a downstairs, and an upstairs with a perfect view of Roarke’s Victorian. Earlier in the day, she had sat upstairs in one of the round, windowed turrets and watched in absorbed detachment as Roarke and Epps drove off to wherever they were going.

  She feels no particular pull to follow them. Whatever they are doing is clearly staged, possibly for her benefit, but it impacts her not in the least, and she is still tired, so tired, not fully recovered from the wounds from the desert, the third near-death experience of her life.

  So she watches the show they put on in the street, and when their car has gone she drifts back uptown toward her little room in the battered Victorian in the Haight, where she falls into a black and dreamless sleep.

  It is the sounds that wake her… as the street below her windows starts to come alive with music and hilarity, instruments tuning up, sound checks, guitar riffs and the thump of bass.

  She stands and moves to the curved glass of the alcove. Looking down on the street she can see platforms which have appeared as if by magic, constructed at the ends of each block like bookends: bandshells and stages. Live indie bands are beginning to play on every block, food carts and craft tables line the sidewalks, the shop doors are open wide.
A street fair.

  She finds a thick sweater, scarf and hat, and moves downstairs.

  As she opens the side door of her building into the alley, the fair hits her like a tidal wave. The music overlaps, reggae, nouveau punk, a Grateful Dead tribute band. The sidewalks pulse with it. Stoned buskers hand out flyers for shows, food carts hawk fragrant dishes from all nations, craft merchants preside over tables of jewelry and art and batik T-shirts and blown glass drug paraphernalia on the sidewalks. The host of sensations is both overwhelming and welcome; it is a happy kind of overload, and she is as anonymous as she can ever hope to be.

  She wades into the experience, and when she sees the girl with the flaming, flowering tattoos, she knows. This is inevitable, what is going to happen. It is why she is here.

  The girl dances by herself in the crowded street, the tattoos on her back coming alive, a tree dropping blossoms of flame.

  She watches as the girl twirls in a circle, laughing, shrieking… and suddenly she catches sight of Cara and stops her spinning. She smiles, a strange, high smile in the midst of that pounding street music… and then she is dancing backward, slipping into the crowd.

  When the girl disappears, Cara moves on through the dancers and the vendors. Within a block she sees him, that rock star fall of dark hair, the snakelike sinuousness. The pirate pimp. He is high already, perhaps he is never not, a being on the brink of self-immolation.

  He has an entirely different girl in his grasp and is roughly steering her down the sidewalk. This girl has neither the intelligence nor the experience of the girl in flames; this is no more than a child. The baby fat is obvious in her limbs and in her face, in the soft roundness of her stomach, bared to midriff even in the November cold. She is no more than thirteen, fourteen at most.