Blood Moon

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “There may be a tangible connection based in Arcata, yes. Did the killer recognize Lynn Fairchild? Did he pursue her?” There was a strange calm to the profiler’s voice. “Or was he drawn to her in some way, in the same way that you were drawn to Cara, or she to you?”

  “What the hell…”

  “There does seem to be some vortex to this case. The Reaper was drawn to Mrs. Fairchild. Was it conscious? Or was it perhaps in some way we may never understand?”

  Roarke felt his whole body tensing in instinctive resistance. “I don’t get what you’re saying at all.”

  Snyder gave him a brief glance that said he was a liar, but he didn’t say it aloud. “I think we need to focus on what we can solidly pursue in this case, but not ignore signposts that we may not immediately understand.”

  He looked out through the glass wall into the forest, the tops of trees moving in the night wind, under stars. “We’re going to be here for some time, I think. Do you have hotel rooms yet?” he asked.

  They didn’t.

  “Then I’d suggest we set up camp.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The Arrowhead Lodge was a Triple-A accommodation right at the gateway to the central village, a five-minute walk from the lake down a hushed, meandering path through the forest. Across the parking lot was a shopping complex with a 7-11 and a large neon sign advertising psychic readings.

  “Just what we need,” Epps muttered from the seat beside him, but Roarke felt a wild secret urge to walk over and ask for a consultation.

  The main lodge was a historic building. “Built in nineteen seventeen,” the desk clerk told the agents as they checked in and stood in the firelit lobby looking around the two stories of rock walls and staggered dormer windows, molded ceilings, modern lighting wired into the original gaslight fixtures, an octagonal bar in the lounge.

  Epps nodded at the period detail with satisfaction. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “As long as you’re happy,” Roarke said dryly.

  Outside the main lodge the complex also had several dozen standalone cottages with mini-kitchens. There was a warren of them between the tall pines, all connected by wooden bridges over dry creek beds.

  Weddings, Roarke thought. Just perfect for weddings and tracking serial killers.

  The swollen moon was high above the trees as Epps parked their vehicle in the space assigned to their cabins. Roarke got out of the Jeep. A hulking shadow loomed beside him and he startled back… then realized he was facing an enormous chainsaw- carved sculpture of a standing bear.

  He shook his head at his own jumpiness and followed Epps down stepping stones laid between cabins.

  He and Epps had two cabins, one above the other on the walkway, with secluded porches; Jones was across the way. Lam and Stotlemyre had remained at the Fairchilds, but Epps had booked them a two-story unit in the next row, and Snyder a fourth cabin below them. Another walkway led out to a gazebo lit by strings of white lights.

  Roarke turned to face Epps, Jones and Snyder. “Let’s try to get an hour’s rest and meet back here in an hour-fifteen.”

  He walked in through the door of his cabin and found a much bigger space than he’d expected from the outside. A bathroom connected the living room with a bedroom. A kitchenette on the other side of the living room led out to a second entrance.

  The bedroom had wood paneling halfway up the walls and fleur-de-lis-patterned wallpaper above that. The slanted ceiling was probably cozy in below-freezing temperatures, but also claustrophobic; he felt too enclosed. On the bright side there was a spa tub in the tiled bathroom. He stood looking down on it, but knew his mind would never let him rest if he didn’t settle something first.

  He stripped off his coat and suitcoat and found his phone, then, not trusting himself to lie on the bed, he took a seat in one of the armchairs in the dim sitting area, facing the window and the light of the moon, and dialed Rachel. She had called twice during the day without leaving a message, and he dreaded speaking with her, but he owed her much more than that for his behavior.

  The phone rang and rang and he thought he might have been reprieved… just before she picked up.

  “Hello,” she said, and despite everything, her voice was a sexual charge.

  “I wasn’t sure I was going to get you,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Doing okay,” she said, but he could hear the wariness in the words.

  “I’m glad. I’m sorry I haven’t called before now—”

  “I understand,” she said, cutting him off.

  “I don’t think you—”

  “I understand about work,” she said.

  Silence crackled through the line between them. She finally spoke. “I called for a reason. You know I have two of Danny’s girls with us at the house, now, besides Jade. I showed them the police sketch of that woman.”

  Roarke felt a sudden twist in the pit of his stomach. “Yes,” he said.

  “Shauna, one of the other girls, saw her too. She says she saw her beat up a john, smash his head against a brick wall in an alley. Hurt him pretty badly, it sounds like. I thought you would want to know.”

  “When was this?” he asked, too sharply.

  “Three days ago, she said.”

  Before the pimp was killed.

  “In the Haight?”

  “Yes, just a few blocks away from here.”

  Which means that Cara probably is staying somewhere in the Haight. Which means…

  “Look, I want you to be careful,” he said abruptly. “Don’t go out alone at night. Report anything that seems suspicious.”

  There was a beat of silence before Rachel answered. “What do you mean? Why?”

  He found he had no answer. Because Cara might feel possessive of me and slash you to pieces on a whim? It wasn’t what she did. Unless it was.

  “Just be careful. Please.” He felt emotions spiraling dangerously out of control. “How is Jade?” he asked, to steady himself.

  “Still here,” Rachel said. “Terrorizing the others.” She was joking, but Roarke imagined there was truth in it, too. “I don’t know for how long, but she seems to have settled in for the time being. Sometimes they get tired of running. Maybe she has.”

  “That’s good,” he said. So we have a witness after all.

  “I’ll try to find out where she’s from,” Rachel said, before he could ask.

  “I appreciate that.” He was suddenly rabid to get off the phone. She seemed to sense it, because after a few beats of silence she spoke before he could.

  “I don’t want to keep you.”

  “I should get some sleep, really,” he admitted. “I just wanted to see how you were.”

  “I’ll be all right,” she said, and he thought there was an ambiguous tone in her voice, but he was too suddenly drowsy to tell.

  “Be careful,” she said again, quickly, and disconnected.

  He punched off the phone and sat in the moonlight. So Cara had been busy, following a track of her own. He found it ironic, and humbling, that they’d been fishing for her with the wrong bait. She had her own unpredictable yet unrelenting agenda, and he had no doubt there was more to be revealed about what she’d been up to.

  And despite his to-the-bone fatigue, he sat for a long time.

  In his own cabin, Snyder shut the door behind him and locked it, breathing in as he tried to release the images from the Cavanaugh house.

  The profiler had long had his own means of coping with horrors, the investigation of which was his life’s work. Detachment was key. Detachment was not the same as peace, the spiritual goal cultivated by Buddhists. Snyder was too much a product of his Protestant background, even long abandoned, to find that kind of comfort. His own detachment was merely a hard-won ability to look at acts which other cultures had no qualms about calling demonic, and reduce them to quantifiable statistics, characteristics, probabilities. This has happened in seventy percent of cases with variable X and factor Y, so there is a seventy pe
rcent probability that it will happen here.

  But lately, as he felt his own death draw inexorably closer, he had become more interested in those cultures’ more layered views of life and death, good and evil, and he sometimes found himself wondering what truths he may have been overlooking in his rational approach to his work.

  The carnage at the Cavanaugh house was enough to give the most hardened rationalist pause.

  He stepped to the window and drew back the heavy drape to look out. It was going to be an icy night; the wind was whispering through the trees, swirling leaves on the ground. He shivered, turning away.

  As he moved around in the excessively quaint cabin, lighting the gas logs in the fireplace, hanging up his coat, he felt an agitation, a sickness somewhat like fear. Revulsion, he thought of it. There was a revulsion triggered by the sight of human evil, or its aftermath. The smell of death was still on him; even the frigidity of the Cavanaugh’s unheated house had not been able to cut that stench, and he was thinking that a shower would wash away the anxiety aroused by the lingering smell, a nearly palpable presence in the room.

  He turned toward the bathroom…

  A blond woman stepped out through the door.

  And he realized the anxiety he felt had not been a reaction to the smell of death. Not at all.

  He looked into Cara Lindstrom’s fine, pale face, as she stood very still in the half-light, looking at him.

  “Hello,” he said softly, and tried to breathe through the jolt of adrenaline to his heart. He had no idea what this visit might be about, but he knew he was not the one who had control over it.

  ***

  In his cabin, Roarke finally stood and moved for the bedroom, but stopped in the bathroom, looking down at the Jacuzzi tub.

  “Fuck it,” he mumbled, and reached to turn on the jets.

  ***

  Snyder could not keep his eyes off her. She was quite beautiful, though not in any conventional way: the sharp curves of her bone structure, and the intensity, almost hyper-focus, her body still, yet seeming to vibrate with tension. She was present.

  “I’m Chuck Snyder,” he said, throught a mouth gone perfectly dry. “But I imagine you know that.”

  “I know,” she said. Hearing words from her was a relief, perhaps false relief, but in the moment, any kind of normalcy was welcome. Behind him, the gas logs sizzled.

  “Do you know about the Reaper, too?” he asked, speaking slowly and calmly.

  She looked at him without answering. Snyder realized he was pouring sweat from every pore in his body. He swallowed.

  “Is there anything you can tell us… anything at all that would help us catch him?”

  “Roarke is wrong,” she said, and despite his fear, he felt a sharp spur of curiosity.

  “What is he wrong about?”

  Her eyes were looking past him, toward the moon, he thought. “The Reaper,” she said.

  “What about the Reaper?”

  “I know,” she said, and the sudden agitation in her voice froze his blood.

  “What do you know?”

  She turned back to him, and in the shadows, her eyes were dark, almost black. “It’s a trap.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Now clean and changed and shaven, Roarke stepped out of his cabin into the icy wind. The bath had been lifesaving, but all the heat of that delicious soak had leached out of him by the time he crossed the low-lit path to Snyder’s cabin.

  He knocked on the door, and stood in the dark and the wind, shivering. Wind whistled through the treetops, shaking the long pine needles.

  After a few seconds he knocked again, harder.

  There was no answer, and he noticed, no light on inside, either.

  “Chuck?” he called.

  He reached for the doorknob automatically, and to his surprise, it turned. Unlocked.

  Adrenaline flooded his system. He pushed the door open and pressed his body against the frame as he looked cautiously inside.

  “Chuck?” he said sharply.

  He pulled away from the door and drew his weapon. He reached into the room and snapped on the light, then barged in, swiveling in a firing stance, scanning the room.

  Empty.

  He spun at the sound of a muffled thud from the bedroom. He shoved through the connecting bathroom door, checked the space, pushed open the bedroom door, scanned that room. The bedroom was empty, moonlight filterng through the shuttered window. Across the room a chair was shoved under the doorknob of the closet door.

  He strode forward and kicked the chair out of position, twisted open the door with one hand.

  Snyder looked up at him from the dark of the closet floor. His hands were tied behind his back, his mouth gagged with a shirt tied around his head. Roarke crouched to untie the gag.

  “Well, I’ve met Cara,” Snyder said ruefully.

  When Roarke barreled out the cabin door onto the deck, Jones and Epps were already there, weapons drawn. All three agents raised their weapons, showing their hands.

  Jones spoke tautly. “I was watching from across the way. I saw you go in. Then no lights went on…”

  “Cara was here,” Roarke told them.

  “Shit,” Epps exploded. He spun to look around them. The pines towered above and the night was as black as tar.

  “Snyder says it was at least twenty minutes ago,” Roarke told them. “He’s okay. But she’s long gone.” On the inside he was ballistic, though who or what he was angry with was unclear, even to him.

  Back in Snyder’s room, Epps paced on the phone to the sheriff’s office, coordinating an immediate search of the area and a BOLO for Cara to all local authorities.

  Roarke turned to Snyder with a combination of fury and filial worry.

  “I’m perfectly fine.” Snyder said mildly, massaging his wrists. “She only wanted to deliver a message.”

  “To you.” Roarke could hear the outrage in his own voice.

  “Every man on your team is watching you like hawks, as they should be,” Snyder said. “How could she get near you?”

  “What message?” Roarke couldn’t contain himself. “What the hell did she say?

  Snyder glanced at Epps, who was looking over from the phone, listening. He took his time answering.

  “Your plan worked. She has been drawn out by the hunt for her family’s killer. Not surprisingly, she feels personally involved in this case. I think perhaps she wanted my take.”

  Roarke felt he’d been punched in the gut. She was ahead of him, behind him, all around him…

  How close she must have been to know where he was going.

  It was the first thing Epps seized on, too, as soon as he signed off his phone and turned to the other men. “She’s in your email,” he told Roarke. “How else would she know to come here?” He stabbed his finger toward the ground.

  Roarke shook his head. “I can’t see it.” He had no proof, no idea, really, but it didn’t seem to him that technology was her style. It was far too easy to track someone online, now, and she was a physical person, a traveler, too restless even to sit. Definitely not a hacker type.

  He remembered his walk out of the shelter on Belvedere, after being with Rachel… the feeling of darkness closing in, of not being alone. “It must have been when you picked me up. On the street. In the Haight. She overheard us talking about Arrowhead.”

  Had she seen him leave the shelter? Or arrive at it? His stomach dropped as he thought of Cara watching him with Rachel Elliott. What had she thought?

  And then there was the even more ominous thought, arising again out of some dark and ambiguous place in him:

  Is Rachel in danger?

  “Jesus,” Epps muttered. “She was right there with you?”

  Roarke scrubbed his face with a hand. “All right, we knew this. I knew it.” Taking the blame was peremptory; Epps would be down his throat once he’d recovered from the initial shock. After all, it had been Roarke who had slipped his tail, his bodyguard, deliberately and consciously.
He was trying to have it both ways, play both sides of the board, however anyone would want to call it.

  He finished aloud. “The fact is, she’s here.”

  “So we can catch her,” Epps said, with a rush of energy. “We know she’s right on top of you, we can nail her. Finally.”

  Roarke felt a flash of rage that he channeled into low, precise words.“Or we concentrate everything we’ve got on going after the Reaper before that fuck kills another family full of kids.”

  Epps swore softly. “That’s no choice at all.”

  “Exactly,” Roarke said. “It’s no choice at all. She’s not going to hurt me—”

  “You don’t know that—”

  “I’m not worried about it,” Roarke overrode him. “Not for one second. But I do know that some monster who has butchered five families now, twenty-four people, fourteen kids, is out there looking to do it again, sooner rather than later. You were in that house. You saw it. What’s the priority, here?”

  For a moment Roarke thought he had pushed his man too far, as he saw a glimpse of the deadly force Epps would have been if he hadn’t made it out of the street life.

  Then the face of the agent, the lawman, returned. He circled the small room. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it. You, her, it, any of it.”

  “We don’t have to like it. We just have to get this piece of shit.”

  Epps halted, and they stared each other down.

  Roarke broke the standoff. “Go. Put out an APB. And then let’s focus on the Reaper.”

  “Right,” Epps said. He moved for the door to the deck and pulled it open. But at the threshold, he suddenly stepped close to Roarke, so that only he could hear him. “Here’s my problem, boss man. You like it. You like it this way.” His eyes bored into Roarke’s, then he shook his head, and stepped back, out the door, off the deck, down the path, heading back toward his cabin.

  Roarke turned back inside the room and closed the door. Snyder had seated himself in an armchair beside the fireplace, blue flames now blazing through the gas logs. He looked up at Roarke, waiting for what he had to say next.