He knows where I am.
She reaches into her pocket, fingering the ballpoint pen there. How easy it would be to end this.
But finally she knows what she must do.
That night, when Ms. Nicole calls the girls forward to take their meds, Cara takes the paper cup and swallows the pills obediently, shows her tongue and cheeks.
Then she locks herself in the bathroom.
Vomiting is easy. Sometimes there is a pain so deep in her gut that the only way to feel better is to puke it out. This time, all she needs to do is think of the pool of blood at the brown-haired girl’s feet for her bile to rise.
She bends over the sink and gags the pills up into her hand.
She looks at the capsules. Depakote. Clozapine. A mood stabilizer and an antipsychotic.
They have been effective, in their way. They have been a curtain between her and the whispers, the visions, the screams.
But she cannot afford the haze that the drugs provide. She must be clear, no matter what horrors she sees. She must be able to see It coming.
She flushes the pills and goes to her room. Through the window, the moon is a perfect half in the blackness of sky.
She lies back on her bed . . . and waits for the moon to talk to her.
ROARKE
Chapter Seven
When people outside California think about California, they picture Hollywood, Disneyland, the beaches. They picture San Diego and San Francisco. The connoisseurs might imagine Sequoia, Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada mountains.
But in reality, vast stretches of California are desert. The Mojave. Death Valley. Joshua Tree. Anza-Borrego. And Palm Desert, where Roarke was headed, straight east on the 10.
It was a perfect Southern California day, windy and clear as only January can be in California, pushing eighty degrees on the inland roads. Global warming might be a disaster for the planet at large, but at the moment, it suited Roarke just fine. His Land Rover ate up the miles, and the driving was a relief. It felt like movement, like life. The foothills rolled down in thick folds from the snow-topped peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains; the valley stretched out before him with its sandy washes and patchwork squares of orange groves, intermittently feathered with the tops of palm trees.
He reached to turn on the radio. As he scanned through the stations, he came across one of the shock-jock commentators he hated. He was just about to punch past to another station when a name stopped him.
“Cara Lindstrom’s arrest and escape has sparked a national debate about ‘rape culture.’ We’re taking callers.”
Despite himself, Roarke left the station where it was.
“Hello, Ron from Bakersfield,” the host said.
The caller didn’t need coaxing. His voice blasted through the speakers, a self-righteous outrage silenced only periodically by censor bleeps. “Rape culture? Please. We’re f***** Americans. We’re the best at everything. If we actually practiced rape culture, there would be a trail of bleeding pussies from New York to Los Angeles and back again. If rape culture actually existed in America, there’s no way we’d let ourselves pass with only sixteen percent of women experiencing it. That’s bush league.”
Roarke’s hands tightened on the steering wheel in disgust and anger. He’d been careful not to turn on the TV because he didn’t want to know how much hate was being focused against Cara by the men’s rights groups, the talk show hosts and shock jocks like the one on this station.
“You just watch. This Lindstrom c*** is going to get a taste of rape culture—”
Roarke punched the button to silence the rant.
Multiply this psycho by ten thousand, a hundred thousand . . .
The thought made him almost sick with fear for her.
If any one of them ever gets to her . . .
He prayed that Cara was so far away no one could ever find her.
Including him.
It was just before noon when Roarke hit Palm Desert, an oasis in the Coachella Valley at the base of the stunning San Jacinto mountain range, with its sheer cliff faces and views of pristine dunes.
The town was now famous for the music festival, which had started with impromptu parties out in the dunes and canyons, musicians on acoustic instruments playing spaced-out psychedelic desert rock. The music scene had exploded and brought not just gentrification but real wealth to the formerly scruffy town. Sixteen years ago it wouldn’t have been so posh. But now El Paseo, the town’s main drag, was a sand-colored version of Rodeo Drive. Large and colorful pieces of public art decorated the median on a street lined with stores with names like Tiffany, Givenchy, Wolfgang Puck. The opulence seemed garish and obscene against the pristine purity of the desert, the staggering beauty of the mountains.
Roarke found the Palm Desert Sheriff’s Station on Gerald Ford Drive, just past a stretch of golf course. The large parking lot was full of black and white trucks and SUVs.
He got out of his Land Rover and looked at the building, built in a vaguely adobe style: red flagstone with pillars, a front plaza with red-gold ceramic tile. Instead of lawns, there were planters with pebbles, and well-tended desert vegetation: bushes with red and orange flowers, squat palm trees. It was the cleanest police station he’d ever seen.
He reached into the back seat for the suit coat he’d hung on the side hook of the vehicle, and shrugged it on. He may have been on the beach for weeks, but it would take a while for the habit of FBI dress standards to die.
Inside the spotless lobby were pink sandstone walls, a few rows of plastic chairs. Several deputies and a couple of plainclothes milled inside the glass-enclosed reception cubicle. Roarke walked up to the counter and addressed the male deputy perched on the front stool.
“I’m looking for Detective Ortiz.”
“You have an appointment?”
“Just hoping to catch him.”
“And you are?”
Roarke was suddenly faced with the new problem of how to introduce himself. No longer technically an agent, at least in his own mind—but not quite a civilian, either.
“My name’s Roarke—”
A sunburned man with dark hair, solidly built in his suit, turned from the counter where he was standing. “I’ll take care of it, Benson,” he told the deputy.
He stepped to open the door of the reception cubicle and walked out into the lobby, then stopped in front of Roarke, a boxer’s stance. “I’m Ortiz.”
That’s a bit of luck, Roarke thought. “Matthew Roarke—”
The man’s face turned darker. “I know who you are. You think you can just turn up here without an appointment? Who the fuck do you think you are, Mr. G-Man?”
The detective’s hostility caught Roarke off guard. He willed his fists not to clench, willed his voice to stay even. “You called me.”
“Yeah, I called you. Now you want to talk. Now that Lindstrom’s in the wind again, thanks to your fuckup.”
Ortiz wasn’t just angry. This was a barely contained rage. Roarke tried to keep himself together.
“You said you had information—”
“Had. I had information. I called. After that whole Bitch thing—the media shitstorm. But no, the FBI had it under control, didn’t you?” His voice was bitter. “So Lindstrom makes fucking bail.”
“Hold on. You called?” Roarke asked. This was coming out of nowhere.
“And no one ever called me back.”
Roarke couldn’t fathom it. That wasn’t like Singh, at all. She was probably the most meticulous person he had ever met, let alone worked with. Then again, in the days before Cara’s hearing, they had all had their hands full, the team. And he hadn’t been thinking clearly himself, not by a long shot.
He forced himself to focus back on Ortiz. “I’m here now. Do you have information relevant to the whereabouts of Cara Lindstrom?”
Is that what he thought? Or hoped? Now that he’d said it aloud he actually hoped the exact opposite.
Ortiz’s voice was grim. “I coulda told you ple
nty that woulda kept her behind bars.”
The anger was beginning to grate on Roarke. “What would that be?”
“She killed a man in cold blood in this county.”
Despite his own suspicions on that front, Roarke found himself rising to her defense. “My understanding is that she was never charged.”
“She was never charged,” Ortiz said, grinding the words.
Roarke pushed it. “Did you ever have anything on her, really? Las Piedras is forty-five miles away from Palm Desert over a mountain road. How do you place that fourteen-year-old girl at that crime scene?”
He’d thought it through a hundred times. Of course he had his own idea about how it had happened. He just wanted to know what the detective had.
Before Ortiz could answer, Roarke added, “And why do you think she would go to that kind of trouble? The planning, the danger. We’re talking about a fourteen-year-old girl—”
“Because Pierson sent her up to YA. He had her put away for two years. Kids kill for less.”
Roarke shook his head. “It never bothered you that there were two of them against one of her? A grown man and a fifteen-year-old boy with a history of assault?”
Ortiz looked ready to jump him. “You didn’t see that crime scene. I did. It was a blood bath. Girl does that at fourteen, it’s not hard to figure what comes next. And I guess we saw, didn’t we? Christ only knows how many men she’s killed since.”
Roarke had to stifle his dislike. There was blistering resentment there, but also triumph. Ortiz had been vindicated, and he wanted everyone to know it.
The detective almost spat his next words. “But she makes bail because she’s a woman. A serial killer, and she just walks.”
Ortiz was wrong about that. What was interesting about Cara was that she wasn’t a serial killer. There was no sexual motivation to her murders whatsoever. She was an extraordinarily prolific vigilante who was convinced that the men she killed were evil. But under the circumstances Roarke wasn’t about to correct him.
“And you have no idea where she is, do you?” Ortiz challenged.
Roarke suddenly had the distinct impression that there was a motive here, that he was being played. “Do you?”
Ortiz looked angry, and also sly. “You don’t even have a guess. With all your FBI resources at your disposal. Fucking useless.” He shook his head. “I’ll tell you what, though. She’ll get hers. There are all kinds of people gunning for her.”
He was sounding just like the radio callers.
But Roarke held back his own anger, because something wasn’t adding up here. “Did you have an actual reason for contacting me?”
Ortiz’s lips curled in something that was not quite a smile. “I got what I expected. Go the hell home, Agent Roarke.”
Chapter Eight
Roarke stood by his Rover in the parking lot outside, at once agitated and mystified by the encounter. On one hand, he knew where Ortiz was coming from. Every lawman had one. For Ortiz, Cara was the one who got away. He’d known all along she was a killer, and now the world knew.
But there was more there than a desire for justice or closure. That level of rage against a fourteen-year-old? It didn’t make sense.
Why would he want to contact me at all? Was it just drunk-dialing? Blowing off steam?
There was something underneath it. Roarke could feel it festering. He just didn’t know what it was.
So I’ve driven all the way out here for nothing.
He looked out on the desert landscape, the towering wall of the mountain range.
What now? Back to Pismo?
He didn’t relish the thought of another five-hour drive back the way he came. But beyond that, the prospect of returning to the beach, to his state of limbo, was almost panic-inducing.
But . . .
But . . . there was an alternate route home that would take him through Las Piedras.
The exact route that fourteen-year-old Cara would have to have taken to get to Palm Desert that night.
He felt the pull of the thought, like a nicotine craving, like an alcoholic’s urge for just one drink. He knew the danger, the seductive undertow of the case.
But I’m here . . .
He gave in, opened the driver’s door, and got back on the road.
The drive from Palm Desert to Las Piedras was an hour and twenty minutes by the Garmin, that began with twenty miles on the famously scenic Highway 74, up and over the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountain range.
Roarke turned onto the highway and began the ascent into the mountains, turning off frequently at the vista points to look back in awe over the huge sprawl of the Coachella Valley. Bare sand, house-sized boulders, cactus . . . and a stunning vastness. It wasn’t a drive for the faint of heart: just two lanes with an occasional turnout for slower vehicles, and whiplash-inducing curves, every new turn opening up staggering desert panoramas and new contrasts in landscape and vegetation.
He found himself gripping the steering wheel with both hands to negotiate the increasing highway elevations on the winding road, the hairpin turns with their deadly drop-offs.
More and more he realized it was a crazy thing to think that Cara had driven it herself, at night, at fourteen.
He couldn’t fathom how she would’ve been able to do it. The winding road through the mountains at night would be perilous in the extreme. He knew the adult Cara was an expert car thief, and she would have had to learn somewhere, some time. But at the time of the counselor’s murder she had been in CYA, juvenile prison, for two years. In order to make this drive at the time Ortiz was alleging, she would have had to learn to drive at twelve.
If she had done it, how the hell had she done it?
On the other side of the mountain, the road descended gradually, with equally stunning canyon views. In between watching the road, he went over the time line in his head. He’d practically memorized it.
Twenty-five years ago the Lindstrom family was massacred by the serial killer known as the Reaper, after which five-year-old Cara lived with her father’s sister, her aunt Joan, and Joan’s new husband in the wine country town of Temecula.
Cara’s mental scars from that night proved overwhelming. The husband left the family almost immediately, and Joan gave Cara up to the foster care system only a few months later, citing extreme behavioral problems and overwhelming mental issues.
Cara was in and out of foster homes, and then group homes, for the next seven years. During all that time she was on psychotropic medication. The trouble with that was, the diagnoses of her mental state were so conflicting that it wasn’t possible to properly medicate her. No one really knew what they were medicating. But whatever else it was, there was certainly PTSD: severe, sustained psychological anguish stemming from the unspeakable tragedy of that long-ago night.
Then came the attack on the boy in the group home, Pierson’s testimony against her and her incarceration in CYA, the old name for the California Division of Juvenile Justice. She was released in January of 2000, and sent to a group home in the Riverside County town of Las Piedras. She was at the high school there for just two weeks, after which she was transferred again.
And during which the former counselor from the group home was murdered in Palm Desert: almost an hour and a half drive from the high school.
Had Cara been planning that murder, plotting revenge, all the time she had been incarcerated? Or was there more to it than that?
Roarke had always wondered. Because with Cara, there was always more to the story.
The state road turned into Cahuilla Road, a twenty-mile two-lane highway through hills and valleys, skirting and sometimes crossing several separate Indian reservations: Santa Rosa, Cahuilla, Pechanga . . . each one so distinct topographically. Native American nations, sovereign territory, with their own laws and justice system.
Cara would have grown up with that, too. Roarke filed that thought away as he stared out at vast stretches of unpopulated wilderness.
So many
places to hide. And this is just one state.
He felt a spark of hope. She really could be anywhere, by now. She had the resources . . . surely she had the sense to get lost and stay lost.
He thought suddenly of Ortiz, the detective’s explosive anger. And a traitorous part of him whispered to Cara, Go. Stay gone.
Chapter Nine
He reached Las Piedras in the early afternoon.
It was one of the weird little towns in the hill-lined corridor between the coast and the desert: hippified Lake Elsinore, Murrietta with its hot springs, the Temecula wine country. Las Piedras had not experienced the land boom or the resulting traffic congestion that some of those other towns had. It was nestled beneath sage green hills dotted with the huge pale boulders that must have given the town its name. Isolated, quiet, not too different from what it must have been like sixteen years ago. Roarke had the feeling of traveling back into a simpler time.
He had told himself he would just drive by the high school, a cluster of two-story sand-colored brick buildings with a scattering of oaks and palm trees. But it only took one glance for him to pull to the curb and get out of the car.
He stood on the sidewalk, feeling the wind on his skin, while students milled on the front lawn under the dry, rustling palms.
And he stared up at the front of the school, at the words painted in red cursive letters:
HOME OF THE WOLFPACK
He didn’t live his life by synchronicity, although he had a healthy respect for intuition in general. But Cara had attended the school for just two weeks.
In January.
A Wolf Moon.
Before he was aware what he was doing, he was walking across the school lawn toward the administration building.
He stepped through the metal gates, and was confronted by a snarling wolf effigy on the wall outside of the building. As if the thoughts in his mind had assumed form.
He turned away from it, glanced over the quad: a core defined by four discrete but interconnected two-story brick-and-glass buildings. Rows of lockers surrounded the quad at sidewalk level.
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