Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Behind her she hears the gunning of the van’s motor. She scrapes over the top of the fence, feels sharp pain as the wires slice into her stomach before she drops hard to the grass below. She staggers, and whips around . . . just in time to see the van hurtling around the corner of the block, disappearing from sight before she can spot the license plate.

  Her heart is hammering in her chest and her breath comes in hot gasps. Her vision is edged with black.

  The running, the breathlessness, the surge of adrenaline, has created chaos in her bloodstream. The grassy field in front of her is too green and seems to be shimmering.

  She puts her hands on her knees, bending over, and gulps in air, a long inhale . . . another longer, slower release to try to still herself.

  Then she stumbles forward, making her way along the fence, under the bleachers.

  Have to get out. Have to get away. How? How?

  She reaches the concrete maze of the tennis and handball courts and for a moment lets her guard down, thinking she is safe.

  She is never safe.

  She smells the smoky pungence of marijuana, and as soon as she hears the voice, she knows how much trouble she’s in.

  “Lookit here.”

  She hears the slithering of It. And turns to face Martell.

  He is not alone. There are other jocks, in their letter jackets with the snarling wolf emblem. Five of them, glassy-eyed with pot, clothes reeking with the green smoke.

  Her adrenaline is pumping, and her anger flares. It. It. It is everywhere.

  In that moment, she could kill him, she knows. But she doesn’t. She stands motionless, feeling the asphalt under her feet, settling on her legs. Wait, a voice tells her.

  Martell moves closer. It is hard to be still with this predator so close to her, leaning toward her, breathing on her neck.

  “I know who you are,” he whispers.

  Her insides go cold. She knew she would be found out. Of course it would be him.

  “Miracle Girl, that’s what they say.”

  The jocks shift on their feet, surrounding her. She hears someone else whisper it. “Miracle Girl.” She can feel It, the mindless rage, slipping in and around them, and hears the low growling from the pack. Sometimes It doesn’t take just one form. It is also plural.

  “Freak,” Martell rasps, and she feels his poison spittle on her skin. “How’d you do it, freak?

  She has no idea what he means. She keeps herself very still, but her blood is racing, her limbs itching.

  Martell circles her. The other boys watch. She knows she will fight, but they are so much bigger and there are so many of them.

  “The Reaper gets your whole fuckin’ family, and he doesn’t kill you? Why not? What did you do to save your own skin? Did you fuck him? Did you? Did you offer that little pussy up and beg for your life? Whore. Freak—”

  She leans in to him, surprising him, and whispers, “I know what you are.” Her hand shoots out toward his crotch; she grabs the soft sack, and twists. He howls in surprise and rage. Then he is on her, grappling her, hurling her to the ground.

  For a split second, she sees him. Devlin. Standing toward the back of the pack, looking torn, and defensive, and angry, all at once.

  Then they surround her, the snarling wolves, tearing at her, slathering jaws snapping. The asphalt is hot beneath her. Someone is kicking her from behind. She tastes blood in her mouth. Claws rip at her clothes, forcing her legs apart. But she pins her arms to her sides, lets the blows rain down on her. Because she has heard it. The sound of running feet.

  She senses rather than sees the teachers rounding the corner, heading toward the fray . . .

  She feels hands pawing between her legs, and bites down hard on her lips. But she doesn’t move. After seconds that stretch like years, she feels the fists cease, the hands withdrawing, the bodies being pulled away from her as savage adult voices berate her attackers.

  She is being helped to her feet, and she stands shakily to face her rescuers. She knows from their expressions what the teachers see. One small, lone girl against five bigger boys.

  And she knows she has won.

  ROARKE

  Chapter Nineteen

  Out of long habit, Roarke kept a travel bag in the trunk of his car: a few changes of clothes and shoes, a down parka, a Dopp kit. More than enough for overnight.

  He’d passed several golf hotels on the drive in to Las Piedras, so he headed back that way, intending to use the hotel finder app on his phone to price them. But the decision was made for him when he passed the manicured entrance of a resort hotel and caught a glimpse of its marquee, the words GO WOLFPACK!

  He made the turn into the long drive of Shadow Mountain resort, following the sign.

  The hotel was renovated midcentury modern, with a sprawling river-rock fireplace, sunken lounge areas, a spacious bar and restaurant looking out on the golf course. Roarke could see two outdoor pools, two Jacuzzis, moody lighting.

  A plaque at the front desk read Chris Devlin, Manager.

  “How long will you be staying with us, Mr. Roarke?” the young receptionist asked him cheerfully.

  “Just tonight,” Roarke said, and hoped it was the truth.

  His room was a ground-floor business suite with sliding glass doors out onto a patio with a view of the golf course. The lowering sun was brilliant through the glass. Roarke had a feeling of being off the grid, untraceable. As if he’d slipped into a parallel universe, a different time.

  Cara’s time.

  He tossed his bag on the bed, stripped and showered in the bathroom, sluicing off the grime of the road. Then he wrapped a towel around his hips, sat in the low armchair and paged through the yearbook: the young, posed faces, the sports teams and clubs. The students were mostly white, with some scattered Mexican and Native American faces. There were no photos of Cara, of course. No mention of her, or “Eden Ballard.” She hadn’t been at the school long enough to leave a footprint.

  He dressed, ordered dinner from room service, and then started on the school newspapers. He read every line of the papers for the two weeks that Cara was at the school, but again, there was no mention of her. The newspaper the week after had an obituary for Laura Huell, written in adolescently dramatic prose that skirted around the word suicide without ever actually using it. From the article he learned that Laura had been an only child, that her family had attended Calvary Baptist Church. Her father had been a real estate agent and a member of the local Wayfarers Club. Her mother had been a housewife and taught Sunday school at the church. Laura had played the piano at the church and at some Wayfarers events.

  Vague details about a girl who’d now been dead longer than she’d been alive.

  He opened the yearbook to the photo of Laura, put it on the bed. Then he found his own photo of teenage Cara in the file that he’d brought with him, and set it next to Laura’s photo on the In Memoriam page.

  Laura Huell had killed herself.

  She had visited Ivy.

  The obvious inference was that Laura had been attacked by the same man. Roarke knew the statistics: a conservative estimate was that thirteen percent of rape victims commit suicide. Far more of them have suicidal thoughts. Perhaps Laura had been attacked, had survived, possibly escaped without the mutilation that Ivy had suffered, only to end her own life because of the trauma.

  The warm desert wind billowed the curtains at the open sliding glass door.

  Roarke moved to the door, stepped out onto his patio. He looked across the golf course at the dark curves of mountains, lit by the rising half-moon. The palm fronds whispered in the dry wind. There was an itch on his skin.

  His thoughts were racing.

  Ivy was a group home kid. And Laura had killed herself on the same night that the group home counselor had been murdered in his own home.

  Is there a connection there?

  And why had the principal of Las Piedras High failed to mention the attack on Ivy when Roarke had asked him about unusual, violent
, or traumatic events?

  It was all one vast unknown.

  He’d found what might be an ally in the nun. Mother Doctor, he thought, with the same bemusement he’d felt in her office.

  She was calling the shots, for sure. And he knew something would be revealed. There was nothing to do now but wait until morning.

  He looked out on the moonlight over the golf course, and finally the full horror of all he’d learned that day surrounded him. To be fourteen years old, alone in a world where predators not only existed but were actively hunting for the most vulnerable children . . .

  No one was there for Cara then.

  “I’m here, now,” he said to the night.

  CARA

  Chapter Twenty

  In the school office, the nurse tends Cara, applying some stinging rust-red tincture to her bloody scrapes.

  Cara looks across the office to the mirror above the sink. Her face is bruised, her lip bleeding, her hands cut.

  The door opens and the vice-principal looks in, his face blotched with anger. The nurse turns to him. “She should go to the hospital,” she says.

  “I’ll handle it,” Lethbridge says curtly. He gives Cara a furtive look, as if afraid to look at the damage full out.

  And then the door slams open behind him, and Ms. Sharonda is there behind him, her body stiff with rage.

  “What the hell is going on?” She looks from the vice-principal to Cara, huddled in a chair against the wall. “Eden?”

  Cara makes her voice low, doesn’t look at the VP. “They found out who I am. They were hurting me . . .”

  Ms. Sharonda turns on Lethbridge. “What are you doing about this?”

  “We’ll be looking into what happened—”

  She doesn’t let him finish. “I heard what happened. Five of them against a fourteen-year-old girl—”

  The vice-principal speaks through his teeth. “A fourteen-year-old girl with a record of assault. With a juvenile conviction—”

  “Five. Against one. Don’t you dare think this is going to slide because of their country club daddies—”

  “The boys say she attacked first—”

  Ms. Sharonda turns on Cara. “Is that true? Did you start that fight?”

  Cara sits up, looking from her to the vice-principal. Then she lifts the bottom of her black shirt.

  Lethbridge jerks back slightly and Ms. Sharonda expels her breath, as they take in the wide streaks of blood, the deep scratches in her skin.

  Cara knows it looks worse than it is. On the way to the office she dug her own nails into her flesh, widening the cuts from the fence until she felt the sticky flow, smeared it across her stomach.

  Ms. Sharonda turns and stares the vice-principal in the face. “Those boys are expelled, are we clear?”

  Cara sees her chance and takes it. She makes her voice low and broken, pathetic. “I want to go to my aunt’s. Please can I go to my aunt’s?”

  The adults turn to her.

  It is the perfect opportunity. Her aunt can’t turn the school down.

  She hears the relief in the vice-principal’s voice. “That’s a good idea. A few days off. I can arrange that.”

  Ms. Sharonda marches Cara out of the office, staring daggers at everyone unwise enough to cross her path. Cara is quiet and subdued by her side, holding the ice pack the nurse gave her against her face.

  As they step out into the quad, her heart is beating with wild exhilaration in her chest.

  She is free. She is free.

  ROARKE

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He is back in school, in the sunny quad where he used to hang out with the rest of the guys at San Luis Obispo High. His embroidered football jacket is tight across his back, a little too warm in the sun, and he can see the sweat on Aparicio’s upper lip, too—but there is no freakin’ way any of them are going to take off the jackets. Not on Game Day . . . not when the cheerleaders are prancing around, their hair shiny and soft and their lips wet with whatever junk they put on them that tastes like candy when they kiss. The sun is hot on his thighs, giving him that almost-hard feeling.

  And then he sees her, the girl standing at the periphery of the quad, as apart from the rest of them as she can be. Blond and slim, fragile and strong, too intense to be beautiful, too mesmerizing to look away from.

  He has never seen her before and yet . . .

  I know you . . .

  Roarke opened his eyes. He was in the armchair in the hotel room.

  She stood at the sliding glass door, a pale slip of a girl in the darkness outside, her dress rippling in the wind . . .

  He sat up . . . the image of the girl faded away.

  The glass door was open; it was the gauzy under-curtain that he’d seen, billowing in the wind.

  The yearbook was on his lap. He’d fallen asleep reading it. It felt like the middle of the night, but by his phone it was only just after nine in the evening.

  On the table beside him were the notes that he had been making on Laura Huell earlier. Details from the obituary and the school paper, filled in with copious Googling—though details of anything about the school from sixteen years ago were hard to come by.

  He’d found nothing that would suggest a connection between Laura and the murdered counselor, beyond the fact that they had died the same night.

  But there was something from his dreaming . . . something about the kids at the school.

  Something important . . .

  He sat still in the chair. And then it hit him. He’d seen one of the names in the yearbook before.

  He opened the yearbook and turned to the D’s, found a photo of a blond boy, one of the varsity jocks. Letterman’s jacket, surfer type, easy, dazzling smile. The kind that peaks in high school.

  The name under the photo was Chris Devlin. The same name as on the plaque downstairs. The hotel manager.

  At the front desk, a different but equally pleasant young receptionist told him, “Mr. Devlin won’t be in until the morning. May I leave him a message?”

  After a hesitation Roarke answered, “I’m Special Agent Roarke, San Francisco FBI. I’d like to talk to him when he gets a chance.”

  He turned away from the desk, started automatically for the elevator—then he changed course and walked across the lobby, past the leaping fire in the river-rock hearth, and stepped outside onto the deserted patio.

  Torches burned in between the empty tables and chairs, and the night air was cool and dry.

  He looked out at the stars, the soft manicured hills of the golf course, dotted with tiny arcs of light.

  He was just debating a walk when an animal scream split the darkness.

  He tensed, staring out toward the sound.

  Wolf . . . he thought. And then shook his head.

  Coyote, or a mountain lion, that’s all. You’re jumping at curtains. Seeing signs.

  Yet the scream had set him on edge, so that when he heard the step behind him, he twisted fast, automatically reaching for the gun that he no longer wore.

  Behind him was a blond, athletic man in his early thirties.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you.” The blond man indicated the moonlit landscape. “Glad you’re enjoying our view.” He stuck out his hand in introduction, although of course Roarke already recognized him. “Chris Devlin. I’m the manager here.”

  Devlin’s perfect surfer looks had coarsened since high school, but Roarke imagined he could still set his female employees’ hearts fluttering. “The desk told me you weren’t here.”

  Devlin gave him a distracted smile. “I’m not, officially. But they said you were with the FBI.”

  “I was with the Bureau.” Roarke reached for his wallet, handed over one of the business cards that he’d never gotten around to removing. “Now I’m working privately.” He hesitated. “Consulting.”

  “Is there a problem?” Devlin looked curious and mildly concerned.

  “Not at all. I wanted to talk to you. I understand you went to Las Piedras High
.”

  “That’s right . . .” Then a strange look crossed Devlin’s face. “Wait a minute. This is about Eden, isn’t it? I mean, Cara . . .”

  Roarke was startled. That’s one hell of a guess. At the same time, he had the feeling of having struck pay dirt. Eden Ballard was the first alias Cara had taken.

  He let none of that show on his face. “Cara?” he repeated neutrally.

  “Cara Lindstrom,” Devlin said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re FBI, asking about Las Piedras High. She’s been all over the news. I’ve been reading . . . everything. It’s all so fucking hard to believe.” In his distraction, he apologized automatically, “Excuse the language,” as if it was somehow something Roarke wouldn’t have heard before. And then he looked at Roarke as if he’d just realized: “You’re looking for her here?”

  Because the truth was too hard to explain, even to himself, Roarke improvised. “I’m just retracing some steps, talking to people who knew her. Obviously you did.”

  Devlin shook his head, his eyes clouding. “I knew Eden. Not for long.”

  “But you do remember her.”

  “She’s not someone you forget.”

  There was an ambiguous tone in his voice. Something underneath it that Roarke recognized too well. Longing.

  “Can you tell me about her?” he asked, neutrally.

  “Tell you what?”

  Everything, Roarke wanted to say, but didn’t, of course. This is why you should drop this, he told himself. Now. Instead, he spoke aloud, “Whatever comes to mind,” he suggested. “What interaction did you have with her? Did you have classes together?”

  “She was in my Chem class,” Devlin answered, reverting automatically to high school parlance.

  “Did you know who she was at the time? Her history?”

  “No. I mean, not then. She just showed up in class one day. I knew she was from one of the group homes. She was young to be in Chem, when I think about it. I don’t think she was sixteen yet.”