Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “Fourteen,” Roarke said.

  Devlin looked startled. “You’d never think that. She was . . .” He stopped, and for a minute it seemed he wouldn’t complete the sentence. “Tough.”

  “Were there any incidents while she was at the school, anything odd?”

  “With her?” Devlin asked, after a fraction of a second’s beat that Roarke might have been imagining. “Like, her freaking out? Hurting someone?”

  Roarke didn’t want to lead him. Yet. He made a neutral gesture with his hands: Go on.

  “No, nothing like that,” Devlin said.

  “Why would you ask that, particularly?” Roarke said. “‘Freaking out. Hurting someone.’”

  “Well, because of what she did later. All those . . . I mean, you’re not asking if she actually killed someone back then, right? In high school?”

  Roarke evaded that issue. “Just any incidents that stood out,” he said.

  “No,” Devlin said, and Roarke had the fleeting feeling he was lying. “She seemed pretty focused on school, really.”

  There was a silence. Roarke waited, but Devlin didn’t offer anything further.

  “Do you remember a girl at your school named Laura Huell? She killed herself in January of that year.”

  Devlin’s eyes widened. “I remember. Of course. Awful.”

  It was an adult thing to say, sympathy in hindsight. Not the reaction of a kid who had been there.

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Not really. We weren’t from the same . . .”

  He didn’t say it, but he didn’t have to. Clique. Crowd.

  “Can you tell me anything you remember?”

  Devlin frowned. “The family was pretty churchy. Her dad was in Wayfarers with my dad. That’s really all I knew about her.”

  “Is the family still in town?”

  “Her mother, I think. Over on K Street.”

  “How did Laura kill herself?” It hadn’t been in the papers.

  “I think she cut her wrists. That’s what we heard around school.” Then Devlin’s face changed. He seemed genuinely startled. “Are you saying that had something to do with Cara?”

  It has something to do with something, Roarke thought. Aloud he said, “I was just curious. Is there anything else you can tell me about Eden?”

  “Like what?”

  “Anything at all.”

  “She wasn’t like the other kids. Not even close.” Devlin’s eyes went distant. “She wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met. There was something so—alive about her.”

  Like an animal, Roarke agreed in his mind. She is entirely physically present.

  “Did she really kill all those people?” Devlin asked.

  It was not asked in the way Roarke usually heard it, with gleaming-eyed, prurient interest. And yet he had no idea what to say.

  More people than I think we’ll ever know. More to come, unless by some miracle she decides to stop.

  He knew it would never happen. Not until she was dead.

  He forced himself back to the moment, stuck out his hand. “It was good to meet you. Thanks for taking the time.”

  Devlin returned the grip. “Sorry I couldn’t help.”

  That’s okay, Roarke thought. I don’t know how to help, either.

  As he stood in the mirrored elevator, returning to his room, he thought about the manager, tried to picture him as a teenager.

  There had been an attraction there, on Devlin’s side. That was obvious. Love would be a strong word to use for a sixteen-year-old, but he’d been smitten. It was absurd to feel jealousy. But what about young Cara? Did she have teenage longings, for boys her age, for anything resembling normal?

  She was a mystery. She would always be a mystery. And here he was, chasing the mystery again.

  He looked at his own face in the elevator mirror.

  What are you doing here?

  Walk away.

  The doors slid open.

  And he knew it was already too late.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mother Doctor saw him promptly at ten, and he stepped into the darkened office feeling a strange mix of relief and nervous anticipation.

  The nun stood from her chair, and came around the desk. “Walk with me,” she said.

  She took him out the door again, and at the end of the hall, they moved out through a wood plank door that looked like it had been there for two hundred years.

  In the sunshine, Roarke looked around at an open courtyard crisscrossed by gravel paths, a rectangular plaza with discrete, well-tended garden plots surrounding it, stone benches, a mosaic-tiled fountain, even an altar with a pensive statue of the Virgin Mary.

  As soon as the door shut behind them, the nun was reaching into her pockets, drawing out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. Roarke was unsurprised to see they were old school: Camel nonfilters. She lit up, drew in and exhaled with more satisfaction than he imagined nuns were supposed to indulge in.

  They walked past a bronze mission bell set in a stone-and-mortar arch, and onto a gravel path. Roarke was struck by a sense of timelessness. It was like being transported back to the days of conquistadors and padres.

  “What is this place?” he asked. “I know it’s not an official mission.” The twenty-one missions of Alta California were drilled into the heads of every California school child. Roarke had toured some of them and even now could probably recite the names of a good half of them.

  “It was a sub-mission. The Spaniards called them asistencias.”

  Asistencia. Help.

  She exhaled smoke and looked him over. “So. Roarke. You’re the agent who headed up the hunt for Cara Lindstrom.”

  Roarke blinked. “Yes, I . . . how—”

  She sniffed. “Do I look unfamiliar with Google? You arrested Lindstrom.”

  He paused before answering. That wasn’t exactly the way it had gone down.

  For a moment he was back in the dark forest, with the weight of a madman on top of him, and Cara standing above them in the moonlight, raising her blade . . .

  He banished the vision.

  “We assisted local law enforcement in apprehending her,” he said, finally. “I take it people here have been talking about Lindstrom.”

  She snorted. “This is a smallish town. Not much happens on the surface. A whiff of scandal . . . well, we’re all over it.”

  “Not much happens on the surface,” he repeated.

  She regarded him from above her spectacles. “As opposed to in the hearts of men.”

  He was finding it hard to tell if she was being sincere, or ironic, or completely messing with him. He had a sneaking suspicion she enjoyed keeping people guessing. We all have our hobbies.

  She was speaking again. “Yes, people have been very interested in the Cara Lindstrom story. Our very own mass murderess. Even if she did live here for only two weeks. But how do you think Cara Lindstrom is linked to Ivy?”

  “I don’t know.” And then he realized. “But you do, don’t you? Do you know Cara Lindstrom?”

  “I have met her.”

  He stared at her.

  “Sixteen years ago. When she was attending school at Las Piedras High. She came here to visit.”

  Roarke knew he shouldn’t be surprised. “To visit Ivy?”

  The nun nodded, and glanced toward the high stone wall. “The Mission is less than two miles from Las Piedras High. There’s a city bus that will take you right from the high school to our front gate. But not many students came to visit Ivy. It was . . . I think . . . too much to take in. When Ivy walked out of that desert, she was like a living skeleton. The fire had eaten her down to the bone. I don’t think that kind of pain is even comprehensible to the rest of us.”

  The image was disturbing on so many levels, Roarke had to force himself to breathe. All the obvious reasons, and one more. The walking skeleton. Santa Muerte. The unconsecrated saint known to her petitioners as Lady Death, whose name the media had begun to link with Cara.

 
Was this the beginning, then?

  Mother Doctor was watching him, but if she was aware of his inner turmoil, she didn’t say. “One must consider that if such a thing could happen to someone you know, that it could happen to you. There is a superstitious sense of safety in staying away.”

  Roarke had heard this kind of thinking before, in regard to Cara. As if tragedy was a communicable disease.

  “Did she say why she was visiting?”

  “I spoke to her, but it wasn’t what you would call a conversation. I caught her leaving Ivy’s room. She hadn’t signed in at the desk. Went over the wall, I’m guessing. We frown on that here.”

  “What did she say?”

  “The first time, she just ran.”

  “The first time,” Roarke repeated.

  “We’ll get to that.”

  She dropped her cigarette to the gravel path and crushed it with her shoe, then removed a candy tin from one of the deep pockets of her cardigan. She opened it, stooped to pick up the butt, put it inside the tin, and slipped the tin back in her pocket.

  “Now. You asked about Laura Huell, if she also visited, and I said she did. What I didn’t say is that it was not only once. She came several times over perhaps a two-month period.”

  Roarke was electrified, and also mystified. He had been thinking Laura might have visited Ivy after having being attacked herself. He had no idea how to account for multiple visits.

  “Did she say why?”

  “She said she was a friend. And I wish to God I had asked more.” She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. “She was devout. That I could see. Her parents were church people. Which doesn’t necessarily make anyone devout, as well I know. But that girl was. So I assumed she was here out of what one might call Christian charity.”

  Roarke was about to speak, but she held up a hand, anticipating him.

  “Did I see anything about her that would have tipped someone off to her suicide? I saw she was troubled. But anyone who came to visit Ivy would be troubled. Obviously the girl, Laura, wasn’t in such distress that she raised any kind of alarm bells.” She looked off into the distance. “But maybe I was distracted. Maybe it never occurred to me to ask. I think about that.”

  Roarke was sure she did.

  She reached into her pocket for her pack of cigarettes, drew them out. But her hand was shaking so badly she fumbled the lighter. Roarke took it and lit the cigarette for her. Her eyes crinkled at him.

  “Why, Roarke. You’ll turn my head.”

  He nodded to the cigarette. “You know, those things—”

  The nun held up a warning hand. “If you’re about to bring up vapes, pray do not. I have few enough pleasures in this life.” She drew a deep drag.

  Fair enough.

  “About Laura Huell,” Roarke said. “I’ve been wondering—”

  “If she was also raped,” she finished bluntly.

  Roarke found himself surprised again. “Yes, exactly. I’ve searched news articles about her death, but I haven’t seen any report of it.” He’d been up quite late the night before, looking. “But statistically, rapists . . . they don’t do this just once. They’re serial offenders. They do it until they get caught, if they ever do. Even if they’re caught, they do time only rarely, and after they’re released, they start up right where they left off—”

  “I’m familiar with the statistics.”

  He stopped. Of course she was.

  She nodded. “You’re asking if there were other rapes of this kind. You would think something so heinous would be noticed, wouldn’t you? But even Ivy’s attack was only local news at the time. Ivy was a foster child. Not the kind to make the papers.” She touched her fingers absently to her lips, brushing tobacco away.

  Roarke knew what she meant. With the media, always, some victims mattered more than others.

  “I did keep an eye out for news. I still do. There have been rapes, of course. Thousands. However, many more that are unreported. That scourge never leaves us. But that specific kind of attack? The burning? No. There was nothing like that here or anywhere else that I’ve ever heard or read.” She nodded at him. “You would be the one with access to information like that.”

  And against his better judgment, he was having the urge to access those databases.

  She sat on a stone bench, smoking and studying him. “You’re off asking all these questions on your own, aren’t you? It’s not really part of your Cara Lindstrom case.”

  He found himself wanting to confess. Yes, I’m totally off the reservation and I have no idea what I’m doing. Instead he said, “It’s a loose end. I don’t like loose ends.”

  “But what are you after?”

  It was a good question. He didn’t know how to answer it. Instead he asked, “Did Ivy talk to you? Did she say where she had been taken, during the attack?”

  Mother Doctor gave him a strange look, which he interpreted as her not understanding the point of the question.

  “He left her for dead,” he said slowly. “There could be others that he did kill, and buried.”

  “Out there in in the desert.”

  Roarke thought of Riverside County, the endless stretches of desert sand. So many unincorporated areas. So many miles of nothingness.

  He remembered something a Southern California sheriff had once said to him: “If you stuck a cross everywhere a body was buried out here, the desert would look like Forest Lawn.”

  “It’s a possibility,” he said aloud.

  The nun’s eyes were clouded. “Remember, I never met Ivy until six months later. She couldn’t speak. Her vocal cords were burned. The police questioned her, of course, in whatever ways they had of doing that. But her attacker used a hood to cover her eyes during the abduction and throughout her ordeal; she never saw his face or where he had taken her, only that it was significantly off-road. She could tell that by the jarring of the van over rough terrain. The police never found the spot of the attack. And you didn’t answer my question.”

  Of course she hadn’t forgotten.

  “I don’t know what I’m after,” he told her. He turned where he stood, looked back at the Mission. “Something happened here, in this town, sixteen years ago, that had to do with these girls. Ivy—horrifically attacked. Laura, who killed herself.” And Cara, who became a killer that same month, he added to himself. “It all goes together somehow.”

  “But why is it significant to you that Cara Lindstrom was here?”

  Roarke paused. How could he explain Cara to someone else? When he didn’t know himself?

  “She knows things,” he said. “She seems to see things in people.” She was a vigilante, but her accuracy had so far been astonishing, almost preternatural. “She thinks she sees evil.”

  The nun raised her eyebrows. “And do you believe that?”

  Roarke didn’t know what he believed. But what he heard himself saying was, “Every person I’ve found that she’s killed . . . I’d say the world is better off without them.”

  “So you believe in evil.”

  She sat with her head tipped back to observe him. Great. Just what I need. A nun who’s also a shrink.

  Although maybe it was exactly what he did need. But how to answer her? What did he want? Answers? An end? He knew there was no such thing.

  Aloud he said, “What happened to Ivy—that’s evil. Sometimes there’s no other word.”

  “It is evil. It is an atrocity.” She leveled her gaze on him. “And so?”

  “I want to understand it.”

  “What evil is.”

  “I guess. Yes.” His voice sounded raw. He wanted to be anywhere other than here, having this conversation.

  “What did you do yesterday, after we talked?”

  The query was so abrupt, he didn’t know what to make of it. “I’m sorry?”

  “I’d like to know what you did after our talk yesterday.”

  Roarke felt defensive, as if it were a trick question. But he answered anyway. “I went to the high scho
ol to talk to Principal Lethbridge.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to know why he didn’t mention the attack on Ivy when I questioned him about unusual events at the high school.”

  She nodded. “Interesting. And what did you learn?”

  Roarke’s hackles were rising. What is this, some kind of job interview? It actually felt like one. But at the same time he found he wanted to talk it through, make some sense of what was going on.

  “He’s hiding something. He definitely doesn’t want me stirring up the past. There’s some guilt there. I don’t know how deep, but . . . I don’t trust him.”

  “And what do you intend to do today, when you leave here?”

  Jesus Christ. What does she want from me?

  Across the grassy courtyard, a back door opened in the building, and three nuns walked out in the middle of a group of children. Boys, girls, ages five to maybe ten. There was something about them, immediately, that was different from ordinary children. One little boy fluttered a hand beside his face, the classic stimming gesture of autism. One nun held a little girl by the hand. Her head was down, her eyes fixed on the ground, and she seemed to move only because the nun was leading her.

  Mother Doctor followed his gaze, then looked at him.

  The words were coming out of his mouth before he knew he was going to say them.

  “I’ll probably go out to Palm Desert and ask a few people in the department there what the hell they’ve been doing for sixteen years that they thought was more important . . .” He had to pause, swallow back something that wasn’t exactly anger. “Than putting whoever did that to Ivy away for seven lifetimes.”

  “All right, then.” Mother Doctor leaned suddenly forward and stabbed out her cigarette on the ground, repeated the ritual of taking out the candy tin, placing the butt inside, and slipping the tin back into her pocket. Then she stood.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  Back in the dim comfort of her office, she sat at her desk and pulled open a drawer again. Roarke was fully expecting more cigarettes to come out. He was guessing a pack a day, easily. It would account for that husky, classic film star voice of hers.

  But instead of the Camels, what she pulled out of the drawer was a satin surplice, folded over to create a silky package.