Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  So you killed the counselor that night. But it didn’t work, did it? It didn’t end things. Good riddance to a bad man, but he wasn’t the one. He wasn’t this one.

  Another significant date occurred to him: the burning of the Wayfarers Club.

  It had burned to the ground the night before Ivy had died.

  “Tell me those things aren’t related,” he said aloud.

  He made another Post-it for the burning of the club. And now that he had the blue Post-its up in place on his calendar, he could see clearly: all five events had taken place within the span of two weeks.

  And there had been no corresponding rape reported in that month, not in any state in the US that Singh had found. That didn’t mean there hadn’t been one, somewhere. But it was interesting.

  Next, he focused on the information Singh had sent him from the police reports. First, he simply listed the dates of the attacks.

  On a second wall he made a second timeline, using twelve Post-its across in a straight line, and then repeating that line twenty times, twenty lines of twelve squares, to represent twenty years. He wrote a Post-it for each year, starting with 1996, to label each line.

  Next he wrote the victim names and dates of the rapes that Singh had compiled on orange Post-its and put them up in the corresponding years: January 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2004, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2015. For June 1999 he wrote on a red Post-it to mark the attack on Ivy.

  Now, finally, he took up the reports to read them.

  After reading through all nine, he was so agitated that he had to get out of the cottage.

  He stepped outside and took a walk along the hillside, through the olive grove, looking down on the valley. The desert hills rolled gently down to the town, dotted with their huge boulders. He could smell the pungent scent of sage. Some bird suddenly took flight from the brush, a wild flurry of wings . . . and then there was silence again.

  His thoughts stilled, and focused.

  He had spotted what Singh had, about the reports. She was right: it didn’t sound like a single attacker at all.

  There were two of them.

  CARA

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The next morning, after her first dreamless sleep in years, she is back on the group home minibus, rumbling past the horse ranches toward Las Piedras High. The day is cloaked in chilly fog; white mist swathes the hills. Winter seems to have arrived at last.

  She pays no attention to the weather. She is electric with anticipation.

  She has no idea what she will be walking into. Whether Martell and his jock friends will be there, and gunning for her. She almost hopes they will be. Because she knows something they don’t. The voice is in her head, now.

  “Fear the wolf or be the wolf.”

  She is expecting to have to fight. She knows that she will fight.

  What she finds is far, far worse.

  From the moment she walks onto the quad, she knows something is horribly wrong.

  Through the fog drifting in the quad, she sees huddled clusters of students. Not the usual, casual cliques. People are talking in whispers. There is crying and shaking.

  A pile of flowers and stuffed animals has grown around the center planter. Cards and ribbons laid down . . . as if on a tombstone.

  It can’t be.

  “No,” she says.

  People look up, turn to her. She has spoken aloud. “No,” she says to the watching faces, and sees people flinch back.

  She twists around to face the closest group, a cluster of girls. “What happened?” she says aloud.

  There are murmurs. The words, “Killed herself.”

  Cold fear in her stomach now. “Who?” she says, so loud now that everyone around her turns to look.

  But she does not wait to hear the answer. She doesn’t need to. She knows.

  But I killed It. It’s dead.

  “Dead,” she says aloud. A passing group of girls looks at her nervously. She turns away from them . . .

  Across the quad, she sees the vice-principal, standing at his post outside the administration building.

  He catches her gaze, looks back at her, unsmiling.

  She forces herself to move away from the planter, out of the quad, first walking, then running, her face hot, buzzing.

  She finds Devlin before first bell, in an upstairs hall outside the boys’ bathroom. She advances on him, backing him into a side corridor. She sees guilt in his eyes. They both know why. He was there, when his road dog Martell and the wolves attacked her. He stood by and did nothing. They both know he is a coward. She has no time for his shame. She has no time for any of these things.

  “What happened to her?” she demands.

  “Who?” he says stupidly. She nearly loses it then, and he must see her fury, because he flinches, with actual fear.

  Good, says the voice in her head. Let him be afraid. Let them all be afraid.

  She gestures blindly toward the wall, in the direction of the quad, that hideous pile of offerings.

  “Laura Huell?” he asks. “They say she killed herself.”

  “Why?” she says, and hears the tremor in her voice.

  “I don’t know. Fuck. How should I know?”

  She walks in a circle, unable to hold still. “When?”

  “We heard about it yesterday.”

  The same night. The same night.

  He is staring at her, bewildered . . . and nervous. “What same night?” He takes a step back, watching her with something like alarm. She realizes she has been pacing and possibly talking to herself. She does not know how much she has said.

  “How did it happen?” She makes her voice harsh, to keep it from breaking.

  “I don’t know. No one ever tells us anything. Look, I’m sorry—” He reaches, touches her arm.

  She wrenches away from him. “You’re sorry. Why?”

  “Because it’s sad. She seemed . . . like a good kid. Why wouldn’t I be sorry? What else can I do?”

  She stares at him. “Nothing. You can do nothing.”

  But I can.

  She turns from Devlin, walking away blindly.

  Bile rises in her. There’s a bathroom close by and she veers into it.

  Inside, another girl is there, at the mirror. For a moment Cara sees Laura. But then her eyes focus in the dim light and she recognizes the girl, an older one from gym class, a popular one, applying eye makeup at a sink. The girl freezes, staring into the mirror, fixed on Cara’s face. Then she grabs her purse and hurries out the door, staying as far away from Cara as she can.

  The door hisses shut on its pneumatic hinge and Cara is left alone in the dim, tiled room. The sound of her own harsh breathing surrounds her. Suddenly she lashes out, slams the stall doors, hitting and kicking them, one after another. Hitting to feel the pain, hitting so she doesn’t scream.

  She catches sight of herself in the cloudy mirror—then rushes at it and slams her hands so hard into the glass that it cracks.

  She backs up, staring down at the blood dripping from her fingers.

  Blackness closes in.

  She is standing in the dark bedroom of the mobile home, above the bleeding body of the counselor, his blood dripping from her hands . . .

  She raises her head. From inside the broken mirror, a skull stares back at her. She looks into her own, black, depthless eyes . . .

  Then there is nothing but her own pale face in the cracked glass.

  She turns, reaches for the paper towel dispenser. She wraps a paper towel around her bleeding hand, then smooths her hair back and makes her breathing slow, slower . . .

  Normal.

  She manages to walk herself out, to find her English class, where she sits in a daze, choking down her feelings.

  This isn’t how it was supposed to be.

  It’s not fair.

  She had done what she was told to do by the old Indian and by the moon. She went after It. She killed the man whose mask It wore. She had done battle and washed the blood off her ha
nds and face, had thrown away her bloody clothes.

  But somewhere inside she knows the truth. She has always known the truth.

  She has not killed It. She only put away one of Its masks, Its shells. Playthings that It uses to taunt her. It doesn’t die. It only moves on to the next willing body.

  And It has struck here while she has been away. It has taken Laura, to show her It is not dead, that It never dies. It is playing a game. Horrible. Sick. Deadly. Taunting her. Showing her Its power.

  She sits at her desk and digs her nails into her thighs to keep from screaming.

  But some time during class something happens that wrests her at least momentarily from her savage thoughts.

  It is an announcement from the front office about funeral services for Laura Huell.

  Tomorrow.

  She stays very still, thinking.

  So It wants to play?

  She can play.

  There will be no more running.

  ROARKE

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  When he returned to the guardhouse, Roarke took down the orange Post-its for the 1997 and 1999 attacks and replaced them with red Post-its, like the one he’d made for Ivy.

  There was a knock on the door. Roarke moved to answer it, and Mother Doctor stepped through the doorway, carrying a pot of coffee and a baking tin. Her eyes went to the improvised calendars on the walls.

  “You’ve been busy.”

  In the kitchenette, she poured coffee and set the tin on the table, removed the lid. Roarke saw it contained crumbly cakes. He’d had a drive-through breakfast on the road, but now he realized he was ravenous. He reached for one.

  “Homemade?”

  She snorted. “Not by me.” She indicated the tin lid she’d pulled open. “You’ve just seen the extent of my domestic skills.” She took a cake for herself and stepped in front of the wall to look at Roarke’s timeline.

  He brushed crumbs off his hands. “Do you mind if I go through it with you? It would help me get it straight in my own mind.”

  “I’d be honored.”

  He crossed to the wall with the timeline, the rows of years, and gestured to the colored Post-its. “Two things stick out to me, here. Each attack ticks several of our boxes: the age of the victims—between thirteen and fifteen; the fact that there was a single attacker; the fact that a nondescript, unmarked panel van was used to abduct the girls; and that the attacker covered the victims’ faces with a hood that he brought with him.”

  “Survivors,” Mother Doctor said, gently. “We call them survivors.”

  He turned and looked at her. “Of course.” He turned back to the wall. “So. We have age of survivors. Time of day. Vehicle used. Style of abduction: lying in wait, and a stealth attack. The hooding—covering the girls’ faces, both to conceal his identity but also to depersonalize. The use of threats and force for control. The language: degrading, with terms like slut, bitch, whore. And the dates . . .”

  That weird correlation of dates . . .

  He continued, now indicating the red Post-its. “But. There were two other rapes in which the rapist actually used the threat of burning. This one in January of 1997, and this one in January of 1999. In the 1997 attack, the rapist told the girl to ‘stop screaming or he’d torch her.’ In this 1999 attack, the survivor reported that the rapist actually held a container of gasoline in front of her face and told her he was going to ‘light her on fire and watch her cook’—but didn’t go through with the threat because he was interrupted.

  “Five months later he abducted Ivy and brought this fantasy to its full conclusion. And then apparently, he never used fire or the threat of burning again.” He indicated the orange Post-its. “There have been all these rapes with the same MO since, that not only match the victim pool, the time of day, and the vehicle used—but that have the even more distinctive corresponding detail that the attacks took place during late January.”

  He stepped back from the wall and looked at Mother Doctor.

  “And what’s significant about all that to you?” she asked.

  He pointed to the red Post-its for the 1997 and 1999 attacks. “Here the rapist seems to be escalating. Threatening to burn this survivor, then with this one actually having the gasoline with him, incorporating it into his threats. And then with Ivy . . .” He did not finish the sentence, knowing he didn’t have to.

  “The gasoline and burning has become part of his fantasy.” He reached into his memory and quoted from a classic profiling text. “‘The presence of an object or behavior during sex can quite easily lead to its eroticization and inclusion in fantasy and subsequently fantasy behavior.’” He indicated the red Post-its on the wall. “The rapist was clearly starting to get off on the idea of burning a victim. He acted out the fantasy with Ivy. But apparently none of the subsequent attacks used gasoline, or burning, either as a threat or in reality.”

  Roarke looked at the nun. “So what, he just dialed it back?”

  Her face was intent. “I see. But could he not have felt that he’d lost control, that he had to ‘dial it back’?” She stepped to the calendar herself, and pointed to the orange Post-its for 1996 and 1998, alternating with the red ones. “If I’m understanding your color scheme, then here and here were apparently rapes with no threat of gasoline or burning.”

  Roarke had noticed and wondered. But maybe the fantasy hadn’t yet taken full hold.

  The nun indicated a gap, the blank years from 2000 to 2004, before the orange Post-its started up again. “And here there seems to be a period of five years in which there were no attacks. Maybe he did scare himself after Ivy . . .”

  “And then started again,” Roarke said. “Only more controlled.” He walked the room. “It occurred to me. He may have been more careful. Or he may have been arrested and jailed for several years. But I’ve never seen it work backwards in these cases. The pattern of a sadistic rapist is that his fantasy escalates. Instead what we see here is a de-escalation.”

  “Unless as you said, there are other attacks that aren’t in the database,” Mother Doctor suggested.

  “Exactly.” He knew it was a distinct and troubling possibility. “There could be a dozen reasons. They weren’t reported to begin with. He didn’t use a van, so that detail didn’t ring the bells for Singh’s search.”

  Or the survivors weren’t survivors at all, he thought, uneasily.

  “He also broke his January pattern with Ivy, as if he lost control, and was unable to wait. And—it’s almost certain he meant to kill Ivy. It’s only by a supreme act of personal will that she was able to survive.”

  The nun murmured something that might have been, “Or God’s . . .”

  Roarke didn’t bother to argue. “There’s a pattern we see in serial rapists and serial killers, a syndrome called decompensation. The fantasy tends to build, becoming more ritualized and violent, and the cooling-off period between attacks grows shorter. And at a certain point, if they’re not arrested or killed, a percentage of these attackers start to unravel. They may go on a killing binge.” He looked at the January calendar on the wall. “The attack on Ivy looks like decompensation to me. And I’ve never seen or heard of a rapist or killer pulling back from that.”

  Mother Doctor frowned. “So . . . you think the other attacks, these two early orange ones—and all the ones after Ivy, are not his?”

  She’d read his mind.

  Two different rapists.

  He hadn’t wanted to say it aloud. He didn’t even want to think it. Not only did it muddy the investigation, it meant double the danger.

  He stared at the timeline. “I don’t know. They’re similar on so many points. But the ones in red also differ in the level of injury to the survivors, and . . .” he paused and then said it anyway: “And the order of the specific violations. The orange ones never vary in order: anal, vaginal, oral. The red ones have no set pattern to the violation.”

  “Can’t you compare the DNA from the rape kits?” she asked. There was a dist
inct note of anxiety in her voice.

  That’s the rub, isn’t it?

  He spoke reluctantly. “None of those rape kits have been tested.”

  She stared at him. “What? How can that be?”

  He could feel the outrage in her voice, and he understood. There was no remotely acceptable excuse. The backlog was a national disgrace, just starting to be investigated as the human rights violation it was. Hundreds of thousands of evidence kits sitting untested in crime labs across the country. And because of that, tens of thousands of rapists that could be behind bars were roaming free.

  He tried to answer, even knowing that there was no sane answer. “Money is the usual excuse. It costs a thousand to twenty-five hundred dollars to test the evidence in a rape kit. Sometimes the failure to test is plain ignorance.” Law enforcement agencies often failed to send rape kits for testing because “no suspect had been identified”—these agencies apparently being completely ignorant of the fact that DNA testing was meant to find a suspect, and to ensure that the DNA was kept on file as evidence against further offenses.

  “What a load of horseshit,” the nun said suddenly.

  Roarke glanced at her, startled—not because of the language, but because of the vehemence behind it.

  Mother Doctor’s face was hard. “That is one of the grossest miscarriages of justice I’ve ever heard.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why these things even surprise me anymore. Just when you think you’ve heard it all . . .” She walked the room, agitated, and Roarke sensed an anger that went far beyond the discussion. “Do you want to know what I think? They’re not testing because too many people still think rape isn’t a crime.”

  The thought was so unexpected that Roarke could only stare at her. She spoke grimly. “Oh—so you’ve never noticed anything missing in the Ten Commandments?”

  He ran through the list in his head, but he already sensed where she was going with it.

  She nodded. “There’s no commandment against rape. Or against slavery, or torture, or child abuse, or spousal abuse. There are commandments against theft and swearing, but none against atrocity.”