Blood Moon (16 page)

Between the two houses there was a gap… not a driveway, but what looked like a kind of alley, an unpaved back road winding behind the houses, providing easy access to garages and trash collection.

A perfect observation point for a killer.

He stood and headed for the door.

The hallway connected to the utility room that led to the outside through the side door. He stepped outside quietly without turning on any lights. The chill of the November night hit him and he could see his breath clouding in the air as he looped around the side of the house. There was a side gate as well, opening on to the gravel alley beside the Leland house. Roarke eased it open without knowing exactly why he was being so careful; the stillness of the night seemed to require it.

He couldn’t help but be aware of the half moon climbing in the sky above him.
Half moon, half a month… no, on the moon cycle, less than that. Just a week, now
.

The “road” was packed dirt and lined with wooden shelters which housed the large city trash and recycling containers. The collection truck could run up and down the side roads and pick up the trash on collection day without owners having to trundle the bins out to the street. The road also provided extra parking for pickup trucks, trailers, and some boats.

He looked across the dark main street to where the access road continued across the street, and started walking that way.

Across the street he stopped on the side road to look back at the Leland house.

He had a perfect view of the open window of Leland’s study. Sitting at the desk, Leland would have been completely visible to someone standing where Roarke was standing now.

Wind shivered through the trees above him. He turned back and stared through the night at the trash shelters. Any one of them would be a good hiding place for a watcher; the killer might have left evidence as he stood watching. It had been two weeks, and there had been rain. The chances of evidence remaining were slim, but the alley would have to be processed.

Above the shadows of trees, the half moon glowed. Roarke looked up toward the pale disc… and had a sudden, prickly feeling he was being watched. He twisted toward the shadows, and his body froze even as his eyes focused more keenly, searching the darkness…

His breath stopped, and he stepped forward… a name on his lips.

“Cara?”

A scrabbling sound came from behind the fence. Roarke twisted, his pulse skyrocketing as a dog erupted into wild barking in the yard beside him. And then a hand came down on his shoulder, and he jerked around, grabbing for his weapon —

Epps shoved him backward and stared into his face, his anger livid in the darkness. “What the hell are you doing out here on your own? You somehow forget you’re
bait
?”

Jones was there a moment later, pounding into the alley at a dead run. “Sorry… sorry…” he gasped to Epps. “I was on the other side of the house. I didn’t expect—”

Epps walked in a circle, glaring at Roarke. “Not your fault, it’s his.
Fool
.”

Roarke shook his head, willing his pulse to slow. “I don’t think she’s here,” he said. “I do think the Reaper was.”

“What the fuck? Just now?” Epps’ voice spiked in incredulity.

“No,” Roarke said. But even as he thought it, he heard an engine roar to life, a car taking off somewhere on another street. He took a few automatic steps toward the sound, but halted as the car gunned away in the distance.
No way
. Too late to see who.

But what if
…

He suppressed the urge to run after it, and turned back to his agents. “I meant that night. And maybe for days before. Get Lam and Stotlemyre. They need to process this alley.”

Then despite himself, he strode several paces into the alley, staring out into the dark.

Chapter Sixteen

The trees are tall, towering above her in the quiet grove, as she crouches by the shining pool of water and washes the blood from her hands.

The growing moon is reflected in the water, through the shadows of the pines and cypress, and the soft scents and stillness of the grove surround her. Her heart is still racing, but the chill of the water and the air is reviving, and the hush of this isolated place deeply soothing.

It is done.

***

On a street perpendicular to Roarke’s there is a sandwich shop, two levels: a downstairs, and an upstairs with a perfect view of Roarke’s Victorian. Earlier in the day, she had sat upstairs in one of the round, windowed turrets and watched in absorbed detachment as Roarke and Epps drove off to wherever they were going.

She feels no particular pull to follow them. Whatever they are doing is clearly staged, possibly for her benefit, but it impacts her not in the least, and she is still tired, so tired, not fully recovered from the wounds from the desert, the third near-death experience of her life.

So she watches the show they put on in the street, and when their car has gone she drifts back uptown toward her little room in the battered Victorian in the Haight, where she falls into a black and dreamless sleep.

It is the sounds that wake her… as the street below her windows starts to come alive with music and hilarity, instruments tuning up, sound checks, guitar riffs and the thump of bass.

She stands and moves to the curved glass of the alcove. Looking down on the street she can see platforms which have appeared as if by magic, constructed at the ends of each block like bookends: bandshells and stages. Live indie bands are beginning to play on every block, food carts and craft tables line the sidewalks, the shop doors are open wide. A street fair.

She finds a thick sweater, scarf and hat, and moves downstairs.

As she opens the side door of her building into the alley, the fair hits her like a tidal wave. The music overlaps, reggae, nouveau punk, a Grateful Dead tribute band. The sidewalks pulse with it. Stoned buskers hand out flyers for shows, food carts hawk fragrant dishes from all nations, craft merchants preside over tables of jewelry and art and batik T-shirts and blown glass drug paraphernalia on the sidewalks. The host of sensations is both overwhelming and welcome; it is a happy kind of overload, and she is as anonymous as she can ever hope to be.

She wades into the experience, and when she sees the girl with the flaming, flowering tattoos, she knows. This is inevitable, what is going to happen. It is why she is here.

The girl dances by herself in the crowded street, the tattoos on her back coming alive, a tree dropping blossoms of flame.

She watches as the girl twirls in a circle, laughing, shrieking… and suddenly she catches sight of Cara and stops her spinning. She smiles, a strange, high smile in the midst of that pounding street music… and then she is dancing backward, slipping into the crowd.

When the girl disappears, Cara moves on through the dancers and the vendors. Within a block she sees him, that rock star fall of dark hair, the snakelike sinuousness. The pirate pimp. He is high already, perhaps he is never not, a being on the brink of self-immolation.

He has an entirely different girl in his grasp and is roughly steering her down the sidewalk. This girl has neither the intelligence nor the experience of the girl in flames; this is no more than a child. The baby fat is obvious in her limbs and in her face, in the soft roundness of her stomach, bared to midriff even in the November cold. She is no more than thirteen, fourteen at most.

The pimp has her by the elbow and wrestles her through the crowd. She stumbles along shakily, staggering on her platform heels. She has been used recently.

Cara follows in the crowd, sees him make a sharp turn at a corner.

In the semi-privacy of an alley the pimp wrests cash from the girl, reaching his hand up her skirt and pulling the roll of bills out of her underwear, giving her a hard squeeze that makes her gasp before he withdraws his hand.

He counts the money while still holding her, then sticks it in his pocket and shoves the girl away, pointing her back toward the street. An order for more.

All this Cara watches from the shadows, and begins a slow burn, thinking of the night the girl will have. Thirteen years old, if that.

She turns after the pimp, and walks.

There is nothing easier than following this one through the crowd. He is too stoned to be vigilant and there are so many others on the street; he feels safe, in his element. He strides on the sidewalk through the fair, and others on the street move out of his way automatically, not even consciously, with some sixth sense for self-preservation.

She trails him through the carnival-like psychedelia, past the open shops and food stands and revelers. At the bottom of the street they pass the mural on the free clinic, a sprawling painted street scene that mirrors the live scene in front of it.

The pimp crosses the street toward the tall dark shadows of the park. As he turns off the sidewalk onto a footpath, she follows him into the corridors between the trees.

He walks under the towering eucalyptus and cypress of the Panhandle, a narrow strip of park jutting out from the main mass of the park, notorious for drug deals and robberies. She follows silently, her pulse and senses heightened in the night. The path winds deeper into the trees, and there are other figures lurking now, in the shadows, in the bushes, smoking, shooting up, or just making camp for the night. A few of the men look up with quickened interest at the sight of a lone woman, but something they sense in her makes them freeze and turn away. She sees the shadows moving in them, and her spine stiffens, an instant, atavistic reaction, but she will not let herself be distracted.

The pimp walks on past the huddled street people. He is on some mission. The moon makes him easy to follow at a great distance; every time the path splits the moonlight illuminates him, showing her the way. The trail winds through more eucalyptus, with their spicy, healing fragrance, and magnolias with their luminous waxy blossoms, even redwoods: ancient towering trees with the peace of primeval forest.

At the bottom of the hill the vegetation changes, from coastal undergrowth to an unexpected profusion of flowers lining the path: hydrangeas with globes of flowers shining pale in the moonlight; trumpetvine blossoms hanging like bells; feathery Mexican sage.

As she steps out of the undergrowth, a palace rises up in the moonlight: the Victorian hallucination that is the Conservatory of Flowers. It glows like a whitewashed temple, with its painted glass domes and pillars, the palm trees adding to the Taj Mahal illusion.

She must give the pimp scum credit for the romanticism of the setting. If she were setting out to trip this is where she would want to be.

It is a section of park she knows, and she understands exactly where he is going, and why. She has seen it in the daytime, a short tunnel across the wide landscaped lawn from the conservatory, a walkway underneath the road, an arch of granite framed by pampas grass with its feathery plumes. By day it attracts street musicians because of the tourist traffic and the acoustics. At night it is fetid and ominous, used for a far less lofty purpose. Deliveries can be made in seconds; a car stopping on the road, above, a runner sprinting down the path to the tunnel to make an exchange, then the runner heading back up the stairs to the car. Done and done.

The pimp heads straight for it.

She holds back, and when she moves, she circles the periphery of the lawns, moving silently through the taller flowerbeds on the sloped grounds to reach the archway.

The tunnel is short, dark, and cold. It reeks of body fluids and a smell like burning plastic, and any number of other things. The truth is this procurer will not last long at his current rate of addiction. The question is, how many children will he take down with him?

No more.

She can’t see him in the dark, but she can feel him, and hear his breathing. She knows he does not sense her, so intent is he on the task at hand.

Then there is the flare of a lighter, held to a cloudy glass pipe, and he freezes, seeing her illuminated in the arch of the tunnel.

He can’t believe that a woman is approaching him like this. For a moment he’s amused, intrigued. High, to be sure, but amused and intrigued. His smile is slow, dangerous.

“Want something, bitch?”

She lets her eyes go to the pipe in his hand, so that what he sees in the moment is a junkie, someone not so much older than the girls in his stable, and his addled brain is calculating the possibilities even as she makes her move.

The long hair makes it easy and the drug, even easier. She strides forward and takes him by those locks, exposing his throat. She knows the key veins and arteries by heart; the blade goes exactly where it needs to go.

A flash of gleaming metal and his blood arcs in the tunnel, just another body fluid splashing on the stones. It gushes hot and hard over her hands as he makes astonished, inarticulate noises, desperate and panicked.

One fist twined in his hair, she holds his body against hers as he struggles, but the blood is geysering, pumped by his heart, and it takes mere seconds for him to bleed out.

She releases her grip, lets the body slip to the floor of the tunnel.

Her heart is pounding in her chest, echoing in her ears. She stands in the darkness above the body, feet planted to hold herself up.

Suddenly there is a sound she does not recognize, some small object dropping and rolling. And then she hears harsh, rapid breathing that is not her own.

She turns slowly and in the dim blue light of the moon outside the tunnel, she sees the silhouette. The flaming girl.

The girl doesn’t say anything, just stares at her.

Cara starts forward and the girl flinches back.

Cara crouches beside the body, reaches into the pimp’s pocket, takes out a roll of cash — what he had stolen from the child, earlier, and a lot more, rubber-banded together. She tosses it at the girl, who unfreezes to catch it.

“Get out,” she says to the girl, softly.

They look at each other, a long, held look, then the girl scrambles away, out of the darkness of the tunnel, into the light of the moon.