Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) (10 page)

The girl went still. “Yeah. Her.” She looked up, and the awe was back in her eyes. “She bashed the shit out of him.”

Roarke nodded.
He had no doubt
.
It was a slim connection, though, between beating up a john and murdering a pimp. Shauna’s account could hardly replace Jade’s eyewitness testimony.

He wondered, not for the first time, why Cara hadn’t killed the john in that alley. It wasn’t like her not to complete the act. Because she knew Shauna was watching? Because his crime was not as severe on her scale as the pimp Danny Ramirez’s? He had no idea how she judged these things. Or if it was a conscious decision at all.

He slipped the sketch back into the inner pocket of his suit coat and felt it against his chest. “Thank you, Shauna. You’ve been a big help.” He paused. “I hope you’re liking it here.”

The girl looked confused, then shrugged slightly. “S’all right. Rachel, she all right.”

Rachel is all right,
he agreed with her in his head.
She’s more than all right.

He watched as she stood, a short, slightly plump teenager who had already suffered more in her brief lifetime than he could bear thinking about.

She paused at the doorway and looked back at him. “DeShawn’s for real dead? You saw him?”

“Yeah. I saw him.”

“Jade killed him like that,” she said. There was a dazed quality to her voice, and he was going to answer automatically that it was under investigation, but then he saw a flicker of something in her eyes, something more than ordinary. Something like triumph.

“I don’t know,” he answered, and was aware of how uneasy he sounded.

Shauna nodded, as if he weren’t there. “She did it. She killed him.”

And Roarke, who had spent six years of his life talking to serial killers, rapists, and the criminally insane, felt cold fingers at the back of his neck as the girl walked from the room.

When he turned, Rachel was still sitting at the computer station. He’d forgotten she was there.

She looked at him, then
stood
and walked out.

He climbed the stairs from the basement and stopped in the hall outside her office, found himself pausing to gather himself before he knocked on the half-open door.

She was sitting on the window seat, looking out the curved glass of the bay window at the park.

“They’re looking good,” he said to her. “Healthy.”

“Sure,” she said. “Just a couple of ordinary teenagers.”

He was startled at the sarcasm in her voice. It wasn’t like her. But under the circumstances, bitterness was hardly a surprise.

“Was it any help?” She turned from the window and looked at him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe.”

“You do think Jade killed DeShawn.” The way she spoke it, it wasn’t a question, and technically Roarke had no business answering it, although he found it on the tip of his tongue to say everything. Jade knew how Cara had killed Danny Ramirez. She obviously had motive for killing the man Tyra said had “broken her in.” And then there was the thing he had not been letting himself fully consider. The straight razor beside the corpse. Which the killer had left deliberately. The razor that could cast some serious reasonable doubt in the case against Cara.

Did Jade really do that consciously? Seriously? Not just kill a man, but plant evidence to exonerate Cara? A sixteen-year-old girl?

What are we dealing with here?

“What do you think?” he asked, deflecting Rachel’s statement. “Could she have?”

“You heard Tyra,” Rachel said. “A lot of people could have.”

“Right.” He sat on the armrest of the couch, suddenly bone-tired. “How is Erin?”

Rachel looked briefly surprised at the segue, then shrugged. “She wasn’t cutting when I left.”

“Were you there all night?”

She looked away. “Basically. The cutting’s been happening on and off for a long time. She was sixteen, went to some party, she was drinking . . . she woke up to find herself in a bedroom, naked and bleeding. Someone raped her. She still doesn’t know who. Or how many. Rohypnol, the jock’s little helper.”

Roarke flinched inside, feeling anger and despair. Not that he hadn’t suspected.

“She went to a clinic by herself for pregnancy and STD testing instead of telling her mother or anyone else. I got the strong feeling she’s buried it pretty effectively for years.”

Roarke nodded. He’d had a real conversation with Erin only once, but he could see the quiet, independent young woman suppressing the attack and deciding that she would simply deal with it on her own. Of course buried trauma always came back eventually.

Rachel was speaking, and he tuned in again. “She says she hasn’t done the cutting for years. Which may or may not be true.”

“So learning about what Cara—about the killing she’s doing, why she’s doing it . . .”

“It triggered her,” Rachel said. “Of course. On all kinds of levels.”

He found Rachel’s eyes, felt for a connection. “I feel like I’ve put you in the middle of all this. Jade, Erin . . .”

Something went blank in her face. “It’s my job. I was involved with Jade before you ever came here about her.”

Roarke realized it was true; Rachel had told him at their first meeting that she’d made numerous attempts to get Jade off the street and into the shelter.

“Fair enough. But Erin isn’t your job.”

“It’s hard to tell where the job stops,” she said.

“Yeah,” he answered, looking at her. There was a sudden warmth in the room, the intimacy that had always been there between them, despite the walls.

She shook her head, breaking the moment. “We talked. I gave her the contact info for a good therapist I know, although of course she’s only visiting here. But she has medical services through her university and she can go there. Cutting is a huge issue these days; every college has to deal with it. She can get help if she wants it.”

“Does she want it?”

The shrug Rachel gave was like Tyra’s. “She talked some. That’s a release. Whether she chooses to pursue help . . .” She lifted a hand.

True, Erin was an adult. It was her choice. But Roarke was sure that Rachel was the best therapy Erin could have had at the time.

So he’d kept his promise to Cara for now.

Rachel was watching him. “Are you going after Jade, then?”

“We’ll have to find her, yes.”

Her lips were pressed tightly together as she shook her head. “You know what DeShawn was, don’t you? A guerilla pimp. Shauna’s a foster kid, no great student, but trying her best in a lousy system. She was walking home from school in Oakland and he grabbed her off the street. She’s thirteen. Kidnapped, held hostage, and gang-raped by Butler’s friends for a few days to take the will out of her. Then he drugs her, puts her out on International Boulevard with instructions to bring money back, beats her if she doesn’t, beats her every time she looks toward a door or a window. When it’s convenient to him, he sells her to Ramirez. That’s the man who was killed last night.”

Then she slammed her hands down on the desk and swept an arm across it, sending a pen jar, a binder, several books, a coffee cup flying. She pounded her hands flat against the suddenly bare surface. “Who cares? Who cares?”

For a split second Roarke was rooted to the floor in shock. Then he crossed to the desk.

“I know, Rachel.” He reached across the desktop to put his hands on her shoulders, but she jerked back in her chair. She was pale and breathing hard.

“If
one
thing happened to me that happened to that child, I would drink bleach. I would cut up my wrists. I would kill myself any way I could.”

“I know—”

“Someone should just take a blowtorch to all of them. Pimps, johns, the whole fucking lot of them.”

She was shaking, halfway between fury and tears.
Roarke knew the signals. In ordinary circumstances he would have stepped to her, held her, said with his body what he couldn’t say with words. But the circumstances weren’t ordinary and never had been. There was too much between them . . . and not enough.

“Rachel . . .”

Her eyes were closed now, and she rested her elbows on her desk and her head on her hands. “Just
go
.”

And in the end, he did.

Chapter 15

T
he San Francisco Bureau had several crack Evidence Response Teams that handled crime scenes and lab work for the office. As far as Roarke was concerned, Lam and Stotlemyre were the best techs in the division: one a reed-thin, energetic, unflaggingly cheerful Vietnamese, the other a hulking, methodical German American. The two men had worked together so long that no one in the office ever referred to them separately: it was always “Lam and Stotlemyre.” The Supreme Court had ended the ban on same-sex marriage in California in 2013, and in some part of his mind Roarke had been expecting a wedding invitation ever since. But San Francisco or not, the Bureau was still the Bureau. No one asked, and no one told.

The techs had been on Roarke’s list to visit, but as he crossed the Federal Building’s blue-veined marble lobby on the way toward the elevator, he got a text from Lam that sent him straight up to the lab:

Got something for you. Maybe.

The two techs were huddled at a lab table with a comparison microscope between them. They looked up in tandem as Roarke walked in.

“Got your message,” he told them.

The techs nodded, and Lam stood.

“I was taking a blood sample from the razor to send in for rush DNA testing, but I typed it first. It’s a mixed sample. Meaning there are two types of blood on it. One type is a match for DeShawn Butler—”

Roarke’s pulse elevated. “So the other blood could be the killer’s.”
And if Jade’s blood type is on record anywhere—

The two techs exchanged a glance. “We’re thinking maybe not,” Stotlemyre said.

Roarke frowned. “Not the killer’s blood?”

Lam jumped in to explain. “The second type is rare, AB negative. Less than one percent of the population has this type.”

Roarke could feel a revelation coming from the prickling of his skin. “So who do we know who does?”

“Daniel Ramirez,” the two answered simultaneously.

Roarke stared at the techs. “It’s the
same
murder weapon Lindstrom used?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Stotlemyre warned.

“It’s still just a blood type,” Lam agreed. “We have to wait for DNA results to know for sure if it’s Ramirez’s blood. I pulled some favors to get a quickie analysis.” And before Roarke could ask, he added, “Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe
.”

“But the odds . . .”

The techs exchanged a glance. It was Stotlemyre who answered.

“The odds are . . . odd.”

Roarke looked from one to the other. “You’ll let me know—”

“As soon as we do,” Stotlemyre promised.

As Roarke rode the elevator down to his own floor, his mind was already reeling with the implications.
Two pimps killed with the same weapon.
Not just reasonable doubt.
Exculpatory evidence.

If Cara’s odds of walking out of jail had improved with Jade’s disappearance, they’d just shot up astronomically now.

And if the blood proved to be Ramirez’s, the only explanation Roarke could think of was that the killer had deliberately left the razor with that blood evidence linking the two crimes.

He tried to slow his spinning thoughts so he could work it through.

The murder weapon in the Ramirez case had never been found. Jade had been on the scene; she could have picked up the razor.

And kept it for two weeks? But why? Surely she couldn’t have been planning this kill all that time?

The idea was statistically so beyond the pale that he was already rethinking whether Jade was really DeShawn’s killer, even though the timing made her the most likely suspect.

But is she? The
most
likely?

Who would be more likely to plant evidence to exonerate Cara?

He thought suddenly of the bloody knife he’d taken from Erin’s hotel room. The hotel room that was just steps from the park where Ramirez had been killed.

Should I have that knife tested, too?
Compare Erin’s blood with the blood on the razor?

He almost turned back to the lab but realized that the point would be moot if the blood tested out as Danny Ramirez’s. Which they would know soon enough.

Leave it
,
he decided.
We’ll see what we see
.

He could hear voices in the conference room as he walked down the hall, but there was instant silence when he entered the room. Epps and Singh turned to him simultaneously from opposite sides of the long table.

The atmosphere was strained. It felt for a moment almost as if his agents had been fighting.

“I’ve just been up to the lab,” Roarke began. “Lam and Stotlemyre—”

“We know,” Epps said tautly. “Same murder weapon. At least that’s what fucking Molina is going to say.”

That explained Epps’ level of agitation. “We don’t know for sure yet,” Roarke said. “Any progress on the other cases?” he asked, though he could guess the answer from the look on Epps’ face. Singh’s expression was harder to interpret.

“We are racing the clock,” she said, echoing Mills. “If there had been a case close enough to file, I would have said so.” Her tone didn’t change, but Roarke sensed a rebuke to Epps in it, unusual for Singh. “But Agent Jones and I will be checking with every agency again to see if there is something that can be done to move any one of them forward.” She sounded dubious, and Epps looked angry. And Roarke was a little tired of Epps being angry.

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to check in with Mills.”

As he moved out of the office, he heard steps after him and knew by the weight of them that it was Epps. More than that, he could feel his agent’s eyes boring into his back. Roarke stopped in his tracks and turned on him. “What? What is it—?”

“Mills? You’re going to see Mills? Or just that general direction?”

Roarke was momentarily struck into silence. So Epps knew about his visits to Cara. Or guessed. He could wait for the explosion, or he could just have it out. “Okay, let’s hear it—”

“You were doing what with Rachel Elliott last night?” Epps demanded.

“I went by the House,” Roarke admitted.

“You didn’t
go by
. You
took
Elliott out of that house in the middle of the night. Just in time for that girl to disappear before the prelim.”

Roarke stared at him. “You think I
planned
that?”

“Just before the prelim. Can’t buy that kind of timing.”

“Do you also think I somehow engineered the murder of that scumbag by a sixteen-year-old girl?”

His agent stared back, tall, dark, and murderously angry. “I think at this point you could’ve planted the razor yourself.”

Roarke was staggered. “You are way out of line.”

Now Epps was in full-tilt fury. “
I’m
out of line?
I
am?”

Roarke felt his own blood rising. They were close to blows now, and he summoned everything in him to stand down. “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

He turned to walk down the hall. Epps called out behind him.

“Talk about what? Name it. Talk about
what
, goddamn it!”

Roarke walked on, nearly blinded by his rage.