Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) (12 page)

It’s like the Haight, the carnival atmosphere. Jade’s kind of place.

He scanned everyone, everything around him for that hair. But more, for a
feeling.
A sense of her.

“Come on, Jade,” he muttered. “I know you’re here.”

His pulse jumped as his phone buzzed in his coat pocket. He glanced at the screen before punching on to Mills’ gruff voice.

“She’s out.”

Roarke stopped in the aisle of tables not following. “Out where? Jade?”

“Lindstrom. Lindstrom is out. Molina asked for bail and the judge agreed. They posted bond immediately.”

Roarke turned in the crowded market, taking in the kaleidoscope of people around him. He was reeling.

“Where is she?”

“She and Molina never came out of the Hall.”

Now Roarke felt a sick dread. “Call you back.” He searched his contacts, punched Molina’s number . . . strode past a cacophony of colors with the phone to his ear. Voice mail clicked on, then the lawyer’s brusque voice.

He stood still, paralyzed. And in the end he disconnected without leaving a message, as there was nothing he could think of to say but “Where is she?”

And that point, he had a feeling, was already moot.

Chapter 19

S
he sits in the passenger seat of the Lexus as the lawyer inches through the downtown traffic, snarled in even more knots than usual because of the protesters. The car is a luxurious, soundproofed cocoon; she can barely hear the engine, much less any street noise. It intensifies the sounds going on inside her. Her whole body is humming; she feels as if her blood is too much for her veins, as if she will burst at any second.

She has been in a daze since the shadow appeared in the jail corridor, and in the moment that she fully expected to fight to the death, the second guard took her from Driscoll, out of the grasp of
It
. . . out of the jail to the courtroom.

Once again, against all rational odds, she has been spared, saved by whatever it is that guides her.

Now freedom is just outside the car door.

Beside her, at the wheel, the lawyer is jubilant. “I never had any doubt,” she keeps saying. “It is simple justice.”

Cara doesn’t know about justice, but clearly it is meant. The instrument of her liberation at the courthouse is entirely unexpected, and unnerving. An image is clear in her mind: the flaming girl standing over another pimp, dead in a pool of his own blood. The implications are vast; the thought is vertiginous, the stuff of dreams or nightmares. But that she must consider later. Now she must be entirely in the moment. Nothing can distract her from the task at hand.

She looks out the window—right into the hollow eye sockets of a skull staring back at her. A figure in a long, white lace dress, with a skull mask, standing on the street corner as pedestrian traffic flows around her.

The car moves on, and the figure is gone. Cara sits back, holding herself very still.

The lawyer is asking her something, and she has to focus on the words. The lawyer repeats, “Where do you want to go?”

She has considered this, and she responds automatically. “The Hyatt. On Market Street.” It is a huge hotel and the closest she can think of, just blocks away. And it has other advantages as well.

The lawyer glances at her, a quizzical look. “Are you sure . . .” She trails off, the question hanging in the air.

Cara waits. The lawyer finishes delicately. “Do you want to be so close by?”

To the jail, she means. To the courthouse. To Roarke.

“I need a shower,” she answers. “And to sleep.”

The lawyer looks at her, but whatever she is thinking, she merely nods.

Cara looks back toward the street corner, but there is no sign of the skull-masked figure.

Three blocks later the lawyer pulls the Lexus into the small drop-off area of the massive hotel and stops at the curb. She turns from the wheel to Cara in the seat, and Cara feels an emotion coming from the older woman that is hard to interpret. Ambivalence would not be surprising, nor would apprehension.

“We’ll need to meet as soon as possible,” Cara says, to circumvent the inevitable question.

“Of course.” The lawyer sounds surprised. It was not what she expected, which is the point.

Cara continues, letting her voice be hesitant, as if she is thinking things through only now, in the moment. “Late tomorrow. I have to sleep. And if we could meet here, rather than your office . . . or someplace else you can arrange that is . . .” She trails off, letting the lawyer fill in the details in her mind. The reporters, the immense crowd at the courtroom—the shock of which is one of the things Cara herself must process, once she is out and alone. Her visitor has delivered on her promise. She may have gone much further than Cara ever expected.

“Somewhere private would be best, yes,” the lawyer agrees. She does not, even obliquely, remind Cara of the penalties for disappearing. They understand each other. And as her client reaches for the door handle, the older woman says quickly, “I’m very glad for you, Cara.”

She turns back. “Thank you,” she says. “For everything.” And she shuts the door, severing connection. She has no intention of seeing the lawyer ever again.

The Hyatt is a huge hotel, with plenty of foot traffic from local businesses, and something of a tourist attraction for its
Blade Runner
–style expanse of atrium, escalators, and terraces. People traversing the lobby tend to gape upward at the high-rise interior design with its dozens of ascending balconies and planters, or at the massive metal sculpture centerpiece, a circular whorl that could be anything from a giant pinwheel to an abstract flower or possibly even the sun. There is much ogling and photographing rather than paying attention to faces. And this distraction is useful to her. But the hotel’s primary appeal at the moment is its location: just steps from the Embarcadero BART station.

The lawyer has given her cash, five thousand drawn from one of Cara’s own accounts, and a prepaid credit card under the office name with two thousand more on it to cover hotels and other venues that require plastic. Far more than enough for now. No one has any idea of the rest of her resources; the numbers and locations are all in her head. There is nothing the jail took from her that she needs.

She looks around at the soaring space of the lobby and her eyes rest for a moment on the gleaming metal sculpture. She sees not a flower, or a pinwheel, or a sun. She sees a globe.

She can go anywhere from here.

Chapter 20

M
olina returned Roarke’s call as his taxi was fighting traffic on Market, heading back to the Bureau.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

The lawyer’s voice was impeccable calm. “Agent Roarke, you know I’m not going to tell you that. After all she’s been through, at the very least she deserves her privacy.”

Roarke put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes and wondered how many ways what he was about to say would come back on him.

“Call her. Call her and tell her I want to see her.”

There was a long silence on the phone.

“Incredible,” Molina said softly. And then all Roarke could hear was the silence of her disconnect.

He put the phone on the seat beside him. Almost instantly it vibrated again and he grabbed for it.

Instead of Molina, he heard Singh’s dark velvet voice. “Agent Epps phoned me that Lindstrom has been released.”

There was a delicate pause, the meaning of which Roarke did not want to contemplate.
Is there anyone I’m fooling by now?
he asked himself bleakly. On the end of the line, Singh continued.

“I have been putting myself in her place, and I imagined that she would need not just immediate cash, but perhaps a credit card, which Molina may well have helped her with. An attorney of Molina’s caliber is useful for so many incidental amenities.”

Even through his distraction, Roarke was impressed by his agent’s canny thinking.

“I did a search, and I have found a credit card issued to Molina’s firm was used to charge a room at the Hyatt Regency on Market Street at 2:03 p.m.”

Roarke felt an electric surge through his body. He was two blocks away. He reached for the door handle and his wallet simultaneously, pulling the door open even as he threw money at the cabbie, and then he was running down the sidewalk toward the hotel.

He barreled through the revolving door of the Hyatt, giving several startled guests a faster exit than they had expected.

The first sight of the lobby made him pause. He had been to the hotel for various functions but was always taken aback by the hugeness of the lobby, its expanse of high-rise terraces, the massive metallic sculpture.

He crossed to the reception desk, showed his credentials to get a key card for Cara’s room, and rode the glass elevator up to the seventeenth floor in an agony of impatience.

There was a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door of her room, and it slowed Roarke’s approach as he realized the implications. What if she was inside? Could it be that simple, just to open the door and find her there, turning to him, or in bed, languid and vulnerable and . . .

Those thoughts came in a split second, before he had the presence of mind again to shut them down. He had another second’s absurd contemplation about whether to knock, which would only be giving her time to prepare to kill, though in truth he knew she would not do him harm. Probably.

And then he used the key.

Chapter 21

H
e stepped into the darkened room.

The blackout curtains were drawn, and he experienced a simultaneous jolt of adrenaline . . . and a different kind of excitement. He fought down the immediate impulse to draw his weapon and let his eyes adjust to the light as he stared through the dark toward the bed.

The bedclothes were in disarray, which was a jolt of another kind. But as he focused through the dimness, he realized there was no one under the blankets.

He stood still in the room, absorbing it. There was no sense of any occupant.

He moved to the windows and pulled back the blinds. Light streamed in and he turned away from the brightness. His eyes moved over the disheveled bed, the clothes thrown on the armchair . . .

He strode to the bathroom door, pushed it open, hit the light—and saw towels on the floor, hotel bath products open on the sink. A honey fragrance lingered in the air.

Staged,
his mind was telling him through the crush of disappointment and despair.
She was here for
five minutes, if that.

He could see it all.

After checking in, her next stop is the gift shop, where she uses cash to buy all new clothes in sizes too big for her, to conceal the real proportions of her body. She adds a bag, a winter hat, and sunglasses, which so many Californians wear even on winter days that she will not stand out.

Then she goes up to the room and in less than four minutes total she changes, tucks her hair entirely into the hat, tosses her court clothes on an armchair, pulls the bedclothes down on the bed and shakes them to create a slept-in effect. She stops for a moment, looking down at the bed, and imagines Roarke finding the room. What she is doing now may mislead local law enforcement into thinking she will be returning to the room, but it will not fool him. And she wonders. If it is only a game, why is she doing it? Yet it is what she has always done, and she continues.

In the bathroom she runs the shower for a few seconds and opens shampoo and conditioner and lotion, throws some towels on the bathroom floor, then hangs the “Do Not Disturb” placard on the outside doorknob and rides the glass elevator back downstairs.

She walks out onto the sidewalk into the gray mist and bustle of pedestrians and crosses the fifty yards to the BART station, where she uses a machine to buy a ticket with cash.

Then she rides the long, steep escalator down to the underground platform, feeling the rumble of the approaching train in the tunnel around her as a rush of exhilaration. Freedom . . . and anticipation.

There is much to do.