Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) (2 page)

DAY ONE

Chapter 1

I
t all comes down to one,” said Singh.

The team sat in the conference room of the San Francisco Bureau, four of them at the long mahogany table. Special Agent Damien Epps: tall, fierce, and black as midnight; Special Agent Antara Singh: luminously calm and strikingly exotic, with her gold wristbands and shimmering fall of hair; Special Agent Ryan Jones: young, blond, buff, and as laid-back as a surfer. And Assistant Special Agent in Charge Matthew Roarke. Their leader. Though more and more lately, he doubted he’d continue in that role much longer. Or in his job, for that matter.

Roarke said nothing in response to Singh’s pronouncement. But Epps looked like he had plenty to say.

“
One
? One fucking case?” He was a study in outrage, and you really didn’t want to have Special Agent Damien Epps pissed.

Singh looked back at Epps calmly. “In terms of legally actionable evidence, yes. There is only one case among these that can be prosecuted.”

All of the agents looked automatically toward the whiteboards surrounding the conference table: three eight-foot-long panels filled with dates, crime scene photos, news articles, and photos of dead men. A detailed chronology of mass murder.

Thirteen men slain that the team had documented. Many more that they knew were out there. A years-long rampage by the woman pictured in the center of the middle board: blond and slim, with fine features and high, carved cheekbones. As beautiful and feral as an animal. And far more deadly.

Cara Lindstrom.

The timeline was a concrete representation of a vortex of a case. A case Roarke knew he was far too personally involved with to approach with anything near rationality. And he knew that it would all come down on him soon enough.

“No way that’s right,” Epps said. “
One
?”

Roarke cut in before the other agent could continue. “Take us through it,” he told Singh.

Singh rose from her chair with the elegance of a dancer and stepped to the first board. “The cold cases: Edwin Wann, in Salt Lake City. John ‘Preacherman’ Milvia in Portland.”

They were the first of Cara Lindstrom’s murders that Roarke had discovered. Wann, a Salt Lake City construction engineer who had mysteriously fallen to his death from the twentieth
floor of his own unfinished building, and Preacherman, a homegrown Portland anarchist whose throat had been cut while he was sleeping off a drunk in a culvert.

Local law enforcement agencies had been stumped by the deaths. It was Roarke who’d made the connection to Cara Lindstrom, who’d discovered that Wann was the molester of his own fourteen-year-old daughter, that days before his murder, Preacherman had been planning the bombing of a downtown street fair.

Roarke hadn’t expected any charges to come out of the cold cases. He’d discovered only the most slender thread of connection between Cara and the deaths.

“That was never going to happen,” he said aloud. “There’s no evidence in those cases.” Other than the slightest possibility that a mentally ill, homeless person could identify Cara as being in the same city on the day Preacherman died. It was vapor. It was only in his own soul that Roarke was certain.

Epps looked to the second whiteboard. “The trucker in Atascadero,” he said. “Hartley.”

“They cannot prosecute that case,” Singh said, and Roarke was surprised to hear an edge under her characteristic serenity.

Epps countered. “She slashed the man’s throat—”

“He came after her in the women’s bathroom of a rest stop,” Singh said without raising her voice, but Roarke thought he saw a flash in the dark depths of her eyes. She did not add what the team knew. Hartley had had a record for aggravated sexual assault.

Epps took a breath, visibly containing himself, not an unremarkable thing in a man who stood six feet three. “I’m talkin’ ’bout evidence. There was print evidence on that Honda she stole that got picked up in Pismo Beach. We got her on tape stealing the fu—” He stopped. “Stealing the thing. It proves she was there.”

“It proves she was in contact with the car,” Singh said with murderous calm. “And not even conclusively. Also, there is no evidence to connect Hartley
to the car. Unless you are suggesting that we prosecute Lindstrom for auto theft.”

“What about Greer?” Jones asked, deflecting the standoff between the other two agents.
Probably unconsciously
, Roarke thought. Jones didn’t have Singh’s depth perception.

None of the rest of the team even bothered to answer. The death of Special Agent Greer was a complete nonstarter as far as evidence was concerned, though Roarke had witnessed the agent’s demise himself. His own undercover man had been killed in front of his eyes, on a business-district street, mowed down by a commercial truck while Cara stood on the sidewalk behind him.

She’d spoken to Greer before he stepped out into the street but had not touched him.
No one could possibly prove his death was a murder.

And it was only because of Greer’s death that Roarke had learned the agent had been sexually assaulting women held hostage by the trafficking ring he was supposed to be gathering evidence against. Another bad guy felled by Cara Lindstrom’s fury.

“And the killings at the concrete plant . . .” Singh moved to the third whiteboard but paused to glance at Roarke. “Also problematic.” The largest number of Cara’s victims they knew of had been killed all in one night, a little over a month ago at a concrete batch plant in the Southern California desert. A total of seven human traffickers dead: five by Cara’s hands and two by Roarke himself. Another situation too fraught with complications to prosecute, given Roarke’s involvement, the number of trafficking victims who had been killed by their captors, and Cara’s rescue of an eleven-year-old girl from imminent rape.

“But the Reaper . . .” Epps said. And even as he said it, his voice trailed off.

“Never,” Singh said flatly.

“No,” Roarke said, and for a moment he was back in the moonlit forest, lying in a bed of pine needles and snow. Blood on his face, on his clothes, the copper stink of it in his nostrils and mouth . . . and the gaunt shadow of the Reaper looming over him.

A man. Not a monster. Just a man.

He wrenched himself out of the memory.

Prosecuting Cara for that particular murder was impossible. Completely impossible, though Cara had cut Nathaniel Hughes’ throat and Roarke was a material witness to the killing.

But the whiteboards around them told only part of the story.

Cara herself was a legendary victim of a horrific and borderline mythic crime. Twenty-five years had passed since a psychotic killer known only as the Reaper had slaughtered three California families, then disappeared without a trace. Five-year-old Cara Lindstrom had survived the massacre of her family with her throat slashed and her mental state shattered into a million pieces. The case had gripped everyone in the state, including nine-year-old Matt Roarke, and had started him on his lifelong quest for justice through a law enforcement career.

Then just two months ago, either randomly or by some strange confluence of fate, Roarke’s own path had collided with the adult Cara Lindstrom’s.

He had hunted her. And then the Reaper had resurfaced.

Two more families slaughtered, a third targeted. A total of twenty-five people dead, fifteen of them children.

Roarke looked up at the photo of the man who still attacked him every night in his dreams . . . until Cara killed him yet again.

She’d saved Roarke’s life—and he’d ended hers. Maybe not literally . . . but he had serious doubts she would survive captivity.

The thought was a black hole of dread, and he had to press his hands flat against the table to stop the sudden tremor.

Singh glanced at Roarke as if to assess his state of mind before she continued. “Special Agent Snyder is in Montana on an active case, but we have been compiling a family and criminal history on Nathaniel Marcus Hughes, aka the Reaper. We will continue after Agent Snyder’s return. But that will not help us with the prosecution of Cara Lindstrom. Rather more the opposite.”

No. No district attorney in his right mind would try Cara for the Reaper’s death.

The team sat with this.

Epps finally spoke. “So it’s all down to San Francisco.”

“One case,” Singh agreed. “It is the Ramirez killing or nothing.” She looked back to the middle whiteboard, where the image of a wolfish man with a rock-star flair stared insolently out of a mug shot. Danny Ramirez. A pimp who’d been running a stable of six underage girls . . . until Cara had slashed his throat in a tunnel in Golden Gate Park, just a few miles away. As far as Roarke was concerned, Ramirez was the lowest form of humanity. Cara had freed three of his teenage victims from the street life when she cut him down. But no matter how deserving Ramirez had been of his fate, it was an out-and-out vigilante killing, and the courts did not look kindly on the practice.

Jones was the first to say it. “Which means it’s all down to Jade.”

Singh clicked her mouse and a mug shot came up on the conference screen.

Far-too-mature eyes smudged with kohl stared boldly out of the photo. The flesh exposed by her sequined halter top was smooth and rounded with baby fat and covered with intricate body art. Her hair was a wild mass of blond curls.

Their entire case against Cara Lindstrom rested on the word of a sixteen-year-old girl.

Chapter 2

S
ingh aligned a stack of color-coded folders in front of her and began her summation. “Cara Lindstrom is being held at County Women’s #8 on the charge of the first-degree murder of Daniel Alfonso Ramirez two weeks ago. Assistant District Attorney Stanton is handling the prosecution. The key evidence in this case is the eyewitness testimony of ‘Jade Lauren,’ real name unknown, age approximately sixteen years, real age unknown, who claims to have seen Lindstrom cut Ramirez’s throat inside the tunnel on the night in question. Lindstrom’s attorney of record is Julia Molina. Molina has invoked the ten-day rule; thus the preliminary hearing has been set for three days
from today.”

Epps and Jones shifted in their seats in surprise. Roarke took in the news with shock and unease. California law required a preliminary hearing for a judge to review the prosecution’s evidence and decide whether the evidence was sufficient to warrant a trial. The hearings were generally brief, lasting as little as a few hours or even less; they usually involved the presentation of just the prosecution’s evidence and the defense’s examination of the prosecution’s witnesses.
Since Jade was the key witness, she would need to testify. The team knew all that already.

However, also under California law, preliminary hearings were required to be held within ten court days of a defendant’s “not guilty” plea, unless the defendant waived that right. Singh was saying that Cara and her lawyer had not waived and had instead demanded an immediate hearing. It was an unexpected turn of events, given that more time typically helped the defendant. Although it was quite possible that Cara had pressed for the hearing. Roarke wasn’t entirely sure how she’d survived jail for a week.

Epps spoke up. “Can we ask for a court-ordered detention?
To make sure Jade doesn’t do a runner?” The tension was clear in his voice, and Roarke understood where his agent was coming from. Jade Lauren was a prostitute. Or, to use the FBI’s new consciousness-raised and more accurate term, a “commercially sexually exploited youth.”
Roarke didn’t want to speculate on the horrors the girl had experienced, but those experiences had turned her into a loose cannon: clever, narcissistic, a meth addict—and sixteen years old. The height of instability.

Singh turned to Epps to answer.
“She has been living at the Belvedere House under Rachel Elliott’s care, with no such restraint. In the two weeks she has been at the House she has not disappeared. There is no basis on which to convince a judge that detention is necessary. Also, Rachel Elliott is serving as her court-appointed special advocate, and I believe that Elliott would fight such a detention very convincingly.” Singh gave Roarke an oblique glance, and he felt a twinge of unease. She couldn’t know about his ill-considered one-night stand with Rachel. Unless his agent had somehow picked up on his ongoing discomfort at any mention of the social worker. Of course Singh was more than perceptive enough to have done just that. The thought that she might actually have sussed him out caused him a fresh wave of guilt.

He forced himself into professional mode. “I think if anyone can keep Jade in town, Elliott can. The girl is bonded with her.”

“The girl is also a stone liar,” Epps pointed out. “We can’t trust her as far as I could throw a church.”

Epps had seen Jade only through the two-way mirror of an interrogation room,
but it didn’t take a road map. She was a piece of work.

“No, we can’t,” Roarke admitted. “I’ll call Mills. We’ll head over there this morning to prep her for the prelim.”
And check on her state of mind
, he thought. “All we can do is keep tabs on her . . . and hope.”

As Roarke walked down the corridor, he was so deep in thought that he almost ran into Epps, who was waiting for him in front of the elevator. The two men looked at each other for a long, tense moment.

Two months ago, Roarke would have said he had never worked so well with another human being—with the possible exception of Snyder, who was on such a different plane that he didn’t really count.

And then came Cara.

The relationship between the agents had deteriorated since Cara, because of Cara. Epps’ disapproval had been instant and militant. Not without reason, Roarke had to admit.

Epps finally spoke. “You aren’t thinking of doing anything insane, are you?”

Roarke turned to face him straight on. “Insane like what?”

Epps looked at him impassively. “Now, there’s the trouble. It could be just about anything.” And they both knew what he meant. Roarke wasn’t sure how detailed Epps’ fears were, but he was willing to bet they extended to Roarke’s somehow breaking Cara Lindstrom out of County #8. Which was entirely insane. And impossible.

He answered equally impassively. “I wasn’t thinking of anything too insane, no. Not at the moment.”

“A’ight then. Good to know.” Epps gave him a last, hard look before he turned to walk down the hall.

Roarke stood in the ringing silence and wondered how many more lies he would tell today. Until the elevator door pinged, releasing him.