Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) (8 page)

“It’s okay,” Rachel said quickly. “Let me see, Erin.”

Erin backed away from her. Rachel dropped her voice lower. “I just want to check that you’re all right.”

She moved closer, as carefully as she would approach a wild animal, and reached slowly to lift Erin’s T-shirt. Blood seeped from several precise cuts around her navel, forming a single word:

D I E

Roarke felt a jolt as he took in the letters. Rachel dropped the edge of the T-shirt and looked into Erin’s face. Her voice was calm and firm. “Okay. We’re going to get that fixed up.” She put an arm around the younger woman and steered her gently toward the bathroom. Roarke automatically started to follow, but Rachel put an arm out, holding him back.

“Matt, I’ve got this.”

He looked at her, startled that she’d used his first name.

“I mean it. Go home.” Her voice was low and rough.

He knew she didn’t hold him responsible for Erin’s distress, but he felt a strange guilt nonetheless. He nodded and said softly, “Call me if you need—anything.”

He watched them disappear into the bathroom. Left alone, he stood for a moment, taking in the room: the canted windows, the mussed bed, the open wardrobe door . . . and the bloody knife on the desk. He glanced around, pulled the liner from the trash can, and used it to wrap the knife. He put the package into his jacket pocket.

Then he moved quietly to the door and out.

Chapter 11

H
e is on the sidewalk on the hill . . . and she is there across the street.

She stands in tight black pants and boots, with her past-the-shoulder blond hair and black sunglasses. She looks through the passing cars at Roarke. And he looks back at her, an endless moment, drinking her in. The sun on her hair. The black of her turtleneck and the taut muscles of her arms. The violent purple irises in the flower stand behind her. The smell of exhaust and coffee.

That moment. His destiny.

He knows what will happen, knows what is coming, the blood and the screaming and the death, but he is paralyzed, frozen on the street, helpless as the sound of a truck builds, an insistent rattling somewhere out of vision. And then there is the screeching of brakes straining against the downward plunge of the hill, the sickening thud . . . and the blood, crimson exploding over the truck’s front grille and a man’s body flying, and the screaming, one scream on top of another, and male shouting, a building wave of panic. The sidewalk is crowded with people turning away, shrieking in horror . . .

He looks across the street through the chaos and the screams . . . and it is not Cara standing on the sidewalk, but someone smaller, with a wild mane of curly hair, and every exposed inch of skin covered in body art.

Jade.

Standing on the sidewalk in front of a river of blood.

DAY THREE

Chapter 12

T
he truck’s rattling jerked him out of sleep. No, not the truck, but his phone vibrating, clattering on the bedside table. His room was dark, predawn, and his heart hammered in his chest.

The dream, the truck, the blood . . .

He lifted the phone with an overwhelming feeling of dread and heard Rachel’s agitated voice. “She’s gone.”

For a moment he thought,
Cara
.
Hurt, killed . . . escaped?
He fumbled for words, any word. “What?”

“Jade. I just got back to Belvedere and she’s gone. All her things are gone.”

A dozen emotions spiraled through Roarke: disbelief, unreality, apprehension.

Our witness. The case.
The trial.

Rachel was speaking, words tumbling out. “The other girls haven’t seen her. I have no idea—”

“I’m on my way.”

There was always a set of fresh suits and shirts lined up in his closet so that even if awakened in the dead of night he could dress to Bureau standard in minutes. He stripped clothes from hangers and pulled them on in a routine perfected over years, while alarming memories churned in his head. The weird conversation about destiny. The way Jade had seemed to be grilling him about something he couldn’t get to . . .

Should I have known she would flee? Could I have prevented it?

And worse . . .

Did I say something to set her off?

And the dream . . .

The dream.

It came back to him in a rush of images, a feeling like falling from a great height, until he landed with all the force of gravity and just one vision in his head.

Jade standing on the sidewalk in front of that pool of blood.

Socks, shoes, a tie, his shoulder holster, and
he was out the door, pounding down the stairs, through the front door and out into the fog, down the sidewalk toward the fleet car he’d left parked on the street.

As he strode on the sidewalk, he racked his brain, trying to remember everything he had said to Jade, everything she had said to him.

“When did you know?”

“Know what?”

“When did you know what your destiny was?”

His phone vibrated again just as he was reaching for the car door handle, spiking his adrenaline higher. It was Mills. Roarke punched
ANSWER
, was about to speak, when the detective’s words stopped him in his tracks.

“We got another pimp dead. O’Farrell, between Polk and Van Ness.”

“A pimp?” Roarke repeated through a suddenly constricted throat.

“Facedown in his own blood. Throat slashed with a thin blade. Any of this sounding familiar?”

Roarke felt a cold wave of apprehension, followed by a new rush of emotions that he didn’t dare to sort. He stared out over the fog blanketing the hills. “When?” was all he could manage.

“After midnight is all the ME will say. You want to get down here and see, do it.”

“I’m there.”

He punched
END
and immediately called Epps. The other agent picked up saying, “Mills just called.”

“Leaving now,” Roarke said, and he pulled open the car door.

Chapter 13

T
he fog was icy, drifting sluggishly in the streets. The neon signs still blazed, lighting the entrances of the sex clubs with their theater-style displays: glassed-in posters of contorted female bodies in G-strings and spike heels, signs advertising
“Massage,” “Sauna,” “Incall/Outcall.”

The Tenderloin was San Francisco’s infamous sex district, fifty square blocks on the southern slope of Nob Hill, sandwiched between the high-end shopping of Union Square and the scruffier Civic Center. Otherwise known as the Loin, the TL, the Trendyloin, and Little Saigon.

Madam Tessie Wall had opened her first brothel here in 1898, and no one ever looked back. By the 1920s the TL was infamous for its billiard halls, burlesque houses, theaters, and speakeasies. It was the birthplace of the porn movie industry in the 1960s; in the ’70s it pushed the envelope even further with live sex acts on stage.

While the rest of San Francisco real estate had skyrocketed in value after the dot-com boom, the TL had resisted gentrification. Its streets teemed with junkies looking for a cheap fix, homeless looking for a cheap hotel, men looking for a cheap fuck.

The police barricade was set up at the entrance of an alley between two lurid sex clubs:
Barely Legal and Wildcats.
As Roarke parked, he saw Epps’ tall silhouette striding up the sidewalk in the drifting fog. Roarke got out of the car to meet him.

“What the hell is this now?” Epps started.

“I don’t know,” Roarke answered. He was too tense to speak further.

The agents flashed credentials at the uniform guarding the yellow crime scene tape at the front of the long, narrow uphill alley and headed for the collection of cops, crime scene techs, and police photographers milling at the far end of the enclosed strip.

The sense of déjà vu was strong. The alley was narrow and dark in the fog, reminiscent of the tunnel where Jade’s pimp had been murdered. Like Ramirez, this dead pimp was also collapsed in his own blood, at the foot of a short set of concrete steps leading down from a back door of the Wildcats club. Roarke could see the blood was thick and congealing around the edges of the spill, but still deep and liquid in places around the body. He hadn’t been dead long.

Mills lumbered over to meet them.
“Rear assault incised neck wound,” he began without preamble. “No defensive wounds on hands or arms.” He looked up toward the steps, the small landing outside the door. “I figure the doer was above him on the stairs. Grabbed his hair from behind, slashed his neck. Same kind of cut we got with Danny Ramirez. No hesitation marks, a clean slice left to right.”

Exactly how Cara killed.
Only Cara was locked away.

“Murder weapon was a straight razor,” Mills added.

Roarke and Epps exchanged a sharp glance. Cara’s weapon of choice, but it wasn’t often that the type of weapon could be determined from an incised wound. The detective was watching their faces.

“How do we know, you’re wondering? I’ll tell you how we know. The perp left it. Right there.” Mills nodded to the end of the railing, the concrete pillar of the steps, where a plastic evidence marker sat next to a dark smear of blood.

“So, friends and neighbors, I think you see why I’ve called you here this morning.
Our case just got completely fucked up the ass.”

“
Wait a minute. Wait a minute . . .” Epps was already walking in a circle in outraged disbelief. Mills smiled grimly.

“Oh, I’m just getting started. It gets better. Mr. DeShawn dead-as-a-doornail Butler is a known associate of Danny Ramirez. They ‘looked after’ each other’s stables. Took them on the road together when they went out on the circuit.”

“So Jade knew him,” Roarke said softly. There was a black pit of dread in his stomach.

“Do you like nailing bad guys, Agent Roarke?”

“Jade?” Epps and Mills asked simultaneously, turning to him, but it was Epps who seemed to know what was coming. His face was a mirror of the dark foreboding Roarke was feeling himself.

“She’s gone,” Roarke answered. “She disappeared from the Belvedere House last night.”

“What the hell?”

“
What
?”

Mills and Epps exploded at the same time. Epps’ face was a study in consternation. “When?”

Roarke realized he hadn’t yet talked to Rachel, so he had no idea when Jade had gone.

“Sometime last night. Rachel called me this morning, just before I got the call from you.” He nodded toward Mills.

“Wait a minute. Wait just a goddamn fucking minute.” Mills walked several steps, then stopped. “Are you trying to say . . .” He trailed off and they all looked toward the corpse, simultaneously realizing that they had a far bigger problem than losing their key witness. “Are we really saying a
sixteen-year-old
girl
did this? A clean incised neck wound? No hesitation marks?”

“She saw Lindstrom do it,” Epps said. He looked to Roarke and spread his hands slightly in a question.

Roarke’s mind was racing. Jade was exceptional in many ways. Precocious, no doubt. But for a girl that age to coldly grasp a grown man’s hair and cut through the tendons of his exposed throat . . . it was nearly unthinkable.

But if not Jade . . .

And suddenly he was thinking about Cara’s first kill, or what he suspected was her first kill, a male counselor at one of the many group homes that had been Cara’s childhood existence. She had been just fourteen years old. If Cara could do it, why not Jade at sixteen?

He looked around at the alley and the scenario spun out in his head. Jade
had
seen Cara kill Ramirez. But even if she’d grasped the mechanics of cutting someone’s throat, what were the chances of her being able to duplicate the killing so perfectly? On the other hand, she would pose no apparent threat. If anyone could get close enough to a player like DeShawn Butler without arousing suspicion . . .

Roarke had seen Jade in action before. He looked at the short set of concrete stairs and pictured her bumming a cigarette, sitting on the step above the pimp to smoke it, fingering the razor in her pocket . . .

It was all too easy to visualize.

“You pick up any cigarette butts?” he asked Mills abruptly.

“Only about a hundred an’ five,” Mills said. “Interesting you should ask. Because the blood pattern looks to me like he was sitting on that step when he got slashed. Nice clean ass cheek prints in the middle of all that blood.”

Sitting. It indicated DeShawn probably wasn’t feeling any particular sense of threat.

“So yeah, we’ll be looking at those stubs for lipstick prints,” Mills said. “In fact, I’m having the razor and butts sent straight over to your guys, just on the assumption you’re gonna be happy to use your extra-special speedy lab to get that testing done. We should be getting something for the privilege of involving you in this mess.” He shook his head.
“Lemme tell you. If it wasn’t your fucked-up case we’re talkin’ about here, I’d be thinking pimp war. Some street retribution.”

The thought stopped Roarke cold. He had always assumed Cara had killed Ramirez . . . but Jade was an expert liar . . .

Epps jumped in before he could voice a thought. “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” Roarke could hear his agent’s righteous fury underneath the words. “Someone kills Ramirez with Cara Lindstrom’s exact MO. ’Cause macks are
favorin’ straight razors for their killing these days.”

Epps was right. It made no sense at all. It also suddenly occurred to Roarke that if the razor was the same type Cara used, Jade would have had to buy it. It spoke of a planning that completely unnerved him.

Did she have the razor on her when I saw her last night?
he wondered. He felt a chill.
More to the point, did she deliberately leave the razor? Because if she did . . .

“Hey, I said ‘If
,
’
” Mills told Epps, interrupting Roarke’s thought. “Since it
is
your fucked-up case, I am certain
there is some whole other shit going on here.”

Roarke had a sinking feeling Mills was more than right. The detective continued.

“I’ve got my uniforms inside the club and canvassing the Loin. Not that we’re likely to find anyone who’ll talk. Your guys’ll be printing the razor and DNA-testing the blood on it—we have Jade’s prints from her last booking into juvie. Also it’s a hella sharp blade so we might get lucky, get some of the killer’s own blood off the razor.”

Roarke had a sudden flash of the bloody knife he’d taken from Erin’s hotel room and felt another wave of dread.

Mills paused and looked grim. “But we’re racing the clock here. Prelim is day after tomorrow, and we just lost our key witness.”

“The DA can ask for a continuance—” Epps started.

“Yeah. The disappearance of a key witness counts as good cause. But Molina invoked the ten-day rule. Delay the prelim and Lindstrom gets OR.”

OR.
Own recognizance.

California’s ten-day rule not only stipulated a defendant had the right to a preliminary hearing within ten days, but also mandated that if a prelim was delayed beyond those ten days, an incarcerated defendant must be released, barring a very circumscribed set of circumstances.

Roarke realized Mills was saying that Cara could walk out of jail on bail. And if she walked, she was gone. She wouldn’t just run; she’d vanish. She’d lived under the radar since she was eighteen years old.

He felt a whole new spate of emotions that he knew—if he stopped to analyze them—meant he shouldn’t be anywhere near this case.

“So Stanton is going to have to go in with what he’s got,” Epps muttered, looking dazed.

“Or we’re going to have to get Jade back to testify,” Roarke said.

Jade . . . who was looking very much like the killer of the pimp in the alley behind them.

He forced himself from his own thoughts, struggled for a game plan. “Rachel’s got two other girls from Ramirez’s stable staying at the shelter. They’re going to be our best bet for tying Jade to DeShawn. And tracking her down.”

Mills shook his head. “Well, I’d be much obliged if you’d trot yourself over there and do some digging. We need to find that wildcat before the prelim, and we’ve got two days to do it.”

Dawn was breaking, a knifelike gray, as Roarke and Epps walked out of the alley to the sidewalk. Without the neon lighting, now swirling with ocean fog, O’Farrell Street had lost any sleazy glamour it held in the nighttime. The street was as bleak and grimy as a hangover.

Roarke could feel his agent seething beside him. “What are the other good-cause reasons for a continuance?” Epps asked abruptly.

Roarke pushed his emotions to the side and tried to think like a lawman. “Defendant waives time, but that won’t work. Molina would love to waive time. She’d waive time in exchange for bail. That’s the usual gimme.”

And Cara walking on bail was the same as walking free.

“So what else?” Epps asked tensely. “Illness of counsel, capital offense with preponderance of evidence . . .”

Roarke reached into his memory. “Counsel unexpectedly engaged in another trial, conflict of interest requires appointment of new counsel, a necessary witness becomes unavailable due to the actions of the defendant . . .”

He paused, and the two of them pondered that last for a moment.

“No evidence of that,” Roarke said.

“That we know of,” Epps countered.

Roarke had to admit there was something about the idea that felt strangely apropos. Cara couldn’t have made Jade disappear herself, but he had wondered during the interview with Mills if perhaps Jade felt threatened.

“I’ll ask Rachel— ”

“Wait.” Epps was tense with concentration. “The judge can’t kick Lindstrom on OR if she’s being held on other charges, right?”

“That sounds right,” Roarke said, and felt a new stab of worry that he had no business feeling.

Epps looked triumphant. “One of the other agencies has to charge her, then. For one of the other killings. Singh will know which case we can push.”

It was a plan. Whether Roarke liked it or not was a different story.