Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) (9 page)

Chapter 14

T
hey split up: Epps back to the office, Roarke to the Belvedere House.

Rachel looked exhausted—pale and worn. And not at all happy to see Roarke. In her office, he took a seat in one of the armchairs and tried to relax his posture, make himself as neutral as possible, in the hope of lowering her obviously high agitation. He had not told her about DeShawn Butler’s murder, although she would know soon enough. Instead he focused on the question at hand. “Did Jade show any signs that she was going to take off? Anything at all?”

Her anger flared up. “You think I wouldn’t have told you—”

“I know,” he said.

She pressed her fists to her forehead. When she spoke again it was more calmly.

“No one’s confined here, but there’s a curfew. Janet says that the girls were all here at ten p.m. There’s a security alarm and she set it downstairs.”

“So . . .”

“So Jade got the code somehow and used it.”

Piece of cake for someone like Jade, Roarke knew. A quick mind could be turned to criminal pursuits just as easily as it could be to problem solving in a mainstream profession.

The question was about the timing. She’d been at the shelter for over two weeks, and according to Rachel she’d seemed content enough to stay. And as Rachel said, she wasn’t being confined against her will. So why the sudden need to leave?

If not for the express purpose of killing DeShawn.

Roarke had never believed in coincidence, although this case was messing with his head about it.

“I need to talk to Ramirez’s other girls,” he said.

Rachel stiffened again, and the anger was back in her voice, more deadly this time. “They’re not Ramirez’s girls. They never were, even before that fuck was dead.”

“You’re right,” he said, and he meant it. “I just don’t know their names.”

She softened slightly. “Shauna and Tyra. They don’t know where Jade is, though. It’s the first thing I asked them.”

Roarke was sure she had. And he had no idea what he was going to ask a couple of street girls that could possibly get them to open up or say anything of use to him.

Rachel was watching him. “Are you here because . . . Do you think she killed DeShawn?” she asked softly.

Roarke felt the words like a hammer blow to the back of his head. He stared at her. “How do you know about DeShawn?”

Rachel gave him an oblique look. “The girls have been talking about it.”

“
They
know?” He couldn’t believe it. He himself had learned of the death only hours ago.

“People on the street . . .” She shrugged.

Roarke understood. The network. It was almost telepathic, the way word got around.

“Did you know him?” he asked.

“DeShawn Butler? Oh yeah. I knew him. Of him, anyway.” Her voice was full of loathing. “He sold Shauna to Danny Ramirez. The way I heard it, she was better off with Danny. If you believe there’s some kind of variation in the levels of hell.”

Roarke didn’t know what he believed. At a certain point it was all hell. “Can I see them?”

Rachel led him downstairs, to a room he had not been in before, a big basement hangout. Rumpus room, they used to call them. It was typical Bay Area retro: long, low, thrift store couches and overflowing bookshelves and a television surrounded by uncased DVDs. There was even a beanbag chair.

Two teenage girls were sunk into adjacent mismatched sofas. The older, whom Rachel called Tyra, was a mixed-race girl with caramel-colored skin, big pouty lips, big lashes, big silver hoop earrings
.
She moved with a sultry sulkiness, and when her midriff top shifted Roarke caught a glimpse of a tattooed cross over most of her stomach. She may have been seventeen.

The other, whom Rachel introduced as Shauna, was small and plump and dark, with wary brown eyes. The most striking thing about her was that she was clearly no more than thirteen. For the millionth time in his career, Roarke wondered what kind of man had so little conscience that he could use children like this for sex.

Rachel left him with the girls without leaving the room; she took a seat in front of a computer station on the opposite side of the basement space, unobtrusive but present.

Roarke settled himself on the wide arm of a chair facing the two teenagers.

“I understand you ladies know something about DeShawn Butler.”

The girls were silent. Roarke looked pointedly to Tyra, the older of the two. She shrugged. “Heard he wuz
dead
.” And then for a moment her eyes were shrewd, assessing him. “That be right?”

Underneath the deliberate street drawl she had a slight Southern accent, maybe from living there, maybe just a legacy from some long-ago parent.

“He’s dead, yes,” he answered the girl.
And good fucking riddance
,
he added in his head.
“How did you find out about it?”

Tyra looked slightly smug. “Ev’rybody knows. Got hisself offed in an alley in the TL.”

“That’s right,” Roarke said. “Do you know who did it?”

The girls looked at each other briefly.

“Guess you thinkin’ it was Jade,” Tyra said with an attempt at casual indifference.

“What do you think?”

Tyra cut her eyes Shauna’s way. Shauna concentrated on the floor and gnawed at a fingernail. Roarke realized that the acne scarring on her cheeks was actually from old meth sores.

“Jade hated DeShawn, no doubt,” Tyra finally drawled, and Roarke looked steadily back at her.

“Why was that?”

He had been watching both girls closely since he’d walked into the room. Now Shauna, who had been listless and passive throughout, stiffened and fidgeted.

“Shauna?” he asked gently.

The girl crossed her arms and kept her eyes on the floor.

“He broke her in,” Tyra said from the other couch. Her voice was flat. “Danny took new girls to DeShawn.”

Roarke felt his blood rising in anger. Typical pimp practice. Trauma bonding, psychologists called it. The pimps raped the girls themselves, or the more devious ones got friends and associates to rape a new girl so the pimp seemed like some comfort afterward, however perverse. An insidious kind of brainwashing.

“Shauna?”

Shauna wouldn’t look at him. Tyra rolled her head back and looked at Roarke.

“Shauna too. She be walkin’ home from school and DeShawn and some guys grabbed her, pulled her into his car.”

Shauna’s eyes were glazed. “I was walkin’ and I hear them say, ‘Get that girl.’
Get that girl
,” she repeated softly.

Roarke sat still in his chair and tasted bile in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said to Shauna. His voice was thick and he had no other words. “I’m sorry.”

The girl lifted her shoulders, barely. Her eyes never left the floor.

“He dead,” Tyra said, with no particular inflection. “Nobody cryin’ here. Whole hella lot of people coulda killed him.”

At the moment, Roarke would have been more than happy to have done it himself. He forced down his fury and concentrated on Tyra’s last words.
“A lot of people could have killed DeShawn.”
Not surprising, and it was a point that Molina was sure to make about Ramirez’s murder as well. He tried to focus back on something, anything, that would move him closer to finding Jade.

“Do you have any idea where Jade is from?” he asked.

Shauna shook her head. Tyra shrugged.

“You think she’s from around here?” he tried. “Or California in general?”

Tyra gave him a look that was as close to rolling her eyes as someone could get without actually doing it. “Could be you try lookin’ her up on Facebook.”

Roarke had to admit the girl had a sense of irony.

“We dint sit around jawing,” she elaborated. “Not if we dint want to get beat. She dint talk about it.”

“Okay,” Roarke said, and took a moment to still his outrage. “But sometimes things just come out, right? You pick up things?”

He looked at Tyra and she stared back sullenly, then gave a ghost of a shrug. She was sunk into the couch and her crop top was riding up, and Roarke tried not to look at the tattoo emblazoned over her bare midriff.

He asked, “Can you tell me
anything
else about her? Things she did, things she liked . . .”

Tyra considered. “She was into that cosmic shit. Incense, candles, psychics. Third eye blind and all.”

Another tick in the box for a California background
,
Roarke thought. He heard Jade’s voice again.
“Do you believe in destiny, Agent Roarke?”

He cleared his throat. “Did you get any sense of her family? Father, mother . . .”

“Stepdaddy,” Shauna said suddenly. Roarke turned to her. Her brown eyes seemed liquid in the dim room.

“Really? She said that?”

“Once, maybe. I think. Somethin’.” The younger girl faltered under Tyra’s stare.

“Do you know where that might have been, where she lived?”

Shauna half-shrugged. “Uh-uh.”

“Anything else—anyone else—she may have mentioned?”

Shauna shook her head. She seemed to have slipped back into a slightly dazed state.

“Did Jade own a straight razor?”

Shauna looked blank.

“It’s a blade about this long. It folds up into the handle.” Roarke gestured, making a V with his hands.

Shauna’s eyes went a little wide, but she shook her head. Roarke looked to Tyra.

“Never saw it,” the girl answered.

He nodded. “If you think of anything, I’d appreciate it if you’d let Rachel know. She’ll get in touch with me. Or you can call or text me directly.” He put two of his business cards on the table in front of them.

Shauna didn’t move. After a moment Tyra leaned forward and picked up both cards. Then she stood, and Shauna stood with her.

As he watched the smaller girl start after Tyra, he remembered something Rachel had told him.

“Shauna, would you stay a minute? I’d like to talk to you a little more.”

The girl looked alarmed. She shot a look toward Rachel, who nodded. After a moment, Shauna sat awkwardly back down. Tyra paused by the doorway and looked back, half-relieved, half-suspicious. Then reluctantly she sidled out the door.

Roarke leaned forward and addressed the younger girl. “I understand you saw someone beat up one of your tricks recently.”

She looked at him, wide-eyed.

“Is that right, Shauna?”

She averted her eyes and nodded. He wondered what he was doing questioning her about it. She had seen Cara being violent; his lawman brain was calculating that she could act as a witness to that fact. Another part of him simply craved hearing what Cara had done.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

She looked down, away, anywhere but at him. She put her hand to her mouth, and for a moment Roarke thought she was going to suck her thumb. Instead she bit at the nail of her pinkie finger. “I had this guy in the alley . . .”

“Where was this?”

“Um . . . next to Karma Records.” She moved on to the next fingernail. “I was, you know, startin’ to go down on him, and this lady come up behind me and say she got it.”

“She got it?”

“Like, ‘I got this.’ And she look at me funny, so I leave.”

“What do you mean by ‘funny’?”

The girl looked trapped. “I dunno.”

“But you didn’t really leave?”

She hesitated. “I was wonderin’ what was up, so I stayed.”

“You were hiding?”

“Kinda on the other side of the Dumpster . . .”

“And what did you see?”

The girl looked away.

“Anything you can remember would help,” he told her gently.

“She step up and unbuckle him, pull his pants down ’roun’ his knees.” Her eyes were unfocused, as if she were seeing it. “And then she stand up and slam her fists ’gainst the side of his head, real hard . . . and grab his head and start beatin’ it ’gainst the wall. Slammin’ the shit out of him.”

Roarke’s mouth was dry, picturing it. The narrow alley. Cara approaching the man with that mesmerizing sensuality . . . and then the sudden explosion of her rage . . .

“He was big, too,” the girl said, a bit in awe. “He was real big.”

“And then what?” Roarke managed.

“He go all limp. And then she drop him. He lying there bare-ass and blood all over him . . .” Her eyes went dull; then she shook her head. “An’ I take off.”

“What did this woman look like, who attacked him?”

She bit deeper into her nail. Roarke saw crimson welling at the tip of her finger and winced.

“White. Blond. Thin . . . pretty.”

“Dressed how?”

She frowned, concentrating. “Jeans. Hoodie.”

“About how old was she?”

She shrugged. “Twenny?”

Cara was ten years older than that. Not that it was a surprising guess. Kids rarely could tell the age of anyone over twenty, but that kind of discrepancy never sounded good in court.

He had the sketch of Cara, though. He always had it. He’d reduced the official sketch to a size he could carry in a coat pocket, laminated. He told himself it was for situations like this, identification purposes that had come up fairly regularly since he had begun chasing her.

He stepped closer and showed Shauna the sketch: glistening laminate finish over that intense, focused image.