Blood Moon (12 page)

She lets him drop and steps back, her breath coming ragged as she stares down at him, crumpled and bare-assed, blood streaming from his face.

Her hand reaches for the razor in her pocket. But she cannot, must not. It is too much of a risk.

She stares down at him, and takes a deep, centering breath.

Not dead, not this time.

But not likely to follow any teenage girls down alleys in the foreseeable future.

She turns and walks, past the Dumpsters, toward the street. The work has just begun.

Chapter Twelve

Returning to the office, Roarke nearly collided with Jones while walking in through the door of the conference room. He absently snapped, “Taking that tail too literally, Jones.” Then he felt a surge of curiosity and turned back on the agent. “Did you—”

“No sign of her,” said the younger agent.

Roarke felt disappointment, and also inevitability. So she’d followed him on the road, but not in the city?

Knowing what he did about Cara, he thought it entirely possible that the city was intolerable to her. On the other hand, it would be child’s play to lose yourself in this densely packed city, especially for someone so expert in disappearing. So she was here, but staying back?

And doing what in the meantime
?

It was an uneasy thought.

He took the seat at the head of the table, then instantly stood up again, as usual too edgy to sit. “We can’t expect Lindstrom to come to us without a reason. So we’re going to give her a reason. We’re going to find a case that we can use to make it look like we’re investigating another Reaper killing. A case that will make it seem as if the killer of her family has reemerged.”

There was a stunned silence in the room. Then Jones and Epps overlapped each other. “How the hell are we going to do that?” “
Fake
a case, you mean?”

“We look for a family massacre,” Roarke told them, and again felt a superstitious chill just saying it. He ignored it and pressed on. “A murder-suicide. Preferably in California, but any bordering state would work. If we mobilize to investigate, she’s going to think it’s because we think it’s the Reaper.”

Jones wasn’t buying it at all. “That seems like a hell of a stretch.”

“It’s not,” Roarke said flatly. “We know she’s watching. She’ll interpret it exactly as we want her to.” He turned to their researcher, and as always when looking at her directly was briefly startled by her exotic beauty. Then he spoke. “Singh, you need to find us a crime. A home invasion where the family is killed, or a murder-suicide — a parent killing a whole family.”

Singh looked momentarily startled herself… and then Roarke could see her begin to process the why of it. He continued.

“The bloodier the better, or if you can’t find something that fits, something close to it, with few details released to the public. We’ll let her imagine what exactly happened.” He felt like a prick, saying it, but it was the plan, it was the way. He looked over the room. Epps was no longer protesting. His eyes were distant, imagining the scenario. And Roarke knew he was not wrong.

He focused back on Singh. “How long do you need to hunt this down?”

“It should not take long to find a recent incident of this nature, if there is one to be found,” she answered in her musical voice. “Perhaps a half-hour break, and reconvene?”

“Go. See what you can come up with.”

“Yes, chief.” She rose instantly and moved for the door.

Roarke looked at Epps and Jones. “Once Singh finds us a case, we’ll put on a show so Lindstrom knows where we’re going. And she’ll follow.”

As he turned to leave, he couldn’t help seeing his agents’ faces, their looks of unease. He didn’t blame them. They were in the Twilight Zone, now, no question.

He retreated to his office to think, and stood at the window, staring down through the glass at the hills of the city. She was there, somewhere. Waiting.

He sensed a presence behind him, knew from the height and bulk and sheer power of that presence that it was Epps. Roarke turned, speaking before he even saw Epps in the door. “Am I crazy? You think she’ll buy this?”

Epps stepped into the room, not too far. There was still a distance between them, and Roarke was sorry for that. “Buy it or not, she’ll follow. It’s about you. Whatever you do, she’ll follow you.”

“Sure,” Roarke laughed shortly.

“Positive,” Epps said. The two men looked at each other.

“It’s about you,” Epps repeated, and suddenly the air between them was thick. “You sure you’re up for this, boss?” he said softly.

Roarke wanted to answer, he owed Epps an answer. The man had been waiting long enough.

And then he felt a cold, vast place open inside him. He had the urge to say no,
no
, not only was he not up for it, he had no idea what they were getting themselves into. He wanted to abandon the whole thing, before something horrific and inevitable came down on them.

But at that moment Jones stuck his head in through the open door.

“Singh’s got something,” he said.

Roarke was used to thinking of Singh as a lake of depthless calm, but as the men joined her in the conference room she was practically bubbly.

“This is clearly a perfect plan, as I have found a perfect case as our stalking horse,” she enthused. “I started with California. I am astonished by how many there are to choose from,” she said, suddenly transitioning to gravity. “This family massacre, or mass murder/suicide, or familicide, is a very prevalent occurrence in the U.S. Approximately ninety-five cases per year take place in the state of California alone: nearly two per week, almost always the father killing first his family, then himself. In my country of origin only the wife will be killed.”

Roarke felt a twinge at her words, the matter-of-fact, grotesque reality of them. He suddenly wondered what Cara and Singh might have to say to each other, if ever they should meet. He saw Epps glance at him as if he might be thinking something similar.

Singh continued. “The latest such crime in this state was a mere sixteen hours ago, in Fresno County. The father shot and killed his wife and three children, then turned the gun on himself. There was another three days ago in Antelope Valley: the bodies of an entire family, father, mother, three children, found burned in a car on the highway. Cause of death, gunshot wounds; the father’s was self-inflicted. And therein is the problem. The vast majority, ninety-two percent of these family slayings, are by gun, which is not useful for our purposes.”

Roarke realized she was right. The Reaper’s signature, his particular turn-on, was the invasion of flesh, slashing and stabbing.

Singh opened a file folder and removed a set of faxed photos, which she passed across the table to Roarke. “However, there was an instance two weeks ago in Nevada which could have been designed for us. A father stabbed his wife and three children to death and then cut his own throat. The crime was bloody, it was violent, it occurred in the family home, and it occurred just a few miles over the border, on the outskirts of Reno, practically in California.”

Roarke looked down… at shots of hell. A woman lying prone on a bed in blood-soaked sheets, a man slumped in a desk chair with dark blood splashed on the walls behind him, and the unbearable images of children, half-in, half off their beds, slain in their bedrooms.

He passed the photos to Epps, suppressing a shudder of revulsion even as he thought,
She’s right. It’s perfect
. And the thought was a wave of cold.

It was even within the geographical range of the Reaper’s massacres: two hundred fify miles from Bishop, three hundred thirty miles from Arcata.

And a four-hour drive from San Francisco.

“So it’s a road trip,” Epps said. His face was taut as he passed the photos to Jones.

The younger agent also flinched as he shuffled through the images of carnage. But when he looked up, his face was composed — and skeptical. “How are we going to be sure she picks up on the trail? Send an email? Take out an ad?”

Roarke knew where Jones was coming from. It did seem completely implausible. And yet he knew it wasn’t. “I’m going to have to put on a show,” he said. “I’ll park my car on the street outside the house and take a couple of trips down to pack up.”

“Pop the hood, check the oil and water,” Epps suggested. “Eyeball the tires.”

“Leave a map of Reno on the passenger seat,” Roarke added.

He was highly aware of the flaws in the plan. It assumed that Cara would be there watching him every moment, which was unlikely, and if she were watching like that it also suggested they should simply continue to stake out his apartment and catch her that way.

But then, nothing about Cara was simple.

He looked at Epps. “She knows you, and you’re easy to spot. You come over, we pack the car. Transfer your things into my car, or vice-versa. We give her all the chances we can to get a look at what we’re doing.”

“I don’t know,” Jones said.

Roarke didn’t know how to explain it. “She figured out how to track me to San Diego. I never once saw her tailing me. If she’s around, she’ll follow.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“If she doesn’t follow, it means she’s not tailing me, and we can drop this stakeout charade,” Roarke snapped. “It’s just an overnight trip. No huge loss.”

“All right, when?” Epps asked.

“Right now. This afternoon. Before traffic.” If they waited until rush hour, traffic would add three hours to the trip, easily. “We have a few hours to put on a show to get her interested, and then we get on the road.”

He turned to Singh. “We need to set up an interview with the local detectives and get all case files. Schedule a walk-through of the house, preferably this evening. We should be able to get there by seven. We play it as if we’re really investigating and we need to take a look at the case files and the crime scene.”

Then he addressed the men. “We take separate cars. Two separate cars. Epps and me in one, and Jones, you need to be shadowing us in some tourist car. If we get lucky, we might catch her out on the road.”

Roarke was back at his building by one-thirty, where he illegally parked the black Crown Vic from the office fleet right in front of the house by using his OFFICIAL FBI BUSINESS placard. From there the agents followed the script. Upstairs in his flat he put on a light for extra visibility and stayed near his front windows as he packed and pretended to speak on the phone. Then he took his rollerbag down to stow it in the car trunk.

He went back upstairs, waited a bit longer, and went down to the car again, this time with a duffel bag that he’d stuffed with a coat. He stayed at the car, made another fake phone call, checked the oil and fluids, did a slow walk around looking at the tires, feeling like a bit of an ass.

Is this just ridiculous
? He wondered.
Is there any chance in hell she’s watching
?

And yet he could not shake the feeling that Reno was the next right move.

He was prowling his flat looking for anything to load into the car to keep up the whole charade, when his phone buzzed. He punched on to talk to Epps, who told him, “I’m pulling up right now. You can come down and meet me and be visible.”

Roarke grabbed a small cooler from the kitchen, and as an afterthought threw in some bottled cappuccinos and ice, then went downstairs.

Epps had parked half a block down. He carried a large duffel and a binder. He stopped on the sidewalk in front of the car while Roarke opened the trunk for him to put his bag in. He added the cooler to the back seat as well, saying under his breath, “I was running out of ways to hang out at the car.”

Epps closed the trunk lid and extended the notebook to Roarke. “Take a look at this. We can stand here and talk about that for a minute.”

Roarke took it with a frown and opened the binder, resting it on the roof of the car. It was full of scans and copies of case reports. “A little light reading for the road,” Epps said. “Singh put it together. She’s been on the horn to Reno P.D., talking them out of everything they have on the murder/suicide. Looks all official, don’t it?”

Roarke flipped through a few pages. Singh had done her usual stellar work; it looked like everything he would ever want to know about the Leland family massacre.

“What exactly are we telling Reno PD, anyway?” Epps was asking. “This is an open-and-shut case of murder/suicide. We don’t want them freaking out that they got it wrong.”

Roarke had been thinking it through himself. “Singh told them we’re doing a Bureau study on family massacres. Warning signs, that kind of thing. Maybe once we’re there we’ll give them the truth. We’ll have to play it by ear.”

He glanced up the street. “I think we’ve put on all the stage play we can afford to. She’s either watching or she isn’t. Come on upstairs to give it one more shot and then we’ll hit the road.”

Leaving San Francisco was always laced with a touch of the mystic: crossing under the soaring arches of the Bay Bridge, speeding past the silver-gleaming bay with its central island of Alcatraz, dominated by the brooding, fortresslike former prison.

Off the bridge the route was two hundred twenty straight miles on I-80 to the California/Nevada border. Through the flats of Sacramento, the tourist town of Auburn, and up into the Tahoe National Forest, passing to the north of Lake Tahoe itself, and then Reno was just across the state border. Roarke had driven the route a million times on ski trips with his family, fighting with his older brother in the back seat.

Roarke loved his adopted city. But as always he felt a huge release of tension once they were out and on the open road. At the same time, he was realizing he had overlooked the huge flaw in his plan. He would be in a car alone with Epps for four hours, and that meant they would have to talk. To stave off the inevitable, he instantly buried himself in the case file.

The case was already closed, as Epps had said, an open-and-shut case. It was completely apparent to Reno PD and the coroner’s office what had transpired. Professor Leland had stabbed his way through his family members, and when everyone else was dead he sat at the desk in his study and cut his own throat.