Social workers led the girls out of the former storage facility as dawn streaked the sky with orange over the desert. A good bust: thirteen traffickers arrested, twenty-five victims freed, hopefully before irreparable damage had been done.
They called these prisons Residential Brothels. Many of them were race-specific; this one was an LRB, Latino Residential Brothel. The location was a former storage facility, horrifically appropriate, since the girls were no more than objects to the men who stole and then sold them. Girls nineteen, sixteen, fourteen, thirteen, sometimes even younger, were kidnapped or tricked into leaving the poverty of their native towns and coming to the U.S. expecting legitimate work. It was a thirty-three billion dollar a year industry, a rising tide of evil that no agency under the sun had the resources to control, rivaling drugs and arms trafficking for the most profitable enterprise in the world, because after all, you could only sell a drug or a gun once, but you could sell a girl to the walking vermin known as johns twenty-five times a night.
As Roarke walked the empty corridors one last time, he felt more than emptiness surround him. It was more than the reeking, rancid smell. It felt like a darkness behind the doors, a concentration of malignance so outrageous it felt like a live thing.
How anything resembling a human being could do that to another human being, let alone a child
…
He had to get out.
The sun was scorching the desert, searing his eyes, as he stepped out of the facility to see agents loading the last perps and victims into vehicles. The bust would be processed and prepared for prosecution by the Los Angeles Bureau. It was their jurisdiction, not San Francisco’s. But since Roarke and Epps had made the initial bust leading into the trafficking ring, at a deserted concrete plant in the Mojave Desert, the two agents had come along for the takedown. Epps was coordinating with the Los Angeles Assistant SAC, meaning Roarke could leave, now. It was out of his hands. He ran his hands through his thick black hair, and rolled his neck to ease muscles still knotted with adrenaline. He felt relief, and emptiness.
He’d checked every inch of the facility, but his other quarry, the mass killer Cara Lindstrom, was nowhere on the premises. And yet he felt her presence.
Santa Muerte
…
It had been Cara who’d led them to this trafficking ring.
She’d escaped from his custody at the concrete plant two weeks ago, and perhaps in some hidden part of his mind he had feared some trafficker had snatched her up. Her beauty would fetch any price in any number of countries. She would have killed others or herself before she’d let herself be taken, but she had been so badly wounded that night she may not have had the strength.
Roarke dreamed her almost every night, and he always awoke feeling the curves of her body molded to his, as if she had seared into his own flesh that night that he had lifted her and carried her, wounded, across the sand past the bodies of men she had slain.
Cara Lindstrom was in his dreams.
Otherwise, he had no idea where she was, or if she was alive or dead.
But she had killed thirteen men that he knew of, probably many, many more, including one of his own team. It was his job to arrest her, and he was very good at his job.
He would find her, and he would bring her in.
Chapter Two
After not much sleep on his delayed plane, Roarke walked out of the Civic Center BART station into a gorgeous day. Fall in San Francisco was his favorite season, often warmer than summer. Views of the Golden Gate and Alcatraz Island and Berkeley and Sausaulito were crystal clear and the brisk wind off the Bay was a tantalizing promise, but Roarke’s only feeling was unease.
He strode on the bustling downtown streets, weaving through harried commuters and panhandling homeless and the pervasive smell of marijuana smoke on Market Street, up through the plaza between the Beaux-Arts façades of the Asian Art Museum and the main library. And he pretended he wasn’t expecting to see Cara Lindstrom at every intersection, standing across the street from him as she had done the day he’d first seen her, the day his hunt for her had begun. The day she had looked at him for one endless moment before his undercover agent exploded in blood on the street between them, mowed down by a commercial truck…
He was spared further memory of that vision for the moment as the concrete and glass monolith of the Federal Building loomed up in front of him. Inside the lobby of blue-veined marble, he clipped on his plastic ID to bypass security and took the elevator. On the fifteenth floor he walked down gleaming halls with white walls decorated with framed sepia-toned newspaper accounts of famous busts and images of the history of the Bureau, toward the conference room the team had taken over for their manhunt. Manhunt being an ironic word for the investigation into Cara Lindstrom. There were no words for what she was, for what she had done, the Huntress.
His team was already assembled, waiting for him: Antara Singh, a stunning Indian tech goddess and researcher; Epps, GQ handsome, towering and dark as midnight; and Ryan Jones, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, California-born-and-bred jock, a new agent whom Roarke would have to put into undercover now that Greer was gone. But that was for later.
Roarke’s eyes went immediately to the case board behind them, a seven-foot long white board on a standing metal frame taped with clusters of photos, documents, Post-its — everything they knew about Cara Lindstrom. The police sketch that was their only image of her looked down on him: blond and fine-featured, eyes concealed behind big dark sunglasses.
He forced his gaze away and looked around at his waiting team. “So where are we?”
He saw a flicker of anger on Epps’ face, and Roarke knew why. He’d been uncharacteristically late, which for him meant he stepped into the briefing at their meeting time of nine on the dot, to avoid being cornered by Epps. It was the same reason he’d taken a different flight back from L.A. Roarke didn’t want to talk to Epps alone, and Epps knowing that made him even more determined to talk to Roarke, and they had been doing this dance for days.
It would come to a head any moment, now, Roarke knew. But he was not about to talk about that night, two weeks ago, the night he had helped Cara Lindstrom kill ten people. Ten men, to be specific, meth dealers and human traffickers. Ten who needed killing, absolutely no doubt. But even there, that phrase: “Men who needed killing.” In the last month since Roarke had been hunting Cara Lindstrom, thoughts like that were coming into his head with alarming frequency.
He didn’t need Epps grilling him about it when he had no idea what it meant, himself.
But for the moment, Epps simply began his report. “All our paperwork on the cement plant bust is in to the L.A. Bureau. They’re continuing the investigation into the trafficking stemming from the plant. At the cement plant, seven arrested, ten dead. At the storage facility, thirteen arrested, four dead.”
Busts that never would have happened if Cara had not led them out to the desert.
“And victims released?” Roarke asked.
Epps’ eyes flicked to meet his briefly. “Nineteen at the cement plant, twenty-five last night.”
The numbers vibrated in the air between them. Forty-four women and children, victims of sex trafficking.
Roarke avoided Epps’ eyes. “So we can put our focus on Lindstrom, now. The question is, where is she?”
Ryan Jones was the first to speak. “I wasn’t there, but from what you’ve laid out, she could be dead, right? A woman shot by the kind of military grade weapon we’re talking about?”
Agent Singh leaned forward with the grace of a dancer, an earthy and enigmatic presence. She spoke in a musical Anglo-Indian accent. “The L.A. Division has been searching the desert outlying the plant. There have been bodies recovered in the gravel pits on the grounds, in the outlying alluvial area. None of them were Lindstrom’s.”
Roarke had also checked all nearby hospitals, asking about women admitted with gunshot wounds that night. There had been none.
“She’s not dead,” Epps said flatly.
Roarke looked at him.
“
You
don’t think she is,” Epps said.
In fact, Roarke didn’t. The only thing he had to go on was an insane belief that he would simply know in his blood if she had died.
“I have no clue,” he said without inflection. “But our job is to find her, if she’s out there alive.”
Only now did he let himself step to the case board. It was divided into three. First, the past. It started on the left hand side of the board with black-and-white photos of unspeakable carnage, the massacre of four members of an All-American, upper-middle class family, stabbed to death in their desert home by a faceless killer the media had christened the Reaper. The slaughter was the third in a series of similar family slayings that took place over a year’s time exactly twenty-five years ago. It was the criminal case that had inspired Roarke’s early obsession with law enforcement: a serial killer who had never been caught, who had disappeared into the realms of legend after the third family had been slaughtered. The Reaper’s killing spree had left only one surviving victim: five-year old Cara Lindstrom.
That angelic, blond-haired child came out of that bloody night with her throat slashed and her world view shattered into pieces that had reassembled themselves into a woman unlike Roarke had ever encountered before, and had resulted in the carnage depicted in crime scene photos on the right-hand side of the board. A trail of five known male victims killed in three states in a two-year period, and ending with the mass slaughter of the traffickers at the concrete plant two weeks ago. Photos of the victims were pinned to a map of the Western United States: California, Oregon, Utah.
The middle of the board was blank. After a teenage history of foster homes, group homes and juvenile prison, Cara Lindstrom had disappeared off the map at the age of twenty-one. She’d been invisible for eight years. The team had not found any hint of her location, her name, or any activities whatsoever until the day Roarke had seen her on the sidewalk behind Agent Greer just before his bloody demise. What Cara had done to Greer besides speak to him, naming his crime, was still unclear. What
was
clear was that Greer had turned, as undercovers sometimes do. He had been using the trafficked women he was sworn to protect, sexually abusing them rather than helping them to safety. Roarke had no idea how Cara could have known this about Greer, and he doubted they would ever be able to prove that murder, if murder was even what anyone could call it. That was the problem with Cara Lindstrom. She was forcing Roarke to come up with new definitions for everything he’d ever believed in.
But call it murder or call it — whatever —he had seen Cara kill eight men in one night and he had very little doubt that in the weeks to come they would find many, many more bodies to fill up that space in the middle of the board between Cara’s childhood and the bloodshed of two weeks ago.
Singh was speaking and Roarke turned back into the room to listen. “She is on the Wanted list. Bulletins are out to the agencies throughout the states, as well as in Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. We’ve gotten the usual assortment of useless tips and a few confessions. Not one has checked out so far. The San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s department is putting together a package to take to the District Attorney, to see if there is enough there to charge her.”
“If we can find her and deliver her,” Epps muttered.
It was almost always preferable to have local police bring a case rather than federal prosecutors, not just faster: the sentences in non-federal courts were often more harsh. But in this case it was more complicated, being that the trucker whose throat Cara had slashed had a record of sexual assault, and had come after her in the women’s bathroom.
Singh glanced at Roarke as if she’d heard his thought. “And it will be a difficult case to make, obviously. Any defense attorney will be able to introduce a strong motive of self-defense.”
“We’ve got her for kidnapping,” Jones said.
“Also not an easy case to make, under the circumstances.” Singh replied. “My understanding is that Sebastian will never press charges. He and his son are more likely to appear for the defense.”
Mark Sebastian was a newly divorced father who along with his five-year old son had befriended Cara while they were on vacation in Pismo Beach; she had used the pair of them as both hideout and camouflage after Roarke had picked up her trail. Cara had ended up killing the drug dealer boyfriend of Sebastian’s ex-wife. The dealer had been selling pictures of Jason to a pedophile ring. Another murder on her scorecard; another death not many people would ever lose sleep over.
Epps was speaking and Roarke forced himself back into the present to listen.
“We need to get her, and let the prosecutors worry about how to charge her,” Epps said tightly.
Singh glanced at him without comment and then continued. “One more thing. So far our bulletins are confined to law enforcement agencies. Obviously, we could begin a more public appeal—”
“No,” Roarke said, before she could finish the sentence.
His team looked at him.
“We don’t want the media anywhere near this. A female serial killer?”
He didn’t have to explain it. Female serial killers were exceedingly rare. There was even an argument to be made that no such thing existed that fit the textbook definition of sexual homicide, murder specifically for sexual gratification. Cara Lindstrom was a killer, the most unusual one Roarke had ever encountered. She hunted and killed brutally and specifically. But psychologically she was more of a vigilante, her victims hand-picked for their crimes against women and especially children: child molesters, sex traffickers, and in one case, a homegrown terrorist who had been plotting to bomb a Portland street fair.
He spoke into the silence. “We let word leak out about what she’s doing, we won’t be able to take a step without cameras down our throats. It’s too volatile, and a logistical nightmare. I say we do this quickly and quietly, and hope to God the press
doesn’t
get wind of it.”