Huntress Moon (Huntress FBI series 1) Read online

  HUNTRESS MOON

  by

  Alexandra Sokoloff

  Copyright © 2012 by Alexandra Sokoloff

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by BHD. Photo credit: Lilkar

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  For more information about the author, please visit http://alexandrasokoloff.com

  Huntress Moon

  FBI Special Agent Matthew Roarke is closing in on a bust of a major criminal organization in San Francisco when he witnesses an undercover member of his team killed right in front of him on a busy street, an accident Roarke can’t believe is coincidental. His suspicions put him on the trail of a mysterious young woman he glimpsed on the sidewalk behind his agent, who appears to have been present at each scene of a decade-long string of “accidents” and murders.

  Roarke’s hunt for her takes him across three states…while in a small coastal town, a young father and his five-year old son, both wounded from a recent divorce, encounter a lost and compelling young woman on the beach and strike up an unlikely friendship, without realizing how deadly she may be.

  As Roarke uncovers the shocking truth of her background, he realizes she is on a mission of her own, and must race to capture her before more blood is shed.

  A Thriller Award nominee for Best E Book Original Novel

  A Suspense Magazine Pick for Best Thriller of 2012

  Praise for the novels of Alexandra Sokoloff

  The Price

  “Some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre.”

  – The New York Times Book Review

  “A heartbreakingly eerie page-turner.”

  – Library Journal

  “The Price is a gripping read full of questions about good, evil, and human nature… the devastating conclusion leaves the reader with an uncomfortable question to consider: ‘If everyone has a price, what’s yours?’”

  – Rue Morgue Magazine

  The Unseen

  “A creepy haunted house, reports of a 40-year-old poltergeist investigation, and a young researcher trying to rebuild her life take the “publish or perish” initiative for college professors to a terrifying new level in this spine-tingling story that has every indication of becoming a horror classic. Based on the famous Rhine ESP experiments at the Duke University parapsychology department that collapsed in the 1960s, this is a chillingly dark look into the unknown.”

  – Romantic Times Book Reviews

  “Sokoloff keeps her story enticingly ambiguous, never clarifying until the climax whether the unfolding weirdness might be the result of the investigators’ psychic sensitivities or the mischievous handiwork of a human villain.”

  – Publisher’s Weekly

  “Alexandra Sokoloff takes the horror genre to new heights.”

  – Charlotte Examiner

  “Alexandra Sokoloff’s talent brings readers into the dark and encompassing world of the unknown so completely, that readers will find it difficult to go to bed until the last page has been turned. Her novels bring human frailty and the desperate desire to survive together in poignant stories of personal struggle and human triumph. But the truly fascinating element of Sokoloff’s writing is her deep dig into the human psyche and the horrors that lie just beneath the surface of our carefully constructed facades.”

  – Fiction Examiner

  Book of Shadows

  “Compelling, frightening, and exceptionally well-written, Book of Shadows is destined to become another hit for acclaimed horror and suspense novelist Sokoloff. The incredibly tense plot and mysterious characters will keep readers up late at night, jumping at every sound, and turning the pages until they’ve devoured the book.”

  – Romantic Times Book Reviews

  “Sokoloff successfully melds a classic murder-mystery whodunit with supernatural occult overtones.”

  – Library Journal

  The Harrowing

  “Absolutely gripping… it is easy to imagine this as a film. Once started, you won’t want to stop reading.”

  – The London Times

  “Sokoloff’s debut novel is an eerie ghost story that captivates readers from page one. The author creates an element of suspense that builds until the chillingly believable conclusion.”

  – Romantic Times Book Reviews

  “Poltergeist meets The Breakfast Club as five college students tangle with an ancient evil presence. Plenty of sexual tension, quick pace and engaging plot.”

  – Kirkus Reviews

  Bram Stoker and Anthony Award nominee for Best First Novel

  The Space Between

  “Filled with vivid images, mystery, and a strong sense of danger… Sokoloff interlaces psychological elements, quantum physics, and the idea of multiple dimensions and parallel universes into her story; this definitely adds someting different and original from other teen novels on the market today.”

  – Seattle Post Intelligencer

  “Alexandra Sokoloff has created an intricate tapestry, a dark Young Adult novel with threads of horror and science fiction that make it a true original. Loaded with graphic, vivid images that place the reader in the midst of the mystery and danger, The Space Between takes psychological elements, quantum physics and multiple dimensions with parallel universes and creates a storyline that has no equal. A must-read.”

  – Suspense Magazine

  Chapter One

  The city teems.

  A bustle of busy people on the streets under towering buildings, cars climbing the vertical hills, working people traversing the corridors, energized by the cool ocean air off the gleaming, timeless Pacific.

  There is much that is beautiful about San Francisco: the sun on the Bay, the expanses of bridges over the water, the pastel-painted Victorians with their gingerbread trim, the dreamy beaming people in the parks.

  But here, as everywhere, is the darkness.

  While tourists swarm the markets at Fisherman’s Wharf and eat chocolate at Ghirardelli Square and day trip to Alcatraz, the area formerly known as the Tenderloin swarms, too, with a different kind of activity. In the Tenderloin women and children are bought and sold, people are killed for money or drugs, the stench of urine and vomit and blood rises from the filthy sidewalks, the darkness of addiction and madness pervades.

  The woman in black who walks through this flotsam is an anomaly. Too well-dressed to be one of them, too clean to have business in this part of town.

  She gets glances, of course, some surreptitious and curious, some longer predatory stares. Lone women don’t often walk this street except for money. But something about her keeps the flies away. The men she passes shift restlessly; a few of them even flinch from her.

  She is aware of every one of them as she passes. Very few of these souls are evil, but drugs and bad times have made them vulnerable. Desperation leaves their souls raw and open to attack. They are devastated creatures, furtive, pathetic… and sometimes something much worse.

  The shadows of these people are stark in the light today, larger than they should be. It is always this way, close to the time.

  She can see it hovering, lurking in the darker shadows, but keeping to the darkness. Watching, but not coming close.

  There is no rest.

  Not now, not today, not this week… this week, of all weeks…

  Not ever.

  Chapter Two

  Roarke was worried.

  Before his desk phone was back in its cradle, he was out of his seat, grabbing for the suitcoat neatly hung on the real mahogany stand in the corner of his office in the Federal Building. Outside the window the view plunged precipitously, a fifteen-floor drop into the Tenderloin.

  It was Special Agent Greer’s fifth month of undercover with the criminal organization known as Ogromni, and in all that time under, Greer had never used the failsafe signal: a phone dialed to a dedicated number with no message left, code to request a face-to-face meeting. Greer didn’t ask for meetings. He delivered his reports on time, through approved channels, and never deviated from procedure.

  Until today.

  Roarke shrugged his coat on over tightly muscled shoulders as he strode down gleaming hallways, walls lined with the history of the Bureau: black-and-white photographs of grim men in dark suits and spotless dress shirts, framed original newspaper articles of famous FBI busts, glass cases displaying a spy-museum array of ingenious devices: miniature cameras built into pens, shaving cream containers for smuggling microfiche.

  He hurried out of the elevator on the first floor and past the reception desk, framed by a wide pane of bulletproof glass. The clocks on the wall behind it each read a different time zone: Washington, Tokyo, Paris, London, Beijing. The sweep of multiple second hands started a new churning in Roarke’s gut.

  Something’s wrong. Something’s happened.

  He exited the monolithic Federal Building at a clip, and braced himself against the dazzle of sunlight before starting quickly down the sidewalk of Golden Gate Avenue toward the Tenderloin. He had to force himself not to run, which would draw attention he didn’t want, but he was too agitated to find a cab. He’d get to the rendezvous in plenty of time on foot, and he didn’t want to wait around in the café once he got there. The walk would give him time to clear his head, burn off some of the anxiety.

  He was vaguely aware that the day was gorgeous, a crisp and cooling autumn breeze after rain the night before, and for the moment the city was so clean it sparkled. None of which soothed Roarke’s tension in the slightest.

  His Criminal Investigations team had been investigating the Bay Area branch of Ogromni for four months. The name meant “enormous,” and it was, a cross-national viper’s nest, which first came to the San Francisco Division’s attention because of a hijacked container shipment of electronics that had not been confiscated, but rather tracked.

  Electronics smuggling was only the top layer of the onion. It was never just local anymore. Organized crime had blossomed into something much less tangible: Unorganized crime, Roarke thought of it, but Transnational Crime was the official phrase for it; no borders, and weird alliances, a hybrid of gang activity that had little to do with old-style street gangs, but rather massive criminal organizations, bad guys with no racial or national boundaries. And it always turned into the same kind of outrage: smuggling and selling drugs, guns and people. The three evils, as far as Roarke was concerned; where there was one, there were inevitably the others, and sometimes a fourth: high tech. Sometimes it seemed as if money had only the slightest thing to do with anything; it was as if depravity spawned depravity. The longer Roarke worked, the more he felt he was wrestling with a Hydra: cut off one head and seven more grew back.

  Since Agent Greer had infiltrated the San Francisco Ogromni, Roarke’s team had been racking up the evidence to bring charges of piracy, smuggling, heroin and cocaine trafficking — and tracking the inevitable suspicious disappearances that inevitably go along with such activities. The targets were getting bolder and Greer had passed on news of a massive drug shipment imminent: perfect for a bust that could be connected to several key players in the hierarchy.

  But all morning Roarke had had a bad feeling. He’d woken from an old childhood dream of a lurking monster, and it was the damn dream that had him most spooked; it always came up in times of extreme stress or anxiety and it never boded well.

  He didn’t think of any of this as psychic or precognitive; he’d been an investigator for far too long not to know that the human brain processes information too fast for the brain’s owner to be aware of exactly where those subtle signs and warnings are coming from. Something had been off about Greer’s last reports and had triggered early warning bells in Roarke’s head. Cops called it “Blue Sense” or “Spidey Sense—”

  A horn blasted in Roarke’s ear, startling him back to the present. He’d almost stepped straight into traffic on the busy street.

  He lifted a hand in apology to the car that had just missed him, then breathed in and waited five more seconds for the light, and sped through the crosswalk toward the appointed meeting place.

  It was a Peet’s Coffee, perched halfway down the block of a steep incline, one of those streets that give San Franciscans some of the most toned asses and thighs in the continental U.S. Roarke slowed his pace slightly to cushion the shin-jarring descent.

  The Peet’s had a fenced-in outside seating area with wrought iron tables and chairs, set off from the curb with flowering planters. The meeting was arranged to look like a chance encounter, two random businessmen in suits, bumping elbows at the counter.

  Roarke started to turn into the café, when something made him turn his head — and he saw Greer on the sidewalk across the street, about to cross mid-block. The men did not acknowledge each other in any way; that was not the plan. But Roarke felt a tidal wave of relief, seeing him.

  Safe, he thought, and thanked whatever God was out there.

  He would have turned away, then, to go inside as per the pre-arranged drill: get in line, order, take his coffee to the condiment station and let Greer step up to him.

  But Roarke didn’t turn away, because that was when he saw her, standing on the sidewalk, just a bit behind Greer.

  She was medium height, tall in boots, and slim, with long, lithe muscles like a cat. This Roarke could see because her arms were bare, even in the brisk air; she wore a form-fitting black top with a turtleneck. There was something fetishy in the combination of bare arms and high neck that was arresting, but so was everything about her, her past-the-shoulder blond hair and black sunglasses, the way she stood in tight black pants and boots. The city was full of striking women, that was not what drew him. It was the stillness of her, maybe a fraction too still, and she was looking back at Roarke, looking across the street as if she knew him. And for that weird second, he felt that he knew her, too.

  He would remember every detail of that moment for a long, long time. The sun on her hair. The stretch black of her turtleneck and the taut muscles of her arms. The gleam of chrome on the truck. The violent purple irises in the flower stand behind Greer. The smell of exhaust and coffee.

  Roarke was still looking at the street, at her, when the truck rumbled by, a huge semi, which momentarily obscured his view of the woman in black. And then there was the screeching of worn brakes straining against the downward plunge of the hill, and Roarke turned just in time to hear a sickening thud and see blood exploding over the truck’s front grille and a man’s body flying, and then there was screaming, one scream on top of another, and male shouting, a building wave of panic. And then the woman was gone and the sidewalk was crowded with people turning away or shrieking in horror… and through the chaos and the screaming Roarke realized he had just watched his agent obliterated by a seventeen-ton commercial truck.

  Chapter Three

  Roarke didn’t believe in coincidence. He never had.

  His undercover man had missed a meeting, had used the default system to set up an emergency face-to-face, and less than an hour later was killed right before his eyes.

  The first part was acceptable, the second was alarming. The third was a million to one, and Roarke was having none of it.

  “You think they had him killed.” Roarke’s team member and right-hand man Damien Epps was thinking on it. Epps was straight out of Oakland, and not the gentrified part: six feet three inches and 220 ebony pounds of ex-gangbanger, although these days you couldn’t tell him from a GQ model. Roarke was aware that he himself had a certain dark-haired, dark-eyed appeal: six foot even, jock’s body, thick and unruly h air that women liked to get their hands into, and even more — he radiated the pure male energy of his job, which attracted some of the fairer sex like catnip. But Epps was in a different category entirely; he constantly drew pornographic looks from women — and men — of all ages and races.

  They were in the café, which they had appropriated for a command post as technicians from one of the office’s four investigative units processed the scene.

  The SFPD was out in full force as well. The fact that Greer had been a Federal agent automatically made the investigation a Federal case, and for once there was not the slightest hesitation about deferring to Roarke and the Bureau; even City of San Francisco homicide wasn’t going to argue the jurisdiction on this one. The Bureau took care of its own, and as far as the Bureau was concerned, taking out an agent was the biggest crime there was. Unforgiveable and unforgettable.

  Epps glanced out at the street and the sidelined truck, where a crime tech was extracting bits of Greer from the crimson-splashed grille. On the sidewalk agents were questioning witnesses.

  “Those good citizens saw an accident,” Epps said neutrally.

  “I saw an accident, too.” Roarke felt the tightness in his own voice. “I don’t like the timing.”

  Epps nodded. “Hard to engineer, though.”

  Roarke didn’t bother to say that he’d seen stranger. They both had.

  An agent not from Roarke’s own team, Wu, hustled up. “Someone you should talk to, Roarke.”