Huntress Moon (Huntress FBI series 1) Read online

  Roarke and Epps followed Wu out of the café and crossed the street. Without the traffic it felt weirdly like a film set, onlookers like actors huddled running their lines, technicians setting up equipment. Wu had the witness sitting on the stoop of a Victorian. His name was Jay Harrison: late twenties, slim and well-groomed, leather jacket over immaculate jeans and T-shirt, and far too good-looking to be straight.

  Epps stayed back while Wu introduced Roarke. “This is Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roarke.”

  Harrison gave Roarke a quick but unmistakable once-over. Par for the course in San Francisco. “What I told him—” Harrison glanced to Agent Wu, back to Roarke. “There was a woman. A blonde, in all black, this sleeveless turtleneck, jeggings, shades. Just before the guy—” the young man swallowed, “Just as the guy stepped out in the street, she said something to him, and he turned back to her. That’s when he got hit.”

  Roarke felt a rock in his stomach. The woman.

  He looked at Epps, back to the witness.

  “Did you hear what she said?” Roarke asked, keeping his tone even.

  The young man shook his head. “Too much traffic. But it must have been good. Whatever it was, the guy really whipped around to look at her.”

  Roarke felt a rush of adrenaline.

  “And that was when…” The young man shuddered, the lingering horror of the accident plain on his face.

  Only not an accident, was it?

  “Ever see this woman before?” Roarke asked, over the pounding in his blood.

  The young man was about to answer automatically in the negative, Roarke could see. But then he stopped, and frowned, and Roarke felt a spike of hope.

  “You know, maybe. That high collar. I thought I’d seen it before.” The young man shrugged. “I mean, she’s hot, and not cheap about it either. She stands out.”

  Roarke always found it interesting how matter-of-fact gay men were about talking about women, more honestly appraising than most straight men.

  “Where would this have been, that you saw her?”

  Harrison thought for a moment. “Right around here, must have been. It was the last few days, day before yesterday maybe, and I’ve been working on a deadline at home — haven’t really been out of the house except to run out for coffee.”

  “You live near here?”

  Harrison pointed to a Victorian at the end of the block. “Two B.”

  “You didn’t speak to her, interact with her in any way?”

  The young man shook his head. “Nothing, and I wouldn’t swear I’d seen her before, either. Just feels like it.”

  “Thanks,” Roarke said. “That’s a big help. If anything comes to you…” He handed the young man his card. “Agent Wu will take your contact information.” He nodded to the agent who’d summoned him over, and stepped aside with Epps.

  “I saw her,” Roarke told his man. “Standing on the sidewalk behind Greer, just before he stepped into the street.”

  Epps looked at him, startled. “You see her talk to him?”

  “Truck blocked my view.” Roarke glanced back toward the witness. “I believe she talked to him, though. She wasn’t just standing. She was there for a reason.”

  Epps was studying him, trying to read him. “So what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I want to talk to her.”

  The office’s best sketch artist met Roarke at the café so not a moment would be wasted, and then went on to gather details from Harrison. In under an hour Epps was distributing photocopies to the agents who gathered at the back of the café.

  Roarke stared down at his own copy of the sketch: the woman’s lush fall of hair, her carved jaw, the fine features, rendered implacable by the sunglasses. The artist had captured her intensity, though, no doubt; her concentration burned through the page. And of course, the high collar, a memorable detail that they might just get lucky on. He looked up, around at his team and the uniformed officers the SFPD had loaned him.

  He raised his voice and spoke to them. “We’re going to work this block and then on out, door to door, every residence, every establishment. It’s likely this woman lives or works in the neighborhood, so let’s find her.”

  “Is she a suspect?” An agent called out from one of the coffee tables.

  Roarke paused a half-second. “At the moment, a witness. I want you going wide on this first pass. Hit each building and business and talk to the manager or landlord, show the photo, then move on, until you’ve covered the whole block. We do four square blocks that way, then go back and start the door-to-door. I want to know immediately if you get an ID; I want to talk to her first. Let’s do it.”

  As the others started to file out of the café, Roarke joined his own team, seated together at a corner table: tall, dark Epps; Ryan Jones, as blond, athletic and clean-cut as his name implied; and Antara Singh, a stunning Indian tech goddess who was also the best researcher Roarke had ever worked with. Roarke looked around at them gravely. “I don’t have to tell you, but Greer’s death takes priority from here. All our work on Ogromni gets directed at finding out what happened to him.” Jones and Singh nodded tensely, their eyes fixed on Roarke. “Jones, I need you out there working all our CIs. Find out anything you can about this shipment that was coming in. Find out if Greer’s cover was compromised.”

  “You got it,” Jones said.

  Roarke turned to Singh and indicated the sketch of the woman on the table. “Singh, for now, I need you back at the office working the databases on this woman. Get creative, see if you can find her.”

  “I’ll find her,” the agent assured him. The two agents stood to leave, but before Jones turned away, he paused, looked back at Roarke. “What a mess,” he said, bleakly.

  Roarke turned back to Epps and found the agent watching him. Roarke stared back, frowning. “What?”

  Epps lifted his hands. “Never heard of somebody ever killing nobody by talking to them.”

  Roarke said flatly, “On the day that Greer uses the emergency signal for a face-to-face, he gets crushed by a semi — just after this woman speaks to him in the street.”

  Epps shrugged with eloquent, silent skepticism.

  He was right, of course. But then, Epps hadn’t seen her.

  While Greer’s mangled body was transported to 850 Bryant, where the Hall of Justice housed the city morgue, Roarke stayed on the street making the rounds of the other witnesses to the accident. It was quickly apparent that no one but Harrison and Roarke himself had noticed the woman in black.

  As Roarke walked the street back toward the café, his phone buzzed. He pulled it out, checked the text, and felt a jolt. He scanned for Epps on the sidewalk and gestured. Without seeming to hustle, Epps was in front of him in seconds.

  “SRO on Eddy,” Roarke told him. “The manager made her.”

  SROs, they called them, “Single Room Occupancy.” The Carondolet had been a hotel at some point, and a fairly good one. Now to live there was a step away from being homeless: pay by the week for one room with a shared bathroom or half-bath, and a hotplate by the sink serving for a kitchen. The neighborhood was turning good again, surrounding streets were on the rise, but an SRO was hard to convert into something else, so while the Victorians had been gentrified and the cafes and boutiques had blossomed, the old SROs were kept afloat by government subsidies. There was a whole row of them on Eddy Street, fighting a losing battle against drug dealing and prostitution.

  It was no way the kind of place Roarke would expect the woman he had seen to be staying in. No way in hell.

  The manager was Armenian, Kavashian: burly and red-nosed and bushy-browed. He stood in the lobby, which was dingy and high-ceilinged, with battered Art-Deco flourishes, a cloudy mirror, a scarred wooden front counter with a rack of old fashioned mailboxes on the wall behind, a door into the manager’s office. “Yes,” he told Roarke and Epps, stabbing a thick forefinger on the sketch. “Her. Deposit two weeks in advance.”

  “When?”

  Kavashian mulled it. “Friday. Five days.”

  Roarke’s badge obtained them the room key, second floor, 208. They took the stairs.

  The second floor hall was brighter than Roarke expected, with tall windows on either end streaming clear light, old-fashioned metal fire escapes outside. He felt his pulse quickening as they approached the door. Epps looked at him, and their hands hovered by their weapons. Draw? Not draw?

  Three steps outside the door Roarke paused mid-step, alert to a familiar, strong, unpleasant smell. He saw Epps reacting to it as well, puzzlement, then recognition.

  Bleach.

  Both men drew their Glocks. With his left hand, Roarke pulled the key and jammed it into the lock, shoved the door open in one fluid move.

  The smell hit them like a truck. The room was small, and empty. Epps sidestepped to the bathroom, kicked the door open wider to check inside, while Roarke shoved the bed across the floor with his foot to reveal anything underneath.

  No one. Just the overpowering smell of bleach.

  Chapter Four

  She sits in the rough-riding BART train, headed to San Francisco International Airport. No need for a rental car in this city; the public transportation is faster than any other vehicle and there is no parking to be found anywhere, anyway. Parking tickets are dangerous, to be avoided at all cost; they leave a time-stamped trail. So after disposing of the bleach-soaked bedding in a restaurant dumpster she’d descended one of the escalators on Market Street to a BART stop and bought an eight-dollar ticket to SFO.

  She wears a tailored charcoal overcoat, her hair is tucked up in a black, short wig, and she carries nothing but a rolling carryon bag, which gives her the appearance of dozens of others on the train, just another business traveler on her way out of town.

/>   She feels a profound calm; there is always that feeling of respite when an encounter goes so perfectly, to its highest and best conclusion.

  Only one thing mars the feeling of peace. The man she saw across the street is law enforcement. Too observant to be anything else, too vigilant; it was in his clothes, his posture, his eyes. She thinks back over every moment, fixing each second in time, examining it. Not police; the cut of the suit said FBI. And he had seen her… but then, there had been nothing to see. The truck had been too big, too fast. Nothing too much to concern her.

  Still, she will not stay another second in the city. She will find a car and take a circuitous route, go along some way where there are no people, just her and the car, no need for contact. Everything will be revealed, as it always is.

  It is, after all, a whole week until the day.

  As she sits, rocking slightly with the movement of the car, the train screeches metallically on its tracks, a surreal and disturbing sound. A weathered man is staring at her from several seats away, unkempt and on drugs at least, probably homeless, but he has the look that she knows so well.

  She is more and more tense as he stares, her breath coming harsh in her throat. The sound of the train feels like screaming.

  Her hand goes to her coat pocket, slips inside to finger the straight razor concealed there.

  As the train slows at the next stop, the man rises clumsily, smiling vacantly, his eyes burning, and walks straight for her.

  As he reaches to touch her she slashes the razor across his fingers. It happens so fast she can barely hear the shriek as he realizes his hand is dripping blood and fingers to the dirty car floor—

  The man in the aisle veers away from her as if he knows what she is thinking and she rouses herself from the fantasy. Of course she has not cut him. This is a trap, part of the Game, put in front of her to taunt her, to trick her into making a mistake. There is no way to take care of him, not now, not here, there are too many people, and she must concentrate on getting clear, leaving with as few ripples as humanly possible.

  He staggers off the train and her heart quiets again. Her hand stays in her pocket, loosely gripping the razor.

  Chapter Five

  The two Evidence Response Team techs jostled each other for working space in the small hotel room, surveying the place with UV light for traces of body fluids, vacuuming for hair or fiber, dusting with Black Dragon powder for prints. Roarke had been working with Stotlemyre and Lam for years, one an enormous German, one a reed-thin Vietnamese, and implausibly inseparable. He knew what they were going to say before they said it.

  “One of the best cleanup jobs I’ve ever seen,” Stotlemyre announced.

  “Cherry.” Lam nodded in agreement.

  There was nothing in the chest of drawers or the medicine cabinet or small trash cans, not an object, and not a single print or fiber. The bed was stripped of blankets and linens and pillows; they were nowhere to be found. The scarred hardwood floor had been scrubbed down with bleach, the tiny bathroom had been doused with it, the windows, the doors, the walls. Most of it was dry, but some corners and cracks were still damp; she’d probably done the cleanup early in the morning, before the accident.

  Lam continued cheerfully. “Could’ve been butchering people for sausage in here and we wouldn’t be able to tell. Can’t believe she didn’t pass out from the fumes.”

  Roarke heard movement in the hall and stepped out to see Epps heading out of the stairwell.

  “No bedding in the Dumpsters,” he reported. “I sent a man to cover the rest of the block.”

  “We won’t find anything,” Roarke said. “She was too careful with all the rest of it to get careless about the linens.”

  Epps shrugged. “So we question the other residents of this fine establishment, see if they saw her coming out with a garbage bag, maybe getting into a car.” He started for the door, then took another look around the room. “A pro, right?”

  “Yeah,” Roarke said tightly. “A pro.”

  Epps shook his head. “Still. A truck? Weirdest hit I ever saw.”

  The manager, Kavashian, had no idea where she’d come from. He shrugged eloquently. “Cash advance, no references.”

  And what do you think she was doing here? Roarke thought, but there was no point to the question. “She fill out a registration form?”

  Kavashian brightened to the extent that Roarke expected the dour Armenian ever did. “Yes, a form.” He bustled back through the open door into the inner office, and Roarke stood still, his breath suspended. Any information on the form would surely be useless, fake, and she may have worn gloves; someone this careful may even have used her non-dominant hand. But computers had made handwriting analysis very precise, and the databases were extensive.

  Kavashian hadn’t returned, and Roarke stepped behind the counter to the doorway to look inside. The burly manager looked up from an open file with a frown.

  “Gone,” he said, holding out the empty file folder.

  Roarke felt his spirits sink again. Of course. A pro.

  He shook his head, tried to contain his frustration. “Did she come and go often? Stay in her room?”

  “I give her key, see nothing of her after that.”

  “Did she have an accent? Anything that would say where she was from?”

  The manager shrugged. “American accent.”

  “What kind of American? Southern? New York?”

  Kavashian frowned, and Roarke sighed internally. The man’s own accent was thick enough that it was unlikely he’d be able to distinguish regional accents.

  “She say not so much,” the manager pointed out.

  Roarke stepped back and surveyed the lobby, such as it was. “Do residents have to come through this way to exit?”

  Kavashian shrugged again. “There are back stairs to alley. Walk to street from there.”

  “So it’s a miracle you remember her at all,” Roarke said, and waited for the answer he knew would come. But the manager surprised him.

  “No. That girl, you remember.” Roarke saw a flicker of lust in the portly man’s eyes, and felt a twinge of revulsion. “Big coat, couldn’t see much,” he gestured in the direction of his chest. “But you remember.”

  Chapter Six

  Instead of taking the train into the airport terminal, she gets off at long-term parking. With her roller bag she looks just like any returning passenger.

  She seats herself on the BART bench and waits, watching people park and remove luggage from their trunks. The optimum is a traveler with a large piece of luggage, indicating a long trip, driving a comfortable but nondescript and easily enterable vehicle: a pre-2000 Honda, Acura or GMC. She has master keys for all three makes: keys with teeth that have been filed down to fit pretty much any car of those lines. A year or so ago she’d liberated a set from a drunk tow truck driver who thought he’d gotten extraordinarily lucky. But she’s always been able to make do; in a pinch, there is almost always a Toyota Camry, thirty seconds to open and start with a pair of scissors.

  Another BART train slows and stops, discharging another set of travelers. As they disperse, she spots a man in a center aisle, a graying man with sunglasses getting out of a silver Honda Accord. Her interest quickens as he hefts a large suitcase out of the back seat and hustles for the BART train.

  She watches and waits until the doors are safely closed behind him, then as the train departs she walks purposefully to the Accord and looks down in through the driver’s window. There is a red blinking light on the dashboard, but the car is at least ten years old and she’s reasonably sure it’s just a decoy, a flashing LED that only simulates a car alarm.

  “Locked out?” A male voice says behind her.

  She turns too quickly, her hand moving to her coat pocket.

  A man stands some distance away, dressed in a suit, roller bag at his side. Not airport security, just a traveler — with a hint of predator on the side.

  She can feel anger rising. What man would ever think a lone woman in a deserted parking lot would want help from him? She is already fingering the razor, but is too aware that there will be security cameras.

  “No, I’m fine,” she says, hearing the edge in her voice, and sticks the key into the Accord’s door, turning it quickly. There is no alarm.