Blood Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff

close to the beach would normally be a party school, but S.D. had a staid reputation, probably because beyond the woods it was surrounded by a residential no-man’s land. Students could walk down to the beach to surf between classes but were miles from the nightlife of the city center.
    Cara Lindstrom’s cousin Erin McNally was a med student, one would assume she had the attendant workload, but apparently she had immediately agreed to Roarke’s request for a meeting. Singh had set up an appointment in front of the campus’s Geisel Library. “She said you cannot miss it.”
    She was right — no one could have missed it. Roarke walked through the sunny, modern campus toward a concrete and glass structure looking for all the world like the Starship Enterprise: a spaceship-shaped oval perched on steep concrete ramps resembling loading docks.
    Singh had sent through a photo of Erin, an olive-skinned girl with black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, a studious type as far from Cara Lindstrom’s edgy and feral beauty as a blood relative could get. The glasses made her easy to spot; she was poring over a thick textbook at a shaded table in the library plaza. She looked serious and much younger than her twenty-six years.
    She squinted up at him as he stopped in front of her table. “Ms. McNally?” he asked.
    “Agent Roarke,” she said, and looked him over, not in a sexual way at all, but with a rather more scientific curiosity. He’d changed to a dress shirt and tie in the parking lot and shrugged on his suit coat on the way across campus, so he probably looked his part.
    He motioned to the seat across from her and she nodded, old school manners for someone of her generation. “Agent Singh told you what I wanted to speak to you about?” he asked as he settled.
    “My cousin,” Erin said, and closed her textbook. Pathologic Basis of Disease , he noted. “What do you want with her?”
    Her bluntness was startling. She might not look like Cara, but that sharp watchfulness apparently ran in the family.
    “I’m trying to find her.”
    “I don’t have a clue,” Erin said, and looked at him so directly he knew it was true. Not that he’d really expected her to have an answer. It was going to take some digging, to see what she knew that she didn’t know she knew.
    “Why do you want to find her?” Erin asked. “Does it have to do with the murders?”
    Roarke knew that she meant the murders of the Lindstrom family, not Cara’s own killings. The APB that had been out for her when she’d kidnapped Jason Sebastian had gone out with the alias she was using at the time, Leila French, and Roarke doubted that Erin would have seen the FBI sketch that had briefly been released in central California. There was no reason Erin would know her cousin was wanted.
    “Yes, something to do with them,” he answered her.
    “That’s weird.” She frowned. “After all this time.” She looked disturbed.
    “When was the last time you saw her?”
    She hesitated. “I think when I was seventeen.”
    “You think ?” he repeated. He doubted this precise young woman was in the habit of uncertainty.
    She looked away from him, off into the distance. “No, I guess I know. I was a senior in high school. I was leaving school and I thought I saw her in a car parked across the street, looking at me. I can’t be sure, because I hadn’t seen her for years by then, not since I was… fourteen. But it looked like her, and she was looking at me, and this was just a week before she disappeared.”
    Roarke felt a little chill up his spine. “How do you mean disappeared?”
    “The day she turned twenty-one all the insurance money from the murders got signed over to her and no one ever heard from her again. My mother said that she fired the trustee and she asked for the whole lump of it to be wired somewhere and then her phone was turned off and her P.O. Box and her email were all shut down. The trustee was calling Mom every few days asking if