Blood Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff Page B

didn’t know how to say that at the time, but I know it was true. She never spent the night at our house. I think Mom thought…”
    Roarke felt his pulse start to race. “That she’d hurt you?”
    Erin shook her head, and didn’t look at him. Her voice was hollow. “That he really would come back for her. The Reaper. And take the rest of us, too.”
    Roarke felt a heaviness in the air between them. He had heard that kind of superstitious talk before about the Reaper. An uncaught serial killer took on the aura of legend. He leaned forward to get her full attention. “Erin. I need to know. Did your mother ever talk about some sign, some indication that the massacre was going to happen? Anything unusual, any marker…”
    Erin’s head was down, black curls curtaining her face. She murmured something that set Roarke’s hair on end, even as he was unsure what she had actually said. “I’m sorry, what—” and this time he heard.
    “The rabbit,” she said, very softly.
    “What about the rabbit?”
    “Mom said that Aunt Gillian found a dead rabbit on the porch before it all happened.”
    So there. Trent hadn’t been lying. It is a clue, something tangible from the past . Not to do with his case, of course, but Roarke felt the subterranean pull of the lead. It was a path to a killer, a marker of his personality, a trail.
    What Roarke wanted with it was less clear. Revenge ? Just to know ? It was what he did. He hunted killers.
    No. That had been before. Another life.
    Erin was looking at him. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked in a small voice. “He must be dead.”
    “Almost certainly,” Roarke said. But he felt the hollowness of the words. “Or we would know by now. Men like that never stop.” They sat in silence for a moment, and there was a chill in the sunny day.
    “If you find Cara, would you tell her…” the young woman stopped, looked down at her books.
    “What?” Roarke asked gently.
    “I’d like to see her,” she said, without raising her eyes. “I’d really like to see her.”
     
     

Chapter Six
     
     
    It was late afternoon, coming on sunset, and Roarke was far too close to the ocean not to find a beach. He had to think, and there was no better place.
    He collected his car in the visitor lot and stopped to ask directions from a guard at a security kiosk, who turned and pointed. Torrey Pines State Reserve was just minutes from campus.
    Roarke drove to the trailhead, where he stood by the open trunk of the car and exchanged his dress shirt and suit coat for a T-shirt and sweater, and his work shoes for the lightweight Hi-Tec hiking boots he always took on the road with him. Then he locked the car and set off along a sandy, post-fenced trail through the scattered long-needled pines, gnarled and twisted into surreal shapes by the wind. His feet crunched past low, soft coastal sage scrub and hard-leafed chaparral, and he felt his muscles loosening, his lungs filling with the pure spicy air as the natural setting worked its magic.
    The trail opened out on a cliff and he stopped in his tracks to take in the spectacular overlook: a swoop of spotless beach under fantastically carved cliffs, the vast ocean with the sinking sun starting to glimmer orange across the water, outlining the streaks of cirrus clouds in light.
    After a long moment of just drinking it in, he descended the steep trail with the wind blowing at his hair and seagulls sailing through the air beside him, down the bluff to a secluded beach. The temperature was dropping and fog was rolling in off the water, but there was a warmth from the golden sandstone cliff face. Roarke breathed in deeply, feeling clean, and a million miles away from civilization.
    The beach curved along the wind-sculpted bluffs, and the long stretch of sand was nearly deserted, just a few lone walkers with dogs. A molten ball of sun poured orange light across the waves as it sank into the water.
    Once at the shoreline, he slowed his pace, and then sat