Blood Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

become a con. It didn’t just start at thirty-nine. Not in Roarke’s experience.
    Cara had been only five years old when she lived under the same roof as Trent just after her near-murder, and it was unlikely in the extreme that she had… Roarke had no idea how to even finish the thought. That she had seen the badness in Trent, that she had driven him out of the house…
    At age five.
    Epps’ words in the corridor came back to him. You are talking crazy talk .
    And yet the question hovered. What happened ?
    Inside the prison’s main building Roarke surrendered his service weapon at the security gate and stripped off his belt, shoes, and personal belongings to send them through the X-ray machine. He re-dressed on the other end and was escorted by a guard through halls reeking of the biting faux-pine stench of some antiseptic cleaner. Steel gates clanged open before him and slammed locked behind him, and he felt himself flinching at the sounds. Prisons always made him tense, with their pervasive sense of desperation and madness, but today there was the added knowledge that he was looking at Cara Lindstrom’s future, if she were alive and if he caught her. And he would catch her. It didn’t mean he liked thinking about what that meant.
    It wasn’t a visiting day so he was the only one in the visitation room. It was bright from the long windows overlooking the desert and filled with rows of scarred rectangular folding tables and plastic bucket chairs. He remained standing at one of those windows, gazing out at an expansive view of the cloudless blue sky and the jagged red mountains.
    A door opened behind him and Trent shambled in, escorted by a guard. He was a medium-tall and weathered man in his late fifties, with the hard bitterness of a convict, but there was enough tone left to his muscles and enough definition to his face that Roarke could see he had once been an attractive man. Not a good one, but an attractive one.
    Trent stopped behind the chair right at the middle of the table and across from Roarke and eyed him. “Fed, huh,” he said, half-bored, half-contemptuous.
    Roarke moved toward the table. “Have a seat, Mr. Trent.”
    Trent shrugged, pulled the chair out and sat. “To what do I owe the honor?”
    And some polish, too. Definitely a ladies’ man in his time .
    “I’m reinvestigating the Lindstrom murders,” Roarke said, and while he watched the man’s face he wondered why he’d said it that way
    Trent looked startled for a split-second, which he covered fairly skillfully. “You don’t say. Can’t help you. Wasn’t even in the same town when it happened.”
    “Actually, I’m looking for Cara Lindstrom.”
    A different kind of look flashed across Trent’ face, uninterpretable. “You have got to be kidding. Haven’t seen the kid for a million years.”
    Roarke looked at him without expression. “That’s right. You moved out — two months after Cara moved in with you?”
    The convict shrugged again, disinterested. “I guess. Like I said. Long time ago.”
    Roarke flipped open a file, but he didn’t need to check the report that Singh had compiled. He knew the date.
    “Two months to the day.” He looked back up at Trent. “Interesting timing.”
    “In what way?” Trent said, with a hint of a challenge.
    “It looks almost like it might have had to do with the little girl.”
    The inmate smiled thinly. “We already had Joan’s two. Three just broke the camel’s back.”
    Roarke stared at him. “Kind of cold, isn’t it?”
    “Don’t know what you mean.”
    “Little girl who’d been through all that — five years old. Seems like a person could give her a little time.”
    Trent’ face and voice turned ugly. And more than ugly: furtive. “Yeah, well, you didn’t have to live with the kid. She was not right.”
    “Not right,” Roarke repeated colorlessly.
    “Mental,” Trent summed up.
    “Like how?”
    “Always watching. Always snooping around.” The convict looked grimly