Blood Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff

how big California was. Cara might well follow them, but that was a long trip for their purposes, one that might lead nowhere. He spoke reluctantly. “It’s a possibility, but a long trip for a long shot. There might be a better way. I’m going to get Snyder’s input.”
    Epps stood as well. “Go out of the building to do it, then. Go have breakfast, let Jones tail you. We stick to the first plan until we figure this the hell out.”
     
    Though he felt foolish and conspicuous doing it, Roarke left the building and walked through the fog, over to a taqueria on MacAllister that had a wicked breakfast burrito. He was uncomfortably aware of Jones on his tail.
    Inside the warm, mural-painted hole in the wall he ordered his comida to go, and then walked back out toward the plaza, through denizens of Market Street doing their business: spare-changing, hugging each other to slip various substances into pockets. The green smell of pot wafted through the air.
    On the plaza he found a bench in between the rows of bare mulberry trees and unwrapped his burrito. Homeless drifted in front of him like dream figures in the fog, some lost and silent, some talking very actively to themselves and whoever else would listen. There were multitudes of them on San Francisco’s streets, drawn by the excellent services the city provided its most downtrodden: soup kitchens, shelters, free clinics. Since the recession, the population seemed to have doubled.
    Roarke fixed on one ragged man who had stopped still on the pavement and was gently rocking on his heels, apparently listening to some inner voice.
    As the Reaper might be doing right now.
    Roarke found himself thinking back to a question that had plagued him ever since a psych residency after college: What made some of those voices turn people self-destructive, while others made the afflicted one torture and kill?
    He pulled out his phone to call Snyder.
    Snyder picked up his phone immediately, and Roarke didn’t bother with pleasantries.
    “I need a profile. Unofficially and yesterday.” There were advantages to having a killer so unique that he could make that request to one of the best profilers in the field and know he’d comply.
    “For Cara Lindstrom?” Snyder didn’t sound angry, but puzzled. He’d already profiled Cara, or rather forced Roarke to do his own profile and then agreed with it. Once a teacher, always a teacher.
    “For the Reaper,” Roarke told him.
    “Ah,” Snyder said. “Interesting.”
    “And don’t tell me to do it myself, this time.”
    Snyder laughed, a rare sound. “Matthew, I know your relationship to this case. I know you’ve had a profile in your head for years, decades, probably.”
    It was true. At nine years old, Roarke had dreamed a monster killing those families. As a Behavioral Analysis trainee, one of the first things he’d done was to profile the Reaper.
    “Haven’t you?” Snyder prodded.
    “Of course,” Roarke admitted grudgingly.
    “So?”
    “All right.” Roarke glanced around him at the oddly-populated square and hunched on the bench, lowering his voice. “The frenziedness of the attacks indicates a highly disorganized killer, almost certainly psychotic.” He paused for a moment, studying the examples right in front of him in the plaza. One of the transients was now crouched on the pavement, tracing an intricate invisible pattern on the asphalt with his finger.
    “I would say a likely paranoid schizophrenic: he has a fantasy of violent murder based on a delusion. The closest prototype I know of is Richard Trenton Chase.” Chase had shot and killed six people in the Sacramento area within the span of a month in late 1977 and 1978. Despite the relatively low body count he was one of the most notorious of serial killers, dubbed “The Vampire Killer,” “The Vampire of Sacramento,” and “The Dracula Killer,” for his gruesome signature behavior of drinking his victims’ blood and cannibalizing their remains.
    Roarke could