Cold Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 3) by Alexandra Sokoloff Page B

shrewd, assessing him. “That be right?”
    Underneath the deliberate street drawl she had a slight Southern accent, maybe from living there, maybe just a legacy from some long-ago parent.
    “He’s dead, yes,” he answered the girl. And good fucking riddance ,he added in his head.“How did you find out about it?”
    Tyra looked slightly smug. “Ev’rybody knows. Got hisself offed in an alley in the TL.”
    “That’s right,” Roarke said. “Do you know who did it?”
    The girls looked at each other briefly.
    “Guess you thinkin’ it was Jade,” Tyra said with an attempt at casual indifference.
    “What do you think?”
    Tyra cut her eyes Shauna’s way. Shauna concentrated on the floor and gnawed at a fingernail. Roarke realized that the acne scarring on her cheeks was actually from old meth sores.
    “Jade hated DeShawn, no doubt,” Tyra finally drawled, and Roarke looked steadily back at her.
    “Why was that?”
    He had been watching both girls closely since he’d walked into the room. Now Shauna, who had been listless and passive throughout, stiffened and fidgeted.
    “Shauna?” he asked gently.
    The girl crossed her arms and kept her eyes on the floor.
    “He broke her in,” Tyra said from the other couch. Her voice was flat. “Danny took new girls to DeShawn.”
    Roarke felt his blood rising in anger. Typical pimp practice. Trauma bonding, psychologists called it. The pimps raped the girls themselves, or the more devious ones got friends and associates to rape a new girl so the pimp seemed like some comfort afterward, however perverse. An insidious kind of brainwashing.
    “Shauna?”
    Shauna wouldn’t look at him. Tyra rolled her head back and looked at Roarke.
    “Shauna too. She be walkin’ home from school and DeShawn and some guys grabbed her, pulled her into his car.”
    Shauna’s eyes were glazed. “I was walkin’ and I hear them say, ‘Get that girl.’ Get that girl ,” she repeated softly.
    Roarke sat still in his chair and tasted bile in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said to Shauna. His voice was thick and he had no other words. “I’m sorry.”
    The girl lifted her shoulders, barely. Her eyes never left the floor.
    “He dead,” Tyra said, with no particular inflection. “Nobody cryin’ here. Whole hella lot of people coulda killed him.”
    At the moment, Roarke would have been more than happy to have done it himself. He forced down his fury and concentrated on Tyra’s last words. “A lot of people could have killed DeShawn.” Not surprising, and it was a point that Molina was sure to make about Ramirez’s murder as well. He tried to focus back on something, anything, that would move him closer to finding Jade.
    “Do you have any idea where Jade is from?” he asked.
    Shauna shook her head. Tyra shrugged.
    “You think she’s from around here?” he tried. “Or California in general?”
    Tyra gave him a look that was as close to rolling her eyes as someone could get without actually doing it. “Could be you try lookin’ her up on Facebook.”
    Roarke had to admit the girl had a sense of irony.
    “We dint sit around jawing,” she elaborated. “Not if we dint want to get beat. She dint talk about it.”
    “Okay,” Roarke said, and took a moment to still his outrage. “But sometimes things just come out, right? You pick up things?”
    He looked at Tyra and she stared back sullenly, then gave a ghost of a shrug. She was sunk into the couch and her crop top was riding up, and Roarke tried not to look at the tattoo emblazoned over her bare midriff.
    He asked, “Can you tell me anything else about her? Things she did, things she liked . . .”
    Tyra considered. “She was into that cosmic shit. Incense, candles, psychics. Third eye blind and all.”
    Another tick in the box for a California background ,Roarke thought. He heard Jade’s voice again. “Do you believe in destiny, Agent Roarke?”
    He cleared his throat. “Did you get any sense of her family? Father,