Page 40 of Blood Moon

“What type?”

“A man who would keep his grandmother’s gumbo recipe, much less make it. Who would share socks.” She looked over at Mutt, who was curled up asleep on a folded blanket on the floor. “Who would be so fond of his dog. You looked too… um…”

“Mean?”

Her head came back around to him. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

“It’s okay. I was trying to look mean.”

“Why?”

“To make the impression I apparently did.”

“On me?”

“Definitely on you. But also on the bartender and the guys shooting stick. I could’ve been walking into a trap.” He cocked an eyebrow. “One laid by someone other than you, that is.”

“Someone like the ogre? Tom Barker?”

Exactly like that, he thought, although he didn’t say so. Restless and agitated, he spread his fingers wide and ran his hands up and down his thighs, dreading like hell the course this conversation was about to take. Since their arrival, neither of them had acknowledged what had brought them here. The meal had delayed addressing the subject. Then her phone call. They’d put off talking about it long enough.

He looked over at her, where she was curled up in the oversize chair. “Tell me about the two abductions that happened in 2018.”

She stopped winding strands of the fringe around her fingers and let them fall into her lap. “In January of that year, a nineteen-year-old woman in Jackson disappeared while riding her bicycle home from her shift at a Waffle House.

“In July, in Shreveport, a woman in her early twenties was seen for the last time walking her dog around the playground of her apartment complex. The dog was found roaming, still on his leash, unharmed. She’d vanished.”

He glanced over at the long folding table where he permanently kept a laptop. He was tempted to boot it up and researchthose cases, but he was also afraid of being drawn farther in. The less he knew, the easier it was to remain detached.

“They’re regional,” Beth said.

“That’s a stretch.” But not that much of one. He ran a rough calculation in his head. You could drive the distances between those points in one day or less.

She said, “I think 2018 was when he started.”

John came out of his chair, picked up his empty mug, and headed for the kitchen. When he got there, he realized he didn’t want a refill of coffee. Instead, he took a bottle of bourbon from the cabinet. The lip of the bottle clinked against the drinking glass as he poured a shot. He hesitated, then poured a bit more. “Want one?”

“No thank you.”

He took a swallow, then another, loving the burn, the bite, the rush of relief that was too damned temporary. He returned to the living area but prowled around the room, swirling the liquor in his glass.

“What makes you think that’s when he started?” he asked. “What about three and a half years earlier and those two blood moons?”

“I didn’t find any accounts of missing women that coincided with those dates. And—”

“Jesus, there’s an and?”

“And the two 2018 eclipses were particularly significant.”

“I can hardly wait. Why were they particularly significant?”

He could tell she didn’t approve of his sarcasm, but she let it pass. “The one on January thirty-first was also a blue moon.”

“I forgot what that means.”

“The second full moon within a month.”

“Right,” he mumbled into his glass as he took a drink from it.