Blood Moon

The bartender brings John another coke, and Beth pays. Beth asks John if he understood what she said. John does, but he’s still leaving. He walks her to her car, and she repeats that what happened to Crissy will happen again. He tells her that it is not his problem. She tries to tell him that the man the police caught—who died by suicide—was not the killer. He dismisses her. John asks her why she was sneaky when approaching him. She admits that she came for herself, not for her network. He asks why she thinks the killer will strike again, and she says that it’s because of the blood moon.

Annoyed and uncertain, John watches her leave the parking lot. He takes a photograph of her license plate. John feels angry that Beth interrupted his life, which is difficult enough. Crissy’s case has haunted him since it closed three years before. John goes back into the bar and hits the guy who mocked him.

At home, icing his bruised face after the fight, John considers what Beth meant by the blood moon. After showering, he finds the man who insulted him at the bar in his living room.

John tells Mitch Haskell that he’s lucky he didn’t have his gun. Mitch tells him that he knocked, but the lights were off, and the front door was unlocked. Mitch asks how John’s face feels—he had to make the fight look authentic. Mitch and John were partner detectives before Mitch joined the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Mitch came by boat to avoid anyone seeing him. Mitch asks why John was in the bar. John tells Mitch that it was random, but Mitch is skeptical.

John asks about Mitch’s wife, Angela, and he tells John that she’s pregnant and that he’s planning on leaving the DEA. He’s reached his limit, just like John did after Crissy’s case. John tells Mitch that he was too drunk then and that Mitch shouldn’t trust anything he said. Mitch asks him what his boss, Tom Barker, has him doing. John admits that he’s on boring assignments. Mitch asks why he stays despite Barker’s poor treatment of him, and John avoids the question. Mitch tells him that he must let Crissy’s case go. Mitch asks if John will see Beth again, and John pretends that it was a random meeting. Mitch leaves. John watches the news, which shows a photograph of the blood moon.

Beth calls Max Longren, her boss at the network who is being forced to retire, and she admits that she struck out with John. Max was the executive producer of Crisis Point, but when the network was taken over, Max was replaced by a younger man named Winston Brady. Max handpicked Beth after she’d worked on the show for only two years, and he taught her everything he could about producing. Their worst fight occurred when Beth told Max that they missed something on Crissy’s case and he told her to drop it. She’d informed him that she was taking vacation days, and he was suspicious. He warns her that if she gets caught, she puts the show and her job at risk. Beth didn’t tell Brady that she was going at all, which could result in her getting fired. Max urges her take an earlier flight back to New York.

The next morning, Beth calls the Auclair Police Department and asks for John, but she’s told that he’s not available. She searches for Crissy Mellin’s mother, Carla Mellin. She doesn’t live at her previous address, and none of the neighbors are helpful. Beth drives to the New Orleans airport.

Tom Barker—John’s boss at the Crimes Against Persons unit—asks John what happened to his face, and John says he fell. Barker doesn’t believe him but can’t prove it. He tells John that Crisis Point has scheduled the episode on Crissy’s case in two weeks. Barker tells John that if he is approached to do an interview, he must decline. He should not bring up any of the problems he has with the case. John reminds Barker that he closed the case when the body of Crissy was still missing. Barker gets angry and says that he should have told the chief to fire John back then. John tells Barker that the only reason he didn’t fire him is because Barker does not want John to speak openly. Barker tells John that he has an alcohol addiction, an ex-wife who left him, and a kid “run[ning] off to God knows where” (46). John tells Barker that he doesn’t have to take this, and Barker tells him to quit. John leaves and starts his laptop in his car.

Beth calls the police station from the airport and gets a male voice. When she asks for John, he tells her that John’s been gone for a couple hours. Beth takes it as a sign, and she gets into the security line. Suddenly, John identifies Beth to a TSA agent, who asks her to come with him because of a police matter. To Beth’s embarrassment, John escorts her out of the airport.

John directs Beth into his SUV. When John starts the car, Beth demands to know what he’s doing. He tells her that there was a blood moon the night of Crissy Mellin’s disappearance. John drives through a fast-food restaurant, and they talk in the parking lot. Beth asks about John’s face. He tells her that after she left the bar, he went back in and got into a fight. John agrees to discuss Crissy’s case, off the record.

The last blood moon was on the night of November 7-8, 2022. Crissy’s mother, Carla, noticed that they were out of milk, and Crissy offered to walk to the convenience store and get some. Carla gave Crissy money and went to bed. Carla never saw her daughter again. Carla got home from work the next day, and Crissy was not home. Carla called the next-door neighbor, Billy Oliver, who saw Crissy walking to the store the previous night. Carla called the police and reported Crissy missing. The police were not receptive, but a missing person’s case was opened, and John and his partner were assigned it.

John questioned Billy first, and then Tom Barker handed his questioning over to Frank Gray, who questioned Billy relentlessly. John noted that the weather on the night of Crissy’s disappearance was overcast and rainy and that no one would have been able to see the blood moon. Beth asks John if he really believes that Billy was the killer, and John does not answer but seems upset by the question. John mentions that there will be two blood moons sometime that year, and Beth corrects him: not “sometime”—the next blood moon is in four days.

Tom Barker is appalled when he finds out what John did at the airport. He speaks to the TSA agent who was concerned with John’s behavior. Barker smooths the incident over with the TSA agent and reassures him that John is a good agent. Barker then calls Frank Gray into his office. Gray is loyal to Barker, and he calls on him when he needs a discreet favor. Barker tells Gray to figure out who Beth Collins is and what her connection to John is. Gray asks him how far Barker wants him to take it, and Barker makes it clear that he’s done dealing with John.

John takes Beth to his home—a small house in the swamp. John tells Beth that despite her attempts at subterfuge, his department is aware that she’s attempting to question him, and they are on borrowed time. Beth asks why he was suddenly willing to talk to her, and John tells her that Barker confronted him. He shares that Barker had a vested interest in quickly “solving” Crissy’s murder so that he could get a promotion. John asks Beth why she was interested in the case, and she tells him that she was a fact checker at Crisis Point.

Beth accuses John of looking into her, and he admits that he did. He called her network and spoke to her assistant. Beth explains that Max Longren is being forced to retire as executive producer, and that makes her position tenuous. Max was loyal to her, but her position with the new executive producer, Winston Brady, is fragile. Max did not want Beth to investigate Crissy’s case further because it could hurt her career if Brady found out, and he did not believe the blood moon angle. Beth became interested in Crissy’s case in part because she is from the area. Shortly after Beth and Max edited the Crissy episode, Max had a heart attack and was asked to retire. Brady took over and gave the episode final approval, but Beth did not agree that the episode was finished.

John admits that Crissy’s case cannot be closed for him until her body is found. While Beth probed Crissy’s case, she found another missing girl from Texas. Sixteen-year-old Larissa Whitmore went missing from Galveston, Texas, while out on a boat with a wealthy man she’d met while clubbing. Her body was never found, despite an extensive search. John points out that the suspect in that case was in jail awaiting trial when Crissy went missing. Beth tells him that Larissa disappeared on the night of a blood moon. While looking into Larissa’s disappearance, Beth realized that the Crisis Point episode never mentioned the blood moon that occurred on the night of Crissy’s disappearance.

John argues with Beth about the significance of the blood moon in the case, trying to convince himself that it’s meritless. Suddenly, John’s dog, Mutt, shoots to his feet, and John instinctively unholsters his weapon. Beth asks what happened, and John tells her that Mutt growled.

John checks the window and leads Beth outside to an outbuilding. John tells her to drop to the ground if she hears gunshots. He watches the house. Beth hears a car start in the distance. John relaxes and asks if Beth is okay. John leads her away from the house, but Beth is initially reluctant follow. John will not tell her where they’re going. Beth wants to go back to the house where all her things are, but John tells her that if she does not come with him, then she should never contact him again. Reluctantly, Beth follows him to a boat.

John rows the boat through the bayou. Finally, Beth asks why they are fleeing. He tells her that Mutt has never growled, not once. From the outhouse, John saw someone walk around the house and peep in windows. Beth tells John that the previous blood moons were in 2022 and 2018, and on each blood moon, a young woman from the region was reported missing. None of the cases were solved. They arrive at a Cajun fishing camp that has been in John’s family for a long time. He leads her to the cabin. John’s parents and cousins moved away, so he was left with the cabin.

John tells Beth that the man at the house is Frank Gray, nicknamed “the ogre,” who is a detective and one of Tom Barker’s henchmen. John tells her that no one knows where he lives, besides Mitch. John knows that Gray looked hard to find him, and he likely tracked Beth’s cell phone. John uses burner phones, so his cannot be tracked. Beth notes that John has taken care to avoid being located, and John tells her that Gray was not paying him a social call.

Tom Barker is at home with his wife when Frank Gray calls him. Gray tells Barker that he got lost trying to find John’s house and that he and Beth were not inside when he got there. Barker is frustrated, reminding Gray that Beth’s phone is inside the house. Gray saw John’s car and Beth’s suitcase inside it, but neither Beth nor John was visible from the windows. Barker is frustrated because he “wanted to nip this in the bud, scare him into humility and compliance, today, before he had time to think about defying [Barker]” (102). Barker wanted to ensure that John did not speak to Beth or any other reporter about the Crissy Mellin case. Barker tries to tell Gray to go back to John’s house, but Gray tells him that he’s not driving back out there tonight.