Blood Moon

Gray tells Barker that John and Beth slipped away from the hotel. Barker wants to know who helped John, and he tells Gray to determine if John and Mitch are still friends. Gray suggests that they wait until John reappears. Barker suggests that Gray is afraid of John, offending Gray. Barker tells Gray that he got a warrant to arrest John for assault. Barker tells Gray that he wants Gray to locate John and dispose of him and Beth.

The next morning, John tells Beth that he has to go see his daughter, Molly, before they talk to Carla Mellin. John goes into the coffee shop with Molly. He can tell that she is not okay. Molly asks about who the woman in the car is, and he tells her that she works for Crisis Point and wants to speak with him about a case. John asks Molly what’s bothering her, and she tells him that she hates living with her mother and wants to live with him. John reminds her that the judge placed her in her mother’s custody. He tells her that she has to uphold her end of their bargain, and he’ll uphold his. John hugs her, and Molly goes to class.

John tells Beth that the divorce was contentious and that the judge would not grant joint custody. Molly did not want to stay with her mother, so she ran away. A year later, she ran away again. John made a deal with Molly that if she stopped trying to run away from her mother’s house, he would pay for an art conservatory in Manhattan. John expresses regret over his and Beth’s evening ending abruptly because of his daughter’s call. Then, a police officer’s helping John calls his burner phone and tells John that Barker issued a warrant for his arrest and had a closed-door meeting with Gray.

An unnamed man drives down a road he’s familiar with. He thinks about how the experience with Crissy Mellin was not quite right and feels “nothing except a powerful disdain for the young woman who had ruined the ceremony for him,” (213). In contrast, he feels remorse for Billy Oliver, but he dismisses it as out of his control. The man decides to focus on the future. He punches the code on the padlock, which is too fancy for the building. He’s installed brighter lights since the last time. He regretted that the setting was not more like a temple. The building was not soundproofed, but there was no one within a mile of the building.

The man found the unoccupied building accidentally, after taking a wrong turn. He took it over. The interior is 15 by 20 feet. He has a utility sink and surgical tools, which he’s sterilized many times. The upper shelf is empty, and he plans to put something special there. There are only two more days until the ceremony.

Carla Mellin relocated to a plain house in a middle-class neighborhood. Beth wants to approach first, thinking that she might be more welcome than John. John calls Mitch, and Mitch tells him that the police department called his office and asked for a call back. Carla agrees to see Beth and John, but she is unfriendly. She asks if they’ve found Crissy, and John says that they have not. John and Beth tell Carla about the blood-moon connection and the other missing women. Carla reiterates that Billy Oliver did not kill Crissy. He was socially awkward but harmless. Carla tells them that she needs to get to work, but Beth asks if Crissy was into astrology or anything with planetary movements. Carla tells John that he had his chance to help Crissy, but he didn’t. John tells her that he knows it’s too late for Crissy and Billy, but he wants to help someone else. Carla isn’t interested in John’s absolution and points out that the police were very proud of their false confession. John admits that he thinks Billy was bullied into writing the confession. Carla shocks him by stating that Billy didn’t write the confession at all because he was dyslexic.

Beth is dismayed to learn that Billy couldn’t read and write well. Carla states that he could get by, but he froze when stressed. Under the stress of an interrogation, he would not have been able to write the confession letter. John asks why he wasn’t told about Billy’s dyslexia, and Carla tells him that Billy’s grandmother, Gracie, told Barker, who acted like she was making it up to protect Billy. Carla tells them to leave.

John and Beth discuss the dyslexia and the false confession, but it would be impossible to prove since Billy was not diagnosed. John speculates that Carla could be in danger if Barker finds out that she knows about Billy’s dyslexia. Beth calls Max and leaves a voicemail. John leaves voicemails about Billy’s dyslexia for Morris, Couger, and Roberts. John wonders who could have planted the confession, and he decides that they need to speak to Isabel Sanchez, the person who discovered Billy’s body.

John calls Sanchez, and she tells him that she cannot talk to him because she has to protect her husband and kids. She tries to hang up, but he begs her to answer a few questions. She says that she has nothing to say about Billy and hangs up on him. John knows that someone issued her a warning because he’d never even mentioned Billy to her.

Barker asks Gray how Sanchez reacted to seeing him, and he says that she started crying. Gray is certain that Sanchez will be too frightened to speak to John. Gray reports that Mitch claims that he and John had a falling out over John’s binge drinking. Barker is skeptical.

John and Beth return to the fishing cabin. John calls Detective Morris, and she is appalled by what he tells her about Billy Oliver’s forged confession. They discuss the potential corruption in John’s former police department, and he shares that someone scared Isabel Sanchez. Morris learned from Patrick Dobbs that Larissa Whitmore had a red crescent-moon tattoo. The moon signified Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. John and Beth interview Dr. Victor Wallace, a professor of the occult, and he knows about Luna because he gives lectures on the topic. He agrees to send his class registration list and a link to chat rooms interested in Luna to John and Beth.

John and Beth are comparing the interview lists with the list that Dr. Wallace sent when Sanchez calls.

Deputy Sanchez told her husband what happened, and he insisted that she call John. Sanchez admits that Frank Gray threatened her. Gray told her that John was fired and to steer clear of him or else she’d be the enemy of the entire police department. John asks her if she knew that Billy Oliver was dyslexic, and she did not. Sanchez agrees that he could not have written the confession not only because of the dyslexia but also because he did not have a writing utensil. Sanchez tells John that the camera on Billy’s cell went out, and she reported it and requested that he be moved. On the night when Billy died by suicide, he was taken by Gray for interrogation and came back vacant. John had told Barker that Billy was not capable of abducting Crissy, so Barker pulled him and Mitch off the case and gave it to Gray.

After ending the call with Sanchez, John is conflicted. Beth asks John if he regrets getting involved in the case again. He denies it. Beth calls Max again. Her assistant, Richard, answers Max’s phone, and Beth asks him why.

John worries that Gray and Barker could find his fishing camp. When John goes back inside, he finds Beth’s door still closed. He knocks, and Beth is crying. Richard told her that Max came into work and then died at his desk. John asks if there’s anything he can do, and she tells him to leave her alone.

John goes over the case file and calls Mitch. He asks him to have a contact who could look through the dark web relating to Luna. Dr. Wallace emails that he has something, so John calls him. Wallace noticed that each of the women’s names have double letters in them: Anna, Allison, Larissa, and Crissy. This would be important to a numerologist, who uses numbers and their relationship to letters to create a roadmap for one’s life. After John goes to bed, Beth comes to his room and apologizes for being rude. He pulls her into bed with him and holds her. They have sex.