Blood Sins

by Kay Hooper

  More than inclined. In his experience, there really was no such thing as a coincidence.

  Robin was thinking along the same lines. “Do you think she could be from the Compound, like Mr. Brackin suggested? From the church?”

  “I think she’s been in the river long enough that somebody should have noticed she was missing.”

  “And since no report was filed . . .”

  “Well, Reverend Samuel and his flock never look for help outside the Compound. Maybe they’ve got trouble of the nasty kind and believe they can handle it themselves.”

  “A killer inside the church?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or?” Robin was watching him intently.

  “Or maybe the church has an enemy out here. A very, very pissed-off enemy.”

  “And he’s taking it out on the women?”

  “We have a couple of men unaccounted for, remember? Just because we haven’t found bodies doesn’t mean they didn’t wind up the same way these women wound up.”

  Robin shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Chief, is it true what I heard about the woman last week? That Ellen Hodges was . . . that somebody beat her to death?”

  “The state M.E. hasn’t completed the autopsy. Their office currently has a six-week backlog.”

  Characteristically, Robin wasn’t deterred. “Okay, but Doc Macy examined the body before she was shipped to Chapel Hill, right?”

  Sawyer nodded, wondering just where in hell their county M.E. was at the moment, since he should have arrived by now.

  “What was in his report?” Robin persisted.

  “Sure you want to know?” He waited for her decided nod, then replied, “Doc’s report recommended we ship the body to the state chief medical examiner, where the facilities are a lot better than any in this area. Because his X-rays showed that virtually every bone in her body had been broken, almost pulverized—and there wasn’t a mark on her anywhere to indicate how that happened.”

  Tessa Gray had put off actually visiting the Church of the Everlasting Sin’s Compound as long as she dared, a reluctance that had, according to the more experienced Hollis, worked for her so far.

  So far.

  “But you need to get out there,” Hollis said, early on the afternoon that Sarah Warren’s body was found in the river.

  Tessa was still grappling with that, and it wasn’t easy. It was the first time she’d ever been on assignment when a fellow Haven operative had lost her life—though not the first time it had happened.

  The stakes were high.

  And Tessa accepted that, got that. No operative joined the organization without being warned repeatedly, by John and Maggie Garrett, cofounders and codirectors of Haven, and by Bishop, another cofounder as well as Chief of the FBI’s Special Crimes Unit and someone who certainly knew better than most what price could be demanded of the soldiers in this war.

  That was the most unsettling part of the death of a fellow operative, the stark reminder that this was war, that people could and did die fighting what they all believed were necessary battles. They were none of them superheroes; being psychic hardly made them invulnerable. In fact, it was often the opposite.

  Depending on the ability and its individual quirks, being psychic could be a weakness at best, and an active liability at worst—especially some of the least common and even unique abilities, and most especially when those abilities were held by operatives or agents with erratic control.

  Unfortunately, those with erratic control far outnumbered those with a better mastery over their capabilities.

  Tessa was uncertain of where she fell on that score, since her own ability had not really been tested under fire. She knew she was considered to possess excellent control, but who knew what might happen under extreme and dangerous circumstances? She was trained to handle a gun and was licensed to carry a concealed firearm. But she wouldn’t be going into the Church of the Everlasting Sin’s Compound carrying a weapon of that sort. Worse, she had to appear and act like an extremely vulnerable woman who was ripe to be dominated by stronger people, stronger minds.

  A terrifying prospect, especially since they weren’t at all sure how Reverend Samuel achieved his seemingly absolute domination over his flock. If he was using psychic ability to control them, Tessa had no way of knowing whether that same control would work on her.

  Until she put her shields to the test by exposing them to the church Compound. And Samuel.

  “The police will probably be there,” she objected finally.

  “Not necessarily. They haven’t identified the body yet.”

  “But we have.”

  “Yeah. It’s Sarah, no question.”

  “Did you see . . . ?”

  “Her spirit? No.” Hollis frowned. “I seldom see the spirits of team members—or people I know, for that matter. I wonder why.” It wasn’t a question so much as it was an acknowledgment that the universe was arbitrary in its choices.

  Tessa waited a moment, then asked, “How can we be sure it was Sarah’s body?”

  Hollis pushed aside her musing with an almost physical gesture. “Hoping for a mistake in identification? Don’t. We have someone else in the area, and the I.D. of her body is confirmed.”

  “By someone I’m not supposed to know about, I gather.”

  Patiently, Hollis said, “What you don’t know, you can’t communicate—on any level—to anyone else. Tessa, I don’t even know for certain how many of our agents and Haven operatives are working this case. And right now, I don’t care. Someone is killing people, about as viciously as I’ve ever seen. As inexplicably as I’ve ever seen. And everything we know or think we know suggests Reverend Samuel is the one responsible. We believe he’s doing that killing using no weapon or tool except for the power of his mind, using paranormal abilities we haven’t been able to count, far less define and understand. I don’t know about you, but that scares the hell out of me.”

  “I just . . . I never knew psychic ability could be like that. Could be used as a weapon.”

  “It’s rare, but we have at least one agent who can channel and focus energy well enough to make it a destructive force. And Haven has at least one operative who can do it.”

  “And if there are two on our side . . .”

  “There are likely to be at least a couple on the other side, yeah. We’ve had evidence in the past of psychic abilities in some really evil and twisted bad guys who could do some scarily remarkable things psychically. Look, we haven’t discovered our own limits yet. But it only makes sense that in the wrong hands, driven by the wrong intentions, at least some psychic abilities could be corrupted. Dark energy channeled in ways more powerful than anything we’ve experienced so far.”

  “And used to kill. But why?”

  “The question we desperately need answered, Tessa, especially since we have no direct evidence so far pointing to either Samuel or his church, not evidence that would stand up in court. We know precious little, but what we do know from interviewing the very few defectors we’ve found tells us that Samuel built himself a church because something very seriously traumatic happened to him more than twenty years ago, something so mysterious or terrifying even the defectors wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about it, and whatever it was, it changed him forever.

  “Problem is, we don’t believe he was all that stable to begin with. It’s difficult to know for certain, because the early background info we have on him is sketchy, to say the least. Can’t even find a reliable birth certificate on him, though we’ve found half a dozen phony ones. In any case, he had a few early run-ins with the law, so he’s on record as having a troubled childhood. His mother was apparently a prostitute, and not of the high-class variety.”

  “I’d call that a troubled childhood,” Tessa said.

  “Yeah. We can’t find attendance records, so if he even went to school it was rare and sporadic. We haven’t been able to find any evidence that he started fires or tortured animals or displayed other signs of
a budding sociopath, but there’s so little solid information on him that we can’t rule anything out.”

  “Except that he grew up to become a cult leader.”

  “Except that,” Hollis agreed.

  Tessa shook her head. “I read up on cults and cult leaders when I got this assignment, and just the regular, run-of-the-mill leaders without psychic abilities are more than scary. The patterns of behavior they follow, the power trips and growing paranoia, the isolation, the need to dominate and control their followers—and the means they use to impose that control—is all so . . .”

  “Deadly, in many cases. Certainly in this one. We know women, men, and even a few children have gone missing from that compound in the last year, all vanished without a trace—and that none of them was reported missing by the church or any of its members. What we don’t know is why. Why his own have been targeted, and why these people in particular.”

  Tessa frowned. “Maybe he’s culling. Weeding out those of his people he can’t trust.”

  “That could very well be. Except that it doesn’t really explain the kids, does it?”

  “No. We’re sure kids have gone missing?”

  “We’re sure. No reports to the local police, but we’re sure.”

  “And we’re not talking about the kids Sarah got out?”

  Hollis shook her head. “No. Creepy thing is, one or both of the parents of at least two of the missing kids are still church members. Not only did they not report the kids missing, but they don’t seem to miss the kids.”

  “What?”

  “Either they don’t remember or don’t care. I’m guessing it’s the former. And we have no idea how that’s even possible. If Samuel can affect people’s memories, especially the sort as deeply rooted and emotional as the memory of a child . . .”

  She really didn’t have to finish that.

  Tessa drew a breath and let it out slowly, trying to fight off a chill that was seeping into her very bones. “The missing people, kids included, weren’t all psychics, I assume?”

  “We have no way of knowing for certain, but as far as we’ve been able to determine, among the known missing and murder victims only Sarah was psychic. If he found out who and what she was, then chances are he’s even stronger than we believed. Which means he’s even more deadly than we believed.”

  ——

  Officially, the children of the Church of the Everlasting Sin were home-schooled. Unofficially, they were often involved in church-supervised activities throughout the day. And like the adults who had chosen this refuge from the world, the children had a unique inner life that outsiders would have found odd.

  Some of the adult church members would have found it odd as well. And not a little alarming.

  Because not all of the children believed.

  And some of them were afraid.

  “Do you think Wendy got away?” Brooke kept her voice low, audible only to the small group at the playground’s covered picnic table. The group was busily collecting numerous toys left by some of the younger children now being shepherded toward the church.

  “I think so.” Ruby’s voice was equally low. She held open a cloth bag so that Cody could pile in all the alphabet blocks.

  As he did so, he said, “Yeah, but I don’t think Sarah made it.”

  Ruby and Brooke exchanged looks, and then both stared at the dark, solemn-eyed boy.

  Replying to their silent question, he said simply, “I don’t feel her anymore.”

  “Are you sure?” Hunter was the fourth member of the little group and the accepted leader, despite being the youngest at eleven. “Just because we haven’t seen her doesn’t mean she’s gone. I mean really gone. She has a shell. We’ve all felt it.”

  “I don’t even feel that now. Do you?” Cody said.

  Hunter frowned, concentrating on collecting all the small plastic pieces of a miniature dairy farm. “No. But I thought it might just be me. Because I hardly feel anything at all.”

  Blinking back tears, Brooke said, “I was going to ask Sarah if she could get me out next.”

  Ruby said, “We aren’t supposed to know she got anybody out, Brooke. We aren’t supposed to know she was here to snoop around.”

  “I didn’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t have.”

  Cody muttered, “Just because you don’t tell doesn’t mean somebody doesn’t know.”

  “I was careful. I’m always careful. But it’s getting harder and harder. I can’t stay here anymore, I just can’t. My aunt Judy lives in Texas, and she doesn’t like the church. I know she’d let me live with her.”

  “What about your mom and dad?” Hunter asked.

  “What about them?” Brooke fixed her gaze on the crayons she was gathering into a plastic container. “They believe in the church. They believe in Father. They’re never going to leave here.”

  After a moment, Cody said, “My mom isn’t so sure anymore. She’s beginning to be afraid.”

  “Does she know you feel that?” Ruby asked him.

  “No. She pretends everything is just the same.”

  “Don’t tell her,” Hunter warned. “We can’t tell any of our parents. Not what we know, and not what we feel. We have to keep hiding it. Because we all know what’ll happen if we don’t.”

  “Then what do we do?” Cody spoke more quickly, his gaze on the two adult church members coming toward them.

  “We keep our mouths shut.”

  “Until?”

  “Until we figure out something better.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, Cody. But I do know we’re safer doing nothing until we figure out what to do.”

  Ruby said, “That’s easy for you. You two aren’t girls.”

  “No,” Brooke agreed, also aware of the approach of two of their . . . keepers. “It’s different for us. Once the Ceremonies begin. Once Father notices we’re growing up.” Her last few words were whispered, “Once Father starts watching us. . . .”

  Tessa hadn’t known Sarah very well; Haven was a growing organization whose members were spread out all over the country, most living quiet, seemingly normal lives—at least until they were called into service—and many of them had never even met one another. But not knowing a fallen comrade, she had discovered, did nothing to lessen the feeling of loss.

  One of their own was gone.

  That knowledge was too painful to think about unless Tessa could make something meaningful of it. And right now that was all but impossible for her, especially when she was going into the same situation that had cost Sarah her life.

  Hollis said, “Your shield is stronger than Sarah’s.”

  “You’re a telepath now?”

  “No. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t thinking about it.”

  Tessa didn’t want to think about it. Instead, she thought about the young church member Bambi’s expression of adoration, and that of others she had met. She said slowly, “They don’t seem to be afraid of him. His followers.”

  Hollis didn’t push it. “Well, not the ones he sends out in public, anyway.” She shook her head. “Given the typical profile of a cult leader, there’s often some kind of sexual domination and control, but we aren’t sure about that with Samuel. For one thing, the church has existed long enough that I would have expected him to have offspring by more than one woman if he was using sex. But as far as we can determine, he’s childless.”

  “Sterile, maybe?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he genuinely sees himself as a more traditional prophet in the sense of being a holy man, above the needs of the flesh. He’s a bit older, somewhere in his midforties, and they do call him Father, after all.”

  A cold memory stirred in Tessa. “Didn’t Jim Jones’s followers call him Father?”

  “Yes, as I recall. It’s the rule rather than an exception for a cult leader to portray himself as a patriarchal or messianic head of his church. An absolute power structure with a single figure at the top.”

  “I think s
ome of the younger church members I’ve talked to so far would respond strongly to that idea of a protective father image. But the older ones? The ones closer to his own age? How does he hold them? How does he convince them to follow him?”

  “More questions we don’t have answers for. And we need them. If we have any hope of stopping Samuel, we need information.”

  “I know.” Tessa drew a breath and let it out slowly. “I know.”

  It was that sense of urgency rather than any confidence on her part that finally sent Tessa, later on that Wednesday afternoon, several miles outside the very small town of Grace to a nice if deceptively ordinary wrought-iron gate at the end of a short lane off the area’s main two-lane highway.

  There was what appeared to be a small farmhouse to the left and just inside the surprisingly pretty brick and wrought-iron fencing. Tessa had only a moment or two to wonder if the clearly very sturdy and certainly very expensive fence ran around the entire two-hundred-acre Compound, before she saw a tall man in jeans and a flannel shirt come out of the house and approach the other side of the gate.

  The two sides of the gate opened inward as he neared them, giving Tessa an unsettling feeling that wasn’t lessened a bit by his casual air or by the fact that he addressed her by name as soon as she put the car window down—and she had never met him before in her life.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Gray. Come for a visit?”

  Tessa managed to avoid even a glance at the plain gold band on her left hand, its weight still an unfamiliar, slightly uncomfortable sensation. “Yes. Ruth said—” She broke off when he nodded.

  “Of course. She’ll be waiting for you at the Square. Just continue along the drive all the way to the end. And welcome.”

  “Thank you.” Tessa hoped he couldn’t see that her fingers were white-knuckled with tension on the steering wheel as she drove through the gates and followed the long asphalt drive that disappeared into a dense-looking forest.

  She glanced into the rearview mirror in time to see the big gates slowly closing behind her, and her feeling of being trapped owed nothing to any sense except the very primitive one of self-preservation.