Blood Ties

by Kay Hooper

  “There’s that. All that. What we can’t get past is that he watched all day. Hollis was visible a lot of that time, close to motionless long enough and often enough to give him a clear shot—if that was his only goal, his only reason for waiting out there all day. But he did wait. Until late in the day and after the second victim was found. Almost as if that was what he was waiting for.”

  “Maybe hoping we wouldn’t find that victim. Or maybe what Diana suggested. Mind games.”

  “Could be. Especially if he recognized any of you as belonging to the SCU.” There was a pause, and then, wryly, “It’s getting a bit like the Old West these days, only in your case the hotshot young gunslinger riding into town to challenge the famous veteran is a twisted serial killer eager to pit his smarts and skills up against the SCU.”

  “I really hope that isn’t the case.”

  “Yeah.”

  Miranda was silent for long minutes, her gaze roaming absently up and down the quiet, peaceful scene of Main Street, Small Town, USA. Finally she said, “If Hollis was the target, she’s become a threat to someone. A very specific threat to a very specific someone. And I’m finding it difficult to believe that would be wholly unconnected to our investigation these last weeks.”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “If nothing else, the shooter could have been following you two as you pursued the investigation. Under orders not to do anything until…”

  “That is the question, isn’t it? Until what? Maybe… somewhere along the way, through some action or simply by her presence, Hollis became too much of a liability to the killer. And yet she has some of the least-invasive, least-threatening abilities. She’s a medium and a self-healer, and she sees auras. Where’s the threat in any of that?”

  “Something we can’t know until we find out who—or what—she threatens.”

  Miranda drew a deep breath and then allowed it to escape, misting in front of her face. “Yeah. And in the meantime, we have these murders to investigate.”

  “That we do.”

  “While we keep Hollis safe.”

  “Might be easier just to take the shooter out.”

  “Easier, but probably not the right call. Take him out and chances are somebody else will be sent to do the job. Somebody we might not see until too late. At least this guy is an enemy we’ve spotted, one we can keep an eye on.”

  “True. So we watch him? Stick close?”

  “Like white on rice. And, Roxanne—be careful. Be very careful. You and Gabe both.”

  “Copy that. Get some rest tonight, will you? All you guys are running on fumes, and that is not a good thing.”

  “I know.”

  “You have guns. Dangerous things in sleep-deprived hands.”

  “And you’ve made your point.”

  “Good. We’ll watch tonight. Time enough tomorrow to try to figure things out.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Miranda said.

  “That you’ll figure things out?”

  “That we have time enough to do it.”

  For a long time now, Diana hadn’t needed sedatives to sleep, but she still required time to wind down and something boring to occupy her mind while her body gradually relaxed and her nearly ever-present guard came down. The usual remedies, like a hot bath or shower and glass of warm milk, didn’t do much for her.

  For her, either a few games of solitaire—the old-fashioned way, with actual cards—or a boring documentary on TV tended to work more often than not.

  On this particular night, it was “not.” Weary though she was, nothing seemed to work.

  Her room in the B&B, one of only three doubles with two queen-sized beds, looked out onto a pretty little courtyard at the rear of the building. It was pleasant and comfortable, and since each guest room was a suite with its own tiny sitting area and generous bathroom, and there were eight of the suites, each agent had his or her own space. That was not a little thing, they had discovered, to have some room and privacy during an investigation. It provided at least the illusion of normalcy.

  Most of the time.

  And it helped. Most of the time.

  But Diana didn’t think the problem tonight was her surroundings. She’d been on edge since she and Quentin joined this investigation a couple of weeks before, and she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because this was the first real SCU case she’d been assigned, and she was still uncertain of her training and abilities.

  Maybe it was because her relationship with Quentin was still tentative and wary.

  Maybe it was the case itself, twisted and depressing as serial-murder investigations tended to be. With little evidence and few leads, she had the hollow feeling they were pretty much chasing their own tails, waiting for a break in the case that might never happen, while viciously murdered and tortured victims were being cast aside like garbage and contemptuously left for them to find.

  Contemptuously?

  It was an easy guess, she decided, requiring no particular skill as a profiler—which she wasn’t. But she had begun reading up on the subject, as she was reading up on so many others, and what stuck in her mind was the accepted fact that most if not all serial killers developed and followed very specific, unique rituals—many involving burial or whatever means they chose to dispose of bodies. Some rituals were even weirdly respectful, with victims dressed in clean clothing and laid out in carefully dug graves.

  This killer very clearly didn’t see his victims as people deserving of any respect, not before death and not after.

  Diana realized she was endlessly shuffling her deck of playing cards and tossed them aside with a half-conscious curse. She leaned against the pillows banked behind her and stared across the room at an old, mostly black-and-white documentary on TV about World War II.

  So he feels contempt for his victims. No big surprise there. Nothing helpful there. Miranda probably had that little bit of information nailed with the first victim. If not before.

  The real problem, she decided reluctantly, was that she felt pretty damn useless. Despite intensive training over the last months, she didn’t feel qualified to investigate a single murder, let alone a string of them. Even as…just one of the team. Not only had she never been any sort of cop, but her entire adult life—right up until little more than a year ago—was more dreamlike than real in her mind.

  Except for scattered instances of a psychic ability she was still coming to terms with—which had been notably absent for weeks now—she had literally sleepwalked through her life.

  And Diana wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t still doing that, at least some of the time. How else could she explain her very calm reactions today—to the bodies, the bear, Hollis nearly being shot?

  Jesus, I didn’t even ask Hollis if she was okay.

  Not that Hollis had seemed all that concerned about getting shot at, but despite the other woman’s casual friendliness and humor, Diana didn’t think she knew any of the agents well enough to manage a decent guess at what they might be feeling at any given moment.

  Except Quentin. Maybe.

  But that wasn’t what was really bothering her.

  Am I still sleepwalking? Is that what’s going on here? Why I feel so uneasy and uncertain all the time? So… out of place and unsure of myself? Given the opportunity to live a full life, to get into the game, did I opt out?

  No matter what Quentin says, was Dad right when he said I wasn’t cut out for this sort of job, right to believe I wouldn’t be able to handle it? Is that why I’ve been so hesitant, so uncertain? Do I believe him?

  Is that why I’ve been pushing Quentin away?

  She didn’t want to admit that might be true. Didn’t even want to think it might be true.

  Decided not to think about it at all.

  Oh, yeah, that’s the grown-up way to handle it. Just put your head in the sand.

  She told her inner self to shut up and rummaged among the rumpled bedclothes for the TV remote. The
n, determinedly keeping her mind blank, she began to channel-surf, looking for something even more boring than an old documentary about World War II.

  * Out of the Shadows

  Four

  DIANA OPENED HER EYES SLOWLY, then sat up a lot faster, shoving the covers aside to sit on the edge of her bed.

  Her bed—changed. Weirdly one-dimensional, a photograph without light or shadow. Like the room that was dull and without color or life or warmth. It was filled with that oddly flat, colorless twilight that was not day and not night but somewhere in between. She had always suspected that this place lay somewhere outside time, apart from what she knew and understood time to be. That it was something between the living world and whatever lay beyond it.

  As far back as she could remember, she’d called it the gray time.

  She turned her head and looked at the clock on her nightstand, which had boasted large red digital numbers in a readout easy to see. Now it was blank, featureless and numberless. All clocks were the same here, missing numbers or missing hands and numbers.

  No time passed in the gray time. Funny, that.

  Creepy.

  Diana got out of bed, not bothering to find slippers or even socks, though her feet were cold; it was always cold in the gray time, and no amount of clothing or blankets had ever made a difference. Besides, she wasn’t physically here, after all. At least—

  She looked back, both relieved and, as always, unsettled to see herself still there in the undisturbed bed, sleeping, face peaceful. Her physical body breathed, its heart beat. It lived.

  But everything that made her emotionally and psychologically Diana—her personality, her soul—no longer occupied that body. She couldn’t see the thread connecting the two halves of herself but knew it existed. Knew how fragile it was. How easily it could be severed.

  Yeah, great job scaring yourself. Stop thinking about what could happen. Just move.

  “Remember all this in the morning. No matter what happens. There’s no more forgetting now,” she told her sleeping self, unsurprised by the hollow, almost echo of her voice. Normal, for the gray time. And so was the faint and faintly unpleasant smell.

  Her own alert readiness and familiarity with this place was also normal, and she wondered as she always did why she never felt this sure of herself in the real world. It would make so many things so much easier, she thought, if she could feel this way all the time.

  That rueful awareness had barely dawned when she started around the foot of the bed toward the door and was jolted to a stop by what she saw. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Beats me,” Hollis said, looking around her warily. She was standing just inside the door to the hallway. “This is your world, not mine. I was asleep in bed, minding my own business, a minute ago. I saw me there. Which was an experience I’d rather not repeat, thank you.”

  “I told you not to look back.”

  “Hey, I was curious. And at least I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt, so, you know, thankful for that. Why’d you pull me in?”

  “I didn’t,” Diana said slowly. “I’ve only done that once, when we tried it months ago—and I was surprised as hell that it worked.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “That was my question, remember?”

  Hollis shivered and absently rubbed her bare arms. “Damn. If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have worn flannel pajamas instead of this nightgown.”

  Diana was about to explain that more clothing wouldn’t have helped the chill, but then she took a second look and said, “Huh. That’s an awfully… urn… Not something you usually pack for a work trip, is it?”

  “Can we just get on with it, please?”

  “Get on with what?”

  “Whatever it is I assume I’m here for.”

  “I don’t know what you’re here for. Or why I’m here, when I haven’t been able to get here for weeks even when I tried.”

  “Something to do with the case, no doubt. The more deeply involved in an investigation we get, the more apt we are to find all our senses reacting—including the extra ones.” Hollis shrugged. “At any rate, one thing I’ve learned in the SCU is that you take things as they come. We’re here now, and there has to be a reason why we’re here. What’s your normal procedure? Just start walking and see where your guides—isn’t that what you call them—take you?”

  “Yeah, usually. If a guide shows up, that is.”

  “I don’t think I’ll ask what happens if no guide shows up. Just lead the way, will you? If I remember correctly, being here in your gray time is physically draining, and we were both tired to begin with.”

  “It’s not my gray time.” But Diana moved past Hollis and led the way from her room.

  As soon as they stepped out into the hallway, it became apparent that they were no longer at the B&B.

  “Oh, man, this is creepy,” Hollis breathed.

  Diana looked over her shoulder at the other woman. “I don’t recognize this place. You do?”

  “I hope not. I really, really hope not.” Hollis didn’t as a rule give much away in terms of her expression, but the strain in her voice was impossible to miss, and her eyes were huge.

  Diana looked around them. They stood at what appeared to be an intersection of two seemingly endless corridors. Each corridor was hospital-clean and gleaming even in this dull gray twilight, and each was lined with closed doors that were all identically featureless with the exception of gleaming grayish handles.

  “Looks ordinary enough to me,” she said, returning her gaze to Hollis’s very still face. “I mean, no weirder than other places I’ve visited in the gray time.”

  “But you’ve never been here before?”

  “I don’t think so. Why? Where is this place?”

  Hollis drew a breath and let it out slowly. “The first time I saw it, I was in somebody else’s dream.* Found out later it’s a real place. And the real place is… Once upon a time, it was an asylum. Back in October, I met the monster who was caged there. He strapped me down to a table, and…”

  “Hollis?”

  “And he almost killed me.”

  Reese DeMarco leaned on an elbow as he studied the map spread across his bed, his gaze moving intently from one highlighted spot to the next. Two of the highlights were close together and represented the two bodies found in Pageant County today. Or, rather, the previous day, since it was after midnight now. The other six were spread farther apart, over three southeastern states.

  He was looking for a pattern.

  He wasn’t finding one.

  Not that it surprised him. The SCU was made up of serious and experienced monster hunters with the added edge of psychic abilities, and they were successful because they were very, very good; if a rational pattern in this madness had existed, the efforts of the rest of the team likely would have found it by now.

  Eight murders committed in just over eight weeks. Five women, three men. All apparently tortured—with a singular creativity—before they were killed, and the most recent two further mangled and defiled after they were dead. No connection between the victims. No real enemies in any of their backgrounds individually, and virtually no commonalities among them as a group except for race: All had been white.

  And all, with the exception of the most recent two, had been dumped like garbage by the side of various roads.

  DeMarco frowned as he thought about that one more time. Until Serenade, the victims had been, as far as they could tell, shoved out of a car, possibly even a moving car.

  Which, as Miranda had noted, pointed to the possibility of a second murderer, or at least an accomplice, since shoving a body out of a moving car was not an easy thing to do, and shoving one out of a stationary car required at least a few moments and some strength—or help.

  That, more than anything else, had made this case, this investigation, unusual even for the SCU. One serial killer rampaging through their towns or counties was virtually always more than the local o
r state police could handle; they simply weren’t set up, with the procedures, the equipment, or the personnel and experience, to track down a killer of that sort, especially if he was only passing through and had no connection to the area.

  Two serial killers, or one with an accomplice, put them into a smaller category than the relatively small one of serial killer: A conspiracy to commit murder was rare, and a serial killer with a partner or a sidekick was even more so. Only a handful of such cases had ever been documented by law enforcement.

  “We’re keeping the possibility to ourselves for now,” Miranda had told DeMarco earlier in the evening, just as she had told the other agents on the case. “As well as we can, anyway. No leaks to the media. Nothing written in our reports. We don’t even discuss it among ourselves unless we’re absolutely sure we’re alone. And that includes not telling local police—unless and until we know the killers are in the area and we have a shot at finding them.”

  “You know there are two of them, don’t you?” DeMarco had asked.

  “We believe there’s a good chance.” We meaning she and Bishop. “But we’re not certain, Reese. Until we are, we investigate this case according to procedure and the evidence, not speculation.”

  DeMarco had been about to remind her that they speculated all the time, when something she’d said before began to nag at him. “Nothing in our written reports? We don’t let the Bureau in on what’s going on?”

  “We don’t speculate in our reports about something we have little or no evidence to support.”

  He eyed her. “Oh, they are really not going to be happy with us about that.”

  “When we stop these killers, that’ll be the only thing anybody who counts remembers about the investigation. That the killing was stopped.”

  “I doubt the Director will be one of those people.”

  “That’s okay. There are others. Noah’s spent a great deal of time and effort building a network of support, and that network will hold. No matter what the Director thinks.”

  “And what about Bishop’s enemy? Whoever’s been reporting SCU movements back to the Director since—what—last summer? If we don’t know who that was—or is—we can hardly stop the leaks. And if we mean to withhold info from the Bureau, we damn sure need to make sure they don’t catch us doing it.”