Blood Dreams (21 page)

But to their immense relief, in the center of the room, strapped to a stainless-steel table that was tilted about forty-five degrees up at the head, was Hollis.

She was more than a little bruised and battered, and it was clear the monster had begun to cut her clothing off before he was…interrupted…but she was very much alive.

“Hollis?” Bishop’s normally cool voice was unsteady.

She turned her head and looked at him, and her swollen lips smiled, if only a little. “Boss, I want a raise. Either that or a new job.”

“What the hell did you do to him?” Roxanne asked, her gaze fixed on the desperately struggling monster.

“You can’t see them, but I have a posse in the room. All his victims have come to visit their murderer. And lemme tell you, they’re pissed. Right now, they’re telling him all about hell. In Technicolor.”

Bishop gestured for Roxanne to keep her gun on the monster and holstered his own weapon as he went to free Hollis.

“
All
his victims?”

“Well, most of ’em. I got scared and opened a lot of doors.” She winced slightly. “Ow.”

Roxanne said, “I may have to shoot him just to get the scalpel away from him.”

“Feel free,” Marc said. Then he looked at Dani. “Are you okay? That looked—”

“Paris helped. Right at the end.”

“Is she…?”

“She’s gone.” Dani didn’t know when she had started to cry, but she couldn’t seem to stop. She felt empty and knew it wasn’t because of what she had done, but what she had lost. “I think she just stuck around as long as she did so she could help.”

It wasn’t much solace to Dani to remind herself that, deep down, she and Paris had both known, for weeks, that this was going to happen. It didn’t help to recognize that they had, at least, been granted the time to begin to say good-bye.

Half of her had been torn away, or nearly half; Paris had given her twin her abilities, even her life force, and Dani felt that too. She knew she was not quite as alone as others would perceive her to be.

That didn’t help either.

“I’m sorry. God, Dani, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.” She tried for a smile and knew it was no more than a shadow. “Even if I knew all along it would happen.”

“Did you?”

“I knew. Paris knew too. That’s why she gave me her abilities when she could.”

“He came after you instead of her.”

“Maybe he tried to get to Paris first and found the guardian. Or maybe he intended to go after me all along. But I think I surprised him, maybe even hurt him. I don’t think he realized that I could learn so fast to channel energy. Neither did I, really.”

She looked at the monster that had taken so much from her, from so many people, and even through her numb sense of loss, an uneasiness stirred. “I don’t think…”

“What?” Marc asked.

“I’m too tired to reach out, really, but what I feel from this monster is…it’s sick and evil, but…I just don’t think—”

“Christ, look over there,” Roxanne said, nodding toward the wall where photo collections detailed the stalking and torturing of his victims. “I don’t think we’ll have any problem convincing a jury this is our killer. Assuming it even gets to trial. Want my take, I say he picked this place because the universe told him it was where he belonged. In an asylum.”

Dani avoided looking at the trophies, but she could feel herself frowning. “I wonder if this monster was ever human.”

“Dani?” Marc’s arm tightened around her.

She realized he didn’t have to ask the question for her to know what it was. “Out there in the hallway…what I felt during that attack. It was never from this room. It was never
in
this room, Marc.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is the killer, I know that.” Even exhausted and aching, she knew that, felt that. “There are so many dark and twisted things inside him it’s like worms. Maggots.” She closed her eyes briefly, trying to shut off the unwelcome information. “Audrey…”

“His mother.” Hollis, freed from her stainless-steel prison and cautiously testing her bruises, said, “His victims got an earful about her by the end. She doted on him. In a very unnatural way.”

Dani shook her head. “He was born twisted; she just made him worse.”

“Yeah. Well, before they started putting the fear of hell into him a while ago, one of his victims told me we might want to take a look into the room closest to this one. She seemed to think we were in for a surprise.”

E
ven before they began exploring, they had a baffling mystery on their hands, because when Marc touched the killer he was able to confirm what Dani had already sensed.

“He’s not psychic.”

“Maybe burned out?” Roxanne suggested. “That last attack against Dani was a fierce one. Maybe too much for him?”

Still surprisingly calm, Hollis said, “If you’re talking about whatever energy blew the door in, I doubt he had anything to do with it. He was fully occupied, believe me, for at least ten or fifteen minutes before you guys got here.”

“I don’t think this…man…was ever psychic,” Marc said, half consciously brushing his hands together after touching the killer. “I’ve been able to pick up latent psychic ability, but from him I get nothing at all.”

They looked at one another, and Hollis said, “I say we look for whatever Becky thought would surprise us.”

They found it about ten minutes later while exploring the rooms nearest his torture chamber. The now seemingly catatonic monster remained cuffed and under the watchful eyes and ready weapons of Gabriel and Roxanne.

It was a neat and scrupulously clean room, as small and unadorned as a monk’s cell. Just a cot, a metal chair and desk, and an unfinished pine wardrobe, where his clothing was folded precisely.

“He kept a scrapbook of his own life,” Bishop said, finding it in one of the desk drawers. He used his pen to turn several pages back. “Born…Carl Brewster, ordinarily enough. Not much about his early life here, just his birth certificate and what look like some school records. Enough to help us know where to look for more information about him. Pages of doodles the psychologists are going to have a field day with, including the word
Prophecy
written over and over again.”

“Just that word?” Dani asked.

“Looks like. Then the newspaper clippings start. No way to tell just from this what the ultimate trigger was, but it looks like we were right about the Boston murders being his first. There are no clippings or information about earlier murders here.”

“When did his mother die?” Dani asked.

Bishop continued to page through the scrapbook, finally stopping about halfway through. “Yeah, that could be it. Her obituary is here. She died last spring, after a long illness.”

“Domineering she might have been,” Hollis said, “but she was probably his leash and held him back as long as she was alive. Once she was gone, there was no one to stop him.”

Marc said, “What sickens me is that he’ll probably live out his life in a prison cell more comfortable than this one, with psychologists, cops, and profilers lining up to try to figure out what makes him tick.”

“It might help catch the next one,” Bishop reminded him.

“I know, I know. Still.”

Before he could say anything else, Jordan appeared in the doorway, holding a manila envelope in his gloved hand. “Guys, look at this. And please tell me it doesn’t mean what I think it means.” He came into the room, crossed to the bed, and emptied the envelope.

Photographs.

“Of me,” Hollis said.

“Yeah.” Jordan looked at her steadily. “He apparently had a little workroom across the hall where he liked to cut up the pictures. I found this lying on a table in there, all ready for him. Notice anything unusual?”

But Dani saw it first. “They’re dated. All taken with a digital camera. And…some are dated more than a year ago.”

“The bastard hunted me for over a year?” Hollis was too bewildered to be angry about it. For now, at least.

“I don’t think so.” Jordan showed them the envelope. “This was mailed to him at a post office box here in Venture. Mailed
from
Washington, D.C. Postmarked two days ago.”

“He was here two days ago,” Marc said slowly.

“Yeah. There are also several empty envelopes in there. D.C. and New York postmarks. Different dates, but all during the past month.”

They looked at one another, several things and possibilities falling into place.

“A trained monster,” Bishop said. “Or maybe just…a tool. A puppet. But not the puppetmaster.”

“That’s why it felt different,” Dani said slowly. “Why I didn’t feel the same energy in his—his torture chamber that I felt out in the hallway. Because he wasn’t responsible for the attack. Marc was right, the killer was never psychic. His wasn’t the voice in my head.”

“He was bait too,” Bishop said slowly.

Dani nodded. “The bait to draw us. If you want to trap the monster hunters, you have to provide a monster. Find one. Uncage one. Or create one. Every time we hit a wall in the investigation, another little fact or detail or possible lead would be dangled in front of us. To keep us asking questions, to keep us off balance. To keep us moving, always toward the trap.”

“He didn’t catch anything in his trap,” Jordan pointed out. “Did he?”

“He didn’t get Paris’s ability,” Dani said. “But this attack…it was different. It was stronger, more focused. He may have gained something, even if it wasn’t a new ability. The experience alone could have given him something of value to him.”

“You said you thought you hurt him,” Marc reminded her.

“It felt like I did. A sense of pain, of frustration. But…it wasn’t a crippling injury. There was still the echo of a very strong, distinct presence, a personality—especially right at the end, when I discharged all that energy. He knew he’d lost…this round.”

Jordan said, “Shit. This round?”

“It isn’t over,” Marc said.

Epilogue

Boston

S
ENATOR ABE LEMOTT
turned from the window and looked at the man in his visitor’s chair. “So that’s it?”

Bishop said, “The monster who killed your daughter will spend the remainder of his pathetic life screaming at the walls, babbling about some prophecy he probably created when his own acts became too evil even for him. We may never know; whatever was left of his mind got broken there at the end. Or maybe a long time before the end.”

“And the monster who pulled his strings? The cold, calculating mind behind him?”

“We never saw him,” Bishop said. “Even though we believe he was close enough, more than once, to watch. Close enough to affect some of us. Close enough to hunt and possibly even capture the…prey…for his pet killer.”

LaMott’s mouth twisted. “Like feeding a spider.”

“Yes.”

“So who spun the web?”

“So far we haven’t found so much as a trace of evidence that he even exists. Except, of course, that we know he does.”

“What else do you know?”

“I believe I know where to start looking for him.”

Senator LeMott smiled. “That’s good, Bishop. That’s very good indeed.”

BANTAM BOOKS BY KAY HOOPER

T
HE
B
ISHOP
T
RILOGIES

Stealing Shadows

Hiding in the Shadows

Out of the Shadows

Touching Evil

Whisper of Evil

Sense of Evil

Hunting Fear

Chill of Fear

Sleeping with Fear

T
HE
Q
UINN
N
OVELS

Once a Thief

Always a Thief

R
OMANTIC
S
USPENSE

Amanda

After Caroline

Finding Laura

Hunting Rachel

C
LASSIC
F
ANTASY AND
R
OMANCE

On Wings of Magic

The Wizard of Seattle

My Guardian Angel
(anthology)

Yours to Keep
(anthology)

Golden Threads

Something Different / Pepper’s Way

C.J.’s Fate

The Haunting of Josie

BLOOD DREAMS

A Bantam Book / December 2007

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2007 by Kay Hooper

Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hooper, Kay.

Blood dreams / Kay Hooper.

p. cm.

1. Bishop, Noah (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Serial murderers—Fiction. 3. Government investigators—Fiction. 4. Serial murders—Fiction. 5. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. 6. Suspense fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.O587B58 2007

813'.54—dc22      2007034564

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-553-90392-8

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