Blood Ties (2 page)

Duncan spoke up to say, “Our county medical examiner hasn’t had to deal with any but accidental deaths since he got the job, but he said he was sure this man wasn’t killed here.”

Miranda Bishop nodded. “Your M.E. is right. If the victim had been killed here, the ground would be soaked with blood—at the very least. This man was probably alive twenty-four hours ago and dumped here sometime around dawn today.”

Duncan didn’t ask how she’d arrived at that conclusion; his M.E. had made the same guesstimate.

“No signs of a struggle,” Quentin added. “And unless this guy was drugged or otherwise unconscious or dead, I would imagine he struggled.”

With a grimace, Duncan said, “Personally, I’m hoping he was already dead when… that… was done to him.”

“We’re all hoping the same thing,” Quentin assured him. “In the meantime, knowing who the victim was would at least give us a place to start. Any word on the prints your people took?”

“When I checked in an hour ago, no. I’ll go back to my Jeep and check again; like I told you, cell service is lousy up here, and our portable radios next to useless. We have to use a specially designed booster antenna on our police vehicles to get any kind of signal at all, and even that tends to be spotty.”

“Appreciate it, Sheriff.” Quentin watched the older man cautiously make his way down the steep trail toward the road and their cars, then turned his head and looked at Miranda with lifted brows.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Quentin lowered his voice even though the nearest sheriff’s deputies—Duncan’s chief deputy, Neil Scanlon, and his partner, Nadine Twain—were yards away, crouched over a map of the area spread out on the ground. “The M.O. is close. Torture on the inhuman side of brutal.”

She slid her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and frowned. “Yeah, but this… this is beyond anything we’ve seen so far.”

“From this killer, at least,” Quentin muttered.

Miranda nodded. “Maybe it’s simply a case of escalation, the usual he-gets-worse-as-he-gets-better-at-it, but… I’m not seeing a purpose for what was done here. Whether he was dead at the beginning is still arguable, but this man was most definitely dead a long time before his killer was finished with him, and that hasn’t been the case with the other victims we’ve linked together. If this was torture, why keep going after the vic was dead?”

“For the fun of it?”

“Christ, I hope not.”

“You and me both. Am I the only one having a very bad feeling about this one?”

“I wish you were. But I think we’ve all picked up on something unnatural here and at the other dump sites. For one thing, I have no idea what means this killer used to strip the body literally to the bone.”

Quentin glanced toward the remains. “I didn’t spot any obvious tool marks on the bones. Or claw or tooth marks, for that matter. You?”

“No. Or any visible signs that chemicals were used, though forensics will tell us that for certain.”

“We ship the body—or what’s left of it—to the state medical examiner?”

“We do. Duncan already okayed it; he’s been very frank about the state of technology in this area.”

“As in the fact that there
is
no technology? I mean, we’ve been to some pretty out-of-the-way places, but this is what I’d call seriously remote. How many people you figure the town of Serenade can boast? A few hundred at best?”

“Nearly three thousand, if you count those living outside the town limits but still using Serenade as their mailing address.” She saw Quentin’s brows go up again and explained, “I checked when we were flying in.”

“Uh-huh. And did you happen to notice that the one motel we passed looks an awful lot like the sort that would have Norman Bates behind the desk?”

“I noticed. Though I thought of it as your typical small-town no-tell motel.” Miranda shrugged. “And we both know it may not matter. If this victim fits the pattern, then where he was found is only a small piece of the puzzle. In which case we won’t be staying here long.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”

She looked at him, her own brows rising.

“Hunch,” he explained. “We’re only about thirty miles away from The Lodge, as the crow flies, and there were a lot of unnatural goings-on there for a very long time.”

“You and Diana put that to rest,” Miranda reminded him.
^*

“Well, we—she, mostly—put part of it to rest. Hopefully the worst part. But that doesn’t mean we got it all.”

“It’s been a year,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, to the month. Hell, almost to the day. Which I’m finding more than a bit unsettling.”

Miranda Bishop was not in the habit of discounting either a hunch or an uneasy feeling expressed by someone around her, especially by a fellow team member, and she didn’t start now. “Okay. But, so far, nothing leads us in the direction of The Lodge. No connection to the place or to anyone there, not that we’ve found.”

“I know. Wish I could say that reassured me, but it doesn’t.”

“Do you want to drive over to The Lodge, take a look around?”

“If anybody goes, it should be someone with a fresh eye and no baggage,” Quentin answered, so promptly that she knew the question had been on his mind for a while. “And probably a medium, given the age and… nature of the place.”

“You know very well we have only two available. Diana shouldn’t go because of all the baggage, and I’d rather keep Hollis close.”

Quentin eyed her. “Why?”

Miranda’s frown had returned, but this time she appeared to be gazing into the distance at nothing. Or at something only she could see. And it was a long moment before she replied. “Because her abilities are… evolving. Because every case seems to bring a new ability and ramp up the power on an existing one. And that’s faster than we’ve
ever
known psychic abilities to evolve. It’s unprecedented.”

“She’s been in some unusually intense situations these last months,” Quentin said slowly. “From the beginning, really. Hell, the trigger that made her go active was about as extreme and intense as anything
I’ve
ever heard of.”

“Yes, she’s clearly a survivor,” Miranda said.
^*

“But?”

“I don’t know that there is a but. Except that the tolerances of the human brain are likely to be higher than those of the human mind.”

Quentin worked that out. “You mean she may not be adjusting to all this quite as easily and completely as she appears to be. Emotionally. Psychologically.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. So I’d rather keep her close for now. So far, every one of these dump sites has been just that, with no evidence that the killer remained behind in the area. At every site so far, we’ve collected evidence, asked a few questions, and explored what turned out to be a few dead ends, then moved on.”

“So… less intensity to trigger something new in Hollis?”

“That,” Miranda said, “would be the theory, yes. It isn’t something we can keep up indefinitely, for obvious reasons, and you and I both know any given situation can change in a heartbeat. And usually does in our investigations. But short of ordering her to take a sabbatical, which would not go over well at all and could do more harm than good, it’s the best temporary solution we’ve been able to come up with.”

“You and Bishop?”

Miranda nodded. “It doesn’t fix the problem—assuming the pace of Hollis’s development as a psychic
is
a problem rather than her own natural evolution—but we’re hoping it will at least offer her a little breathing space to really come to terms with how much her life has changed. More time to adjust to what’s been happening to her, to work on her investigative skills as well as her psychic ones. Hell, just time to move through her life without feeling there’s a target painted on her forehead.”

“Which she pretty much had during the whole complicated investigation of Samuel and his church.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Quentin looked around, suddenly and obviously uneasy. “Great theory, and I really hope it works out. For her sake and for ours. But I’m beginning to think this creepy but calm investigation might be turning into something else. Like one of the more intense ones. Because they should be back by now, shouldn’t they?”

“N
obody said there’d be
bears,”
Special Agent Hollis Templeton whispered somewhat fiercely.

Special Investigator Diana Brisco kept her gaze fixed on the rather large specimen of black bear foraging in the brush not twenty yards from their present location and whispered back, “It’s the right time of year for them. I think. Spring. They come out of hibernation and start looking for food.”

“Oh, lovely.”

“They usually run from people.”

“You think or you know?”

“I’ve been reading a lot the last year. Catching up. I remember reading that. Also that they
can
climb trees, and if they do attack it’s useless to fake being dead the way you can with a grizzly bear.”

“I wouldn’t have to fake being dead if a grizzly attacked. Hell, I won’t have to fake being dead if this bear attacks.” Hollis smothered a sigh. “Okay, so what do we do? Wait him out?”

“Might be a while. Looks like he’s found something to eat.”

Hollis watched the bear’s movements for a few moments, then squinted her eyes in an effort to see more clearly through the thicket they were crouched behind and whispered, “Oh, shit.”

Diana had seen it as well. Her weapon, like Hollis’s, was at the ready, and though her experience with the Glock was limited to training and practice, she was somewhat surprised to realize it felt comfortable in her hand. Or, at the very least, familiar. “I say we both aim at that tree about three feet to his left. If that doesn’t spook him into running…”

“It better. Because I don’t want to shoot a bear, Diana.”

“Neither do I. Got a better idea?”

“No. Dammit.” Hollis leveled her own weapon and aimed carefully through the tangle of newly greening brush that was all the cover they had. “On three. One… two… three.”

The two gunshots were virtually simultaneous, sharp and loud in the relative stillness of the forest, and both bullets struck the tree near the bear with dull thuds, sending splinters of bark flying.

The bear, either no stranger to guns or wary enough to take no chances, ran, thankfully away from them, taking the easiest path to lumber with bulky grace down the mountainside.

The two women got to their feet slowly, weapons still held ready, tense until they could no longer see the bear or hear its crashing progress through the underbrush.

Diana finally relaxed and slid her gun into the holster she wore on her hip. With no need to whisper now, she said, “First time I fire my weapon in the field and it’s because of a damn bear. Quentin will never let me hear the end of it.”

“Probably not,” Hollis agreed, holstering her own gun. “Think they heard the shots? Or the echoes?” There had been many of the latter.

“In this kind of terrain? God knows, especially since all of us searching went in different directions. But even if it does feel like we’ve hiked miles, we can’t be more than a few hundred yards from the original site. The others have probably gotten back there by now.”

Hollis checked her cell phone for a signal, even though they had previously discovered no joy in that. Still no joy. She sighed and replaced the cell in the special case worn on the opposite side of her hip from her weapon. “Well, even if some of the others heard the shots, we have no way of verifying that they did, so one of us is going to have to trek back there.”

“While the other stays here and makes sure the bear doesn’t come back and remove… evidence?”

“That would be the correct procedure, under the circumstances.”

“Great.”

Hollis noticed that neither of them had taken a step in the necessary direction to verify that the bear had indeed discovered what they thought it had. Reminding herself that she was a more experienced agent than Diana and therefore the de facto lead investigator between the two of them, she moved around the brush that had sheltered them and made her way carefully to the spot yards away.

Diana silently accompanied her, both of them wary, both keeping one hand on their weapon until they had to pull aside a tangle of brown vines in order to see what they suspected.

The bear had discovered human remains.

The women took a step back and looked at each other. Hollis had no idea whether her own face was as pale as Diana’s but thought it very likely. No matter how many times she’d been forced to view human remains after a violent end, it didn’t get any easier.

Probably a good thing, that
.

And she didn’t know which was worse—finding fresh remains or those that had lain out in the elements long enough to have gone through several stages of decomposition, as this one had.

The smell made her stomach churn.

Diana said, “That was some hunch you had. To leave the trail and head in this direction. To come this far. Because otherwise…”

“Otherwise,” Hollis finished, “I doubt anybody would have stumbled onto this body. Recognize the vines?”

“Kudzu. This patch starts farther down the slope. The stuff covers and smothers everything in its path.”

Hollis nodded. “It dries up in winter but comes back stronger than ever in spring and summer. The vines can grow several feet in a single day.” She paused, forcing herself to look down at what was left of, she believed, a woman’s body. “It sure as hell would have hidden her from everything except some predators and small animals.”

“Which raises the question: Is she here by accident or design?”

“Yeah. If she wound up here accidentally, it probably won’t tell us much. But if she was left here deliberately…”

“Then this body, unlike the one by that popular hiking trail, was never meant to be found.”

“That would be my guess. Whether the same killer is responsible is another question entirely.”

Brows raised, Diana said, “I know I’m still pretty new to all this investigative stuff, but isn’t it stretching things a bit to assume there’s a second killer operating at the same time in such a remote area?”