Blood Ties (3 page)

“It’s stretching things a lot. But besides not knowing if both these victims were killed by the same person, we don’t even know if this victim was murdered at all. Natural deaths do occur in terrain like this on a regular basis.”

“Yeah. But you don’t believe there was anything natural about this.” It wasn’t a question.

Hollis shrugged. “I think we’re usually not that lucky. So we assume murder until evidence says otherwise.”

“Gotcha.”

Hollis looked around them with a slight frown and, thinking aloud, said, “The killer we’ve been tracking for more than two months has used dumping sites all over the Southeast, so there’s no way for us to be sure just where his home base is. Maybe near here, maybe not. According to the profile, he may not even have a base and could be completely transient.”

“Giving us precious little info to work with.”

“To say the least. But if both these people are his victims, it’s certainly a new wrinkle. He’s spread out his dumping sites before now over hundreds of miles—not hundreds of yards. And this is the first time we’ve found two victims who, I’m guessing, were killed within a week of each other. The guy on the trail was very recent, and this woman at least a few days and probably a week ago.”

Diana drew a short breath—through her mouth—and let it out slowly. “I’ll take your word for it, especially since I’m barely halfway through the crime-scene-investigation manual.” She was one of the newest members of the SCU team, having joined less than a year before. “And, I repeat, that was some hunch to draw you way out here. Except it wasn’t a hunch, was it?”

“No.”

“You saw her?”

“I caught a glimpse.” Hollis frowned again. “It was odd, though. They usually stick around long enough to at least try to communicate. She barely let me see her at all, and she wasn’t close.”

“But she led us here. Probably realized her body would never be found otherwise.”

Hollis looked at Diana. “You didn’t see anything? Anyone?”

“No. But I don’t often just
see
them here on our side, at least not without the help of a storm or some other external energy. For me, it’s usually a far more deliberate thing, you know that. I have to concentrate, pretty much go into a trancelike state. Or else it happens when I’m asleep.”

She hated that, more now than she had in years past, when she had been consciously unaware of her psychic forays due to the many medications her father and various doctors had used to control her “illness.” Neither Elliot Brisco nor any of those doctors had considered for even a moment that she might not, in fact, be ill but merely… gifted. Diana hadn’t considered it either. She had been utterly convinced she was mentally unstable at best and out of her mind at worst.

Until she met Quentin Hayes. And had been both educated and wholeheartedly accepted by him and the members of the SCU.

For the first time in her life, she didn’t feel like a freak.

“Diana?”

She yanked her attention back to the present, saying parenthetically, “I hate it happening while I’m asleep. Very disconcerting.”

“I can imagine. Very well, in fact.”

“Yeah, you never really told me after our little experiment what you thought about that visit to the gray time.” It was the name she used for a place or time that seemed to be a sort of limbo between the spirit world and the world of the living.

“It was creepy as hell. I don’t envy you the ability to go there.” Despite being a medium herself, Hollis had been completely unfamiliar with that gray and lifeless limbo, which was just one more affirmation of Bishop’s belief that every psychic was unique.

“You never told Bishop or Miranda about it either, did you?”

Hollis offered her a twisted smile. “I don’t have to be telepathic to know they’re both… concerned about me. Seems I’m a bit of a freak as psychics go, and they aren’t quite sure what’s going to happen to me as time goes on. Neither one has said it in so many words, but I gather the most recent tests showed that the amount of electrical activity in my brain is excessive even for psychics. Whether that turns out to be a good thing or a bad one is apparently very much in question.”

“I wish you’d told me that before I took you into the gray time.”

“Don’t
you
start worrying. I’m fine. Just… exploring my abilities, that’s all. I’d rather have some idea of what I can do
before
yet another deadly situation opens up, without warning, yet another door in my psychic world. Less disconcerting that way.”

“If you say so.” Diana didn’t look especially convinced, but another glance down at the remains distracted her. “Do we flip a coin to decide who stays here with her?”

“No need; I’ll stay. She might pay me another visit if I’m alone. Besides, you seem to have a better feeling for direction in this kind of terrain, so you’re a hell of a lot less likely to get lost. Plus, there’s Quentin. You two are connected and you usually sense him, right?”

Diana’s expression went a bit guarded, but she said readily enough, “Usually. As a matter of fact, I’m reasonably sure he either heard the shots or felt something, because I think he’s heading this way.”

“Well, go meet him, then, will you, please? The less time I have to spend here waiting for a spirit or a bear, the better.”

“I hear that.” Diana turned away, adding, “Sit tight. I’ll be back with the others ASAP.”

“I’ll be here.” Hollis was left staring down at the remains of a woman who had, assuming that spirit was hers, died far too young.

There wasn’t a lot left of the body. Hollis knew enough to recognize that both maggots and small scavengers had consumed most of the soft tissue. There was some skin left, and quite a bit of long blond hair clung to a small patch of scalp that was still attached to the skull.

She had beautiful teeth, straight and gleaming white.

Must have cost a fortune at the orthodontist
.

Hollis knelt gingerly, telling herself the smell wasn’t at all overpowering as she did her best to look for evidence, for clues to how this woman died. To study the scene as she had been taught.

The first clue surprised her, both because she had missed it until now and because it struck her as unexpectedly sloppy that the killer had left it behind: A loop of plastic bound fragile wrists together behind the victim’s back. It was the sort of binding that law-enforcement units often used these days in a big operation or when they otherwise ran out of metal handcuffs.

It was also quite possibly the sort of plastic tie found commonly in boxes of garbage bags and in the gardening and home-improvement sections of most DIY stores.

Hollis pushed aside that wry realization and continued to study the remains. The bear, she decided, had… pawed… a bit, so it was difficult to even guess in what position she had been when she’d been dumped here. Right now she was more or less faceup, forearms, wrists, and hands mostly beneath her and legs twisted, splayed apart at the thigh area but tangled together around the ankles and feet.

There was no sign of another plastic tie, but Hollis wondered if the ankles had been bound as the wrists were. Possibly.

There was also, she realized suddenly, absolutely no sign of any clothing whatsoever. It made her throat tighten to think of a young woman, perhaps already dead or perhaps still alive, in agony and terrified, dumped here in a wilderness of dirt and vines, bound and naked. So unspeakably vulnerable. So very alone.

It stirred memories Hollis would have given much to forget.

“Hey.”

Hollis nearly jumped out of her skin. She looked up and was angrily aware of the crack in her voice when she demanded, “Where the hell did you come from?”

*
Chill of Fear

*
Touching Evil

Two

W
EST,” REESE DEMARCO REPLIED
matter-of-factly.
“I’d
finished searching my grid and was heading back when I heard the shots.”

Of course it would have to be him
. Hollis abruptly remembered that DeMarco was, among other things, telepathic, and she made rather a production of rising to her feet and brushing off the knee of her jeans.

“There was a bear,” she explained briefly. “We scared it off. Diana went to report while I waited here.”

“Ah.” He looked down at the remains, his coldly handsome face as usual utterly without expression. He was dressed as casually as the rest of the SCU team was today, in jeans and a white shirt underneath a lightweight windbreaker, but the informal attire did nothing to soften the almost military crispness of his stance and movements, that truly visible sense of considerable strength and the training and ability to know how best to use it.

Hollis had seen that in other ex-military types, but in DeMarco there was something just a little bit… excessive… in his straight posture and almost hypersensitivity to his surroundings. He seemed to her too alert, too ready to explode into action. He made her think of a cocked gun, and she had no idea whether a dangerous hair trigger lurked inside him.

She couldn’t see his aura unless he allowed her to.

He wasn’t allowing her to.

“I gather the bear discovered these remains?”

She shoved the oddly disjointed thoughts aside.
He’s a telepath, remember? Don’t let him into your head
. Not that she had any kind of a shield she could use to keep him out if he wanted in. Dammit. “Yeah.”

“Is that what brought you two so far off the trails?”

“Not exactly.”

His gaze shifted, pale blue eyes fixed intently on her face. “You know, we
are
on the same side, Hollis. You don’t have to be so guarded with me. I’m not trying to read you.”

She wondered if that meant he wasn’t reading her—or simply didn’t have to try in
order
to read her. She didn’t have the nerve to ask. “Was I being evasive? Sorry. Diana and I weren’t following the bear, we were following a spirit who led us to this area.
Then
we found the bear. Which had just found what was left of this body.”

“That must have been an interesting encounter.”

“You could say.”

DeMarco returned his dispassionate attention to the remains. “Probably female, probably on the young side. Blond. Great teeth. Her hands were bound behind her back and there’s no sign of clothing, so highly unlikely this was an accidental death. Most likely a sexual assault, though whether that was the intent from the beginning is impossible to say. That’s as far as my crime-scene and forensic knowledge can take me.”

“About the same for me. Except that it seems obvious she’s been out here longer than the male victim.”

“Yes. The bear wasn’t the first scavenger to find her.”

Hollis didn’t like the silence that fell between them, so she filled it with what amounted to thinking aloud. It was becoming something of a habit with her during investigations.
Because, after all, with telepaths always underfoot, what the hell…
.

Besides, she wondered if he’d agree with her conclusion.

“This body was left—what—a good fifty yards off the nearest trail?”

“About that.”

“Place like this, nobody’s likely to be riding or hiking. The trees and underbrush would hide anything left here from the air even now, without full summer foliage.”

“Once it greens up, the kudzu would just about ensure anything left here would be hidden from two feet away. In any direction.”

Hollis nodded. “This is a fairly level spot, but the slope is steep above and below it. Not all that easy to get to. Between the terrain and the wildlife, the chances of discovery are virtually nil. Or would have been, if we hadn’t been led so far off the beaten paths. So…”

“So, unlike the other body, this one was not intended to be found.” DeMarco considered for a moment. “I wonder which is the most significant—that he was meant to be found or that she wasn’t.”

That angle hadn’t occurred to Hollis. Still thinking out loud, she said, “The killer—assuming it was the same killer, of course—couldn’t have assumed we’d search this far out after finding the other body.” She frowned. “I don’t like two assumptions in one sentence.”

“One’s a negative,” DeMarco pointed out.

“Does that matter?”

“Maybe. It’s not a wrong assumption, I’d say. In fact, the location of the other body should have guaranteed police focus would have been
away
from this area. And even with our expanded search, it’s well outside the grid. There’d be no reason to imagine any of us would have found this body.”

“If the killer knows police procedure, sure. If it’s the same killer.” She paused, then said, “Are you suggesting the guy on the trail could have been intended as a distraction, to prevent anybody from finding her? Because it seems to me she was a lot less likely to be found if we hadn’t been here in the first place, combing the area looking for evidence in another crime.”

“Maybe our killer is very paranoid. Or maybe he couldn’t risk even the chance that we might find this body.”

“Because he has a connection to her? Because she wasn’t a random stranger to him?”

“Could be.”

“Then why not just do a better job of disposing of the body? He could have buried her.” Hollis didn’t know why she was arguing with DeMarco; his possibilities made as much sense as her own did.

“Not out here. Too much granite to end up with anything but a uselessly shallow grave. And where there isn’t granite, the roots of these trees would make digging by hand difficult and time-consuming if not impossible.”

“There are easier places to dig.”

“Granted. But maybe he was short on time. Maybe he had to get rid of the body in a hurry.”

“Okay. But—” Hollis felt it before she saw any sign of it. Tension, so sudden and powerful that it was like a live current in the air. Then DeMarco turned his head, looking at her, almost looking
through
her, and she saw his eyes change in a heartbeat, his pupils dilating as if he had been thrust without warning into pitch-black darkness.