Blood Dreams

Chapter Sixteen

HOLLIS HADN'T EXPECTED to sleep well on Friday night, because the day had been too long and the previous night unusually active, if only on a subconscious level.

There was something amusing in that, she decided. That what had quite probably been a brief dream experience-because they mostly were brief, even if some felt interminable while they were actually happening-could take so much out of one physically.

But dragging her exhausted self around all day Friday had certainly proven the truth of that. It had also convinced Hollis to report in to Bishop before she got ready for bed. And, more important, to hold nothing back.

"You heard the voice too?" Bishop asked.

Sitting on the edge of the bed in her motel room, using the phone on the nightstand because her cell was charging, Hollis frowned at the ice bucket on the dresser. "Yeah, sort of. It was almost more a feeling than a sound."

"What kind of feeling?"

"Pressure," she replied, after thinking about it. "Like something pushing at me. At us. Probably mostly at Dani, since she's the one who woke up with a nosebleed. Or was that from the effort to take Paris and me in?"

"It's difficult for me to even guess," he said slowly. "Her abilities have always been somewhat erratic, I gather, but Miranda felt she was considerably stronger than she seemed, even more than a year ago. I don't recall a nosebleed being reported by her previously."

"Not according to Paris. I have to say, though, that I'm a lot more worried about that voice. Dani seems certain it's the voice-or thoughts, or energy, whatever-of our killer. And even if she hasn't said a whole lot about it, or showed much of what she's feeling, I think she's scared."

"Feeling threatened?"

"Yeah, probably. He told her she couldn't run or hide and that nobody could protect her from him. And he told her from inside her head. And not just in her dreams, but when she was awake. Feeling threatened? She ought to be freakin' terrified. I'm not so sure I wouldn't be in bed with the covers pulled over my head if I were in her place."

After a moment Bishop asked, "How are you doing?"

Hollis wanted to give him a flip answer, but she had learned the uselessness of that where Bishop was concerned.

Just because she wasn't a telepath didn't mean he couldn't read her, even across whatever distance lay between them. So she answered honestly.

"I'm tired and worried. And even though I suppose I should be happy about it, I'm also unnerved that the dead seem to be reaching me a lot easier than they did in the beginning."

"It is a good thing," he reminded her.

"It's a scary thing. I don't think I'm ever going to get used to it, just so you know." She changed the subject abruptly. "Listen, is there any progress in revising that profile? Because we could sure as hell use it."

"You've given me new information," Bishop pointed out. "Wednesday's crime scene, plus the open stalking of Marie Goode, if we assume that's him-"

Hollis interrupted to say, "Trust me, this is hardly the sort of town to have more than one weirdo sneaking around taking pictures of women. That would be stretching coincidence to the snapping point."

"You're assuming the killer takes photos of the murders," Bishop pointed out calmly.

She nodded, half consciously. "Because of the one crime scene we have. Struck me the first time I saw those overhead shots Marc's forensics team got. It was carefully chosen, and not just because it was isolated. The area made a perfect composition for his… art. He left us a picture and took one himself, I'd bet on it."

"Then I'd call it more than an assumption," Bishop said.

"So he's photographing not only his kill sites but also his potential victims, as he stalks them. That, plus the necklace and bracelet left so conspicuously behind-all are radical departures from his previous M.O. He's leaving traces of himself, possibly even a trail. Add in the virtual certainty now that we're dealing with a psychic mind of unknown ability-"

"And we're screwed?" she finished wryly.

"You need to be careful, Hollis. All of you, but especially you, Dani, and Paris. Because if the need to terrify is at the core of this bastard's sickness-and what little we know about him points that way-then establishing contact with Dani may be teaching him that he has a new tool. A new weapon. It may not be all about a particular look for him, not anymore."

"I'm no profiler, and even I know that's a huge leap in the evolution of a serial killer."

"It may not be an evolution," Bishop said. "He may be… devolving. The established personality matrix could be disintegrating."

"Jesus. I didn't know that was possible."

"With the right psychological trigger, almost anything is possible."

"And the right psychological trigger in this case would be…?"

"I have no idea."

Hollis sighed. "Never thought I'd say this, but I would have preferred one of your more enigmatic answers. At least then I could cherish the illusion that somebody knew what was going on."

"Sorry to disappoint you." Bishop sighed. "Just be careful, Hollis. I'll get the revised profile to you ASAP. But, in the meantime, don't be too quick to avoid whatever the dead have to tell you. Any trail he leaves, by accident or deliberation, could well take us anywhere-or nowhere; it's almost always true of serials that their victims may be our best leads in finding the killer."

After all that plus the day she'd had, Hollis really didn't expect to sleep well. And she didn't, tossing and turning, waking up at least twice to check the clock. And the locks on her door.

Somewhere around three A.M. she finally dropped into an exhausted sleep, the heavy kind that seemed to drag one deeper than dreams. And when she woke from that, it was so sudden that all she could feel at first was the runaway pounding of her heart.

Seconds later, she knew she wasn't alone.

She had left a light burning behind the half-closed bathroom door, and it provided just enough illumination for her to make out a shape at the foot of her bed.

Her weapon was in the drawer of the nightstand, but instead of reaching for that, Hollis reached for the lamp, never taking her eyes off that faint, indistinct shape.

"He knows who you are."

Hollis froze for an instant, her hand on the lamp's switch, chills chasing one another up and down her spine. At least half-hoping she would see nothing, that the quiet statement had been only in her head, she turned the lamp on.

"He knows who you are," Shirley Arledge repeated. Her face was still, eyes anxious. "He knows what you are."

She was already fading.

"Wait," Hollis said quickly, trying to control her voice, to keep it soft. "Who is he? How can we find him, stop him?"

Shirley Arledge shook her head, and her voice faded even as she did as she might have replied, "He's tricking you…"

Hollis slowly sat up in bed, staring at the place where the spirit of a young woman had stood. Then she turned her head slowly and examined the entire motel room: very ordinary, uninspiring, and a little depressing at-she looked at the clock-five in the morning.

Finally convinced that she was, indeed, alone in her room, she looked down at her bare arms, at the clearly visible gooseflesh.

"No," she murmured. "I am never… ever… going to get used to this."

"Still no sign of Shirley Arledge," Marc reported as he joined the others in the conference room. "And still no sign there was anything violent about her disappearance."

"She's dead," Hollis said.

Everyone else in the room went still, staring at the federal agent, and Hollis offered them a weary smile. "I'm beginning to think there's a trail of bread crumbs in the spirit world leading straight to me. First time a spirit's pulled me out of a sound sleep, though."

"Evolving abilities," Paris said almost absently, frowning a little.

"Are you okay?" Dani asked Hollis.

"I'd love to sleep about twelve hours, but other than that, I'm fine. Frustrated by one more thing that doesn't seem to lead us anywhere, though."

Marc stirred, finally, going to fill up his coffee cup before returning to the table, his every move deliberate. He didn't speak until he was seated at the head of the table. "I gather she didn't tell you anything helpful?"

"She said he knew who I was, what I was. And then she said that he was tricking me-or us, I suppose. That he was tricking us. She didn't stick around long enough for more than that." Hollis opened a folder on the table beside her and pulled out a photograph of Shirley Arledge, studying it for a moment before laying it faceup on the table and sliding it toward the center of their group. "No question in my mind: This is the woman I saw around five o'clock this morning. I don't get visitations like that from the living, so I can say with fair certainty that she's dead."

Marc took a swallow of his coffee and then looked at the cup as if he wished there were something other than coffee in it. "Well, shit," he said softly.

"I'm sorry. I wish I could offer you something more useful, but I can't. I can tell you Shirley Arledge died at the hands of this monster. I can tell you his box score is up to at least fifteen now. But I don't know much more about him than I did when I got here. I wish I did, but I don't."

"None of us does," Jordan pointed out. "We have one incredibly gory crime scene with a bloody sign that seems out of character for a killer like this one, but no bodies. So far. Bits and pieces of two victims, but DNA results won't come in for weeks, at least, and only a preliminary match between the fingertip found at the scene and some prints we were able to pull from Becky Huntley's bedroom."

Dani said, "So, probably hers. The fingertip. Way too coincidental if the finger belonged to someone who just happened to visit one of our victims long enough to leave fingerprints in her bedroom." Then she frowned. "Wait. Did Becky and Karen-"

Marc was already shaking his head. "It's preliminary in the case of Shirley Arledge, but as far as we can determine, none of these women knew each other. One more dead end."

Hollis said, "Depressingly common in serial killer investigations. That's why profiling-still more of an art than a science-is so readily accepted and used by law enforcement. Any tool that offers even the hope of narrowing or focusing the scope of the investigation is better than no tool at all."

"We barely have a profile," Marc pointed out. "Still waiting for your boss's rewrite, but in the meantime what we've got is a killer who's probably a white male, probably between twenty-five and thirty-five, probably from an abusive background, and possibly psychic. Hell, I probably passed him on the street sometime this week."

"If he's psychic, you didn't shake hands with him," Dani murmured. "Otherwise, you'd have known."

Hollis lifted her brows at the sheriff. "That's your range? Touch?"

"Yeah. If we hadn't already shaken hands, you could sit next to me and I'd never know you were a medium."

Wryly, Paris said to him, " Care to make a list of everyone you've shaken hands with in Venture?"

"Not really. I don't have a clue how to start that list."

Jordan looked at the file folders stacked here and there on the table and swore under his breath. "I know we're really just getting started in terms of a time frame for a typical serial-killer investigation-and, man, I hate saying every part of that-but does anybody else feel like they're spinning their wheels? A huge task force of law-enforcement personnel, including a team of psychics, has been trying to get a handle on this guy for months, with no luck. Granted, we have a smaller hunting ground here in terms of population-though not in area-and we don't have media breathing down our necks-"

"Yet," Marc interrupted. "Despite what Miss Patty said, I imagine there are at least a few of our citizens who would welcome TV cameras and microphones shoved in their faces."

"Yeah. But the question stands: What do we have that the task force doesn't?"

"We have Dani's vision dream," Hollis said.

"Which keeps changing," Dani pointed out.

"Only in fairly minor details. The setting is always the same: a warehouse."

"And we're generating that list of warehouses now."

Jordan promised. "It's taken more time than I expected to run down some of the property owners, but we're getting there."

"Great." Hollis barely paused. "So there's always a warehouse in the vision. There's always a fire. And, with the roof apparently caving in behind us, we always go down into a basement where we know he's waiting, into what we know is a trap. Interesting that the bait is always the same. Far as I know, Miranda's in Boston with Bishop."

"Which was," Marc said, "this killer's hunting ground. And we're sure it's the same killer."

It was a question.

Hollis nodded. "We're sure. The psychics who tracked him here are sure, and Bishop's sure-and that's good enough for me. Even if the murders here are getting different in ways that don't make sense. Unless Bishop is right again, and this killer's needs and rituals are falling apart rather than evolving."

"I gather that'll be part of the revised profile," Marc said.

"That seems to be the way Bishop is thinking." Hollis frowned. "At least, that was my take."

Dani raised her voice slightly to say, "Can I just ask the question we're all avoiding?"

Hollis nodded, with an expression that said she knew what was coming. "Might as well."

"Okay. If we're right and this guy is psychic, if that's how he managed to hunt so successfully in Boston, then how do we know he isn't at least a step ahead of us here?"

"We don't," Marc said.

"No, we don't. If anything, we have some evidence that he is… playing with us. Leaving signs behind when he never has before."

Hollis said, "That might not be deliberate. It could just be him coming apart."

"But what if it is deliberate? He didn't want the spotlight in Boston, but maybe, looking back, something inside him liked the attention. Maybe now he wants to prove he's smarter than everybody hunting him."

"Maybe," Marc agreed. "And maybe that's a difference we can use to our advantage."

"He's tricking you," Hollis murmured, repeating what Shirley Arledge had told her in the predawn hours. "I'm not the one usually advising caution, but I think we'd better be careful if we even get the chance to play this guy's game. We'd better be very careful."

"Tell me again why I shouldn't clean his clock?" Gabriel demanded.

"With all due respect, Gabe, I wouldn't try it if I were you." The hollow cell connection did nothing to hide the dryness in John Garrett's voice. "As good as you are-he's better."

"I'm willing to test that theory."

"It isn't a theory. And the last thing any of us needs is you tangling with Bishop. Just don't, okay? He had good reason for approaching Roxanne when and how he did. I agree with his reason. Roxanne agrees with his reason."

I do, you know. Three more steps the way I was going, and I would have tripped that motion-sensor floodlight. And roused the neighborhood canine watch. And Bishop could hardly stop me any other way without alerting those same dogs. Right?

"Well, I-"

"Gabe. Let it go."

Gabriel was a stubborn man but hardly a stupid one. "If you say so, John. But I don't have to like it."

"I never expect miracles."

"Yeah, yeah." Gabriel kept his gaze fixed on Bishop, who stood some yards away and out of earshot in this remote spot overlooking Venture.

He's a telepath, Gabe. Do you really think there's such a thing as "out of earshot" where he's concerned?

Bishop turned his head and raised an eyebrow at Gabriel, then once again directed his attention to the town.

"Shit."

John, neither present nor telepathic, had nevertheless spent enough time with psychics in recent years to be able to pick up on nonverbal communication-even at an extreme distance. "Something I should know about?" he asked calmly.

"No. Just remembering why I don't like working around telepaths, that's all."

"You can trust him, Gabe."

"With all due respect, John," Gabriel said, deliberately using his employer's earlier words, "I'll make up my own mind about that."

"Fair enough. But on this particular job, your orders include following his lead as you would mine."

"You sure about that? Running a parallel investigation with the police is one thing, and we've done it before. But this time we're hunting an honest-to-God monster, and the sooner everybody involved puts their heads together and compares notes, the better our chances of tracking him down before somebody else dies."

"And do you honestly believe either Bishop or I would do anything to deliberately sidetrack an investigation or delay for even one moment the capture of such an animal?"

"No. I don't believe that." It wasn't a grudging admission so much as it was an uneasy one. "But somebody always has an agenda, and Bishop's reputation preceded him."

"Meaning?"

"You know exactly what it means. He never puts all his cards on the table, John, and I'm betting he hasn't this time. Whether he and Miranda have seen something he's hoping to avoid, or he's just convinced he has a better plan than the rest of us, he's going to keep it to himself."

"None of us wants Dani's vision to come true," John reminded him.

"I know that. And if I were in Bishop's place, with a vision warning me of that particular dire outcome, I'd make damn sure my wife and partner was safe under lock and key, and far away. I got no problem with that."

"But?"

"But he shouldn't be here. He was part of the vision too, and every player we put within the killer's reach makes it that much more likely that what Dani saw is going to happen."

"Maybe. Or maybe the right person in the right place is all that's needed to change the outcome."

"John, how many times have you and Maggie told us to be careful where premonitions are involved, because we can't know our actions won't produce something worse? Hell, it's practically our mantra."

There was a brief silence, and then John said, "Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"It means work with Bishop, Gabe. You and Roxanne. Keep every sense open, and stay on your toes. And please try to remember that we're all on the same side, okay? Check in daily."

"Right." Gabriel slowly closed his phone and wasn't much surprised to see that Bishop was already crossing the space between them. He waited until the other man was close before speaking. "So what now, Chief?" The title held a faint note of mockery rather than respect. "More warehouses?"

"No," Bishop said. "Now we watch Dani."