Blood Dreams

Chapter One

Tuesday, October 7

"YOU HAD THAT dream again last night, didn't you?" Dani kept her gaze fixed on her coffee cup until the silence dragged on a minute longer than it should have, then looked at her sister's face. "Yeah. I had that dream." Paris sat down on the other side of the table, her own cup cradled in both hands. "Same as before?"

"Pretty much."

"Then not the same as before. What was different?" It was an answer Dani didn't want to offer, but she knew her sister too well to fight the inevitable; Paris determined was as unstoppable as the tides. "It was placed in time. Two forty-seven in the afternoon, October twenty-eighth."

Paris turned her head to study the wall calendar stuck to her refrigerator with South Park character magnets. "The twenty-eighth, huh? This year?"

"Yeah."

"That's three weeks from today."

"I noticed that."

"Same people?"

Dani nodded. "Same people. Same conversations. Same burning warehouse. Same feeling of doom."

"Except for the time being fixed, it was exactly the same?"

"It's never exactly the same, you know that. Some of it's probably symbolic, and I have no way of knowing which parts aren't literal. I only know what I see, and there are always small, sometimes weird changes in that. A word different here or there, a gesture. I think the gun Hollis carried wasn't the same one as before. And Bishop was wearing a black leather jacket this time; before, it was a dark windbreaker."

"But they're always the same. Those two people are always a part of the dream."

"Always."

"People you don't know."

"People I don't know-yet." Dani frowned down at her coffee for a moment, then shook her head and met her sister's steady gaze again. "In the dream, I feel I know them awfully well. I understand them in a way that's difficult to explain."

"Maybe because they're psychic too."

Dani hunched her shoulders. "Maybe."

"And it ended…"

"Just like it always ends. That doesn't change. I shut the door behind us and we go down the stairs. I know the roof has started collapsing. I know we won't be able to get out the same way we went in. I know something terrible and evil is waiting for us in that basement, that it's a trap."

"But you go down there anyway."

"I don't seem to have a choice."

"Or maybe it's a choice you made before you ever set foot in that building," Paris said. "Maybe it's a choice you're making now. The date. How did you see it?"

"Watch."

"On you? Neither of us can wear a watch."

Still reluctant, Dani said, "And it wasn't the sort of watch I'd wear even if I could wear one."

"What sort of watch was it?"

"It was… military-looking. Big, black, digital. Lots of buttons, more than one display. Looked like it could give me the time in Beijing and the latitude and longitude as well. Hell, maybe it could translate Sanskrit into English, for all I know."

"What do you think that means?"

Dani sighed. "One year of psychology under your belt, so naturally everything has to mean something, I guess."

"When it comes to your dreams, yes, everything means something. We both know that. Come on, Dani. How many times now have you dreamed this same dream?"

"A few."

"A half dozen times that I know of-and I'm betting you didn't tell me about it right away."

"So?"

"Dani."

"Look, it doesn't matter how many times I've had the dream. It doesn't matter because it isn't a premonition."

"Could have fooled me."

Dani got up and carried her coffee cup to the sink. "Yeah, well, it wasn't your dream."

Paris turned in her chair but remained where she was. "Dani, is that why you came down here, to Venture? Not to offer me a shoulder to cry on while I go through a messy divorce, but because of that dream?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"The hell you don't."

" Paris -"

"I want the truth. Don't make me get it for myself."

Dani turned around, leaning back against the counter as she once again ruefully faced the knowledge that she would never be able to keep the truth from her sister, not for long.

It was partly the twin thing.

Paris wore her burnished copper hair in a shorter style these days-she called it her divorce rebirth-and she was a bit too thin, but otherwise looking at her was like looking into a mirror. Dani had long since grown accustomed to that and in fact viewed it as an advantage; watching the play of emotions across Paris 's expressive face had taught her to hide her own.

At least from everyone except Paris.

"We promised," her sister reminded her. "To leave each other our personal lives, our own thoughts and feelings. And we've gotten very good at keeping that door closed. But I remember how to open it, Dani. We both do."

It wasn't unusual, of course, for identical twins to have a special connection, but for Dani and Paris that bond had been, in the words of one childhood friend, "sort of spooky." It had been more than closeness, more than finishing each other's sentences or dressing alike or playing the twin game of exchanging identities.

Dani and Paris, especially in early childhood, had felt more like two halves of one person rather than separate individuals. Paris was the sunnier half, quick to laugh and joke, invariably cheerful, open and trusting, the extrovert. Dani was quieter, more still and watchful, even secretive. She was slow to anger and to trust and far more introspective than her sister.

Night and Day, their father had called them-and he hadn't been the only one to misunderstand what he saw.

Dani and Paris preferred it that way, confiding the truth only to each other. They learned early to hide or disguise the easy mental and emotional link they shared, eventually discovering how to fashion the "door" Paris spoke of.

It gave them the privacy of being alone in their own minds, something most people never learned to value. For the twins, it had finally enabled them to at least begin to experience life as unique individuals rather than two halves of a whole.

Dani missed that former closeness, though. It might now be only a door away-but that door did mostly stay closed these days, with the twins in their early thirties and having chosen very different life paths.

Nodding slowly, Dani said, "Okay. The dream started a few months ago, back in the summer. When the senator's daughter was murdered by that serial killer in Boston."

"The one they haven't caught yet?"

"Yeah."

Paris was frowning. "I'm missing the connection."

"I didn't think there was one. Absolutely no connection between me and those murders, not with the victims and not with any of the investigators. And I never have visions about anything not involving me or the people in my life. Which is why I didn't think this dream was a premonition."

Without pouncing on that admission, her sister said, "Until something changed. What?"

"I saw a news report. The federal agent in charge of the investigation in Boston is the man in my dream. Bishop."

"I still don't see-"

"His wife is Miranda Bishop."

Paris sat up straighter. "Jeez. She's the one who told us about Haven."

"Yeah." It had been in Atlanta nearly a year and a half before. Paris and her husband were one argument away from splitting up, and Dani was between jobs and at loose ends. Neither one of them was interested in becoming a fed, even to join the Special Crimes Unit Miranda Bishop had told them about.

They didn't want to carry guns, didn't want to be cops. But working for Haven, a privately run civilian organization of investigators with unique abilities-that had sounded interesting.

Absently, Paris said, "That was the last straw for Danny, you know. When I wanted to use my abilities, when I got a job that actually required them. I saw how creeped-out he was. How could I stay with someone who felt that way about any part of me?"

"Yeah, I know. Been there. Most of the guys I've met couldn't get past the fact that I was an identical twin; having dreams that literally came true hasn't exactly been seen as a fun bonus."

"Especially when you dreamed about them?"

"Well, anybody who gets close takes that risk. And since I never dream about sunshine and puppies, most of the guys in my life haven't stuck around long enough to hear about their own personal-doom scenario."

"There was one who never ran."

Dani frowned. "Yeah, well. He would have. Sooner or later."

"Do you know that, or are you only guessing?"

"Can we get back to the dream, please?"

Since a solemn pact made in girlhood, each of them had been scrupulous about staying out of the other's love life. And because her own very rocky marriage had recently left her hypersensitive to that, Paris could hardly push. "Okay. Getting back to your dream-are you saying it has something to do with that serial killer?"

"I think so."

"Why?"

"A feeling."

Paris watched her steadily. "What else?"

Dani didn't want to answer but finally did. "Whatever was down in that basement was-is-evil. A kind of evil I've never felt before. A kind that scares the hell out of me. And one thing that has been the same in every single version of my dream is the fact that it has Miranda."

"She's a hostage?"

"She's bait."

"She was my only child."

"Yes. I know."

Senator Abe LeMott looked up from the framed photograph he had been studying and directed his attention across the desk to a face that had become, these last months, almost as familiar to him as the one that had belonged to his daughter, Annie.

Special Agent Noah Bishop, Chief of the FBI's Special Crimes Unit, possessed an unforgettable face anyway LeMott thought. Because it was an unusually handsome face but, even more, because the pale silver-gray eyes missed nothing, and because the faint but wicked scar twisting down his left cheek was mute evidence of a violent past. Add to that a streak of pure white hair at his left temple, shocking against the jet-black all around it, and you had a man who was not likely to be overlooked, much less easily forgotten.

"You and your wife don't have children." LeMott set the photograph aside carefully, in its accustomed place to the right of the blotter.

"No."

The senator summoned a smile. "And yet you do. Brothers and sisters, at least. Family. Your unit. Your team."

Bishop nodded.

"Have you ever lost one of them?"

"No. A few close calls, but no."

Not yet.

The unspoken hung in the air between them, and LeMott nodded somberly. "Bound to happen. The work you people do, the evil you face. Sooner or later, there'll be a… an unbearable price demanded. There always is."

Choosing not to respond to that, Bishop said instead, "As I told you, we lost what faint trail we had near Atlanta. Whether he's in the city or somewhere nearby, that's the area. But until he makes a move…"

"Until he kills again, you mean."

"He's gone to ground, and he isn't likely to surface again until he feels less threatened. Less hunted. Or until his needs drive him to act despite that."

"It's gotten personal, hasn't it? Between you and him. The hunter and the hunted."

"I'm a cop. It's my job to hunt scum like him."

LeMott shook his head. "No, it was always more than that for you. I could see it. Hell, anybody could see it. I'm betting he knew it, knew you were hunting him and knew you'd crawled inside his head."

"Not far enough inside his head," Bishop said, a tinge of bitterness creeping into his voice. "He was still able to get Annie, he was still able to get at least eleven other young women, and all I know for certain is that he isn't finished yet."

"It's been months. Is it likely that's why he's been waiting, for the heat to die down? Is that why he left Boston?"

"I believe that's at least part of it. It wasn't the spotlight he was after, the attention. He never wanted to engage the police, to test his skills and will against ours. That's not the kind of killer he is, not what it's about for him."

"What is it about for him?"

"I wish I could answer that with any kind of certainty, but you know I can't. That's the hell of hunting serials: the facts come only after we've caught him. Until then, we have only speculation and guesswork. So all I know is bits and pieces, and precious few of those. Despite all the bodies, he hasn't left us much to work with."

"But you know Annie was a mistake, wasn't she?"

Bishop hesitated, then nodded. "I think she was. He hunts a type, a physical look, and Annie fit like all the others fit. If he needed to go deeper than looks, needed to know anything else about his targets because knowing more than the surface was important to him, he would have known who she was, known the extreme risks in targeting her. The way she was living, quietly, like any other young woman in Boston, the ordinary surface appearance of her life, didn't warn him that the response to her disappearance would be so immediate and so intense."

"That's why he stopped, after her?"

Bishop was only too aware that the grieving father he was talking to had spent years as a prosecutor in a major city and so knew the horrors men could do, perhaps as well as Bishop himself, hut it was still difficult to forget the father and think only of the fellow professional, to discuss this calmly without emotion.

This killer isn't the only man I've been profiling, Senator. I've been studying you as well. And I'm very much afraid that you'll take a hand in this investigation yourself before too much longer.

A deadly hand.

"Bishop? That is why he stopped?"

"I think it was part of the reason, yes. Too many cops, too much media, too much attention. It interfered with his plans, with his ability to hunt. Put his intended prey too much on guard, made them too wary. And it became a distraction for him, one he couldn't afford, especially not at that stage. He needed to be able to concentrate on what he was doing, because he was practicing, for want of a better word. Exploring and perfecting his ritual. That's why-"

When the other man broke off, LeMott finished the observation stoically. "That's why each murder was different, the weapons, the degree of brutality. He was experimenting. Trying to figure out what gave him the most… satisfaction."

You have to hear this over and over again, don't you? Like picking at a scab, keeping the pain alive because it's all you've got left.

"Yes."

"Has he figured it out yet?"

"You know I can't answer that. Too little to work with."

"I'll settle for an educated guess. From you."

Because you know it's much more than an educated guess. And I know now I made a mistake in telling you what's really special about the SCU.

Bishop also knew too well how utterly useless regrets like that one tended to be. The mistake had been made. Now he had to deal with the fallout.

He drew a breath and let it out slowly. "My guess, my belief, is that the response to Annie's abduction and murder threw him off balance. Badly. Until then, he had been almost blindly intent on satisfying the urges driving him. To kill a dozen victims in less than a month means something triggered his rampage, something very traumatic, and whatever it was, the trigger event either destroyed the person he had been until then, or else it freed something long dormant inside him."

"Something evil."

"About that, I have no doubts."

LeMott was frowning. "But even evil has a sense of self-preservation. The brightness of the unexpected spotlight following Annie's murder woke up that part of him. Or, at least, put it in control."

"Yes."

"And so he retreated. Found a safe place to hide."

"For now. To regroup, rethink. Consider his options. Perhaps even find a way to alter his developing rituals to fit this new dynamic."

"Because now he knows he's hunted."

Bishop nodded.

LeMott had given himself a crash course in the psychology of serial killers, immersing himself in the art and science of profiling despite Bishop's warnings, and his frown deepened now.

"Even if he was testing his limits or just figuring out what he needed to satisfy his cravings, to kill so many over such a short period of time and then just stop has to be unusual. How long can he possibly resist the sort of urges driving him?"

"Not long, I would have said."

"But it's been more than two months."

Bishop was silent.

"Or maybe it hasn't been," LeMott said slowly. "Maybe he's done a lot more than go to ground. Maybe he's adapted to being the hunted as well as hunter and changed his M.O. already. Dropped out of sight for a while, yes, but moved and began killing elsewhere. Killing differently than before. Altered his ritual. That's what you're thinking?"

Shit.

Weighing his words carefully, Bishop said, "Most serial killers have been active for months, even years, by the time law enforcement recognizes them for what they are, so there's more to work with in mapping the active and inactive cycles over time, the patterns and phases of behavior. We don't have that with this bastard. Not yet. He moved too fast. Appeared, slaughtered, and then disappeared back into whatever hell he crawled out of. We had no time to really study him. The only way we even pegged him as a serial was the undeniable fact that the young women he killed could have been sisters, they looked so alike.

"That was all we had, all we still have: that he targeted women who were smaller than average, petite, almost waifish, with big eyes and short dark hair."

"Childlike," LeMott said, his voice holding steady.

Bishop nodded.

"I know I've asked you before, but-"

"Do I believe he could begin to target children? The accepted profile says he might. I say it isn't likely. He's killing the same woman over and over again, and that is the experience he's recreating every time. Whatever else changes, he needs her to remain the same."

LeMott frowned. "But if he is changing or has already changed his ritual, if he knows he's being hunted and is as smart as you believe him to be, he must know what commonalities the police will be looking for in any murder case. He must know his M.O. is noted and flagged in every law-enforcement database in the country. Can we afford to assume he'll still target women who fit that victim profile?"

Bishop wasn't particularly reassured by the senator's calm expression and his matter-of-fact, professional tone; if anything, those were worrying signs.

Like nitroglycerin in a paper cup, looks could be terribly deceiving.

LeMott had kept a lid on his emotions for a long time now, and Bishop knew the pressure inside was going to blow that lid sky-high sooner or later.

A grieving father was bad enough. A grieving father with little left to lose was worse. And a grieving father who was also a powerful United States senator and former prosecutor with a reputation for having a tough stance on crime as well as a ruthless belief that justice be served no matter what was something way, way beyond worse.

But all Bishop said was, "He can't change who he is no matter how hard he tries. He'll try, of course. Try to overcome his urges and impulses, or just try to satisfy them in some way that won't betray who he is. But he'll give himself away somehow. They always do."

"At least to hunters who know what to look for."

"The problem isn't knowing what to look for, it's the sickening knowledge that he has to kill again to give us something to look at."

"Always assuming he hasn't killed again and the murder was just different enough to fly under the radar." LeMott wasn't about to let that idea go, it was clear.

Bishop said, "That is a possibility, of course. Maybe even a probability. So I can't say with any certainty that he has or hasn't killed again since he murdered your daughter."

If he had hoped to distract LeMott, back him away, shake him somehow with those last three very deliberate words, Bishop was disappointed, because the senator didn't flinch. He didn't even blink. He just responded to the information Bishop had provided earlier.

"And yet you know he headed south. That he's somewhere near Atlanta."

Shit.

"And you know how I can be certain of that-without any real evidence-when the federal and police task force is still combing Boston for any sign of him."

"You are certain?"

"In my own mind, yes. He's not in Boston anymore. He's somewhere near Atlanta. Probably not the city itself, though it's certainly large enough to get lost in."

"You have someone there?"

"Senator, I've spent years building a network, and it's still growing. We have people just about everywhere."

"Human people. Fallible people."

Bishop heard the bitterness. "Yes, I'm afraid so. We believe he's in the area. We suspect he may have killed again. But we have no hard evidence of either belief-and the visible trail ends in Boston."

"How can you know so much-and yet so little of value?"

Bishop was silent.

LeMott shook his head, his mouth twisting. Blinking for the first time in too long, even looking away, however briefly. "Sorry. God knows and I know you've poured more than your energy and time into trying to find this bastard and stop him. Just… help me to understand how it's possible for us to do nothing except sit and wait for him to kill again."

Once more, Bishop chose his words with care. "Officially, there isn't much else I can do. All the hard evidence we've been able to find on this killer has been in Boston; all the victims we can be certain died by his hand lived and worked in Boston; all the tips and leads generated have been in Boston, and the task force is still following up on those, probably will be for months.

"My team has been ordered to remain in Boston and continue working with the task force for the duration. Unless and until we have strong evidence, solid evidence, that he's surfaced elsewhere, Boston is where we stay."

"I'd call that a waste of Bureau resources."

"Officially, it's being called the opposite. The city is still on edge, the national media is still there in force, and all the media-from TV and newspaper editorials to internet blogs-call daily for more to be done to catch this killer before he targets another young woman. And the fact that his most recent victim was the daughter of a U.S. senator is virtually guaranteed to keep that spotlight very bright and that fire burning hot. For a very long time."

"Jobs are at stake."

"Yes."

"There's a new Director," LeMott said.

"Yes." Bishop's wide shoulders rose and fell in a faint shrug. "Politics. He's been brought in to fix what's wrong with the Bureau, to improve the very negative image a string of disastrous cases has left in the public's mind. Removing top agents from an investigation the entire country is watching wouldn't, from his point of view, be the best of moves."

"I could-"

"I'd rather you didn't. We may well need your influence at some point, but using it now isn't likely to help us-or the investigation."

LeMott nodded slowly. "I have to defer to your judgment on that."

Whether you want to or not. "Thank you."

"But why would the Director object to exchanging some of your people for more-conventional agents?"

"He doesn't really see the difference."

"Ah. The crux of the matter. He doesn't believe in psychic abilities."

"No. He doesn't." With another faint shrug, Bishop added, "We've weathered a changing of the guard before. We will again; our success record is too good to easily dismiss, no matter what the Director may or may not think about our methods. But in the interim…"

"You have to follow orders."

"If I want the SCU to continue, yes, I do. For now. At least officially."

"And unofficially?"

Reluctant for too many reasons to list, Bishop said, "Unofficially there's Haven."