Blood Sins

Chapter Three

Grace , North Carolina

THE BODY SNAGGED on a half-submerged tree that had been blasted by lightning back in the summer. It bobbed a little as the current continued to snatch at it, rolling sluggishly back and forth a few inches. Long brown hair flowed out around the partially submerged face, obscenely graceful in the water, a solitary sign of what might once have been beauty.

There was nothing beautiful about her now. It was fortunate, given the fast-moving river, that there had been something to catch the body before it wound up miles downstream where the water was more shallow and campers were wont to vacation on the picturesque banks.

Not that many did in January, Sawyer Cavenaugh acknowledged absently to himself as he studied the dead woman. Still, there were usually a hardy few, seeking nature when it was a bit less crowded, and most towed their kids along.

Thankfully, a child had not found this body.

Bloated and showing gashes and other postmortem injuries from the rough downstream journey of at least a couple of miles, she was a sight horrifying enough to give even a veteran cop and chief of police the promise of nightmares to come.

As if he didn't already have more than his share.

Sawyer rose from his crouch and walked a few feet to where one of his officers stood with the unhappy citizen who had made the grisly find.

"This is the second one for you, isn't it, Pel?"

"I swear to God, I'm never walking Jake along here again," Pel Brackin said with considerable feeling, one hand on the head of the calm chocolate Lab sitting at his side. "Much more of this and he could be one of them cadaver dogs. Jesus, Sawyerwhat the hell is going on up there?" He jerked his head in the general direction of upstream.

"Up there?"

"Up at the Compound. Don't treat me like an idiotI chased you out of my apple orchard when you were just a snot-nosed kid."

Sawyer sighed, not bothering to ask for an explanation of the parallel. "Is there anything you can tell me that might help me to find out what happened to this woman?"

"All I know is what I found, and we can all see that."

"You didn't see or hear anything else out of the ordinary?"

"Nah, nothing I don't usually sec around here. Though"

Sawyer waited a moment, then prompted, "Though what?"

With his free hand, Brackin rubbed the nape of his neck. "I don't know what it'd have to do with her. Or with that other poor woman last week."

"Let me be the judge of that. What is it, Pel?"

"It's the wildlife."

Sawyer felt his brows rising. "The wildlife?"

"The lack of it, really. Jake and me, we usually see a lot of critters on our morning rambles. These last weeks, since back before the holidays, really not so many."

Thinking out loud, Sawyer said, "A mild winter, so far. Not very cold, almost no snow."

Brackin nodded. "This sort of winter, there's usually plenty of wildlife visible. Deer, foxes, rabbits, squirrels. Plenty of raccoon and possum. Even some bears coming down out of the mountains. And lots of birds. But now that I think about it, my wife's bird feeders haven't been very popular. Not even doves or cardinals, and we generally have dozens of them about the place all winter." He shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. "Like I said, probably nothing to do with these killings. Just something weird, is all."

"Okay. Anything else you can think of?"

"Nah. I'll call if I think of anything, but I told Robin here"

"Officer Keever, Pel. Come on," she protested.

"Well, then, Officer Keever, I'll be Mister Brackin to you."

She rolled her eyes but then caught Sawyer's and subsided. "Right. Sorry, Mr. Brackin."

Satisfied, he finished: "I told her everything I remembered from the time Jake started barking and I saw the body."

"Not an easy question, but I suppose you don't recognize her?" Sawyer asked.

"Shit, Sawyer, her own mother wouldn't recognize her."

"I had to ask."

"Yeah, yeah. If I've ever seen her before, I can't tell by looking at her now. Look, can I go? It's not like you don't know where I've lived for the last sixty years of my life, and I'm not going anywhere except home. My feet are freezing, I want my coffee, and Jake wants his breakfast."

Sawyer nodded. "Yeah, go ahead. Sorry to keep you."

With a grunt that might have been meant as thanks, Brackin headed downstream toward his place, avoiding so much as a glance at the corpse in the river.

"Wildlife," Sawyer murmured, more to himself than anything else.

"Chief?"

"Nothing." Mildly, he added, "Robin, when you're fighting an uphill battle to be taken seriously, it helps to act like a professional."

"I know. Sorry, Chief."

"Just don't make me sorry I cleared you for field work, that's all I'm saying."

She nodded, now wearing a slightly anxious expression.

Her face was an open book, Sawyer reflected, betraying her thoughts and her emotions equally. Which certainly gave the lie to the whole inscrutable Asian stereotype, since Robin had been born in China. But, adopted by the Keevers at the age of three, she had been brought up in traditions a long way from Asian. That Southern rural background had left her, twenty years later, with an accent that was pure Carolina Mountain, an occasional turn of phrase that would have astonished and possibly horrified her ancestors, and a slight chip on her shoulder that came from being different from most everyone around her.

Sawyer could relate.

But all he said was, "I gather Pel didn't see anything helpful."

"He claims he never went within twelve feet of the body, and the lack of footprints on the bank there bears him out," the young deputy reported crisply. "Ely had a look around while I waited with Mr. Brackin, but he didn't see anything out of the ordinary."

Sawyer glanced past her, up the shallow bank to where their cars were parked just off the road, and noted that Robin's sometimes partner, Officer Ely Avery, was leaning a hip against their cruiser, obviously trying not to look bored.

There was a second cruiser parked up there, possibly intended to fend off curious onlookers who had not appeared, and the two officers in it, Dale Brown and Donald Brown (no relation, they always explained), appeared just as bored and/or equally detached from the situation.

No taste for or even interest in homicide investigation there. Sawyer made the mental note, then returned his gaze to Robin Keever's earnest young face. She was smart, more than capable, and she was ambitious; he'd known that for a while now.

But more important at the moment, she's fully engaged and intensely curious. Good.

Because he damn sure needed all the help he could get. Nothing in his years as a small-town cop had prepared him for anything even remotely like this.

"I checked with the station soon as I got here," Robin went on, "and we have no reports of missing persons fittingwell, no women reported missing from anywhere in the county."

"Yeah, I checked too." But the last female missing person had turned up in this same stretch of river barely a week before, looking an awful lot the way this one looked, so Sawyer was inclined to start searching for a connection between them.

More than inclined. In his experience, there really was no such thing as a coincidence.

Robin was thinking along the same lines. "Do you think she could be from the Compound, like Mr. Brackin suggested? From the church?"

"I think she's been in the river long enough that somebody should have noticed she was missing."

"And since no report was filed"

"Well, Reverend Samuel and his flock never look for help outside the Compound. Maybe they've got trouble of the nasty kind and believe they can handle it themselves."

"A killer inside the church?"

"Maybe."

"Or?" Robin was watching him intently.

"Or maybe the church has an enemy out here. A very, very pissed-off enemy."

"And he's taking it out on the women?"

"We have a couple of men unaccounted for, remember? Just because we haven't found bodies doesn't mean they didn't wind up the same way these women wound up."

Robin shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Chief, is it true what I heard about the woman last week? That Ellen Hodges was that somebody beat her to death?"

"The state M.E. hasn't completed the autopsy. Their office currently has a six-week backlog."

Characteristically, Robin wasn't deterred. "Okay, but Doc Macy examined the body before she was shipped to Chapel Hill, right?"

Sawyer nodded, wondering just where in hell their county M.E. was at the moment, since he should have arrived by now.

"What was in his report?" Robin persisted.

"Sure you want to know?" He waited for her decided nod, then replied, "Doc's report recommended we ship the body to the state chief medical examiner, where the facilities are a lot better than any in this area. Because his X-rays showed that virtually every bone in her body had been broken, almost pulverizedand there wasn't a mark on her anywhere to indicate how that happened."

Tessa Gray had put off actually visiting the Church of the Everlasting Sin's Compound as long as she dared, a reluctance that had, according to the more experienced Hollis, worked for her so far.

So far.

"But you need to get out there." Hollis said, early on the afternoon that Sarah Warren's body was found in the river.

Tessa was still grappling with that, and it wasn't easy. It was the first time she'd ever been on assignment when a fellow Haven operative had lost her lifethough not the first time it had happened.

The stakes were high.

And Tessa accepted that, got that. No operative joined the organization without being warned repeatedly, by John and Maggie Garrett, cofounders and codirectors of Haven, and by Bishop, another cofounder as well as Chief of the FBI's Special Crimes Unit and someone who certainly knew better than most what price could be demanded of the soldiers in this war.

That was the most unsettling part of the death of a fellow operative, the stark reminder that this was war, that people could and did die fighting what they all believed were necessary battles. They were none of them superheroes; being psychic hardly made them invulnerable. In fact, it was often the opposite.

Depending on the ability and its individual quirks, being psychic could be a weakness at best, and an active liability at worstespecially some of the least common and even unique abilities, and most especially when those abilities were held by operatives or agents with erratic control.

Unfortunately, those with erratic control far outnumbered those with a better mastery over their capbilities.

Tessa was uncertain of where she fell on that score, since her own ability had not really been tested under fire. She knew she was considered to possess excellent control, but who knew what might happen under extreme and dangerous circumstances? She was trained to handle a gun and was licensed to carry a concealed firearm. But she wouldn't be going into the Church of the Everlasting Sin's Compound carrying a weapon of that sort. Worse, she had to appear and act like an extremely vulnerable woman who was ripe to be dominated by stronger people, stronger minds.

A terrifying prospect, especially since they weren't at all sure how Reverend Samuel achieved his seemingly absolute domination over his flock. If he was using psychic ability to control them, Tessa had no way of knowing whether that same control would work on her.

Until she put her shields to the test by exposing them to the church Compound. And Samuel.

"The police will probably be there," she objected finally.

"Not necessarily. They haven't identified the body yet."

"But we have."

"Yeah. It's Sarah, no question."

"Did you see?"

"Her spirit? No." Hollis frowned. "I seldom see the spirits of team membersor people I know, for that matter. I wonder why." It wasn't a question so much as it was an acknowledgment that the universe was arbitrary in its choices.

Tessa waited a moment, then asked, "How can we be sure it was Sarah's body?"

Hollis pushed aside her musing with an almost physical gesture. "Hoping for a mistake in identification? Don't. We have someone else in the area, and the I.D. of her body is confirmed."

"By someone I'm not supposed to know about, I gather."

Patiently, Hollis said, "What you don't know, you can't communicateon any levelto anyone else. Tessa, I don't even know for certain how many of our agents and Haven operatives are working this case. And right now, I don't care. Someone is killing people, about as viciously as I've ever seen. As inexplicably as I've ever seen. And everything we know or think we know suggests Reverend Samuel is the one responsible. We believe he's doing that killing using no weapon or tool except for the power of his mind, using paranormal abilities we haven't been able to count, far less define and understand. I don't know about you, but that scares the hell out of me."

"I just I never knew psychic ability could be like that. Could be used as a weapon."

"It's rare, but we have at least one agent who can channel and focus energy well enough to make it a destructive force. And Haven has at least one operative who can do it."

"And if there are two on our side"

"There are likely to be at least a couple on the other side, yeah. We've had evidence in the past of psychic abilities in some really evil and twisted bad guys who could do some scarily remarkable things psychically. Look, we haven't discovered our own limits yet. But it only makes sense that in the wrong hands, driven by the wrong intentions, at least some psychic abilities could be corrupted. Dark energy channeled in ways more powerful than anything we've experienced so far."

"And used to kill. But why?"

"The question we desperately need answered, Tessa, especially since we have no direct evidence so far pointing to either Samuel or his church, not evidence that would stand up in court. We know precious little, but what we do know from interviewing the very few defectors we've found tells us that Samuel built himself a church because something very seriously traumatic happened to him more than twenty years ago, something so mysterious or terrifying even the defectors wouldn't or couldn't talk about it, and whatever it was, it changed him forever."

"Problem is, we don't believe he was all that stable to begin with. It's difficult to know for certain, because the early background info we have on him is sketchy, to say the least. Can't even find a reliable birth certificate on him, though we've found half a dozen phony ones. In any case, he had a few early run-ins with the law, so he's on record as having a troubled childhood. His mother was apparently a prostitute, and not of the high-class variety."

"I'd call that a troubled childhood," Tessa said.

"Yeah. We can't find attendance records, so if he even went to school it was rare and sporadic. We haven't been able to find any evidence that he started fires or tortured animals or displayed other signs of a budding sociopath, but there's so little solid information on him that we can't rule anything out."

"Except that he grew up to become a cult leader."

"Except that," Hollis agreed.

Tessa shook her head. "I read up on cults and cult leaders when I got this assignment, and just the regular, run-of-the-mill leaders without psychic abilities are more than scary. The patterns of behavior they follow, the power trips and growing paranoia, the isolation, the need to dominate and control their followersand the means they use to impose that controlis all so"

"Deadly, in many cases. Certainly in this one. We know women, men, and even a few children have gone missing from that compound in the last year, all vanished without a traceand that none of them was reported missing by the church or any of its members. What we don't know is why. Why his own have been targeted, and why these people in particular."

Tessa frowned. "Maybe he's culling. Weeding out those of his people he can't trust."

"That could very well be. Except that it doesn't really explain the kids, does it?"

"No. We're sure kids have gone missing?"

"We're sure. No reports to the local police, but we're sure."

"And we're not talking about the kids Sarah got out?"

Hollis shook her head. "No. Creepy thing is, one or both of the parents of at least two of the missing kids are still church members. Not only did they not report the kids missing, but they don't seem to miss the kids."

"What?"

"Either they don't remember or don't care. I'm guessing it's the former. And we have no idea how that's even possible. If Samuel can affect people's memories, especially the sort as deeply rooted and emotional as the memory of a child"

She really didn't have to finish that.

Tessa drew a breath and let it out slowly, trying to fight off a chill that was seeping into her very bones. "The missing people, kids included, weren't all psychics, I assume?"

"We have no way of knowing for certain, but as far as we've been able to determine, among the known missing and murder victims only Sarah was psychic. If he found out who and what she was, then chances are he's even stronger than we believed. Which means he's even more deadly than we believed. "

Officially, the children of the Church of the Everlasting Sin were home-schooled. Unofficially, they were often involved in church-supervised activities throughout the day. And like the adults who had chosen this refuge from the world, the children had a unique inner life that outsiders would have found odd.

Some of the adult church members would have found it odd as well. And not a little alarming.

Because not all of the children believed.

And some of them were afraid.

"Do you think Wendy got away?" Brooke kept her voice low, audible only to the small group at the playground's covered picnic table. The group was busily collecting numerous toys left by some of the younger children now being shepherded toward the church.

"I think so." Ruby's voice was equally low. She held open a cloth bag so that Cody could pile in all the alphabet blocks.

As he did so, he said, "Yeah, but I don't think Sarah made it."

Ruby and Brooke exchanged looks, and then both stared at the dark, solemn-eyed boy.

Replying to their silent question, he said simply, "I don't feel her anymore."

"Are you sure?" Hunter was the fourth member of the little group and the accepted leader, despite being the youngest at eleven. "Just because we haven't seen her doesn't mean she's gone. I mean really gone. She has a shell. We've all felt it."

"I don't even feel that now. Do you?" Cody said.

Hunter frowned, concentrating on collecting all the small plastic pieces of a miniature dairy farm. "No. But I thought it might just be me. Because I hardly feel anything at all."

Blinking back tears, Brooke said, "I was going to ask Sarah if she could get me out next."

Ruby said, "We aren't supposed to know she got anybody out, Brooke. We aren't supposed to know she was here to snoop around."

"I didn't tell anybody. I wouldn't have."

Cody muttered, "Just because you don't tell doesn't mean somebody doesn't know."

"I was careful. I'm always careful. But it's getting harder and harder. I can't stay here anymore, I just can't. My aunt Judy lives in Texas, and she doesn't like the church. I know she'd let me live with her."

"What about your mom and dad?" Hunter asked.

"What about them?" Brooke fixed her gaze on the crayons she was gathering into a plastic container. "They believe in the church. They believe in Father. They're never going to leave here."

After a moment, Cody said, "My mom isn't so sure anymore. She's beginning to be afraid."

"Does she know you feel that?" Ruby asked him.

"No. She pretends everything is just the same."

"Don't tell her," Hunter warned. "We can't tell any of our parents. Not what we know, and not what we feel. We have to keep hiding it. Because we all know what'll happen if we don't."

"Then what do we do?" Cody spoke more quickly, his gaze on the two adult church members coming toward them.

"We keep our mouths shut."

"Until?"

"Until we figure out something better."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, Cody. But I do know we're safer doing nothing until we figure out what to do."

Ruby said, "That's easy for you. You two aren't girls."

"No," Brooke agreed, also aware of the approach of two of their keepers. "It's different for us. Once the Ceremonies begin. Once Father notices we're growing up." Her last few words were whispered, "Once Father starts watching us____________________"

Tessa hadn't known Sarah very well; Haven was a growing organization whose members were spread out all over the country, most living quiet, seemingly normal livesat least until they were called into serviceand many of them had never even met one another. But not knowing a fallen comrade, she had discovered, did nothing to lessen the feeling of loss.

One of their own was gone.

That knowledge was too painful to think about unless Tessa could make something meaningful of it. And right now that was all but impossible for her, especially when she was going into the same situation that had cost Sarah her life.

Hollis said, "Your shield is stronger than Sarah's."

"You're a telepath now?"

"No. You wouldn't be human if you weren't thinking about it."

Tessa didn't want to think about it. Instead, she thought about the young church member Bambi's expression of adoration, and that of others she had met. She said slowly, "They don't seem to be afraid of him. His followers."

Hollis didn't push it. "Well, not the ones he sends out in public, anyway." She shook her head. "Given the typical profile of a cult leader, there's often some kind of sexual domination and control, but we aren't sure about that with Samuel. For one thing, the church has existed long enough that I would have expected him to have offspring by more than one woman if he was using sex. But as far as we can determine, he's childless."

"Sterile, maybe?"

"Maybe. Or maybe he genuinely sees himself as a more traditional prophet in the sense of being a holy man, above the needs of the flesh. He's a bit older, somewhere in his mid-forties, and they do call him Father, after all."

A cold memory stirred in Tessa. "Didn't Jim Jones's followers call him Father?"

"Yes, as I recall. It's the rule rather than an exception for a cult leader to portray himself as a patriarchal or messianic head of his church. An absolute power structure with a single figure at the top."

"I think some of the younger church members I've talked to so far would respond strongly to that idea of a protective father image. But the older ones? The ones closer to his own age? How does he hold them? How does he convince them to follow him?"

"More questions we don't have answers for. And we need them. If we have any hope of stopping Samuel, we need information."

"I know." Tessa drew a breath and let it out slowly. "I know."

It was that sense of urgency rather than any confidence on her part that finally sent Tessa, later on that Wednesday afternoon, several miles outside the very small town of Grace to a nice if deceptively ordinary wrought-iron gate at the end of a short lane off the area's main two-lane highway.

There was what appeared to be a small farmhouse to the left and just inside the surprisingly pretty brick and wrought-iron fencing. Tessa had only a moment or two to wonder if the clearly very sturdy and certainly very expensive fence ran around the entire two-hundred-acre Compound, before she saw a tall man in jeans and a flannel shirt come out of the house and approach the other side of the gate.

The two sides of the gate opened inward as he neared them, giving Tessa an unsettling feeling that wasn't lessened a bit by his casual air or by the fact that he addressed her by name as soon as she put the car window downand she had never met him before in her life.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Gray. Come for a visit?"

Tessa managed to avoid even a glance at the plain gold band on her left hand, its weight still an unfamiliar, slightly uncomfortable sensation. "Yes. Ruth said" She broke off when he nodded.

"Of course. She'll be waiting for you at the Square. Just continue along the drive all the way to the end. And welcome."

"Thank you." Tessa hoped he couldn't see that her fingers were white-knuckled with tension on the steering wheel as she drove through the gates and followed the long asphalt drive that disappeared into a dense-looking forest.

She glanced into the rearview mirror in time to see the big gates slowly closing behind her, and her feeling of being trapped owed nothing to any sense except the very primitive one of self-preservation.

Sawyer Cavenaugh didn't think he'd ever get used to it. In the ten years since the Church of the Everlasting Sin had set up its main parish in Grace, and most especially in the past two years since he'd been chief of police, he had never seen any church member away from the others alone. They always traveled in pairs, or groups of three or four, but never alone.

Except for the guy at the gate, who was always seen alone.

Unless you were a cop, of course, and were perfectly aware of being closely observed from that innocuous little "farmhouse" a few yards away just inside the fence.

There might be video security. There was certainly someone watching from behind at least one of those mirrorlike windows. Maybe armedthough Sawyer had never once seen any evidence, any sign whatsoever, of guns anywhere in the Compound.

And he had looked. Hard.

"Good afternoon, Chief Cavenaugh. What can we do for you today?"

"Afternoon, Carl." Sawyer smiled a smile every bit as polite and false as the one being smiled at him. "I called ahead and spoke to DeMarco. We're expected." He knew damn well that Carl Fisk knew they were expected.

He always knew, and they always played this little game anyway.

"Ah, of course. Officer Keever."

"Mr. Fisk." Robin's voice was entirely formal and professional; she wasn't one to make the same mistake twice.

Fisk kept his meaningless smile in place as he stepped back and gestured. "I'm sure you know the way. Mr. DeMarco will meet you at the church, as usual."

Sawyer nodded and drove the Jeep through the open gate.

"I don't like that guy," Robin announced in a decided tone. "He smiles too much."

"You read Shakespeare?"

"That one may smile and be a villain? Yeah."

"Smart guy, that Shakespeare. And a gifted observer."

"You don't like Fisk either."

Sawyer smiled faintly. "Now, did I say that?"

"Yes." Robin followed up that defiant statement with a far more hesitant "Didn't you?"

"As a matter of fact, I did." He didn't wait for her response but slowed the Jeep slightly as it entered the forest and disappeared from the view of anyone near the front gate. Then he said, "I don't want to stop, because they time you from the gate, but take a look around and tell me if you notice anything out of the ordinary."

Robin obediently looked out the Jeep's window at the forest through which they passed. "They time you from the gate?"

"Always. See anything?"

"Well no. Just woods."

"They've planted a lot of holly bushes all through here," Sawyer told her. "Big ones. Good natural barriers if you don't want visitors. This time of year, plenty of birds count on the holly berries for food. See the bushes?"

"Yeah."

"See any birds?"

"No," she replied slowly.

"There were birds in town," he said. "I took special notice of them. But the farther out we came, the closer we got to the Compound, the fewer birds I saw."

Robin turned her head and stared at him. "What on earth does that mean?"

"I wish to hell I knew."

She was silent as the Jeep picked up a little speed, then said, "What Pel said. No wildlife on his morning walks. Why do I get the creepy feeling that when we get to the main part of the Compound, we aren't going to see any dogs or cats?"

Even though she had never formally been inside the Compound, Robin, like most residents of Grace, was undoubtedly familiar with the physical layout of the place.

It got discussed in town. A lot.

The church was sited pretty much dead-center on the two-hundred-acre parcel of land it owned. Around the large and impressive central building that was the church proper was a formal square, with neat little houses lining three sides of the square and set out with equal neatness along the four half-mile-long roads that stretched out from the corners of the square and ended in cul-de-sacs.

Sawyer could have drawn it out on a map. In fact, he had, bothered by the neatness and exactitude of the Compound. But if there was a pattern there, it meant nothing to him.

"They used to have animals," he told his officer. "Most every house had a dog in the backyard, a cat on the front porch. There were always a couple of dogs tagging along after the kids, and a cat or two in every barn to help control mice. Plus livestock in the pastures. Ponies for the kids, some trail horses, milk and beef cattle."

"But not now?"

"No. I wanted to warn you, in case you noticed, not to say anything."

"No pets at all? No livestock?"

"Not visible. I suppose there might be dogs or cats inside, but they used to be easy to spot."

"When did you notice they weren't?"

"Last week, when I came up here to talk about Ellen Hodges. Before then I hadn't been up here since, probably, back in the fall sometime. I remember dogs barking then and seeing cattle and horses in the pastures around the Compound. Last week, nothing but people."

Robin cleared her throat. "You know, the first thing that popped into my head when you said that was"

"Some kind of devil worship. Animal sacrifice. Yeah, I figured."

"You don't think?"

As the Jeep emerged from the woods and into a wide valley where the church and its score of small, neat houses lay just ahead, Sawyer answered, "I have a hunch the truth's a lot more complicated." He knew that Robin was looking around at the houses as they neared the Square, that she was looking for dogs or cats or signs of livestock, but Sawyer's gaze was fixed on the tall, wide-shouldered man waiting for them on the steps of the church.

The man who checked his watch as the Jeep entered the Square.

"A hell of a lot more complicated," Sawyer repeated.