Blood Ties

CHAPTER 1

Present day

April 8

Tennessee

CASE EDGERTON RAN along the narrow trail, aware of his burning legs but concentrating on his breathing. The last mile was always the hardest, especially on his weekly trail run. Easier to just zone out and run when he was on the track or in his neighborhood park; this kind of running, with its uneven terrain and various hazards, required real concentration.

That was why he liked it.

He jumped over a rotted fallen log and almost immediately had to duck a low-hanging branch. After that, it was all downhill—which wasn’t as easy as it sounded, since the trail snaked back and forth in hairpin curves all along the middle quarter of this last mile. Good training for his upcoming race. He planned to win that one, as he had won so many his entire senior year.

And then Kayla Vassey, who had a thing for runners and who was remarkably flexible, would happily reward him. Maybe for the whole summer. But there’d be no clinging to him afterward; she’d be too busy sizing up next year’s crop of runners to do more than wave goodbye when he left in the fall for college.

Sex without strings. The kind he preferred.

Case nearly tripped over a root exposed by recent spring rains and swore at his wandering thoughts.

Concentrate, idiot. Do you want to lose that race?

He really didn’t.

His legs were on fire now and his lungs felt raw, but he kept pushing himself, as he always did, even picking up a little speed as he rounded the last of the wicked hairpin curves.

This time, when he tripped, he went sprawling.

He tried to land on his shoulder and roll, to do as little damage as possible, but the trail was so uneven that instead of rolling he slammed into the hard ground with a grunt, the wind knocked out of him, and a jolt of pain told him he’d probably jammed or torn something.

It took him a few minutes of panting and holding his shoulder gingerly before he felt able to sit up. And it was only then that he saw what had tripped him.

An arm.

Incredulous, he stared at a hand that appeared to belong to a man, a hand that was surprisingly clean and unmarked, long fingers seemingly relaxed. His gaze tracked across a forearm that was likewise uninjured, and then—

And then Case Edgerton began to scream like a little girl.

“You can see why I called you in.” Sheriff Desmond Duncan’s voice was not—quite—defensive. “We’re on the outskirts of Serenade, but it still falls into my jurisdiction. And I’m not ashamed to admit it’s beyond anything the Pageant County Sheriff’s Department has ever handled.” He paused, then repeated, “Ever.”

“I’m not surprised,” she replied somewhat absently.

His training and experience told Des Duncan to shut up and let her concentrate on the scene, but his curiosity was stronger. He hadn’t known what to expect when he contacted the FBI, never having done so before, so maybe any agent would have surprised him. This one definitely did.

She was drop-dead gorgeous, for one thing, with a centerfold body and the face of an exotic angel. And she possessed the most vivid blue eyes Duncan had seen in his life. With all that, she appeared remarkably casual and unaware of the effect she was having on just about every man within eyesight of her. She was in faded jeans and a loose pullover sweater, and her boots were both serviceable and worn. Her long gleaming black hair was pulled back into a low ponytail at the nape of her neck. No makeup, at least as far as he could tell.

She had done everything short of taking a mud bath to downplay her looks, and Des still had to fight a tendency to stutter a bit when speaking to her. He wasn’t even sure she had shown him a badge.

And he was nearly sixty, for Christ’s sake.

Wary of asking the wrong question or asking one the wrong way, he said tentatively, “I’m grateful to turn this over to more experienced hands, believe me. I naturally called the State Bureau of Investigation first, but… Well, once they heard me out, they suggested I call in your office. Yours specifically, not just the FBI. Sort of surprised me, to be honest. That they suggested right off the bat I should call you folks. But it sounded like a good idea to me, so I did. Didn’t really expect so many feds to respond, and I sure as hell didn’t expect it to be so fast. I sent in the request less than five hours ago.”

“We were in the area,” she said. “Near enough. Just over the mountains in North Carolina.”

“Another case?”

“Ongoing. But not really going anywhere, so coming over to check this out made sense.”

Duncan nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at him. She was on one knee a couple of feet from the body—what was left of the body—her gaze fixed unwaveringly on that.

He wondered what she saw. Because, word had it, the agents of the FBI’s elite Special Crimes Unit saw a lot more than most cops, even if the what and how of that was rather vaguely defined.

What Duncan saw was plain enough, if incredibly bizarre, and he had to force himself to look again.

The body lay sprawled beside what was, among the high school track team and some of the hardier souls in town, a popular hiking and running trail. It was a wickedly difficult path to walk at a brisk pace, let alone run, which made it an excellent training course if you knew what you were doing—and potentially deadly if you didn’t.

There were numerous cases of sprains, strains, and broken bones in this area year-round, but especially after the spring rains.

Still, Duncan didn’t have to be an M.E. or even a doctor to know that a fall while running or walking hadn’t done this. Not this.

The dense undergrowth of this part of the forest had done a fair job for the killer of concealing most of the body; Duncan’s deputies had been forced hours before to carefully clear away bushes and vines just to have good access to the remains.

Which made it a damn good thing that this was obviously a dump site rather than a murder scene; Duncan might not have been familiar with grisly murders, but he certainly knew enough to be sure the feds would not have been happy to find their evidence disturbed.

Evidence. He wondered if there was any to speak of. His own people certainly hadn’t found much. Prints were being run through IAFIS now, and if that avenue of identification turned up no name, Duncan supposed the next step would be dental records.

Because there wasn’t a whole lot else to identify the poor bastard.

His left arm lay across part of the trail, and it was eerily undamaged, unmarked by so much as a bruise. Eerily because, from the elbow on, the damage was… extreme. Most of the flesh and muscle had been somehow stripped from the bones, leaving behind only bloody tags of sinew attached here and there. Most if not all of the internal organs were gone, including the eyes; the scalp had been ripped from the skull.

Ripped. Jesus, what could have ripped it? What could have done this?

“Any ideas what could have done this?” Duncan asked.

“No sane ones,” she replied in a matter-of-fact tone.

“So I’m not the only one imagining nightmare impossibilities?” He could hear the relief in his own voice.

She turned her head and looked at him, then rose easily from her kneeling position and stepped away from the remains to join him. “We learned a long time ago not to throw around words like impossible.”

“And nightmare?”

“That one too. ‘There are stranger things in heaven and earth, Horatio….’ “Special Agent Miranda Bishop shrugged. “The SCU was created to deal with those stranger things. We’ve seen a lot of them.”

“So I’ve heard, Agent Bishop.”

She smiled, and he was aware yet again of an entirely unprofessional and entirely masculine response to truly breathtaking beauty.

“Miranda, please. Otherwise it’ll get confusing.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Because,” a new voice chimed in, “you’re likely to hear all of us referring to Bishop, and when we do we’re talking about Noah Bishop, the chief of the Special Crimes Unit.”

“My husband,” Miranda Bishop clarified. “Everybody calls him Bishop. So please do call me Miranda.” She waited for his nod, then turned her electric-blue-eyed gaze to the other agent. “Quentin, anything?”

“Not so you’d notice.” Special Agent Quentin Hayes shook his head, then frowned and pulled a twig from his rather shaggy blond hair. “Though I’ve seldom searched an area with undergrowth this dense, so I can’t say I couldn’t have missed something.”

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. { see Chill of Fear}

“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. {see Touching Evil}

“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?”

“Nobody 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?”

“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?”