Blood Ties

CHAPTER 3

Serenade, Tennessee

“DOGS,” SHERIFF DUNCAN OFFERED. “Not ‘til tomorrow, of course, but at first light. With people getting lost in these mountains as often as they do, we have nearly a dozen canine search-and-rescue teams in the area, and they have a very high success rate. They can track just about anything or anyone. The SOB must have left a trail from those bodies to wherever he was perched out there today. And since the rain’s holding off, dogs should be able to pick up on it.”

Chief Deputy Scanlon added, “Three of the teams have handlers trained by law enforcement and they’re licensed to carry, so they wouldn’t be going out there unarmed.”

“He won’t be hanging around,” Quentin pointed out, “so what would be the use? I’m betting he policed the area and gathered up his spent shells, as well as any other evidence that showed he was there. This guy is a pro, and a pro isn’t going to leave evidence for us to find.”

“Defeatist.” Shaking his head, DeMarco added, “Not that I don’t agree with you. Waste of manpower. He’s long gone, at least from that spot.”

Quentin nodded. “I’m also betting that if we wanted to waste manpower and go looking, we’d find an old deer blind or something of the sort, a place he could have spent the day in relative comfort.”

Probably almost as comfortable as they were now, Quentin reflected. Because they weren’t all that comfortable. The “conference room” of the Pageant County Sheriff’s Department was barely large enough to house a table that just about seated the six of them—if you didn’t mind keeping your elbows tucked in and could bear office chairs so old that with the slightest movement of their occupants they shrieked instead of creaked.

Scanlon leaned against the doorjamb; the room couldn’t fit another deputy.

There was one small and lonely window, its dusty blinds closing out the night that had come with the suddenness typical for springtime in the mountains. There were two tall filing cabinets crammed into one corner. Two shorter ones near the door provided a reasonably clear surface for a chuckling coffeemaker, a motley collection of mugs—most imprinted with high school or college team emblems or rude or arguably witty slogans—and the disposable conveniences of paper sugar packets, powdered “creamer,” and plastic stirrers.

Not that anyone at the table had moved toward coffee that would likely, Quentin thought, taste like something drained off an engine.

Shoved up against the walls in another corner was an old slate-topped desk, which took up way too much space and was used, apparently, only to provide a surface for an ancient printer, a tall and leaning stack of yellowed file folders, two disconnected keyboards, and a shiny new multiline office phone.

The phone wasn’t plugged in.

Quentin was sure he had worked in more depressing rooms, but he could not at the moment call any of them to mind.

Sheriff Duncan had already apologized for the deficiencies of the old building and this cramped room, even suggesting that they could probably commandeer the dining room of the bed-and-breakfast he had recommended for the duration of their stay.

“Please,” he had said, “don’t stay at the motel. The roaches tend to carry away your shoes in the night.”

Miranda had gravely accepted the advice, allowing one of Duncan’s part-time deputies to call and book the necessary rooms for her team and another to transport the agents’ overnight/weekender luggage to the B&B. But she insisted that for this first real meeting of the group, the sheriff’s conference room was fine.

“It’s been a long day and we’re all tired anyway. We can start fresh in the morning, maybe at the B&B if the management doesn’t mind.”

“I’ll call Jewel—Jewel Lawson, the owner and housekeeper. I’m sure she won’t mind. Your group will all but fill the place up anyway, and there won’t be any other guests to disturb.”

“Thanks, Sheriff.”

“Call me Des, please. All of you. We’re pretty damn informal here, as you’ve seen. Hell, I have only six full-time deputies, plus a handful of part-timers I don’t even allow to carry guns.” He shook his head. “We’re so in over our heads with this one it’s pathetic.”

“That’s the truth,” Scanlon murmured.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Quentin advised them. “Nobody’s really prepared when monsters come to visit. You just hope they’re passing through and go away soon.”

“Leaving as few bodies as possible behind them?” Duncan said.

“That’s the idea. With a little luck, we won’t need to stay more than a night or two in this B&B of yours.”

But restless as cops tended to be with a job at hand—wanting to get at the thing even though there wasn’t, as yet, much to work with—they weren’t in any hurry to get out to the B&B and settle in.

DeMarco said, “With the remains on their way to the state medical examiner and no hit yet on either set of prints, all we’ve got is speculation. And way too many questions.”

Quentin nodded. “The biggest one in my mind—at the moment, at least—being why Reese and Hollis were shot at. If that was our killer, it was a boneheaded move, drawing attention to his presence.”

“Maybe he panicked,” Diana suggested.

“Maybe. But if we’re right about the distances involved out there, this guy really is a pro, a trained sniper. And they aren’t generally given to panic.”

DeMarco, an experienced sniper in his previous military life, said, “It does take discipline. And discipline tends to breed patience.”

“Or a reasonable facsimile of it,” Miranda, a certified sharpshooter, agreed. “What bothers me is that the profile is wrong.”

DeMarco was nodding. “If a sniper that good is going to kill, chances are it’ll be with his rifle and scope, and from a maximum distance. Hands off, cold and clean, as per his training. Not up close and personal.”

Miranda said, “Those people were all but butchered, and that’s definitely up close and personal.”

Diana said, “Maybe killing from a distance stopped being satisfying somewhere along the way. Maybe he decided to get his hands bloody.”

“Serial killers do evolve,” Miranda agreed.

Duncan stared at her. “Serial killers? Don’t there have to be at least three killings with very similar M.O.s before anybody can declare there’s a serial killer at work?”

Miranda looked steadily back at him. “That ongoing case I mentioned?”

“The one that had you over in North Carolina this morning, before I called? What about it?”

“It may turn out to be the same case, Des.”

Duncan looked around the table at the other agents, one at a time, then focused on her face. “There’ve been more bodies, more victims? Found like these two people were?”

“Found in similar ways, at dump sites in three states. Victims who were tortured before death.”

The sheriff was scowling. He leaned back a bit, swore beneath his breath when his chair groaned loudly, and said, “I admit I don’t know much about torture, but we’ve all heard more than we’d like to about it in recent years. I gather this isn’t the sort of torture done to get information?”

Miranda shook her head. “As far as we’ve been able to determine, the victims possessed no valuable information on any subject of interest, no connections or ties to organized crime or the military or any paramilitary or terrorist organization. They were average, ordinary, everyday citizens, innocent of anything except whatever it was about them that drew the attention of a killer. A killer who apparently likes to watch his victims suffer.”

“Jesus Christ.” Duncan looked more than a little queasy. “You hear about that kind of thing, see it in the news, but you never expect it to turn up in your own backyard.”

“We don’t know that it has, especially given this new wrinkle of a pro with sniper training. There’s been no sign of those particular skills up to now. But it’s a possibility, especially if these two victims have no connection to each other and no discernible enemies.”

“So what you’re telling me is that either your serial killer has wandered into—or through—my little town or else I have a homegrown killer on the wrong side of sanity with a pretty vicious grudge against this man and woman.” Duncan frowned suddenly. “A man and woman who, so far, haven’t turned up on any missing persons reports in the area; I have one of my deputies sifting, for at least the third time, through reports going back a month.”

“The male victim was probably alive and well yesterday,” Miranda reminded him, “so may not have been missed yet, especially if he lived alone or took regular business trips. The woman, on the other hand…”

“Dead at least a few days,” DeMarco contributed. “Maybe as long as a week. Even if she lived alone and had no family, she most likely had a job and should have been missed by now.”

Hollis leaned forward, winced as her chair protested loudly, and said, “Maybe we haven’t cast out a large enough net. These were clearly dump sites, and we have no way of knowing where the vies were actually killed; there’s nothing to say they’re even local.”

“True,” Miranda agreed. “It was certainly true of at least three of the previous victims, assuming the same killer. Until we get positive I.D.s, we have no way of knowing where they belonged. We should check missing persons reports in a radius of at least a hundred miles.”

“For starters,” Quentin murmured.

“I have my people on that already,” the sheriff said. “We’ll expand the search, though.”

Several chairs squawked as their occupants moved restlessly, and Miranda rose with a rueful smile. “In the meantime, I think we’ve done all we can for today. The B&B is just up the street, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, three blocks up the hill, an easy walk. And you’ve got two good restaurants between here and there, both serving decent food and both keeping reasonable hours.”

“We may decide to take your suggestion and set up a kind of command center at the B&B, assuming it’s okay with the management, and the technical specs allow us to use our laptops and other electronics. I’ll call you in the morning and let you know.”

As the others rose to the accompaniment of creaks and groans, Duncan sighed and said, “I think that’s your best bet. We have some fairly undependable high-speed Internet access here, but Jewel’s place was renovated a couple years back and she installed all the latest tech stuff, including wireless.”

“Sounds good. You know where we are if anything new turns up overnight; otherwise, we’ll see you in the morning.”

Duncan escorted the agents as far as his small bullpen, where one of his part-time deputies, without the sense to even try to look professional, was leaned back in his chair, feet up on his desk, reading a magazine. A second part-timer was staring intently at her computer monitor.

The two full-time deputies for this shift were out on patrol.

Without bothering to remove his feet or put down his magazine, Dale McMurry said, “Somebody delivered rental SUVs for the agents, Sheriff. I was told to say they’re parked out front, keys under the mats.”

Before Duncan could think too much about “rental” vehicles in a town that didn’t boast a rental company or ask any questions about who had delivered said vehicles, Miranda said pleasantly, “We’ll just leave them out front tonight, if they won’t be a bother parked there.”

“No, no bother. Lock ‘em up, but they shouldn’t be disturbed here overnight. See you folks in the morning.”

As the doors closed behind the agents, McMurry said plaintively, “I thought feds always wore them jackets with FBI written in huge letters on the back.”

Bobbie Silvers said, “You watch too much TV. This is a small town, and they don’t want to stand out any more than they have to.”

I’m going to lose her to some outfit in a much larger town. Duncan sighed and said to her, “Any luck?”

“No, sorry, Sheriff. I’ve been through all the calls we’ve gotten in the last month—four times now, just to be sure I didn’t miss anything—and not a single still-missing person is in here.”

“Okay. Reach out to the surrounding counties, at least a hundred-mile-radius. Sheriff’s departments, police departments, highway patrol. And the state bureau too. Find out who’s on their missing-persons list and whether any of the names might even possibly match up with our victims.”

“Will do, Sheriff.”

“Neil, you go on home and get some rest,” Duncan told his chief deputy. “I’ll need you back here first thing tomorrow.”

“Right.”

McMurry said, “What about me?”

Duncan stared at him. “You get your feet off the desk, Dale. And then I want you to find some WD-40 and go into the conference room and oil every one of those goddamn chairs.”

BJ watched.

The building was old, its bricks musty and, on this northern side that would be shadowed even in daylight, smelling faintly of damp. But in the little-used alleyway between it and the building beside it, he was surrounded by darkness and felt sheltered.

Protected.

He watched them as he’d learned long ago to watch a dog whose temperament he was uncertain of, almost from the corner of his eye rather than directly. He glanced at them and then away, allowed his gaze to roam among them without lingering, avoiding a stare that one or more of them would likely sense.

They were special, and he had to be careful; he had learned that much today.

But it was surprising how much one could see only in glances.

Five of them, wearing casual clothing designed to help them blend in or, at the very least, not stand out as feds. Two men, three women. Mostly, he judged, in their thirties, people who moved with the ease of those comfortable inside their trained and active bodies. Strolling along the sidewalk, moving slowly up the hill toward the B&B where he knew they would be staying, at least for tonight.

They had stopped at one of the two restaurants along the way from the sheriff’s department, sitting at one table near the front window as they ate and talked among themselves. He had seen a few smiles but judged that they had not engaged in a great deal of meaningless social conversation.

He wondered if, in another place or time, they would be friends.

Still, there was a look about them he recognized. Like soldiers in the same battle unit or cops walking the same beat, they were all focused on the same things, the same tasks and information. And they carried that air about them no matter how relaxed they might appear, that inner wariness and tension, that alertness to their surroundings.

To danger.

The slightly taller of the two men was the least successful at hiding the coiled spring of readiness inside him. Every move he made—even simply walking with a cat-footed lightness—gave it away. He had good instincts, very good instincts. And quite probably more than mere instincts.

Otherwise he never would have been able to save the Templeton woman’s life.

“Take her out if you get the chance,”

More than one chance had come and gone. But there would doubtless be another.

He watched them walking away from him. It was a short street, all things considered, with short small-town blocks that city blocks would have sneered at, and he was able to watch the group, without leaving the shelter of his alley, all the way to the B&B.

An easy building to get inside. He had, the previous night, and had taken the time to look around, so he was completely familiar with the layout. Just in case.

He watched them go up the steps to the wide front porch and linger momentarily in the welcoming light at the door before being invited inside. The door closed behind them, and they passed from his view.

Just about to turn and go on to other chores scheduled for tonight, he was halted by a glimpse of movement in the shadows of the sidewalk near the B&B. He had to narrow his gaze and concentrate intensely, but within seconds he made out the shape of another watcher flitting along in the dark and quiet wake of the feds.

He wasn’t sure if the other watcher was a man or a woman; whoever it was clung to the shadows as though a part of them, giving away little of any other substance or shape. And when that moving shadow settled down at last, it was in one corner of the small front yard the B&B boasted, among tall shrubbery and inside the wrought-iron fence that was more decorative than protective.

A car drove quietly past, and the watcher noted that the other one was so completely hidden by the shrubbery or by skill that even the passing headlights failed to expose him—or her.

He hesitated a moment longer than he should have, then withdrew slowly back through the alley to where he had parked his own car, mentally adding another player to the game. An unknown player, with unknown motives.

Interesting…

It was nearly ten o’clock that evening when Miranda stepped from her room out onto the second-floor balcony that wrapped three sides of the Victorian-era building. She wasn’t yet dressed for bed, which was a good thing since the temperature hovered just a few degrees above freezing. Comfortable in her sweater and jeans, she leaned against the high railing and looked up and down the very quiet, softly lit Main Street of Serenade.

“Like a postcard, isn’t it?” The low voice came from behind her, near the corner of the building where the balcony turned along its side. “The perfect come-and-visit-us view the chamber of commerce wants the outside world to see.”

Miranda didn’t look around but replied quietly, “They so often do, these sweet little towns—look picture-postcard perfect and so inviting. Maybe that’s why the monsters hunt in them.” It was a truth she had learned several years before. {see Out of the Shadows}

“Yeah. Isolated geographically and technologically. Where, even if people lock their doors, the locks are easy to pick or break and the only other security consists of the family dog sleeping at the foot of the bed. A town small enough that most know their neighbors but not so small that strangers are seen as a threat—especially since they bring tourist dollars when they come to visit the Blue Ridge.”

“Not many visit here, I’d say. Only a couple more B&Bs in the area, both smaller than this one.”

“And one fleabag motel. Yeah, I saw that.”

“Figured you would. What else did you see?”

“You guys were being watched. All the way from the sheriff’s department. While you were in the restaurant too.”

“The alley on the other side of the street?”

“Yeah, he’s not as bright as he thinks. Which does not, of course, make him any less dangerous. More so, probably. I let him catch a glimpse of me just to give him pause. Not enough to I.D. me, of course. Anyway, he’s at that fleabag motel. Paid cash, used an alias to check in. John Smith, if you can believe that. I’m figuring he’s down for the night.”

“Was he today’s shooter?”

“Pretty sure.”

“You found his vantage point?”

“Gabe did.” Gabriel Wolf was a Haven operative. As was his twin sister, Roxanne. And they formed a unique team.

“Was Quentin right?”

“Yeah. An old hunter’s blind. No real evidence to be found, including foot-, tire, or hoofprints. Nothing in the blind worth taking to court except one little smudge Gabe believes could have been made by binoculars.”

“So we were watched all day.”

“Seems likely. The guy must have hiked in and out, sticking to all the granite outcroppings and ridges to avoid leaving prints. And judging by how good he was at that, and how twisty and difficult his path must have been, our guess is he’s determined and disciplined as hell and he knows his way around these parts.”

“This area specifically?”

“Yeah.”

“Then he probably isn’t the killer we’ve been tracking.”

“Unless you find something that more strongly ties the bodies here to those we’ve been following, our guess is not. The one thing our killer’s previous dump sites have in common is that they were handy to roads. The two vics today, not so much. But that isn’t really good news. Given the distance between his position and the second dump site, this guy today is a pro sniper, and I mean a well-trained and well-equipped one. Probably military at some point, maybe recently. And soldiers with his type of skills tend not to stop the work just because they take off the uniform.”

“A private contractor.”

“The war created a lot of them. And with the current lousy economy, legit jobs are getting harder to come by.”

“Paid assassin?”

“That’s our take. DeMarco is a better person to ask about that sort of thing, but it makes sense given the skill necessary to even attempt that shot today. If we’re right, Hollis may have a price on her head. It’s the simplest explanation. Thing is—”

“The simplest explanation,” Miranda finished, “is seldom the right one in our world. For one thing, why single out Hollis? She’s taken the brunt of things more often than any other agent, but not usually because she was on the offensive. She’s stayed out of the spotlight. She’s made enemies the unit has made, but not on her own behalf. She’s never been a primary agent on any investigation, not so far, and we haven’t sent her in undercover. Under wraps for all the good that did, but not undercover.”

“There’s that. All that. What we can’t get past is that he watched all day. Hollis was visible a lot of that time, close to motionless long enough and often enough to give him a clear shot—if that was his only goal, his only reason for waiting out there all day. But he did wait. Until late in the day and after the second victim was found. Almost as if that was what he was waiting for.”

“Maybe hoping we wouldn’t find that victim. Or maybe what Diana suggested. Mind games.”

“Could be. Especially if he recognized any of you as belonging to the SCU.” There was a pause, and then, wryly, “It’s getting a bit like the Old West these days, only in your case the hotshot young gunslinger riding into town to challenge the famous veteran is a twisted serial killer eager to pit his smarts and skills up against the SCU.”

“I really hope that isn’t the case.”

“Yeah.”

Miranda was silent for long minutes, her gaze roaming absently up and down the quiet, peaceful scene of Main Street, Small Town, USA. Finally she said, “If Hollis was the target, she’s become a threat to someone. A very specific threat to a very specific someone. And I’m finding it difficult to believe that would be wholly unconnected to our investigation these last weeks.”

“It doesn’t seem likely.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“If nothing else, the shooter could have been following you two as you pursued the investigation. Under orders not to do anything until…”

“That is the question, isn’t it? Until what? Maybe… somewhere along the way, through some action or simply by her presence, Hollis became too much of a liability to the killer. And yet she has some of the least-invasive, least-threatening abilities. She’s a medium and a self-healer, and she sees auras. Where’s the threat in any of that?”

“Something we can’t know until we find out who—or what—she threatens.”

Miranda drew a deep breath and then allowed it to escape, misting in front of her face. “Yeah. And in the meantime, we have these murders to investigate.”

“That we do.”

“While we keep Hollis safe.”

“Might be easier just to take the shooter out.”

“Easier, but probably not the right call. Take him out and chances are somebody else will be sent to do the job. Somebody we might not see until too late. At least this guy is an enemy we’ve spotted, one we can keep an eye on.”

“True. So we watch him? Stick close?”

“Like white on rice. And, Roxanne—be careful. Be very careful. You and Gabe both.”

“Copy that. Get some rest tonight, will you? All you guys are running on fumes, and that is not a good thing.”

“I know.”

“You have guns. Dangerous things in sleep-deprived hands.”

“And you’ve made your point.”

“Good. We’ll watch tonight. Time enough tomorrow to try to figure things out.”

“I hope you’re right,” Miranda said.

“That you’ll figure things out?”

“That we have time enough to do it.”

For a long time now, Diana hadn’t needed sedatives to sleep, but she still required time to wind down and something boring to occupy her mind while her body gradually relaxed and her nearly ever-present guard came down. The usual remedies, like a hot bath or shower and glass of warm milk, didn’t do much for her.

For her, either a few games of solitaire—the old-fashioned way, with actual cards—or a boring documentary on TV tended to work more often than not.

On this particular night, it was “not.” Weary though she was, nothing seemed to work.

Her room in the B&B, one of only three doubles with two queen-sized beds, looked out onto a pretty little courtyard at the rear of the building. It was pleasant and comfortable, and since each guest room was a suite with its own tiny sitting area and generous bathroom, and there were eight of the suites, each agent had his or her own space. That was not a little thing, they had discovered, to have some room and privacy during an investigation. It provided at least the illusion of normalcy.

Most of the time.

And it helped. Most of the time.

But Diana didn’t think the problem tonight was her surroundings. She’d been on edge since she and Quentin joined this investigation a couple of weeks before, and she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because this was the first real SCU case she’d been assigned, and she was still uncertain of her training and abilities.

Maybe it was because her relationship with Quentin was still tentative and wary.

Maybe it was the case itself, twisted and depressing as serial-murder investigations tended to be. With little evidence and few leads, she had the hollow feeling they were pretty much chasing their own tails, waiting for a break in the case that might never happen, while viciously murdered and tortured victims were being cast aside like garbage and contemptuously left for them to find.

Contemptuously?

It was an easy guess, she decided, requiring no particular skill as a profiler—which she wasn’t. But she had begun reading up on the subject, as she was reading up on so many others, and what stuck in her mind was the accepted fact that most if not all serial killers developed and followed very specific, unique rituals—many involving burial or whatever means they chose to dispose of bodies. Some rituals were even weirdly respectful, with victims dressed in clean clothing and laid out in carefully dug graves.

This killer very clearly didn’t see his victims as people deserving of any respect, not before death and not after.

Diana realized she was endlessly shuffling her deck of playing cards and tossed them aside with a half-conscious curse. She leaned against the pillows banked behind her and stared across the room at an old, mostly black-and-white documentary on TV about World War II.

So he feels contempt for his victims. No big surprise there. Nothing helpful there. Miranda probably had that little bit of information nailed with the first victim. If not before.

The real problem, she decided reluctantly, was that she felt pretty damn useless. Despite intensive training over the last months, she didn’t feel qualified to investigate a single murder, let alone a string of them. Even as…just one of the team. Not only had she never been any sort of cop, but her entire adult life—right up until little more than a year ago—was more dreamlike than real in her mind.

Except for scattered instances of a psychic ability she was still coming to terms with—which had been notably absent for weeks now—she had literally sleepwalked through her life.

And Diana wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t still doing that, at least some of the time. How else could she explain her very calm reactions today—to the bodies, the bear, Hollis nearly being shot?

Jesus, I didn’t even ask Hollis if she was okay.

Not that Hollis had seemed all that concerned about getting shot at, but despite the other woman’s casual friendliness and humor, Diana didn’t think she knew any of the agents well enough to manage a decent guess at what they might be feeling at any given moment.

Except Quentin. Maybe.

But that wasn’t what was really bothering her.

Am I still sleepwalking? Is that what’s going on here? Why I feel so uneasy and uncertain all the time? So… out of place and unsure of myself? Given the opportunity to live a full life, to get into the game, did I opt out?

No matter what Quentin says, was Dad right when he said I wasn’t cut out for this sort of job, right to believe I wouldn’t be able to handle it? Is that why I’ve been so hesitant, so uncertain? Do I believe him?

Is that why I’ve been pushing Quentin away?

She didn’t want to admit that might be true. Didn’t even want to think it might be true.

Decided not to think about it at all.

Oh, yeah, that’s the grown-up way to handle it. Just put your head in the sand.

She told her inner self to shut up and rummaged among the rumpled bedclothes for the TV remote. Then, determinedly keeping her mind blank, she began to channel-surf, looking for something even more boring than an old documentary about World War II.