Blood Dreams (2 page)

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 re-creating 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 circumstances 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.”

2

T
HE BOX CUTTER’S
blade was new and sharp, so he used it with care as he cut around the part of the photo’s image containing the girl.

She was pretty.

She was always pretty.

He enjoyed her curves. It was one reason he took such care in cutting the images out of the photographs and newspapers, because his knife could slowly—so slowly—caress the curves.

He was careful even with her face, though the curves of nose and chin and jaw barely caused a ripple inside him.

But her throat. The very slight, gentle curves of her breasts, just that faint hint of womanliness. The delicate flare of hips. Those his knife lingered on.

Sometimes he scanned the pictures into his computer and manipulated the images to suit a variety of fantasies. He could replace clothed flesh with naked, change all the different hairstyles to the short, dark, nearly boyish look she almost always wore. He could pose her any way he liked, do wild things with color and texture. He had even found autopsy photos and superimposed her head onto those bodies that were laid out, their exposed organs gleaming in the cold, clinical light.

But that sort of thing, he had discovered, gave him little satisfaction. It was too…remote.

Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was something else.

All he knew was that the computer, while useful as a research tool, had proved worse than useless in satisfying his urges.

But the photos…

He finished the last cut on this particular photo and carefully lifted her out. A candid shot, it showed her coming out of a pharmacy, juggling bags, her face preoccupied.

Though it was October, the day was warm enough that she was wearing short sleeves and a light summer skirt, with sandals.

He thought her toenails were painted. Deep red, or perhaps bright pink. He was almost sure of it, though the picture didn’t confirm that pleasant suspicion.

He held the cutout in his cupped hands for a moment, just enjoying it. His thumb rubbed the glossy paper gently, tracing the flare of her skirt, the bare thighs below.

He studied every detail, memorizing.

He closed his eyes.

And in his mind he touched her.

Soft skin. Warm. Almost humming with life.

The blade cold in his other hand.

His lips parted, breath coming faster.

Soft skin. Warm. A jerk now. The hum becoming a primal sound of terror and pain that sent fire licking through his body.

Soft skin. Wet. Slick.

Red.

He smeared the red over her jerking breast. Watched it glisten in the light as she moved. Listened to the
un…un…un…
grunts that were primitive sounds of agony. They thrummed in his ears like wings, like a heartbeat, like his own quickening pulse.

The fire in his body burned hotter and hotter, his breath came faster, the blade in his hand penetrating in forceful thrusts, again and again and again—

He barely heard his own hoarse cry of release above the wordless, keening sounds she made dying.

Soft skin.

Wet.

Slick.

Red.

3

Wednesday, October 8

C
OMING BACK TO
Venture, Georgia, a relatively small town not far outside Atlanta, was not something Dani had wanted to do, so she hadn’t exactly planned for it. Her apartment was still in Atlanta, along with most of her clothes and other belongings; she had packed as if for a weeklong vacation somewhere.

That had been nearly a month ago.

Not that clothing was a problem, given that she was living with her twin sister. But she and Paris had both worked very hard to have separate lives as adults, and living in the same house again wasn’t really helping sustain that determination.

In fact, it made it all too easy to slip back into girlhood habits and routines. Like this weekly trip to Smith’s Pharmacy downtown, because it was the only place in Venture that sold honest-to-God homemade ice cream from the lunch counter, which still did brisk business, and the twins had a lifetime habit of ice cream before bed every night.

Dani had missed this in Atlanta. Not that she hadn’t continued the habit; she literally couldn’t sleep without at least a small bowl of ice cream at night. But she’d had to substitute brand names for the homemade stuff, and there was simply no comparison in her mind.

Jeez.

Ice cream.

Thirty-one years old, and the treat she looked forward to all day long was ice cream shared with her twin sister before bedtime.

Bedtime at eleven o’clock most nights.

“I’m pathetic,” she muttered, and dropped two of the bags she was juggling while trying to dig her car keys from the bottom of her purse.

“Let me.”

Dani froze, watching a pair of very male hands pick up the dropped bags. Her gaze tracked upward slowly, following as he straightened to note that he was still whipcord-lean, that his shoulders were still wide and powerful, that he was still the sort of good-looking they wrote about in romance novels.

His dark hair was just beginning to gray at the temples, and there might have been a few more laugh lines at the corners of his steady blue eyes, but he still had the face of a heartbreaker.

Marcus Purcell.

Venture was a small-enough town that she had expected to run into him sooner or later. She had hoped for later.

Much later.

“Hey, Dani. How’s tricks?”

The old childhood greeting brought an unexpected lump to her throat, but she thought her voice was calm enough to hide that when she replied as she always had.

“The rabbit ran away, but I still have the top hat. How’re things in your magic show?”

“Not much of an act these days, I’m afraid. The beautiful assistant got a better offer, and after that there didn’t seem to be much point.”

And there it was.

Trust Marc not to pussyfoot around a subject she would have avoided as long as necessary.

Avoidance was her defense mechanism, but hardly his.

“It wasn’t a better offer,” she heard herself say. “It was just…a change I needed. We both needed. You wanted to stay here, and I didn’t.”

“You never asked, Dani.”

That shook her, but only for a moment. “Your roots were always here. I didn’t have to ask. And you knew once Paris decided to stay here, I—”

“Wouldn’t.” He shrugged. “And yet here you are.”

“Visiting. Because Paris needs me.”

“Yeah, who’s getting divorced is always a hot topic around here, so I heard. Tough on her. But she’s better off without him.”

“Oh? And why is that?” She was willing to talk about anything else, even her sister’s painful divorce. Which told her something unsettling about her own feelings.

“Because there are just some things a man shouldn’t say about his wife. Not even when he’s drunk. Maybe especially not when he’s drunk. And never to another man.”

Dani couldn’t bring herself to ask out loud but knew the question showed.

“Not much I’m willing to repeat, Dani. But he talked a lot, and probably in bars up and down the East Coast since he traveled so much. He said she was a literal ball and chain. Holding him down. Said he couldn’t have anything to himself. Not his thoughts, not even his dreams. No private space she couldn’t get into. He said she made his skin crawl sometimes.”

“I knew he had trouble handling it, but…”

“There was no handling, believe me. Not for Dan. It was something he never accepted, never even got used to. Something he hated. Which is bad enough, considering he married Paris anyway. Telling strangers in bars that your wife really does know what you’re thinking and dreaming and it makes you sick to your stomach is stepping way over the line.” Marc shrugged. “Whether anybody ever listened to him or just chalked it up to drunken ramblings doesn’t mitigate the fact that he acted like a jerk. He was drunk a lot toward the end. Spent more than one night in my jail, sobering up.”

Paris had told her that Marc was sheriff now, but Dani felt the need to comment. And to change the subject. “I never thought you’d end up in law enforcement.”

“Yeah, well, things change.”

Not everything changed, Dani thought, but she felt unnerved and uncertain and was very aware that they were standing on the sidewalk in front of the pharmacy in downtown Venture, in full view of God and half the town’s citizens, and that everybody south of God was taking it all in with interest.

“I should be going,” she said abruptly. “My ice cream is melting.”

To her utter relief, he didn’t respond to that lame comment as it probably deserved, but merely said, “You were digging for your keys, I think. Find them?”

Dani produced the keys, used the remote to unlock the Jeep parked only a few yards away, and, as its headlights flashed in acknowledgment, accepted the bags he held out to her.

“Take care, Dani.”

It held the sound of finality, something she should have accepted gratefully, but he hadn’t moved more than a few steps away from her when she heard herself speak. And even as she did, she was aware of a fatalistic certainty that she was turning a critical corner in her life.

And had no idea what lay ahead.

“Marc?”

He paused and looked back at her, eyebrows lifting but otherwise expressionless.

“Has anything…bad happened in Venture lately? In the county? I mean, anything really bad? I read the paper, but—”

“Are you talking about a crime?”

“Yeah.”

He was frowning now. “Nothing really out of the ordinary. A few robberies, domestic disturbances, possession, a couple of meth labs busted.”

“Nothing else?”

Slowly, he replied, “Two missing persons I’ve been uneasy about.”

“Women?”

“One teenage girl; her parents believe she ran away a couple of weeks ago. One wife whose very scared husband insists would never have left him of her own free will.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Last week. And no sign of her yet. What do you know, Dani?”

“Nothing. I don’t…know…anything. Just…be careful, that’s all.”

He took a step back toward her and kept his voice low even though nobody else was near. “What have you dreamed, Dani?”

She couldn’t look away from him. And she couldn’t lie.

Not to Marc.

“There’s nothing concrete. No name or face. Not even a crime I can be sure of, except…except that it’s bad.” She thought of a missing teenager, a missing wife, and felt cold despite the warm early-afternoon October sun. “I know that it’s bad, that it’s a poison here. Somebody evil, I don’t know who.”

“Dani, we both know evil doesn’t wear horns and a tail to signal that it’s with us. If there’s anything else you can tell me—”

“There isn’t. Not yet, at least.”

Marc’s frown deepened, and he took another step toward her. “You’ve had this dream more than once?”

She nodded, unwilling to admit that it was pretty much a nightly occurrence now.

“Okay. Tonight, come get me. Take me in with you.”

Dani realized only later that she wasn’t nearly as shocked by the idea as she should have been. In that moment, however, she just shook her head and said, “I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can. You’ve done it before.”

“That was years ago, Marc. Another lifetime ago.”
And I had no idea how dangerous it was.

He took another step, and now he was standing in front of her, so close she had to tilt her head to look up at his face.

“It never made
my
skin crawl, Dani,” he said softly. “It never creeped me out. It was never something I hated. It never made me think of you as anything other than the unique and remarkable woman I loved. Just in case you didn’t know that.”

She had the vague suspicion that her mouth was open.

“Come get me tonight,” Marc repeated. He turned and walked away.

Somehow Dani managed to get herself and her bags into the Jeep. She thought the homemade raisin cake she’d bought was probably crushed, because she’d been holding on to those bags for dear life, and she was sure now that the ice cream was melting. She didn’t much care about either.

Just in case she didn’t know.

Just in case she didn’t know.

Jesus Christ Almighty.

She was still rattled when her cell phone rang, and it took several rings for her to dig it out of her purse. Making a mental note to get another damn purse or at least to better organize this one, she answered, knowing without the need for caller I.D. that it was Paris.

“We have visitors,” Paris announced without preamble.

Dani closed her eyes. “Don’t tell me.”

“Afraid so. Miranda Bishop is here. With John.”

D
eputy Jordan Swain prided himself on his professionalism. His dedication and intelligence. His rapier wit. And his ability to look like a cool stud in his uniform, thanks to the kind genetics of blond good looks and a rigorous morning workout routine.

He was also well known for his cast-iron stomach, and it was that which failed him late Wednesday afternoon.

“Sorry about that,” he muttered, as he returned from his hasty visit to the bushes a few yards away and well outside the yellow crime-scene tape.

With a grunt, the sheriff said, “Well, at least you made it outside the tape. I would have been pissed if you’d contaminated the scene, Jordan.”

“How could I possibly have contaminated it any more than it already is?”

“Funny.”

“Actually, it isn’t.” Jordan swallowed and tried not to think about all the blood and viscera spattered and scattered around them. Which was more than difficult since it
was
all around them and pretty damn well impossible to miss.

The house—vacant and with a
FOR SALE
sign in the neat front yard—was at the end of a long driveway and on considerable acreage, which was probably why nobody had noticed the butchery that had taken place in the well-maintained, previously very lovely and peaceful backyard patio/pool area.

Nobody, that is, until the gardener had shown up for his routine maintenance work and rounded the back corner of the house, his wheelbarrow filled with the tools and implements he needed to begin getting the plantings ready for the coming winter.

The wheelbarrow, overturned, lay where he had abandoned it just outside the pool area, when he had fled after his first glimpse of the carnage.

And it was a scene of carnage. The comparison that had sent Jordan fleeing into the bushes to lose his lunch was that it looked rather like someone had fed a medium-size cow into a wood chipper.

“Jesus, Marc, what kind of animal would do something like this?”

“The kind we have to catch.” Marc held up a clear plastic evidence bag containing a very large, very bloody hunting knife with a serrated edge. He studied it with a frown. “How many places you figure sell these?”

“Oh, hell, at least a dozen or more in the county. Not counting pawnshops.”

Marc nodded. “That was my take. We’re not likely to get any kind of useful lead from this. Plus, leaving it right here at the scene marks the perp as either very stupid—or very sure we won’t be able to trace the knife back to him.”

“I hate to think of anybody this vicious being smart too,” Jordan said, “but I think we’d regret assuming otherwise.”

“Yeah. Still, we’ll find out what we can.”

“Might get lucky,” Jordan agreed somewhat dubiously.

Marc sent him a wry look, then summoned with a gesture one of his two crime-scene technicians and handed over the knife. “Shorty, you or Teresa find anything we can’t see for ourselves?”

“Not so far, Sheriff.” Shorty, who in the grand tradition of nicknames towered over both other men and, indeed, most people, blinked sleepy eyes and appeared to stifle a yawn. “Might have to move the tape back a few yards, though; I think I’ve found a couple pieces of her right at the periphery of the area.”

Jordan, who had been about to make a caustic demand to know if they were keeping Shorty up, absorbed this new information with another sick twist of his stomach.

Stoic, Marc said, “So the vic
was
a woman.”

“Hard to tell without the…relevant parts,” Shorty said, “but Teresa thinks so. Me too. We found the tip of a finger with a polished acrylic nail still attached. A pinky, I think.”

Jordan retired to the bushes again.

Shorty looked after him briefly, then directed his attention back to the sheriff’s expressionless face. “My excuse is five years of morgue duty in Atlanta,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Rage,” Marc Purcell said.

“Ah. You wear your mad like a shield. I’ve known other cops could do that.” Shorty nodded, studying the sheriff openly. This fairly rural county tended to see few murder cases, and most of those were the domestic or grudge type, where the killer was as obvious as the victim was, as like as not still standing over the body, looking bewildered, smoking gun or bloody knife in hand.

Not so hard to solve, those cases.

In the two years Shorty had been with the Prophet County Sheriff’s Department, this was the first real murder scene he had worked with Purcell.

Interesting guy, Shorty thought. Born here, raised here. Went to a top university in North Carolina, earned a law degree, and returned to Venture to practice. Word around the department was that he’d always been slated to hold some kind of elected office, that it was a family thing going back generations, but everybody seemed a bit surprised he’d chosen law enforcement over other political opportunities.