Free Blood Ties by Kay Hooper Page A

not. I really, really hope not.” Hollis didn’t as a rule give much away in terms of her expression, but the strain in her voice was impossible to miss, and her eyes were huge.
    Diana looked around them. They stood at what appeared to be an intersection of two seemingly endless corridors. Each corridor was hospital-clean and gleaming even in this dull gray twilight, and each was lined with closed doors that were all identically featureless with the exception of gleaming grayish handles.
    “Looks ordinary enough to me,” she said, returning her gaze to Hollis’s very still face. “I mean, no weirder than other places I’ve visited in the gray time.”
    “But you’ve never been here before?”
    “I don’t think so. Why? Where is this place?”
    Hollis drew a breath and let it out slowly. “The first time I saw it, I was in somebody else’s dream. * Found out later it’s a real place. And the real place is… Once upon a time, it was an asylum. Back in October, I met the monster who was caged there. He strapped me down to a table, and…”
    “Hollis?”
    “And he almost killed me.”
    R eese DeMarco leaned on an elbow as he studied the map spread across his bed, his gaze moving intently from one highlighted spot to the next. Two of the highlights were close together and represented the two bodies found in Pageant County today. Or, rather, the previous day, since it was after midnight now. The other six were spread farther apart, over three southeastern states.
    He was looking for a pattern.
    He wasn’t finding one.
    Not that it surprised him. The SCU was made up of serious and experienced monster hunters with the added edge of psychic abilities, and they were successful because they were very, very good; if a rational pattern in this madness had existed, the efforts of the rest of the team likely would have found it by now.
    Eight murders committed in just over eight weeks. Five women, three men. All apparently tortured—with a singular creativity—before they were killed, and the most recent two further mangled and defiled after they were dead. No connection between the victims. No real enemies in any of their backgrounds individually, and virtually no commonalities among them as a group except for race: All had been white.
    And all, with the exception of the most recent two, had been dumped like garbage by the side of various roads.
    DeMarco frowned as he thought about that one more time. Until Serenade, the victims had been, as far as they could tell, shoved out of a car, possibly even a moving car.
    Which, as Miranda had noted, pointed to the possibility of a second murderer, or at least an accomplice, since shoving a body out of a moving car was not an easy thing to do, and shoving one out of a stationary car required at least a few moments and some strength—or help.
    That, more than anything else, had made this case, this investigation, unusual even for the SCU. One serial killer rampaging through their towns or counties was virtually always more than the local or state police could handle; they simply weren’t set up, with the procedures, the equipment, or the personnel and experience, to track down a killer of that sort, especially if he was only passing through and had no connection to the area.
    Two serial killers, or one with an accomplice, put them into a smaller category than the relatively small one of serial killer: A conspiracy to commit murder was rare, and a serial killer with a partner or a sidekick was even more so. Only a handful of such cases had ever been documented by law enforcement.
    “We’re keeping the possibility to ourselves for now,” Miranda had told DeMarco earlier in the evening, just as she had told the other agents on the case. “As well as we can, anyway. No leaks to the media. Nothing written in our reports. We don’t even discuss it among ourselves unless we’re absolutely sure we’re alone. And that includes not telling local police—unless and until we know