Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

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.”