Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

Hollis wasn’t at all happy about that and wasn’t sure she wanted to even begin to examine her mixed emotions on the subject. So she was relieved when Quentin returned to their becoming-a-makeshift command center then, fax in hand.

“Things just got very interesting,” he announced, after a quick look around to make sure the agents were alone in the dining room.

“Don’t you mean more interesting?” Diana shook her head. “Because I haven’t been bored yet.”

“More interesting, then. Since we’re not completely up and running in the command center here, the sheriff faxed this through as soon as his office was notified. It looks like we’re being—you should excuse the word—haunted by Samuel. So to speak.”

Miranda looked up from the laptop she was in the process of setting up and frowned. “He does seem to be a part of this, at least in spirit, doesn’t he? What now?”

“If everybody recalls, we had one supposed church member AWOL and unaccounted for there at the end: Brian Seymour. Part of the security team.”

“In his own mind, maybe,” DeMarco muttered.

“Yeah, well, as we all know, he vanished without a trace. And we never found out for sure who, besides Samuel, he was working for.”

“Senator LeMott denied it was him,” Hollis noted.

“And since LeMott was straight about everything else—finally, when it was all over with—we pretty much have to believe him. So Seymour has been a very large question mark in a supposedly closed case.”

“Until now,” Diana prompted.

“Until now. Well, sort of. He’s still a question mark, only of a different kind. We finally got a hit on the prints from the male victim.” Quentin waved the fax he was holding. “Got his rap sheet right here. He is—or was—Brian Seymour, aka David Vaughan, the name he was born with. Nothing serious on the sheet, just some petty theft, B&E, minor assault. Dropped off the grid about five years ago, when the church records indicate that he went to work for Samuel.”

DeMarco leaned back in his chair with a lightly exhaled breath, eyes suddenly narrow in his usually expressionless face. Methodically, he said, “Somebody reported it to the Director when Galen was shot, and there were only three of us who witnessed that. Carl is still involved with the church—such as it is—so highly doubtful it was him. It wasn’t me. Brian’s disappearance marked him as the likely snitch. But there was no sign whatsoever that he was linked to the Bureau. No sign he ever acted as a police or other law-enforcement informant. In fact, despite his seemingly easygoing personality, the man was all but a ghost and too careful for me even to get a clear set of his prints.”

“Yeah,” Quentin said, “and we all know you took it personally that you were never able to track him down after that whole manufactured history of his fell apart.”

Ignoring that, DeMarco said, “And now, months later, he turns up as a victim in a serial-killer case we’re investigating? Unless there’s a connection we don’t yet know about, I’m guessing the odds against that have to be astronomical.”

Hollis said, “And it’s just plain weird. Very weird. It can’t be coincidental. Can it?”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” DeMarco said.

Quentin shook his head. “Neither do I. Not this kind, at any rate. So … two very different cases, one of them apparently solved months ago, just linked up. And what do we do with that?”

Speaking up finally, Miranda said, “We find out a hell of a lot more about the common denominator. David Vaughan: aka Brian Seymour.”

“Hey, what’d you do, pull a double shift?” Duncan asked, pausing in front of Bobbie Silvers’s desk.

“You said we could sign up for overtime if we wanted. I signed up.” Before he could protest further, Bobbie hurried to add, “I think maybe I found something interesting, Sheriff.”

“You mean about these murders?” He was honestly surprised, not because he doubted her investigative instincts but because she’d had so damn little to work with.

“Yes. At least—maybe.”

Duncan rested a hip on the edge of her desk. “Okay. What?”

Bobbie didn’t have to gather her thoughts; she’d been rehearsing what to say for more than two hours as she waited for him to arrive. “First, I reached out to all the other law-enforcement agencies, as ordered, and asked for any missing persons who might possibly fit our victims. Only I went five hundred miles out rather than a hundred.”

Duncan winced. “Given how little specific information we have, that must be some list.”

“More than a hundred names,” she admitted.

“That’s a hell of a long list, Bobbie,” he pointed out.

“Yeah. I didn’t want to try to eliminate any on my own, for obvious reasons. I don’t know enough about the victims. But every missing-persons report had snippets of additional information, some of it not listed in the computer databases but written in by the investigating officers. Years ago I had a really experienced cop tell me that there are always things in the paper file that don’t fit into any of the forms—some hunches by the investigating officer, naturally, but also bits of hard data. So I went looking for that kind of information.”

Duncan cocked his head as he studied her. “You got cops to dig out and read through files for you in the middle of the night?”

“I owe a deputy in the next county over a drink,” she said somewhat sheepishly. “The rest were mostly bored and willing to help out.”

Suddenly uneasy, Duncan said, “We’re not ready to go public with any of our speculation, Bobbie.”

She nodded. “I told them I was updating our missing-persons database and, because of spotty Internet out here, I had to do most of it manually. Boring second-shift work. They were sympathetic.”

“First spot comes open on the day shift is yours,” Duncan promised.

Bobbie grinned, then tried her best to recapture her professional air. “Well, I’m nowhere near done yet, but I did cover about two dozen of the reports so far, closest first. So within a fifty-mile radius, I’ve probably got detailed reports on two-thirds of the missing persons.”

“You’re not working three straight shifts,” Duncan warned her.

“Don’t worry, Sheriff; I’m so tired I wouldn’t even try. But I’ve got a start, and if you and the agents think it’s necessary, or even worthwhile, I’ll pick it back up when I come in this afternoon. That’s assuming the agents don’t take up where I left off and get it all finished by then.”

“Okay. So what in that two dozen reports so far struck you as interesting?”

“Just one report, actually. You know how things stick in your mind? Well, about a year ago, there was all that excitement over at The Lodge. Remember?” {see Chill of Fear}

“When that kind of thing happens practically in your backyard, you remember. It was a real mess. They found old bones on the grounds—and in some cave nobody knew about. Human bones. And they had a murder at the time. Somebody went nuts and killed one of the maids.” He frowned. “I seem to recall the feds were in on that one too.”

Bobbie was nodding. “One fed in particular—Quentin Hayes. The local investigating officer, Captain Nathan McDaniel, noted in the file that Agent Hayes had visited The Lodge several times over the years and that he had a childhood connection to the place. I… uh… read about it at the time. I was curious.”

“At the time” had been just after she got her job with the Pageant County Sheriff’s Department.

Duncan frowned but said mildly, “Don’t do that again, Bobbie. Use your position here to satisfy personal curiosity.”

Sheepish again, she said, “Yes, sir. I know better now, honest.”