Кей Хупер - Blood Ties

It was also quite possibly the sort of plastic tie found commonly in boxes of garbage bags and in the gardening and home-improvement sections of most DIY stores.

Hollis pushed aside that wry realization and continued to study the remains. The bear, she decided, had… pawed… a bit, so it was difficult to even guess in what position she had been when she’d been dumped here. Right now she was more or less faceup, forearms, wrists, and hands mostly beneath her and legs twisted, splayed apart at the thigh area but tangled together around the ankles and feet.

There was no sign of another plastic tie, but Hollis wondered if the ankles had been bound as the wrists were. Possibly.

There was also, she realized suddenly, absolutely no sign of any clothing whatsoever. It made her throat tighten to think of a young woman, perhaps already dead or perhaps still alive, in agony and terrified, dumped here in a wilderness of dirt and vines, bound and naked. So unspeakably vulnerable. So very alone.

It stirred memories Hollis would have given much to forget.

“Hey.”

Hollis nearly jumped out of her skin. She looked up and was angrily aware of the crack in her voice when she demanded, “Where the hell did you come from?”

“WEST,” REESE DEMARCO REPLIED matter-of-factly. “I’d finished searching my grid and was heading back when I heard the shots.”

Of course it would have to be him . Hollis abruptly remembered that DeMarco was, among other things, telepathic, and she made rather a production of rising to her feet and brushing off the knee of her jeans.

“There was a bear,” she explained briefly. “We scared it off. Diana went to report while I waited here.”

“Ah.” He looked down at the remains, his coldly handsome face as usual utterly without expression. He was dressed as casually as the rest of the SCU team was today, in jeans and a white shirt underneath a lightweight windbreaker, but the informal attire did nothing to soften the almost military crispness of his stance and movements, that truly visible sense of considerable strength and the training and ability to know how best to use it.

Hollis had seen that in other ex-military types, but in DeMarco there was something just a little bit… excessive… in his straight posture and almost hypersensitivity to his surroundings. He seemed to her too alert, too ready to explode into action. He made her think of a cocked gun, and she had no idea whether a dangerous hair trigger lurked inside him.

She couldn’t see his aura unless he allowed her to.

He wasn’t allowing her to.

“I gather the bear discovered these remains?”

She shoved the oddly disjointed thoughts aside. He’s a telepath, remember? Don’t let him into your head . Not that she had any kind of a shield she could use to keep him out if he wanted in. Dammit. “Yeah.”

“Is that what brought you two so far off the trails?”

“Not exactly.”

His gaze shifted, pale blue eyes fixed intently on her face. “You know, we are on the same side, Hollis. You don’t have to be so guarded with me. I’m not trying to read you.”

She wondered if that meant he wasn’t reading her—or simply didn’t have to try in order to read her. She didn’t have the nerve to ask. “Was I being evasive? Sorry. Diana and I weren’t following the bear, we were following a spirit who led us to this area. Then we found the bear. Which had just found what was left of this body.”

“That must have been an interesting encounter.”

“You could say.”

DeMarco returned his dispassionate attention to the remains. “Probably female, probably on the young side. Blond. Great teeth. Her hands were bound behind her back and there’s no sign of clothing, so highly unlikely this was an accidental death. Most likely a sexual assault, though whether that was the intent from the beginning is impossible to say. That’s as far as my crime-scene and forensic knowledge can take me.”

“About the same for me. Except that it seems obvious she’s been out here longer than the male victim.”

“Yes. The bear wasn’t the first scavenger to find her.”

Hollis didn’t like the silence that fell between them, so she filled it with what amounted to thinking aloud. It was becoming something of a habit with her during investigations. Because, after all, with telepaths always underfoot, what the hell… .

Besides, she wondered if he’d agree with her conclusion.

“This body was left—what—a good fifty yards off the nearest trail?”

“About that.”

“Place like this, nobody’s likely to be riding or hiking. The trees and underbrush would hide anything left here from the air even now, without full summer foliage.”

“Once it greens up, the kudzu would just about ensure anything left here would be hidden from two feet away. In any direction.”

Hollis nodded. “This is a fairly level spot, but the slope is steep above and below it. Not all that easy to get to. Between the terrain and the wildlife, the chances of discovery are virtually nil. Or would have been, if we hadn’t been led so far off the beaten paths. So…”

“So, unlike the other body, this one was not intended to be found.” DeMarco considered for a moment. “I wonder which is the most significant—that he was meant to be found or that she wasn’t.”

That angle hadn’t occurred to Hollis. Still thinking out loud, she said, “The killer—assuming it was the same killer, of course—couldn’t have assumed we’d search this far out after finding the other body.” She frowned. “I don’t like two assumptions in one sentence.”

“One’s a negative,” DeMarco pointed out.

“Does that matter?”

“Maybe. It’s not a wrong assumption, I’d say. In fact, the location of the other body should have guaranteed police focus would have been away from this area. And even with our expanded search, it’s well outside the grid. There’d be no reason to imagine any of us would have found this body.”

“If the killer knows police procedure, sure. If it’s the same killer.” She paused, then said, “Are you suggesting the guy on the trail could have been intended as a distraction, to prevent anybody from finding her? Because it seems to me she was a lot less likely to be found if we hadn’t been here in the first place, combing the area looking for evidence in another crime.”

“Maybe our killer is very paranoid. Or maybe he couldn’t risk even the chance that we might find this body.”

“Because he has a connection to her? Because she wasn’t a random stranger to him?”

“Could be.”

“Then why not just do a better job of disposing of the body? He could have buried her.” Hollis didn’t know why she was arguing with DeMarco; his possibilities made as much sense as her own did.

“Not out here. Too much granite to end up with anything but a uselessly shallow grave. And where there isn’t granite, the roots of these trees would make digging by hand difficult and time-consuming if not impossible.”

“There are easier places to dig.”

“Granted. But maybe he was short on time. Maybe he had to get rid of the body in a hurry.”

“Okay. But—” Hollis felt it before she saw any sign of it. Tension, so sudden and powerful that it was like a live current in the air. Then DeMarco turned his head, looking at her, almost looking through her, and she saw his eyes change in a heartbeat, his pupils dilating as if he had been thrust without warning into pitch-black darkness.

For the first time in months, she was able to see his aura radiating outward at least eight or ten inches from his body, and it was unlike any she’d ever seen before, distinctly unlike his normal reddish-orange high-energy aura: In this moment his aura was a deep indigo shot through with violet and silvery streaks.