Kay Hooper - Blood Sins

"Monitored?"

"Oh, yeah. From somewhere inside the main building, I imagine, though I've never seen the actual control room of this place. I doubt many people have."

"So the whole time we've been here"

"We've been watched. Less likely that there are microphones, outside at least, but I've never been sure."

"Jesus. Can we go? Please?"

Since he'd had his fill of the place himself, at least for today, Sawyer merely nodded and put the Jeep in gear.

"She couldn't tell where the pain was coming from?" Bishop asked.

"Not really." Hollis propped the phone between her ear and shoulder as she rinsed her coffee cup. "Seemed to come from all around her, or was just unfocused. Maybe impossible for her to get a fix on at the best of times, far less her first visit to the Compound. She did say it was overwhelming, and she certainly looked like she'd been through the wringer. It's barely ten, and she's already gone up to bed."

Bishop was silent for a moment, then said, "She sensed at least two extremely strong personalities."

"Yeah. A lot of fragmented stuff, but those two 'voices' were perfectly clear. One said, I see you,' and the other said, 'I'm hungry.' And if Tessa wasn't sure about the former, she's damn positive that the latter voice was dark as hell. She was absolutely adamant about that."

"But no real sense of identity."

"No. She met a lot of people up there, but Ruth Hardin was the only one she really spent time with. Probably too much to expect her to connect a voice in her head with anybody she might have met fleetingly."

"When she returned, was she just tired? Or spooked?"

"Tired and spooked. Didn't want it to show, I think, but it did. I didn't ask too many questions, but I gather she's never felt a physical sensation during a vision. This time, she did. Whether someone was out to physically hurt her or it was simply the intensity of the experience, this is the first time her abilities have been painful."

"Evolving? Or affected by whatever energies Samuel is using up there?"

"I don't know. Either. Both. I felt something odd about this place the minute I hit town."

"Odd how?"

"It's nothing I can really pinpoint. Small town, a bit isolated, quiet. Almost too quiet, though. Almost too placid. It's sort of eerie, really. Have we tested the water here?" She was joking. Mostly.

"We've tested just about everything," Bishop told her. "So far, nothing suspicious has turned up."

"Maybe I'm wrong. But it strikes me as more than a little strange that not even the local newspaper has given much space to inexplicably dead bodies found in the river."

"The owner is a church member. So is the senior news editor and at least one of the reporters."

"Okay, then probably not so strange. But no less creepy. It means Samuel's influence extends outside the Compound."

"Yes."

"And we don't know whether that influence is only emotional and psychologicalor psychic as well."

"No, we don't know. Yet. But the Compound is the center, and that's where the answers have to be. Samuel hasn't left the property in weeks."

"So whatever the weirdness is, it's in all probability caused by Samuel and would be most intense up there. Maybe he's getting stronger, just naturally evolving. Or maybe he's about to blow. Either way, it could affect our abilities, especially when any of us are in or near the Compound. Cause them to change, to fluctuate. To evolve. Sarah had been having problems, right?"

"Yeah." Bishop's voice flattened slightly. "Difficulty in concentration, in focusing. And she felt her shield had become weaker over time."

"Felt correctly, I'd say." Hollis kept her own voice even. "For whatever reason, her shield couldn't protect her. The question is, can Tessa's shield protect her?"

"I have to believe it will."

The choice of words struck Hollis, in particular his slight emphasis on the second word, but before she could probe, Bishop asked another calm question.

"She's sure about Chief Cavenaugh?"

"Seemed to be."

"And the others?"

"She couldn't get a fix on either Officer Keever or DeMarco but said Ruth Hardin is an open book."

"What was the reading?"

"What Sarah reported weeks ago. That Ruth, like virtually all the women in the Compound, believes in the church and Samuel utterly and completely. They'd step between him and a bullet without a second thought."

"Devotion indeed," Bishop said slowly.

"Uh-huh."

"You aren't convinced."

"That they're devoted to him, absolutely. That they'd take a bullet for him. But I'd sure like at least one of us to be able to get inside their heads and find out exactly why that's true."

"Any other visits from Ellen Hodges?"

"Not so far. It might have taken all the energy she could muster, so soon after dying, to reach me in California. It's a long way from where she died, and that seems to make a difference."

"They do always seem to find you, don't they?"

Hollis returned to the island bar stool where she'd been attempting to work and looked down at maps of the area spread out on the granite surface. "Yeah, I'm definitely supposed to be part of this. But you already knew that."

"Hollis"

"Bishop, I swear to God, if you don't come clean with me this timetotally cleanthen I'm walking." Her voice was very, very calm.

"All right," her boss said finally. "But you aren't going to like it."

SAWYER TOLD ROBINto go home once they reached the station, but he had a mountain of paperwork and a lot to think about. Added to the fact that he didn't have anyone to go home to, working well into the night and possibly even sleeping on the couch in his office was preferable to returning to a dark apartment with only the TV for company.

Pathetic choice for a grown man to have. Work or an empty apartment. What the hell have you been doing all these years ? It was a good question. He only wished he had a good answer. What did any man do when he hadn't found a woman he wanted to share his life with by the time he was eyeing forty as his next milestone? He worked. If he was lucky, he had a job that occupied most of his time and energy.

And if he was very lucky, that job meant something, counted for something in the sense of attempting to make the world a better place.

Or attempting to just make sense of it.

Not that he was having much luck at the moment.

The station was quiet, the second shift beginning to think about going home at midnight, desk conversation and radio chatter dealing mostly with that and plans for the following day. If he hadn't known a woman's body had been found in the river only that morning, he sure as hell wouldn't have been able to tell it from the relaxed behavior of his officers.

Maybe they have lives.

No, he thought, it was something else. Something more. And it bugged him more than a little. They had always seemed to him curiously detached, most of them. He thought it was undoubtedly a characteristic of officers in any big-city police department, where getting too emotionally involved in stubborn homicide investigations could lead swiftly to burnout, but not so much in small towns where murder was still rare.

Or had been.

They should have been more agitated about these murders. Or at least, by God, interested in them.

"Coffee, Chief?"

He looked at the smiling and slightly quizzical face of Dale Brown and frowned. "You were on duty this morning. Why're you still here, Dale?"

"Picked up an extra shift on account of Terry needing to visit his mom in the hospital up to Asheville. I don't have much overtime in this month, and you said now was the time to get it if we wanted it, what with these bodies turning up in the river."