Blood Dreams

woman frowned and shook her head.

'Or… let me think about that for a while.'

'Do I have a choice?' Marc asked wryly.

'Not really.' She softened that with a smile, which quickly faded. 'The other thing I don't like is the increasing evidence that our killer is changing or has changed, fundamentally. Marie Goode is the right physical type, right age, right everything he likes. But to… make his interest in her so obvious strikes me as a completely new element. Letting her hear his camera, leaving the roses, and-' She frowned at Marc. 'What about the necklace?'

'Shorty reported in as we were leaving my office. It looks like the necklace might be the one Becky Huntley was wearing when she disappeared. No prints. In fact, chemical traces show it was recently cleaned, with ammonia or one of those jewelry-cleaning solutions you can buy in any jewelry store. Description fits. Her parents will have to I.D. it to be sure.'

'Please don't give me that job,' Jordan murmured.

'Harry's going. Hollis, if it is Becky's necklace, what does it say about this bastard? Leaving a trophy from one victim in the home of a potential victim he's stalking?'

She was frowning, and her tone was almost absent when she said, 'I'm no profiler, remember. Not officially, anyway, though Bishop has made sure most of us know more than the average shrink about the psychology of killers. I'll have to fill him in on the latest, and quickly. In the meantime, what this latest twist tells me about the killer is what I said, that he's continuing to change, to evolve.'

'His M.O.?'

She nodded. 'And that means something happened to change him. Something's different in him, in his life, the way he thinks and feels. Assuming he can feel, that is.'

Marc suggested, 'Maybe he changed because he was forced to leave Boston. Maybe the experience of becoming hunted himself made it more… imperative… for him to see himself as the hunter again.'

Dani said, 'So more care in that part of his ritual. More-elaborate steps before catching his prey. Following, taking pictures, maybe even, in his mind, courting her.'

'Yuck,' Paris muttered.

'It may help us,' Hollis pointed out. 'Until that necklace is identified by Becky's parents, we won't have a strong tie between Marie Goode and the killer. But if it is identified as hers, then for the first time we may be a step ahead of this bastard.'

'Do we make that obvious?' Jordan wondered. 'I mean, have our watchdog presence around her obvious to the killer?'

'It's a risk either way,' Marc said. 'For my part, I'd rather err on the side of protecting a potential victim.'

Hollis looked at him steadily for a moment, then nodded. 'Your call.'

'And I run the risk of him just moving on to another potential victim. That being the case, I say we find him before he moves on. So, what do we know about him?'

'We know the type of victims he chooses.'

Jordan said, 'Um… I started to bring this up earlier, but if you saw Karen-'

'I know. A blonde, with blue eyes. And according to her missing persons report, Becky Huntley was a blue- eyed redhead.'

'Both the right type otherwise, though,' Marc said slowly. 'Small, delicate in build. Becky was barely eighteen.'

Paris said, 'You can change hair color with dye or a wig. And tinted contact lenses are usually enough to change eye color. Would he go that far?'

'To fulfill his fantasy, satisfy whatever need is driving him? I'd guess yes,' Hollis said.

Marc said, 'And Bishop's guess?'

'That's it.' With a sigh, Hollis added, 'Bishop is a gifted profiler in more ways than one, but even he's struggling to reconcile the differences between these first two murders in Venture and the previous dozen in Boston. And the new information is not going to help clarify things.'

'He hasn't had much time, after all,' Dani commented.

Hollis shrugged. 'He's had a couple of days since I saw Becky. That's usually enough time for him to at least get a sense of a killer or a change in one, especially a killer he's already spent months studying. But this monster is off the charts. Off even Bishop's charts.'

To the room at large, Jordan said, 'I don't know Agent Bishop, but for some reason that little nugget of information scares me more than anything else.'

'Then you have good instincts,' Hollis told him soberly. 'Because Bishop has seen evil up close and personal more times than any of us would even want to know about-and this guy, this killer, is something new.'

'New how?' Marc asked intently. 'In viciousness? In cunning?'

Jordan offered, 'Even given the carnage we saw yesterday, and granting it was as bad as I ever personally want to see, there are countless books and, hell, Web sites devoted to serial killers who were pretty damn vicious and cunning. Cannibals, necrophiles, and animals who did things to their victims so incredibly evil I hope there aren't names for them.'

Hollis was nodding. 'Yeah, the law-enforcement and psychological case studies are full of their work.'

Repeating his question, Marc asked, 'So what about this killer is new? What makes this killer so unusual that even a huge task force headed up by the FBI's top monster hunter hasn't gotten close in months of trying?'

Hollis hesitated for a long moment, then said slowly, 'The belief has always been that when we do I.D. this killer, we'll discover in his background, his past, what we find in the personal histories of virtually all serial killers. Abuse, dysfunction, possibly some sort of head trauma early in life, things like that.'

'If you want me to feel sorry for this bastard-'

Hollis waved that away. 'No, no. Most of us also believe that serial killers are born with something missing, whether you call it a conscience or a soul, which enables them to be far more monster than man. We don't know whether that missing component is all it takes, or whether the individual could live a perfectly normal life-at least outwardly-without hurting anyone at all. If his or her childhood environment was nurturing and positive, and there was no trauma, there's at least the possibility that the person would never commit evil acts.'

'But?' Marc was still watching her intently.

'But. What we are fairly sure of is that the missing component, coupled with either childhood trauma and abuse, a head injury, or some kind of intense emotional and psychological shock virtually always produces something evil. A serial killer, rapist, pedophile, arsonist-even a terrorist. The inclinations were there, the instincts, the needs. And something happened, over time or in a single traumatic event, to bring them to the surface.'

'I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop,' Marc said.

'Sorry to take so long getting to it. Here's the thing. From this point on, we're in that off-the-charts territory. We have theories. We have a few SCU case studies of situations we felt were borderline or that didn't allow us enough time for any real examination or understanding of the personalities involved. But we don't have proof. Hell, we don't have anything close to proof.'

'Hollis-'

She held up a hand. 'Marc, trauma-in childhood, or as an adult-can also trigger psychic abilities. In fact, some studies have shown definitively that the areas of the brain inexplicably energized in most psychics are the same as those inexplicably active in serial killers.'

He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. 'You're telling me we've got a serial killer operating in my town and he's psychic?'

As if, Dani thought with brief, dim amusement, he had not already considered the idea himself.

'It gets worse,' Hollis said. 'The SCU has psychics who are extremely sensitive to fluctuations in electromagnetic fields and can detect unusual psychic activity, even at a distance; we call it being very plugged in to the universe.'

'Okay. And so?'

'And so, from reports he's received from those psychics in this general area, Bishop suspects our unknown subject is one of only a handful of psychics we've ever encountered who has more than one primary ability. Not secondary or ancillary abilities, but each as powerful and fully developed as any of the others. We don't even know how many abilities are possible or which ones he might have. Maybe he's a telepath and a seer