Blood Dreams

her to make out a shape at the foot of her bed.

Her weapon was in the drawer of the nightstand, but instead of reaching for that, Hollis reached for the lamp, never taking her eyes off that faint, indistinct shape.

'He knows who you are.'

Hollis froze for an instant, her hand on the lamp's switch, chills chasing one another up and down her spine. At least half-hoping she would see nothing, that the quiet statement had been only in her head, she turned the lamp on.

'He knows who you are,' Shirley Arledge repeated. Her face was still, eyes anxious. 'He knows what you are.'

She was already fading.

'Wait,' Hollis said quickly, trying to control her voice, to keep it soft. 'Who is he? How can we find him, stop him?'

Shirley Arledge shook her head, and her voice faded even as she did as she might have replied, 'He's tricking you…'

Hollis slowly sat up in bed, staring at the place where the spirit of a young woman had stood. Then she turned her head slowly and examined the entire motel room: very ordinary, uninspiring, and a little depressing at-she looked at the clock-five in the morning.

Finally convinced that she was, indeed, alone in her room, she looked down at her bare arms, at the clearly visible gooseflesh.

'No,' she murmured. 'I am never… ever… going to get used to this.'

* * * *

'Still no sign of Shirley Arledge,' Marc reported as he joined the others in the conference room. 'And still no sign there was anything violent about her disappearance.'

'She's dead,' Hollis said.

Everyone else in the room went still, staring at the federal agent, and Hollis offered them a weary smile. 'I'm beginning to think there's a trail of bread crumbs in the spirit world leading straight to me. First time a spirit's pulled me out of a sound sleep, though.'

'Evolving abilities,' Paris said almost absently, frowning a little.

'Are you okay?' Dani asked Hollis.

'I'd love to sleep about twelve hours, but other than that, I'm fine. Frustrated by one more thing that doesn't seem to lead us anywhere, though.'

Marc stirred, finally, going to fill up his coffee cup before returning to the table, his every move deliberate. He didn't speak until he was seated at the head of the table. 'I gather she didn't tell you anything helpful?'

'She said he knew who I was, what I was. And then she said that he was tricking me-or us, I suppose. That he was tricking us. She didn't stick around long enough for more than that.' Hollis opened a folder on the table beside her and pulled out a photograph of Shirley Arledge, studying it for a moment before laying it faceup on the table and sliding it toward the center of their group. 'No question in my mind: This is the woman I saw around five o'clock this morning. I don't get visitations like that from the living, so I can say with fair certainty that she's dead.'

Marc took a swallow of his coffee and then looked at the cup as if he wished there were something other than coffee in it. 'Well, shit,' he said softly.

'I'm sorry. I wish I could offer you something more useful, but I can't. I can tell you Shirley Arledge died at the hands of this monster. I can tell you his box score is up to at least fifteen now. But I don't know much more about him than I did when I got here. I wish I did, but I don't.'

'None of us does,' Jordan pointed out. 'We have one incredibly gory crime scene with a bloody sign that seems out of character for a killer like this one, but no bodies. So far. Bits and pieces of two victims, but DNA results won't come in for weeks, at least, and only a preliminary match between the fingertip found at the scene and some prints we were able to pull from Becky Huntley's bedroom.'

Dani said, 'So, probably hers. The fingertip. Way too coincidental if the finger belonged to someone who just happened to visit one of our victims long enough to leave fingerprints in her bedroom.' Then she frowned. 'Wait. Did Becky and Karen-'

Marc was already shaking his head. 'It's preliminary in the case of Shirley Arledge, but as far as we can determine, none of these women knew each other. One more dead end.'

Hollis said, 'Depressingly common in serial killer investigations. That's why profiling-still more of an art than a science-is so readily accepted and used by law enforcement. Any tool that offers even the hope of narrowing or focusing the scope of the investigation is better than no tool at all.'

'We barely have a profile,' Marc pointed out. 'Still waiting for your boss's rewrite, but in the meantime what we've got is a killer who's probably a white male, probably between twenty-five and thirty-five, probably from an abusive background, and possibly psychic. Hell, I probably passed him on the street sometime this week.'

'If he's psychic, you didn't shake hands with him,' Dani murmured. 'Otherwise, you'd have known.'

Hollis lifted her brows at the sheriff. 'That's your range? Touch?'

'Yeah. If we hadn't already shaken hands, you could sit next to me and I'd never know you were a medium.'

Wryly, Paris said to him, ' Care to make a list of everyone you've shaken hands with in Venture?'

'Not really. I don't have a clue how to start that list.'

Jordan looked at the file folders stacked here and there on the table and swore under his breath. 'I know we're really just getting started in terms of a time frame for a typical serial-killer investigation-and, man, I hate saying every part of that-but does anybody else feel like they're spinning their wheels? A huge task force of law-enforcement personnel, including a team of psychics, has been trying to get a handle on this guy for months, with no luck. Granted, we have a smaller hunting ground here in terms of population-though not in area-and we don't have media breathing down our necks-'

'Yet,' Marc interrupted. 'Despite what Miss Patty said, I imagine there are at least a few of our citizens who would welcome TV cameras and microphones shoved in their faces.'

'Yeah. But the question stands: What do we have that the task force doesn't?'

'We have Dani's vision dream,' Hollis said.

'Which keeps changing,' Dani pointed out.

'Only in fairly minor details. The setting is always the same: a warehouse.'

'And we're generating that list of warehouses now.'

Jordan promised. 'It's taken more time than I expected to run down some of the property owners, but we're getting there.'

'Great.' Hollis barely paused. 'So there's always a warehouse in the vision. There's always a fire. And, with the roof apparently caving in behind us, we always go down into a basement where we know he's waiting, into what we know is a trap. Interesting that the bait is always the same. Far as I know, Miranda's in Boston with Bishop.'

'Which was,' Marc said, 'this killer's hunting ground. And we're sure it's the same killer.'

It was a question.

Hollis nodded. 'We're sure. The psychics who tracked him here are sure, and Bishop's sure-and that's good enough for me. Even if the murders here are getting different in ways that don't make sense. Unless Bishop is right again, and this killer's needs and rituals are falling apart rather than evolving.'

'I gather that'll be part of the revised profile,' Marc said.

'That seems to be the way Bishop is thinking.' Hollis frowned. 'At least, that was my take.'

Dani raised her voice slightly to say, 'Can I just ask the question we're all avoiding?'

Hollis nodded, with an expression that said she knew what was coming. 'Might as well.'

'Okay. If we're right and this guy is psychic, if that's how he managed to hunt so successfully in Boston, then