Blood Sins

There was a second cruiser parked up there, possibly intended to fend off curious onlookers who had not appeared, and the two officers in it, Dale Brown and Donald Brown (no relation, they always explained), appeared just as bored and/or equally detached from the situation.

No taste for or even interest in homicide investigation there. Sawyer made the mental note, then returned his gaze to Robin Keever's earnest young face. She was smart, more than capable, and she was ambitious; he'd known that for a while now.

But more important at the moment, she's fully engaged and intensely curious. Good.

Because he damn sure needed all the help he could get. Nothing in his years as a small-town cop had prepared him for anything even remotely like this.

'I checked with the station soon as I got here,' Robin went on, 'and we have no reports of missing persons fittingwell, no women reported missing from anywhere in the county.'

'Yeah, I checked too.' But the last female missing person had turned up in this same stretch of river barely a week before, looking an awful lot the way this one looked, so Sawyer was inclined to start searching for a connection between them.

More than inclined. In his experience, there really was no such thing as a coincidence.

Robin was thinking along the same lines. 'Do you think she could be from the Compound, like Mr. Brackin suggested? From the church?'

'I think she's been in the river long enough that somebody should have noticed she was missing.'

'And since no report was filed'

'Well, Reverend Samuel and his flock never look for help outside the Compound. Maybe they've got trouble of the nasty kind and believe they can handle it themselves.'

'A killer inside the church?'

'Maybe.'

'Or?' Robin was watching him intently.

'Or maybe the church has an enemy out here. A very, very pissed-off enemy.'

'And he's taking it out on the women?'

'We have a couple of men unaccounted for, remember? Just because we haven't found bodies doesn't mean they didn't wind up the same way these women wound up.'

Robin shifted her weight from one foot to the other. 'Chief, is it true what I heard about the woman last week? That Ellen Hodges was that somebody beat her to death?'

'The state M.E. hasn't completed the autopsy. Their office currently has a six-week backlog.'

Characteristically, Robin wasn't deterred. 'Okay, but Doc Macy examined the body before she was shipped to Chapel Hill, right?'

Sawyer nodded, wondering just where in hell their county M.E. was at the moment, since he should have arrived by now.

'What was in his report?' Robin persisted.

'Sure you want to know?' He waited for her decided nod, then replied, 'Doc's report recommended we ship the body to the state chief medical examiner, where the facilities are a lot better than any in this area. Because his X- rays showed that virtually every bone in her body had been broken, almost pulverizedand there wasn't a mark on her anywhere to indicate how that happened.'

* * * *

Tessa Gray had put off actually visiting the Church of the Everlasting Sin's Compound as long as she dared, a reluctance that had, according to the more experienced Hollis, worked for her so far.

So far.

'But you need to get out there.' Hollis said, early on the afternoon that Sarah Warren's body was found in the river.

Tessa was still grappling with that, and it wasn't easy. It was the first time she'd ever been on assignment when a fellow Haven operative had lost her lifethough not the first time it had happened.

The stakes were high.

And Tessa accepted that, got that. No operative joined the organization without being warned repeatedly, by John and Maggie Garrett, cofounders and codirectors of Haven, and by Bishop, another cofounder as well as Chief of the FBI's Special Crimes Unit and someone who certainly knew better than most what price could be demanded of the soldiers in this war.

That was the most unsettling part of the death of a fellow operative, the stark reminder that this was war, that people could and did die fighting what they all believed were necessary battles. They were none of them superheroes; being psychic hardly made them invulnerable. In fact, it was often the opposite.

Depending on the ability and its individual quirks, being psychic could be a weakness at best, and an active liability at worstespecially some of the least common and even unique abilities, and most especially when those abilities were held by operatives or agents with erratic control.

Unfortunately, those with erratic control far outnumbered those with a better mastery over their capbilities.

Tessa was uncertain of where she fell on that score, since her own ability had not really been tested under fire. She knew she was considered to possess excellent control, but who knew what might happen under extreme and dangerous circumstances? She was trained to handle a gun and was licensed to carry a concealed firearm. But she wouldn't be going into the Church of the Everlasting Sin's Compound carrying a weapon of that sort. Worse, she had to appear and act like an extremely vulnerable woman who was ripe to be dominated by stronger people, stronger minds.

A terrifying prospect, especially since they weren't at all sure how Reverend Samuel achieved his seemingly absolute domination over his flock. If he was using psychic ability to control them, Tessa had no way of knowing whether that same control would work on her.

Until she put her shields to the test by exposing them to the church Compound. And Samuel.

'The police will probably be there,' she objected finally.

'Not necessarily. They haven't identified the body yet.'

'But we have.'

'Yeah. It's Sarah, no question.'

'Did you see?'

'Her spirit? No.' Hollis frowned. 'I seldom see the spirits of team membersor people I know, for that matter. I wonder why.' It wasn't a question so much as it was an acknowledgment that the universe was arbitrary in its choices.

Tessa waited a moment, then asked, 'How can we be sure it was Sarah's body?'

Hollis pushed aside her musing with an almost physical gesture. 'Hoping for a mistake in identification? Don't. We have someone else in the area, and the I.D. of her body is confirmed.'

'By someone I'm not supposed to know about, I gather.'

Patiently, Hollis said, 'What you don't know, you can't communicateon any levelto anyone else. Tessa, I don't even know for certain how many of our agents and Haven operatives are working this case. And right now, I don't care. Someone is killing people, about as viciously as I've ever seen. As inexplicably as I've ever seen. And everything we know or think we know suggests Reverend Samuel is the one responsible. We believe he's doing that killing using no weapon or tool except for the power of his mind, using paranormal abilities we haven't been able to count, far less define and understand. I don't know about you, but that scares the hell out of me.'

'I just I never knew psychic ability could be like that. Could be used as a weapon.'

'It's rare, but we have at least one agent who can channel and focus energy well enough to make it a destructive force. And Haven has at least one operative who can do it.'

'And if there are two on our side'

'There are likely to be at least a couple on the other side, yeah. We've had evidence in the past of psychic