Blood Sins Part 9

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 G.o.d, 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."

Chapter Six.

SAWYER TOLD ROBIN to 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+ft 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."

Sawyer had indeed told his people that, but when he glanced past Dale toward his desk, all he saw was an open magazine.

Dale followed his gaze and said, "My turn to answer the phones, Chief. Only call that's come in tonight was somebody complaining that a neighbor's stereo was turned up too loud."

Sawyer accepted a cup of coffee from his officer. "Check missing persons again. A hundred-mile radius. I need to know if there's any chance that woman might not be from the Compound."

"Sure thing, Chief." He sounded almost cheerful.

Why doesn't he have a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach?

But Sawyer couldn't really criticize anyone for not being as visibly upset about the situation as he thought they should be, so he merely stopped by another desk for his messages and then went back to his office.

"Tom? What're you doing here? And get the h.e.l.l out of my chair."

Dr. Tom Macy, the medical examiner for Unity County, took his feet off the desk and unfolded his tall length from Sawyer's chair, yawning. "Almost asleep," he confessed as he moved around the desk to the far less comfortable visitor's chair.

"Is that why you weren't at my crime scene first thing this morning? Pull a double s.h.i.+ft at the hospital yesterday?"

He doesn't have anybody to go home to either.

"I did. And it wasn't a crime scene, we both know that. It wasn't even a dump site, not as far as forensic evidence is concerned. Her body just happened to catch on that fallen tree."

"You should have been there, Tom."

"I got there as soon as I could. And I can't tell you anything much anyway, same as before."

"Nothing more than you told me this morning? That she could have died anything up to a week ago?"

"Yeah, about that." Macy shrugged bony shoulders. He was tall, and thin enough to be familiar with cadaver jokes, especially given his position as county M.E. "Hard to know for sure. Nights have been cold and that mountain river is icy this time of year, so it probably slowed decompalways a.s.suming she was dumped in pretty soon after she was killed. Not many predators in and around that water as a rule, it moves too fast, but from what I saw, there were enough postmortem injuries that she could have been caught on fallen trees or half-submerged rocks a dozen times while the body worked its way down-stream."

"Downstream from the Compound?"

"You know I can't tell you that. Not for sure. She could have been dumped in the river twenty miles away."

"Or two miles away?"

Macy nodded. "Or two miles."

"Which means she could have come from the Compound?"

"I can't rule it out," Tom Macy said.

Hunter threw a pebble against her window around ten-thirty, and Ruby slipped easily out of her bedroom window to join him outside. "It's early," she whispered. "My parents are still up."

Up and arguing, even if it was so quietly she wasn't supposed to know about it. Arguing about the church.

"They won't be for long," he whispered back. "Besides, I waited until they tucked you in."

Ruby remembered with a pang the days of endless bedtime stories and of being sleepily aware that her mother always checked on her a final time before she and her father went to bed. The girl pushed those painful memories aside.

Things were different now.

Things had been different for a long time.

She followed Hunter as they slipped from her yard and across the next two backyards, heading for the accustomed meeting place at the barn over the hill in the west pasture. They kept well away from the churchand the cameras.

"I can't stay out long," Hunter whispered as they worked their way cautiously toward the barn. "My parents still do a bed check, but it's never before eleven-thirty."

"Why're we meeting at all? It's dangerous, Hunter."

"Because Cody says Brooke's going to make a run for it, and we have to talk her out of it."

"Run for it? Where would she go? All the way to Texas by herself? She's only twelve."

"Yeah, that's why we've got to talk her out of trying."

Ruby didn't speak again until they reached the barn and found their friends had already arrived. The barn had housed three ponies and half a dozen milk cows at one time; now it held only a few small pieces of farm machinery that wouldn't be needed until spring.

It smelled mostly of machine oil and metal.

Not like a barn at all, Ruby decided. But her mind s.h.i.+ed away from thinking about that, as it always did. And she simply said to Brooke, "Are you crazy?"

Her friend's strained expression was obvious even in the dim light provided by Cody's small Cub Scout lantern. "Ruby, you're one of the Chosen too. And we're not like the other girlswe know what's happening. What it's doing to us. Don't tell me you aren't scared."

"We have sh.e.l.ls." Ruby was trying her best to pretend she wasn't scared.

"And how long are those sh.e.l.ls going to protect us? Sarah had a sh.e.l.l, and she's gone. How many others have there been?"

"Brooke"

"How many? People who just go awayor at least that's what Father and the others tell us. And people who don't go away, except that they do because they're different. Because they change."

"We won't change."

"How do you know?"

Before Ruby could respond, Cody spoke up for the first time. Gravely, he said, "I know Brooke can't get all the way to Texas, not without help. But I know something else too. Whatever it is Father's been waiting for, it's nearly here."

They looked at one another in the dim light, and none of them pretended to not be scared. Not even Ruby.

"She didn't drown?" Sawyer asked his medical examiner.

"No. No water in the lungs. No sign of a gunshot wound, or a knife wound, or any blunt force trauma to the skin or muscle that wasn't postmortem."

"And her bones?"

"Just like it was with Ellen Hodges."

"But you can't tell me how it happened."

"Jesus, Sawyer, in my wildest imagination I can't think of any way it could have happened. I mean, it should be an impossibility. How do you pulverize bones without damaging the skin and other tissue those bones are surrounded by? I don't know. I don't believe the chief medical examiner in Chapel Hill is going to know."

"That's not a whole h.e.l.l of a lot of help, Tom."

"Sorry."

"I don't suppose you were able to establish an I.D.?"

"On my end? No. There were no tattoos, no birthmarks, nothing especially distinctive. She was five-seven, probably slender, early thirties, brunette. My report's there on your desk."

Sawyer opened the folder and scanned the forms it contained. "You don't have eye color noted." He didn't exactly ask, because he knew what the answer would be. Knew with a queasy certainty.

"Couldn't tell what that was before she died. Right now her eyes are white."

Sawyer drew a breath and let it out slowly. He put a hand to the nape of his neck, realizing only as he did so that he was trying to ease the crawling sensation of his body to something beyond his understanding.

He hadn't wanted to be right.

"Like Ellen Hodges," he said.

Macy nodded. "Another thing that beats the h.e.l.l out of me, because there's no medical explanation. No sign chemicals were used, no signs of trauma, just no color. Like the bones: Something that shouldn't be, is."

"You have any theories?"

"About the eyes? No. In all the years I've been in medicine, I've never seen anything like it. And I hope I never see it again."

"Amen to that." Sawyer leaned back in his chair, scowling. "I've managed to keep the oddities of the deaths quiet, but I don't know how much longer I'll be able to keep a lid on that. Once it gets out"

"Once it gets out," Macy interrupted, "most of the town will believe what you believe. That these deaths are connected to the church. Somehow."

"Ellen Hodges was one of their members."

"Yeah. Do we know the same about this woman?"

"According to them, n.o.body's missing."

"And you're not buying it."

"No. Not that it matters what I believe on that countunless you can give me something, some bit of evidence, to tie that woman to the church."

"Wish I could. Sorry."

"G.o.ddammit."

Macy frowned. "Are you still getting pressure from Ellen's family?"

Sawyer reached over and tapped a stack of messages to the left of his blotter. "Of this dozen messages, ten are from her father. Today."

"But they aren't coming to Grace?"

"Pretty sure I talked him out of that."