Blood Ties (35 page)

“Yeah, I’ve got all that,” he said, calm. “You’re broadcasting.”

“Am I? Sorry.”

“It’s a time-saver.” He looked at Quentin, his brows lifting. “I don’t think there’s anything else for us to do here, and they’ll definitely need us in Serenade. I’m assuming Diana will fill you in.”

“I will,” she said.

DeMarco nodded. “And we’ll tell the others you’re okay. Quentin, you should probably stick close, just in case. I don’t think there’s a threat here, but until we get things cleared up in Serenade…”

“Don’t worry, I’m not planning to leave her side for the next fifty or sixty years.”

To Diana, Hollis said, “Yours is more romantic than mine. That might be a problem.”

Diana tried hard not to smile as she looked at DeMarco. “She’s … really tired right now.”

“I know. She’ll hate herself later. Assuming she remembers. You two watch your backs. Come on, sweetie, let’s go.”

“Sweetie? You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

“A little bit.”

“Well, I’m not sure I like sarcasm from my—from mine. You might have to fix that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I mean fix it
now
, not keep doing it….”

As DeMarco took her away and Hollis’s rather plaintive voice faded with distance, Diana looked at Quentin and said, “I’m glad he enjoys her.”

“Yeah. Reese has a wicked sense of humor; it just doesn’t show very often. I think they’ll be very good for each other.”

“Like you’ve been good for me.”

“I was beginning to wonder,” he said.

“I know. For a long time it seemed like there was nothing in my life, and then there was so much I couldn’t trust it all…. I’m sorry,

Quentin.”

“Don’t be sorry. Some things have to happen just the way they happen, remember? I’d never want to go through the last thirty hours again, but the last year, getting to know you and watching you…bloom right in front of me? I wouldn’t take anything for that.”

“I’m glad. And as soon as I get out of this hospital bed, I’ll show you just how much.”

“Promises, promises.” He saw her fumble with her other hand for the bed’s controls and begin to raise the head slowly, and he said, “Hey, are you sure you want to do that?”

“It’s okay. I’m just a little… stiff. But I won’t face him lying down.”

“Face who?”

“My father.” She stopped raising the bed when she was half sitting up, then took a deep breath and shifted a bit. “Ouch. Quentin, I want you to hear this, okay? Hear it and believe me when I tell you that he is never going to interfere in our lives again. And I’m more than okay with that.”

“Diana—”

She turned her head and said, “Dad, you can come out now.”

Surprised, Quentin saw Elliot Brisco come around the curtain, apparently from the far corner of the room. His instinct was to rise and greet the man, despite the tension that had existed between them since their first meeting nearly a year before, but what he could feel in Diana kept him still and silent.

“What are you doing here, Dad?”

“I came to see you, of course. As soon as I heard about… the accident.” His face was pale, and there was an odd stiffness about him, like something brittle in danger of shattering.

“The accident? That’s the way you prefer to think about the fact that a sniper shot your daughter in broad daylight on a public street?”

He started to reach a hand out to her, but something in her face, something hard and closed, stopped him. “It—was a terrible thing. Horrible. I’m so sorry that happened to you, Diana.”

“I’m assuming you didn’t know he was going to shoot me.”

His face went even whiter. “Christ, Diana, I swear to you that’s the last thing in this world I would have wanted.”

She wasn’t particularly moved by his obvious anguish. “Yeah, well, the thing is, if you’d understood anything at all about my abilities, if you had just kept an open mind and
tried
to believe what I was telling you was real and not some disease you could cure by throwing money at it, you would have known. You would have known the instant Samuel was killed that he’d have to come after me.”

“Do you know how insane that sounds?” His voice was harsh.

“Even now you can’t admit it. He had me shot because he needed my abilities, Dad. He needed what I could do to get out of the place you’d probably call limbo—if you believed in anything not of this world, that is. But you don’t. Even now you don’t.”

“Diana—”

“So much of this was your fault. Because you couldn’t bear to give up control over my life, you destroyed so many other lives. Innocent lives. Destroyed them, Dad. Snuffed them out like candles.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying. You’ve been trying to control events since I met Quentin. The same way you always try to control events. Only this time it wasn’t business deals or doctors, or just keeping your daughter too medicated to live a normal life. This time it was twisted people with evil agendas of their own. You thought you could control them and use them to destroy the SCU, destroy Bishop.”

He hardly seemed to be breathing as he stared at her.

“I wonder what it cost you to hire enough private investigators or pay off enough cops or feds to find the information you wanted—a name. The name of someone who hated Bishop as much as you did and was willing to go to any lengths to destroy him. Whatever it cost, you got that name. Samuel. Adam Deacon Samuel. A man who already had the SCU in his sights, had already begun to test them and test their defenses.

“You didn’t much care about the rest, did you? Didn’t care how sick and twisted he was. Didn’t care about the victims of his evil, their bodies piling up like cordwood. Didn’t care about the people in his so-called church, the
children
he was damaging and killing. And of course you didn’t believe he had any kind of paranormal ability. All you knew, all you needed to know, was that he wanted to destroy the SCU. So you helped him.”

“I made a donation to a church,” he said finally, his voice more hoarse than before.

“You made a donation to a monster.” She shook her head slightly, her eyes never leaving his. “You’ll pay for what you did. I don’t know what Bishop means to do with the evidence he has and will have, but whatever it is, I’ll help him.”

“Diana—”

“I’ll help him. But whatever he does or doesn’t do, you’re no longer a part of my life. No longer my father. As far as I’m concerned, you’re as evil as Samuel was. And the world should be rid of you both.”

Serenade

“T
old you we wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep,” Tony said to Jaylene, yawning, as they relieved two other agents in the command center shortly after six A.M.

“Hey, I got plenty,” she said, sitting down at a console and logging in to the computer. “But then, I went to bed when we got back to the B&B. How long did you stay down in the dining room talking?”

“You make it sound social,” Tony complained, logging in at a second work console. “A bunch of us were working things through. Trying to get a handle on the situation. Weren’t making much headway until Dean came off duty at midnight and joined us for coffee.”

“Coffee at midnight. Yeah, that’ll help you sleep.”

Tony ignored that. “Plus, that’s around the time Reese and Hollis got back. With the great news about Diana being okay. And with more pieces of the puzzle.”

“Confirmation,” Jaylene said. “We’d already figured out this had Samuel’s name written all over it. Or, at least, Miranda had.”

“True enough. Nice to have it confirmed, though. And am I the only one who finds it totally creepy that this bastard is still after us from his grave?”

“No.”

Tony sighed. “Anyway, when Dean came off duty, he said he’d been pulling up everything he could find on Taryn Holder, looking for a connection to somebody here in town.”

“And not finding one, I take it.”

“No, but at least he made a solid start. Now we keep looking.”

About to start work, Jaylene paused to say, “You know, it hit me last night that we haven’t even talked about that poor reporter.”

“I hate to be blunt about it, but what’s to say? She was warned, they all were.”

“Yeah, I know that. And being equally blunt, that’s not what I was thinking about. The sniper could have just as easily shot Miranda. So why didn’t he? Why choose the reporter?”

“To shake up all the noncombatants around here, maybe.” Tony shrugged. “That’s what I’d do.”

Jaylene stared at him.

“Oh, come on, I mean thinking from the bad guy’s point of view. That is what profiling is all about, remember?”

“Yeah, yeah. My point, however, is that maybe Miranda was also right in suggesting that at least some of this could have been designed to draw Bishop out. Offering stark proof that he could have taken Miranda out might be expected to do that.”

“So would taking her out,” Tony countered.

“That’s what a typical enemy might think. But what if the enemy is psychic, Tony? Psychic enough to know that all he’d gain by taking Miranda out would be Bishop paralyzed at best—and dead somewhere far away at worst?”

Tony shook his head slowly. “There aren’t half a dozen people outside the SCU who know that the connection between Bishop and Miranda makes them that vulnerable.”

“But they are that vulnerable. Kill one, and you’ll very likely kill the other as well, or at the very least incapacitate him or her. Because they’re connected, and on a level deeper than any we’ve ever found, even between blood siblings. What if the sniper knows that? Because he’s psychic himself, or because Samuel was. And if he knows, what if killing Bishop long distance—as it were—isn’t good enough?”

“Then… you’re right. Taking out the reporter when she was two feet away from Miranda might be expected to bring Bishop here, and in a hurry. Makes sense. Bishop, more than any of the rest of us, is the one Samuel was always after. And the setup here sure as hell has all the earmarks of a trap.”

“Which is another indication that the sniper could be local, or at least somehow connected to this place. He’s moving around too freely for it to be otherwise. He knows this place like the back of his hand.”

After a moment, Tony said, “Tell you what. Why don’t you keep digging into Taryn Holder’s background?”

“While you do what?”

“While I start checking into the backgrounds of all the Pageant County deputies.”

“You seriously think it’s a cop?”

“I think that sniper has some serious military training, and if this is home, the only job he might feel comfortable in would be one where he carries a gun.”

“It’s a leap,” Jaylene said after a pause.

“Not a big one. There’s been so much confusion since the bomb, even before, that a deputy who knew the terrain could have slipped away long enough to play sniper. And we should rule it out. Hell, we should have ruled it out after the sniper took his first shots.”

“True enough. Okay. Let’s dig.”

G
abriel Wolf studied the old farmhouse, adjusting the binoculars until he had a crystal-clear view. There was no movement, no sign of life.

Maybe he’s playing possum
, Roxanne suggested.

“Why would he be?” Gabriel kept his voice low. “You kept watch all night, and if Bishop knows what he’s talking about, this guy won’t pick up on either of us psychically.”

Doesn’t mean he doesn’t know about us
.

“Oh, I’m betting he knows about us. I’m betting he spotted us. Bastard has the advantage of knowing this place, and well.”

Don’t be so disgruntled about it. We couldn’t have known
.

“Yeah, yeah.” Gabriel frowned as the binoculars finally picked up a bit of movement in what he judged to be the kitchen windows. “Hold on. Looks like he’s finally up.”

About time
.

Gabriel watched intently and was rewarded a little more than ten minutes later: A tall, dark man somewhere in his late forties, with a distinctly military bearing despite his casual jeans and a sweatshirt, came out of the house. The rifle Gabriel knew he carried today was concealed in an oversize duffel bag. The man appeared to feel safe, showing no signs of unease or worry as he crossed the small yard and briskly made his way down the long, fence-bordered drive toward the main road. And town.

“Man, I want to take him out,” Gabriel muttered.

Not the plan. We have nothing on the other one, you know that. We have to draw him out
.

“Yeah. But I don’t have to like it.” Gabriel touched the almost invisible com device in his ear. “Hey. He’s on the move.”

“Got him,” a voice whispered back. “Our information says the one in the house should give you no trouble. But watch yourself.”

“Copy that.” He touched the com again, continued to watch the sniper until he was well away from the house, and then left his own place of concealment to begin moving cautiously toward it.

It
was just after eight A.M. when Dean Ramsey joined Tony and Jaylene in the command center. He was bearing hot coffee and news. “Check your emails,” he advised them. “Word from Bishop.”

Tony groaned. “My eyes are already starting to cross from looking at this screen the last couple of hours.”

“Find anything?”

“I dunno. Maybe.” Tony blew absently on the hot coffee to cool it, staring at the screen. “There’s military training here, just not the kind we’re looking for. At least—”

Jaylene swore under her breath. She turned her head to stare at Tony. “Check your email. Looks like you were right, Tony. The sniper’s connected to this town, all right.”

Dean said, “And that’s not all he’s connected to.”

Tony checked his email, opened the file from Bishop, and began to read. Only a couple of paragraphs in, he was swearing as well, and not under his breath. “Jesus. I don’t believe it. How did we not know—”

“Because Galen didn’t know,” Dean interrupted. “The connection went back too far. Finish reading. And then you guys put your corns in. We’re moving outside in just a few minutes.”

T
he key was under the flowerpot, as promised. Gabriel unlocked the door and slipped into the old farmhouse, moving with utter silence.