Read Online Blood Ties by Kay Hooper - Free Book Online Page B

she was reading up on so many others, and what stuck in her mind was the accepted fact that most if not all serial killers developed and followed very specific, unique rituals—many involving burial or whatever means they chose to dispose of bodies. Some rituals were even weirdly respectful, with victims dressed in clean clothing and laid out in carefully dug graves.
    This killer very clearly didn’t see his victims as people deserving of any respect, not before death and not after.
    Diana realized she was endlessly shuffling her deck of playing cards and tossed them aside with a half-conscious curse. She leaned against the pillows banked behind her and stared across the room at an old, mostly black-and-white documentary on TV about World War II.
    So he feels contempt for his victims. No big surprise there. Nothing helpful there. Miranda probably had that little bit of information nailed with the first victim. If not before .
    The real problem, she decided reluctantly, was that she felt pretty damn useless. Despite intensive training over the last months, she didn’t feel qualified to investigate a single murder, let alone a string of them. Even as…just one of the team. Not only had she never been any sort of cop, but her entire adult life—right up until little more than a year ago—was more dreamlike than real in her mind.
    Except for scattered instances of a psychic ability she was still coming to terms with—which had been notably absent for weeks now—she had literally sleepwalked through her life.
    And Diana wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t still doing that, at least some of the time. How else could she explain her very calm reactions today—to the bodies, the bear, Hollis nearly being shot?
    Jesus, I didn’t even ask Hollis if she was okay .
    Not that Hollis had seemed all that concerned about getting shot at, but despite the other woman’s casual friendliness and humor, Diana didn’t think she knew any of the agents well enough to manage a decent guess at what they might be feeling at any given moment.
    Except Quentin. Maybe.
    But that wasn’t what was really bothering her.
    Am I still sleepwalking? Is that what’s going on here? Why I feel so uneasy and uncertain all the time? So… out of place and unsure of myself? Given the opportunity to live a full life, to get into the game, did I opt out?
    No matter what Quentin says, was Dad right when he said I wasn’t cut out for this sort of job, right to believe I wouldn’t be able to handle it? Is that why I’ve been so hesitant, so uncertain? Do I believe him?
    Is that why I’ve been pushing Quentin away?
    She didn’t want to admit that might be true. Didn’t even want to think it might be true.
    Decided not to think about it at all.
    Oh, yeah, that’s the grown-up way to handle it. Just put your head in the sand .
    She told her inner self to shut up and rummaged among the rumpled bedclothes for the TV remote. Then, determinedly keeping her mind blank, she began to channel-surf, looking for something even more boring than an old documentary about World War II.
* Out of the Shadows
    Four
    D IANA OPENED HER EYES SLOWLY , then sat up a lot faster, shoving the covers aside to sit on the edge of her bed.
    Her bed—changed. Weirdly one-dimensional, a photograph without light or shadow. Like the room that was dull and without color or life or warmth. It was filled with that oddly flat, colorless twilight that was not day and not night but somewhere in between. She had always suspected that this place lay somewhere outside time, apart from what she knew and understood time to be. That it was something between the living world and whatever lay beyond it.
    As far back as she could remember, she’d called it the gray time.
    She turned her head and looked at the clock on her nightstand, which had boasted large red digital numbers in a readout easy to see. Now it was blank, featureless and numberless. All clocks were the same here, missing numbers or