Bad Blood by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Sloane wrapped her arms around Lia in what appeared to be the world’s tightest hug.
“‘Drawn to scale,’” Sloane whispered, just loud enough that I could hear her, “are three of my favorite words.”
By the time the others woke up the next morning, Sloane had developed a complete blueprint of the Serenity Ranch compound.
Agent Sterling helped herself to a cup of coffee, then turned to Lia. “Pull a stunt like that again and you’re out. Out of the program. Out of the house.”
Not a threat. Not a warning. A promise.
Lia didn’t bat an eye, but when Judd cleared his throat and she turned to face him, she actually winced.
“I can keep the FBI from treating you like you’re disposable,” Judd told Lia, his voice even and low. “But I can’t make you value yourself.” Next to Dean, Judd had been the one constant in Lia’s life since she was thirteen years old. “I can’t force you not to take chances with your own life. But you didn’t see me after my daughter died, Lia. If something happens to you? If I go to that place again? I can’t promise I’m coming back.”
Lia found it easier to be the recipient of anger than affection. Judd knew that, just like he knew she’d read the truth in every word.
“Okay,” Lia said, holding up her hands and stepping back. “I’m a bad, bad girl. Point taken. Can we focus on what Sloane has to say?”
Dean appeared in the doorway and registered Lia’s presence. “You’re okay.”
“More or less.” Lia’s reply was flippant, but she took a step toward him. “Dean—”
“No,” Dean said.
No, you don’t want to hear it? No, she doesn’t get to do this to you?
Dean didn’t elaborate.
“Thank goodness you’re home, Lia.” Michael strolled into the room. “Dean is awfully prone to talking about feelings when you’re MIA.”
“Would this be an inappropriate time to say ‘aha’?” Sloane interjected from the floor. “Because aha!”
If Sloane had been even the least bit capable of guile, I would have thought she’d come to Lia’s rescue on purpose.
“What did you find?” I asked, earning a look from Dean that said he knew quite well that I was capable of throwing Lia a lifeline.
“I started with Lia’s drawings and compared them to satellite photographs of the Serenity Ranch compound.” Sloane stood, bouncing to the tips of her toes and walking the perimeter of the diagram she’d laid out on the floor. “Everything lined up, except…” Sloane knelt to point a finger at one of the smaller buildings on her diagram. “This structure is roughly seven-point-six percent smaller on the inside than it should be.”
“That’s the chapel.” Lia tossed her ponytail over her shoulder. “No specific religious ties, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at it.”
I could hear Melody’s monotone in my memory. In Serenity, I’ve found balance. In Serenity, I’ve found peace.
I turned my attention back to Sloane. “What does it mean that the building is smaller on the inside than it should be?”
“It means that either the walls are abnormally thick…” Sloane caught her bottom lip in her teeth, then let it go. “Or there’s a hidden room.”
I didn’t have to sink very far into Holland Darby’s psyche to conclude that he was the kind of man who hid his secrets well. That’s your serenity. That’s your peace.
“Unfortunately,” Agent Sterling said, “none of that gives me probable cause to search the property.”
“No,” Lia said, reaching into her pocket. “But this does.”
She pulled a small glass vial out of her pocket. The liquid inside was milky white. “Not sure what it is,” she said, “but Darby keeps his flock well-dosed.”
“He’s drugging them.” Dean’s stony face showed no signs of softening—toward her or toward the situation.
Agent Sterling took the vial from Lia. “I’ll get this to the lab. If it’s a controlled substance, I can get a warrant to search the compound.”
Beside me, Sloane stared at the vial. “I’d give it even odds that it’s some kind of opiate.”
Your mother died of an overdose. I profiled Sloane as a matter of instinct, but another part of me couldn’t help profiling someone else—something else. Nightshade and whoever in this town had recruited him.
There’s a thin line between medicine and poison.
It took twenty-four hours for Agent Sterling to get her warrant and another hour after that for the FBI to secure the compound—and, more to the point, the compound’s owner. By the time Holland Darby and his followers had been sequestered and the five of us were allowed on the premises, I could feel the ticking of the clock.
Today is April fifth. The reminder thrummed through my veins as we approached the chapel. Another Fibonacci date. Another body.
Briggs hadn’t called us. He hadn’t asked for help. I shoved that thought out of my mind as I pushed open the chapel door.
“No religious iconography,” Dean commented.
He was right. There were no crosses, no statues, nothing to indicate a tie with any established religion—and yet the room was clearly designed to call to mind a religious space. There were pews and altars. Tile mosaics on the floor. Stained glass windows casting colored light into the room.
“We’re looking for a false wall,” Sloane said, pacing the perimeter of the room. She stopped in front of a wooden altar near the back. Her fingers deftly searched for a trigger, some kind of release.
“Got it!” Sloane’s triumph was punctuated by the sound of creaking wood, followed by the whine of rusted hinges. The altar gave way to reveal a hidden room. I took a step forward, but Agent Sterling strode past me. Her right hand on her weapon, she held her left out to Sloane.
“Stay here,” she said, stepping into the room herself.
“It’s narrow,” Sloane reported, peering into the darkness. “Based on my earlier calculations, it almost certainly runs the entire length of the chapel.”
I waited, the steady fall of Agent Sterling’s footsteps the only sound in the room. Dean came to stand on one side of me, Michael and Lia on the other. When Agent Sterling reappeared, she holstered her weapon and called for backup.
“What did you find?” Dean asked her.
If any of the rest of us had asked the question, Agent Sterling might not have responded, but given their history, she was incapable of ignoring Dean.
“A staircase.”
The staircase led to a basement. Not a basement, I corrected myself when it had been deemed safe enough for us to enter. A cell.
The walls were thick. Soundproof. There were shackles on the wall. There was a decomposed body in the shackles.
A second body lay on the floor.
The room smelled of decay and death—but it didn’t smell recent.
“Based on the level of decomposition and taking into account the temperature and humidity levels in this room…” Sloane paused as she ran the numbers in her head. “I’d guess our victims have been dead between nine and eleven years.”
Ten years ago, my mother and I had left Gaither.
Ten years ago, I’d seen a body at the bottom of the stairs.
“Who are they?” I asked the question that everyone was thinking. Who had Holland Darby chained up under his chapel? Whose bodies had been left here to rot and fade away?
“Victim number one is male.” Sloane stepped closer to the body still shackled to the wall. The flesh was nearly nonexistent.
Bones and decay and rot. My stomach threatened to empty itself. Dean laid a hand on the back of my neck. I leaned in to his touch and forced my attention back to Sloane.
“The depth and thickness of the pelvic bone,” Sloane murmured. “The narrow pelvic cavity…definitely male. Facial bones suggest Caucasian. I’d put height at around five foot eleven. Not a juvenile, and no signs of advanced age.” Sloane studied the body for another thirty or forty seconds in silence. “He was shackled postmortem,” she ad
You built this room for something. For someone. I took in the size of the room. You chained this man’s body, even after death.
“What about the other victim?” Agent Sterling asked. I knew her well enough to know that she’d already developed her own theories and interpretation of the scene before us, but she wouldn’t contaminate a second opinion by letting us see even a hint of what that interpretation was.
“Female,” Sloane answered. “I’d put her age somewhere between eighteen and thirty-five. No visible sign of cause of death.”
“And the male?” Agent Starmans asked. “How did he die?”
“Blunt force trauma.” Sloane turned to Agent Sterling. “I need to go upstairs now,” she said. “I need to be not here.”
Sloane had seen plenty of bodies, plenty of crime scenes, but since Aaron’s death, victims hadn’t just been numbers to her. Slipping an arm around her, I led her up the stairs. On the way, we passed Lia, who stood with her back up against Michael’s body.
As Sloane and I made it up into the fresh air, I heard Lia’s ragged whisper. “He put them in a hole.”
YOU
Without order, there is chaos. Without order, there is pain.
That’s Lorelai’s chorus, not yours. You are chaos. You are order.
Five stands before you, sharpening his blade. It’s just you and him. Two had his turn yesterday, a dozen burns on your chest and thighs. And still, you wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. You wouldn’t tell them to eliminate the problem, to take whatever steps necessary to rid Gaither of the FBI.
Not yet.
Five steps forward, blade and eyes gleaming. Closer. Closer. The flat of the blade presses against the side of your face.
Without order, there is chaos. Without order, there is pain.
You smile.
They left you all day in this room, thinking that you were Lorelai. They left you, roaming free in a room with your own shackles, under the belief that the threat of retribution—to you, to Laurel—would keep you in line.
They were wrong.
You surge forward as the broken shackles fall away. You grab the knife and plunge it into your tormenter’s chest. “I am chaos,” you whisper. “I am order.” You press your lips against his and twist the blade. “I am pain.”
Holland Darby and his wife were brought in for questioning. Neither one of them said a word. At my suggestion, Agent Sterling brought in their son. The teenagers among us were relegated to observing—in this case, from behind a two-way mirror.
“Devastation, resignation, fury, guilt.” Michael rattled off the emotions on Kane Darby’s face one by one.
I looked for some hint of what Michael saw, but I couldn’t sense even a trace of emotion churning in Kane Darby. He seemed somber, but not on guard.
“Two bodies were found in a hidden room beneath your family’s chapel.” Agent Sterling mimicked Kane’s manner: no muss, no fuss, no frills. No beating around the bush. “Do you have any idea how they came to be there?”
Kane looked Agent Sterling straight in the eye. “No.”
“Lie,” Lia said beside me.
“We’re looking at one male victim and one female victim, killed approximately ten years ago. Can you shed any light on their identities?”
“No.”
“Lie.”
I stared at Kane’s familiar face, pushing back against any warmth the six-year-old inside of me still felt for the man. You know who they are. You know what happened to them. You know what happened in that room. Why your father built it. Why he built the chapel.
Why there were shackles on the walls.
Kane had told me that Lia would be safe at Serenity Ranch, but that I wouldn’t be. I wondered now if I would have ended up down below.
I am my father’s son. Kane’s voice rang in my memory. I made my choices long ago.
I’d seen parallels between Kane’s emotional control and Dean’s. Dean had known what his father was doing to those women. At the age of twelve, he’d found a way to stop him.
You got out, Kane. But you didn’t stop your father. Didn’t stop it—whatever it was. You didn’t leave town. You couldn’t.
“He might talk to me,” I told Agent Sterling over the audio feed. After a few more questions to Kane, she excused herself from the room.
“He won’t talk to anyone,” she told us, observing my mother’s ex from behind the two-way mirror. “Not until we identify the bodies. Not until we know who they are. Not until this—all of it—is real and he reaches the point of no return.”
Kane Darby had been keeping his father’s secrets all his life. Devastation. Resignation. Fury. Guilt. The last two were the emotions we needed.
“What are the chances the FBI lab can ID the bodies?” I asked.
“With little more than skeletal evidence and no DNA to compare it to?” Agent Sterling returned evenly. “Even if they come up with something, it will take time.”
I thought of today’s date—and yesterday’s. I thought about the fact that it was still unclear how this—any of it—was related to the Masters. I thought about my mother, shackled. The way that corpse had been shackled.
And then I thought about the corpse, the bones peeking out from beneath its fraying flesh. The face that didn’t even look like a face.
I paused. The face. I could see Celine Delacroix in my mind’s eye, her posture regal, her expression wry. I can take one look at a person and know exactly what their facial bones look like underneath the skin.
My mind reeled. What were the chances that Celine could do the reverse? That, given a picture of a person’s facial bones, she could draw the face?
“Cassie?” Agent Sterling’s tone told me this wasn’t the first time she’d said my name.
I turned to catch Michael’s eye. “I have an idea, and you’re really not going to like it.”
We sent Celine photographs of our victims. And then we waited. Waiting was not one of the Naturals program’s collective strong suits. Within an hour, Agent Sterling was out working the case again, but the rest of us were stuck twiddling our thumbs at the hotel. Waiting for Celine to put her skills to the test. Waiting for the truth. Waiting to find out if our efforts would lead us any closer to my mother.
“Dean.” Of all of us, Lia was either the best at waiting or the worst. “Truth or dare?”
“Seriously?” I asked Lia.
Her lips tilted upward ever so slightly. “There’s a certain tradition to it, don’t you think?” She sat down on the arm of the couch. “Truth or dare, Dean?”
For a moment, I thought he would refuse to answer.
“Truth.”
Lia looked down at her hands, examining her fingernails. “How long are you going to be mad at me?”
You don’t sound vulnerable. You don’t sound like the answer could break you.
“I’m not mad at you,” Dean said, his voice cracking.
“He’s mad at himself,” Michael clarified loftily. “Also: me. Definitely me.”
Dean glared at him. “Truth or dare, Townsend.” Those words weren’t issued like a question. They were a challenge.
Michael offered Dean a charming, glittering smile. “Dare.”
For almost a minute, the two of them were caught in a staring competition. Then Dean broke the silence. “Agent Starmans is downstairs patrolling the perimeter of the hotel. I dare you to moon him.”
“What?” Clearly, Michael had not been expecting those words to exit Dean’s mouth.
“The term mooning arises from the vaguely moon-shaped form of the human buttocks,” Sloane volunteered helpfully. “Although the practice dates back to the Middle Ages, the terminology was not common until the mid-1960s.”
“Really?” I asked Dean. I was a natural profiler. He was my boyfriend, and I had in no way seen this coming. Then again, he had promised the universe a significant reduction in brooding if it returned Lia to us intact.
“You heard the man,”
Michael stood up and dusted off his lapels. “Mooning Agent Starmans,” he said solemnly, “would be my pleasure.” He stalked to the balcony, let himself out, waited for Agent Starmans to pass by, and then called down to the man. When Starmans looked up, Michael saluted him. With military precision, he turned and bared his backside.
I was laughing so hard, I almost didn’t hear Michael as he came back in and turned to Dean. “Truth or dare, Redding?”
“Truth.”
Michael crossed his arms over his waist in a way that made me think Dean was going to regret that choice. “Admit it: I’ve grown on you.”
Sloane frowned. “That wasn’t a question.”
“Fine,” Michael said, grinning, before returning to torture Dean. “Do you like me? Am I one of your closest bosom buddies? Would you cry your little heart out if I was gone?”
Michael and Dean had been at each other’s throats for as long as I’d known them.
“Do. You. Like. Me.” Michael repeated the question, this time with gestures.
Dean glanced at Lia, whose presence was a reminder that he couldn’t get away with lying.
“You have your moments,” Dean mumbled.
“What was that?” Michael cupped his ear.
“I don’t have to like you,” Dean snapped back. “We’re family.”
“Bosom buddies,” Michael corrected loftily. Dean gave him a dirty look.
I grinned.
“Your turn again,” Lia reminded Dean, nudging him with the tip of her foot.
Dean resisted the urge to target Michael. “Truth or dare, Cassie?”
There were very few things I kept from Dean—very few things he couldn’t ask me, if he wanted to know.
“Dare,” I said.
Sloane cleared her throat. “I would just like to point out,” she said, “that this is one of only two-point-three percent of hotel rooms that come with a blender.”
Hours ticked by. The blender and the minibar proved to be a dangerous combination.