Blood Ties by Kay Hooper Page B

Serenade now contained more than a hundred names of people reported missing and not yet found.
    With so few specifics about their victims, Bobbie wasn’t about to try to narrow that list on her own. But what she could and did do was to include a brief profile on each of the missing men and women. Most of the details were in the reports she’d gathered from other law-enforcement agencies, so it was an easy—if tedious—matter to condense the information under simple categories: Height; Age; Weight; Coloring; Missing From; Missing Since; Reported Missing By; Criminal Record (it was almost always no under that category); Financial Problems; Unexplained Financial Transactions; Beneficiaries of Death .
    That last one creeped Bobbie out, but it had to be noted, because at least half a dozen of the missing people carried hefty life-insurance policies left to spouses. Not so unusual, of course, but worth noting, in her opinion.
    So Bobbie noted it. And noted all the other bits of information she had gathered. And then she put it all on a somewhat crude spreadsheet, hoping that something would help the far-more-experienced FBI agents identify the two poor souls whose remains had been found so horribly tortured and mangled.
    And it wasn’t until just before midnight and the end of her shift, while barely aware of Dale yawning over a less-than-involving seventies-era sitcom, that Bobbie saw something unexpected. Very unexpected.
    She rechecked all the information she had, bit her lip for a moment in indecision, then reached for the phone, hoping to find another second-shift cop in another quiet law-enforcement agency with time on his or her hands and the will to stay past this shift and dig just a little deeper.
    “S o nobody comes back from being lost in the gray time?” Hollis held her voice steady.
    Diana shook her head. “Nobody, as far as I know. Because even if the body is kept alive on this side, the gray time really is a corridor between two realities. Nothing belonging to either side can exist in there indefinitely; the guides have told me that much. For us, from this side, the exhaustion becomes overwhelming, all our energy is drained away, and…”
    “And?”
    “And our spirits apparently pass on to whatever lies beyond the gray time. I’m told there’s peace to be found there. But I’m also told peace isn’t necessarily the destination for every soul.”
    “So there is a hell,” DeMarco said, sounding thoughtful. “I’ve always wondered.”
    Diana nodded a bit hesitantly. “I think so. At least it sounds that way, that something… unpleasant… is waiting for at least some spirits. Calling it hell is probably as good as anything else.”
    Hollis said, “Let’s not get sidetracked by a philosophical—or theological—discussion, if you don’t mind. Not tonight, anyway. Diana, you’re basically telling me that if I got trapped in the gray time and couldn’t find my way out before the door closed, I’d be dead.”
    “Afraid so.”
    “And the door closes—how?”
    Diana blinked. “You know, I haven’t really thought about it that way. Because there are doors in the gray time that seem literal, and they open or close without seeming to affect me.”
    “Guess,” Hollis suggested.
    “Okay.” She thought about it for a moment. “My guess is that if anyone of this world stays in the gray time too long or… somehow … wanders too deeply into the gray time, gets too far away from their physical self, then the door would close. The door we open as mediums. I suppose, thinking about it, that it’s less a door than a connection that gets severed—the connection between the body and the spirit. Cut that tie or have something cause it to snap, and… and it doesn’t get repaired. The spirit can’t return to the body.”
    “Well, that doesn’t sound fun.” Hollis’s voice remained calm, even somewhat sardonic. But her eyes were wide and dark, and she continued to chew on her thumbnail—until