After a long moment, Bishop raised his shields once again and left the center. He had been the last down off the mountainous slopes and was aware that Miranda and the rest of the team waited for him at the B and B.

It was still relatively early but already dark, and he noted that the downtown area was again very quiet, too quiet for a reasonably pleasant Wednesday evening in March, especially with snow tentatively in the forecast. People tended to want to be out and about with bad weather looming, either stocking up on supplies or just being out while they could be.

Not tonight.

He was willing to bet that at least some details of what had been done to the unidentified victim had made it off the mountain long before his remains had. And there had certainly been enough time since Megan Hales’s family had been notified for that news to spread like wildfire.

So now the townsfolk of Salem knew that at least two of their neighbors had been brutally murdered and that a third was missing.

There had been no sign of Simon Cavendish, Finn’s deputies had discovered no one who had heard from him since he’d left the bank the previous day, and Finn had officially logged him as missing.

Whether the majority of Salem had any clear knowledge that members of the Five were the most likely targets of the killer was very much up for debate, at least for now. It was doubtful anyone would assume themselves to be safe.

Bishop knew that members of the Five made up around forty percent of Salem’s population of less than ten thousand people and probably more if the families were traced through marriages beyond a couple of generations. The longtime practice, as Finn had explained it to Bishop, was for females born in any of the five families to keep their family names, usually hyphenating them officially if and when they married, and those combined names were passed along to offspring. Beyond that generation, however, it was pretty much an individual choice as to whether to keep surnames that were bound to grow cumbersome.

Bishop knew enough about human nature to know that there were undoubtedly men who disliked the idea of their own family names disappearing down the line when they married into the Five, so that was undoubtedly an influence on at least some choices made through the years.

Still, according to Finn, most people were aware if they were descended from one of the five families whether they bore the names or not, and many could trace that ancestry back, sometimes over many generations. In addition, all five families tended to have a higher percentage of sons than would have been the average.

It interested Bishop, especially given the psychic abilities passed down for many generations.

“Like a buffet,” Hollis had said, emphasizing their unit chief’s focus on psychics. Bishop had to smile, remembering that, but his smile faded. He would have much preferred to study Salem only in terms of its psychics, but that hadn’t been an option when Finn had first gotten in touch with him the previous year and wasn’t now.