by Kay Hooper
As she did that, it occurred to her with cold realization that if she had been standing here, reaching up like this, possibly holding this man’s body in a better position for his killer to cut his throat, blood would likely have spattered her clothing and hair and covered her hands and forearms.
All the way to her elbows.
The forensics people were back, carefully cutting down the body, by the time the search teams finally called it quits. If the severed head was in these woods, they reported, then it was buried or otherwise well hidden, and where there were signs of fresh digging the searchers had discovered only two beef bones and a rawhide chew toy.
“Oh, Christ,” Jake muttered when that news was relayed to him. “You don’t think somebody’s dog carried off the head?”
Riley, who had just fished in her shoulder bag to produce a PowerBar, paused in unwrapping it to say, “I doubt it. A feral dog or a very hungry one, maybe, but somebody’s pet would hesitate to consume human flesh. As a rule, anyway.”
Jake stared at her.
“Cats will,” Riley clarified after taking a bite. “Once we’re dead, to them we’re just meat, apparently. Dogs are different. Maybe because they’re domesticated. Cats really aren’t. They just want us to believe they are.”
Leah laughed under her breath. “Cat person, are you?”
“Actually, I like both.” She looked at Jake, who was still staring at her. “What?”
“Talk about jaded. How in the hell can you eat right now?”
“It’s for energy.” The new voice spoke matter-of-factly. “She has a high metabolism, Jake. No calories, no energy.”
“I knew that,” Jake said. “What’re you doing here, Ash?”
“What do you think? I wanted to see the crime scene while it’s still relatively…fresh.”
Ash. Riley turned her head to watch him approach, again digging for memories and again finding none. Absolutely none.
He was about the same height as the sheriff, which made him around six feet. Dark like the sheriff. But that’s where any similarity ended. In comparison to Jake Ballard’s polished handsomeness, this man was almost ugly.
He had broad, powerful shoulders that seemed to strain the fabric of the very nice suit he wore, as though the covering were something not quite natural for him. His very dark hair was fairly short and not at all tidy, his chiseled face was deeply tanned, and his nose had been broken, Riley thought, at least twice.
He had high cheekbones, slanted brows that lent him a sardonic expression, and hooded, very, very pale green eyes that threw both danger and something enigmatic into the mix.
And where charm came off Jake Ballard in almost palpable waves, this man was radiating something else entirely. Something almost primal.
When he joined them, standing nearest Riley, he touched her lightly, his large hand sliding down her back to rest near her waist in a gesture that was curiously possessive.
“Hey,” he said.
Riley, not a woman to be possessed, would have protested. Except that the instant he touched her, a hot shiver started somewhere near her toes and spread upward through her entire body in pulsing waves until she felt like she herself was radiating something primal.
Heat. Pure heat. And she recognized the sensation, even if the degree of it was rather astonishing.
Oh. Oh, shit.
She had taken a lover. Only it wasn’t the sheriff.
“Hey, Ash,” she said calmly, and bit into the PowerBar.
She needed energy. She needed all the energy she could get.
“I would have called you,” Jake was saying to Ash. “But I knew you had court, so—”
“Postponed,” Ash said, looking at the sheriff. “Besides which, murder ranks higher on the list of my priorities than breaking and entering. That case can wait.”
He had a beautiful voice, Riley thought. Deep and rich and curiously fluid. Probably handy for a lawyer. Which, she assumed from the conversation, he was.
Jake grunted. “You usually work from reports and crime-scene photographs.”
A prosecutor, I’m guessing.
“This is something special. Obviously.” He had turned his gaze to the center of the clearing, watching as the headless corpse was zipped into a black body bag. “No idea who he is?”
“Not so far. We fingerprinted him first thing, but his prints aren’t in the database.”
“And no sign of his head,” Riley said, feeling she would be expected to participate in the conversation.
“To delay identification, maybe?” Ash suggested.
Frowning, Jake said, “Take a look around you. If somebody just wanted somebody else dead and not identified, leaving a headless corpse in a ditch or thrown into the ocean makes sense. But left in a fairly public area, strung up and tortured over an altar and inside a circle of salt?”
“Salt?”
“It’s used in some occult rituals,” Riley said.
Ash looked at her. “Yesterday you seemed pretty sure that whatever’s going on around here had nothing to do with the occult.”
Oh, shit. Was that a professional opinion, or just pillow talk? And would I have told you the truth, whatever I believed?
Not that she could ask, of course.
Instead, calmly, she said, “Well, that was before this happened. And Jake’s right—this is a very public way to leave a murder victim if all the killer wants is to delay identification. Whether or not it’s some kind of occult ritual, I can’t say. Yet, anyway.”
One of his slanted brows rose. “So Jake asked you for help? Officially?”
“Not exactly. Not officially.”
“She has resources I don’t, Ash,” Jake said.
“She’s on vacation.”
“I’ll make sure she doesn’t lose vacation days helping with this.”
“She’ll do just that if she’s in this investigation unofficially, on her own time.”
“At least you’re admitting there’s something to investigate.”
“A murder, Jake. Whatever all the bells and whistles are, it’s just a murder.”
“You don’t know that. I don’t know that. Riley can help find out what it is or isn’t.”
“If you need help, ask for it officially—through the FBI. Let them send an agent down here.”
“They have an agent down here.”
Riley was suddenly aware that the hand still touching her back was exuding tension and…something else, something more she could feel but not quite get a handle on. Danger? Warning?
She stepped away from that hand abruptly and turned to face the two men, conjuring a pleasant smile. “Still here, boys.”
Ash was expressionless, but Jake pulled on his sheepish face.
“Sorry, Riley, but—”
“Don’t talk about me as if I weren’t,” she added gently.
Evenly, Ash said, “You’re here on vacation. To rest and relax, remember? After a year of tough cases, you said, the most recent of which nearly got you killed.”
“I didn’t say it nearly got me killed,” she objected, hoping to hell she hadn’t. “I said it was rough and it was a close call. But obviously not too close, since I don’t have a mark on me.”
She offered that deliberately, watching him for the slightest reaction. And—dammit—saw a disquieting gleam in those green eyes.
A familiar gleam.
The shower stall was full of steam—the whole damn bathroom, in fact—by the time they turned the water off and made it to the bed.
“We’re getting the sheets wet,” she murmured.
“Do you care?” His mouth trailed down her throat and between her breasts. “Shall I stop?”
His hair was just long enough for her to get a handful and force his head up so she could gaze into those green, green eyes.
“Stop and I’ll shoot you,” she said huskily.
He laughed and covered her mouth with his, and that glorious heat began to burn….
“No,” he said. “Yo
u don’t have a mark on you. Still, you came here on vacation.”
Damn memories, rearing their heads at the most inconvenient moments. Riley cleared her throat and forged ahead. “I’ve had almost three weeks, good food, lots of rest and walks on the beach. I’m fine, Ash.”
“And I need her help,” Jake said flatly. “I’m not too proud to ask, Ash, whether you are or not.”
“It’s got nothing to do with being too proud.” He kept his gaze on Riley.
Half under his breath, but loud enough for them all to hear, Jake muttered, “I know what it’s got to do with.”
Riley jumped in before the tension she could feel in Ash made him say something he might later regret.
“Look, I’ve said I’ll help if I can. And I will. So there’s nothing more to be said about it. Right?”
“Right,” Jake said immediately.
Ash took a moment longer, holding her gaze with those vivid eyes, then smiled. “Sure,” he said. “I think the three of us can work together. Professionally.”
Riley smiled back. “I’m sure we can.”
Gordon rubbed a big hand across his bald head and stared at Riley. “Say what?”
“My memory of the last three weeks resembles Swiss cheese. Lots and lots of holes.”
“The other part.”
“Oh, that. I woke up this afternoon with dried blood all over me.”
“Human blood?”
“Dunno yet. Probably hear from Quantico tomorrow.”
“And you can’t remember how you got blood all over you.”
“One of the holes, yeah. And it’s really bothering me, especially since we have this tortured and mangled body, which was apparently tortured and mangled in about the right time frame.”
“I can see how that’d be a worry,” he agreed.
They stared at each other, Gordon leaning back against the side of his boat and Riley sitting on the bench across from him. The boat was tied up at the dock behind the small house Gordon owned on the mainland side of Opal Island; he kept himself busy as well as made extra money taking fishing parties out onto the Atlantic.
“Not that I think for one minute that you’re capable of doing that to somebody for no good reason,” he said.
Wryly appreciative of the qualifier, she said, “But what if I had a good reason?”
“Out of the war zone?” He shook his head. “Nah. Not your style. You might get pissed and come out swingin’, but nothing more, not back here in the world.”
“I am an FBI agent,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, so you’d shoot somebody. Maybe. If you didn’t have another choice. We both know you’re capable of that. But torture and decapitation?” Gordon pursed his lips, his broad brown face considering. “You know, I don’t see you doing that even in wartime. It takes a certain cruelty, not to mention cold-blooded ruthlessness, and you never had either.”
Riley was reassured, if only partly. Gordon knew her, probably, as well as anyone did, and if he said killing someone like that was not in her nature, then he was very likely right. She didn’t think she was capable of it either.
But.
“Okay, so if I didn’t do that to the guy, then why did I wake up covered in blood?”
“You don’t know it was his blood.”
“But what if?”
“Could be you tried to help him at some point. Went to try to cut him down before you realized it was too late.”
“And then just went home and fell asleep, fully dressed and still covered with blood?”
“No, that doesn’t sound likely, does it? Not for you. Not if you were in your right mind, anyway. Something must have happened in between. A shock of some kind, maybe. You sure you didn’t get a bump on the head, something like that?”
“No lumps or bruises that I could find. Woke up with a hell of a headache, though. You know what that usually means.”
He nodded. “Your version of a hangover, minus the booze. You’d been using the spooky senses.”
“Apparently.” He’d known about her clairvoyance for years, believed in it utterly because he’d seen again and again what she could do, and had kept her secret.
“But you don’t remember what they told you?”
“Nope. If they told me anything.”
“Must have been something bad. Bad enough to take away your memory, maybe?”
“I don’t know, Gordon. I’ve seen some pretty lousy things. Horrible, sick things. It never affected my memory before. What could have been so bad, so totally shocking, that I couldn’t bear to remember it?”
“Maybe you saw what happened out there in the woods. Hell, maybe you saw somebody conjure up the devil.”
“I don’t believe in the devil. Not like that, anyway.”
“And maybe that’s why you don’t remember.”
Riley considered that, but shook her head. “In addition to some lousy things, I’ve also seen some incredibly weird things, especially in the last few years. Off-the-chart scary things. I don’t believe any occult ritual would actually conjure a flesh-and-blood devil complete with horns and a pitchfork—but I don’t know that I’d be all that shocked if it happened right in front of me.”
Gordon grinned. “Come to think of it, you’d probably just wonder how they managed to get the guy in the rubber suit so fast.”
“Probably. It is mostly smoke and mirrors, you know, the seemingly supernatural occult stuff. Usually.”
“So you’ve told me. Okay. So you saw the murder out there, and something about it caused the amnesia. That’s the most likely explanation, right?”
She had to agree. “Yeah, I guess. Which makes it imperative for me to recover those memories ASAP.”
“Think the killer might know you saw something?”
“I think I have to assume that until I have proof to the contrary. And finding that proof is not going to be a lot of fun, since I don’t have a clue who the killer might be. Worse yet, the spooky senses seem to be out of commission, at least for the moment.”
“No shit?”
Riley shook her head. “No shit. I should have been able to tap into something at the crime scene; that sort of situation, with everybody tense and upset, is always where I’m strongest. Or always have been. This time, nothing. Not a damn thing, even when I touched those rocks.”
“So you’re hunting a killer in the dark.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Gordon brooded. “A killer who might know, or at least believe, that you saw something out there. But if he does know you saw something, or even suspects you did, why let you run around loose? I mean, he’s killed pretty brutally already. Why let you live?”
“I don’t know. Unless he had damn good reason to be sure I wouldn’t be a threat.”
“Like, maybe, he knew you wouldn’t remember whatever it was that you’d seen?”
“How could he know that? Amnesia isn’t something you can deliberately cause, at least not as far as I know. And the SCU has studied this sort of thing, for years now. Traumatic injuries, especially head injuries, have all sorts of consequences, but amnesia other than very short-term isn’t especially high on the list. Besides which—no bumps or bruises, let alone anything severe enough to be termed a head injury.”
“Very short-term amnesia?”
“It’s fairly common after a traumatic injury to not remember the events immediately before it occurred. But that almost always means a gap of hours, not days—and almost never weeks.”
“Okay.” Gordon brooded some more. “Long shot, maybe, but what about another psychic?”
Riley winced. “Christ, I hope not.”
“But it’s possible another psychic could be affecting you?”
“Just about anything is possible, you know that as well as I do. Another psychic might have picked up on the amnesia, or even known about it in advance. Hell, maybe caused it. Or at the very least be taking advantage of it.” She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “I can tell you this much. If th
ere is another psychic in this, he or she has the upper hand, at least until the fog in my head clears and I can use my own abilities.”
If I can. If I can.
“Don’t much like the sound of that, babe,” Gordon offered.
“No. Me either.” It was Riley’s turn to brood. “Leah said you two thought I had been unusually secretive lately.” The deputy had dropped Riley off and then returned to the sheriff’s department, since she was on duty for another hour.
“Well, more than I liked. It was me brought you down here, after all. I been feeling responsible.”
“Don’t.”
He rolled his eyes, a characteristic gesture Leah had probably picked up from him. “Yeah, yeah.”
“I mean it. And, by the way, I haven’t told Leah about the memory loss. I trust her, it’s just…”
“I know what it’s just,” he responded. And he did know. Fellow soldiers understood the need to guard vulnerabilities in a way few civilians ever could. “I’ll keep the secret if you want, but I think she can probably help. ’Specially if—”
Riley eyed him, seeing in that suddenly impassive face a lot more than most would have seen. “Especially if I don’t remember my obviously hot social life these last weeks,” she finished.
“So you don’t, huh?”
“Not much of it, no. I gather I dated Jake Ballard, at least for a while. And that I’m currently involved with Ash. Ash what, by the way? I haven’t heard his surname used.” The very question struck her as almost comical.
Almost.
Gordon’s brows climbed into his nonexistent hairline. “Prescott. Ash Prescott. District Attorney for Hazard County.”
“Jesus. What was I thinking?”
“One of the things you didn’t share,” Gordon informed her politely. “Mind you, I wasn’t surprised when Jake talked you into going out with him. He’s got the knack. Far as I could tell, though, it was just a couple dates—and then you met Ash. You and him surprised me.”
“Why? Because of me, or because of him?”
Gordon gave the question serious consideration. “Well, it’s not what I’d call normal for you to bed down with a man you’ve known no more than a few days.”