by Kay Hooper
“And I’m hearing this only now?”
She kept her tone even. “Imagine waking up with your memory full of holes. Imagine that when you woke up, you had dried blood on you. And then imagine that before you could get your feet under you and try to figure out what had happened, you were called to the scene of a grisly murder.” Riley managed a shrug. “It took me a while just to get all the characters straight, never mind the plot. I’m still working on that.”
“Dried blood on you?”
“That was the part of the report from Quantico that I didn’t want to explain to Jake. First test: human. The blood on my clothes was human; my boss ordered it tested.”
Slowly, Ash said, “And the second test said the blood was the same type as the donor. So the blood on you matched what was in the victim’s stomach?”
Riley nodded. “I don’t have a clue how it got all over me, but the obvious possibility is that I was there. At some point before, during, or after that murder, I was there. Involved somehow.”
“You didn’t kill anybody,” he said immediately.
“I certainly hope not. But I can’t explain that blood. And until I can, admitting all this to Jake doesn’t seem like a good idea. Especially since he’s not all that happy with me right now.”
Ash frowned. “Wait a minute. On Sunday night, you told me—unexpectedly—that you needed some time alone and sent me away. Which means you knew something was going to happen.”
“Or at least knew I wanted to do some investigating on my own, yeah, we can assume that.”
“But you don’t remember where you were planning to go or why?”
“Afraid not.”
He turned his gaze forward, staring through the windshield as his long fingers drummed on the steering wheel for a moment. Then he looked at her again, this time with a certain amount of anger. “This was never just a vacation for you, was it, Riley?”
So I hadn’t confided in him about that. Why not?
Dammit, why not?
“Riley—”
“It’s never just a vacation for me. Never.”
Mobile, Alabama
2½ Years Previously
By now, Riley could have been blindfolded and taken anywhere in the Southeast or along the Gulf and would have been able to recognize a coastal or river city from the smell alone.
She was also beginning to really dislike it. Musty, muddy, faintly sour, it made her think of damp and decay and blood.
Not so surprising, really, considering how many butchered bodies she’d stood over in otherwise lovely coastal cities.
This time, Riley didn’t wait for the killer to strike. She didn’t just drift into Mobile and blend in, vanish into anonymity while allowing her senses time to adjust, which had been the game plan up to that point.
After New Orleans, waiting patiently was somewhat beyond Riley. Whether because this particular killer had thrown a gauntlet at her feet professionally or because she felt personally violated, the fact remained that she was certain he had somehow managed to touch her mind more surely than she had touched his.
And that, to Riley, was a hell of a strong motivation to get this case resolved and this killer behind bars ASAP.
So, despite Bishop’s warnings, despite her own uneasy misgivings, she used every trick of concentration and focus she had learned in her life to begin trying to connect the moment she hit town.
It wasn’t the way her abilities were supposed to work, really. She had connected with other minds before; Bishop said her secondary or ancillary ability was telepathy, and being a telepath himself, he’d know. But generally speaking, telepathy was barely a blip on her personal radar, and her clairvoyance took the form of picking up bits of information from her surroundings or from other people. Touching objects or people tended to make it easier, but not always. Sometimes she got absolutely nothing. And on a few memorable occasions she had been slammed by a “dump” of information that had left her mentally disoriented and physically exhausted—a truly disconcerting experience she was wary of repeating but had no way of controlling or predicting.
Cosmic irony, that. A not-so-gentle reminder from the universe that the gifts given never came without strings.
In any case, her own “gifts” tended to be far more benign than those many psychics experienced. No pain, no disorientation, no visions yanking her from the here and now. Mostly, she just became aware of something rising in her mind, bobbing about to attract her notice, like flotsam on a wave. A fact, a feeling, a certainty.
Reaching beyond that, opening herself deliberately to contact from a dark and twisted killer, was a move as risky as it was unprecedented, at least where she was concerned.
She wasn’t even sure how to do it other than to focus, concentrate, think about this butcher and how badly she wanted to stop him—
Welcome to Mobile, little girl.
Riley stopped in her tracks. She stood on a side street in downtown Mobile, near a well-lighted corner where people passed on foot and in cars on a typical weeknight like this.
They went about their business, oblivious, as Riley put out a hand to the building beside her, steadying herself not so much physically as emotionally.
There weren’t words to describe how cold and slimy his thoughts were in her mind. Everything in her recoiled, yet she made herself stand still and silent, ignoring her surroundings until she saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing except that voice in her mind.
That presence.
I knew you’d come. Knew you’d follow me.
“Where are you?” she whispered, not even aware that she’d shut her eyes, the better to concentrate.
I’m close, little girl. Closer than I’ve ever been.
“Where?”
Can’t you feel my breath on the back of your neck?
She forced herself not to turn, not to betray the icy shiver chilling her all the way to her bones on the warm, humid night.
“Where are you, you bastard?”
Fast as you were, I got here before you. I’ve been waiting, little girl.
“God damn you—”
I’ve left you a present.
Riley’s eyes flew open and she jerked as though physically struck. “No,” she murmured. “Oh, no…”
He had left her another victim to find. Another butchered body. Another family destroyed.
She had failed. Again.
Poor little girl. In such pain. But don’t worry. You’ll get another chance. We’ll meet again, Riley.
Present Day
“Riley?”
Dragging her mind back from the past, fighting to focus on the here and now, Riley had to wonder why, if she was sleeping with this man, she hadn’t told him the real reason she’d come to Opal Island.
Had she trusted him before the Taser attack? Or was there, among her lost memories, a reason why she had allowed him to share her bed without sharing her truths?
But she had already taken the leap of faith, so she pushed the doubts aside, drew a breath, and answered him honestly.
“Gordon got in touch just before I came down here. The fires, the signs and symbols pointing to the occult, worried him. He’s seen enough of the world, walked through enough jungles, to know when something bad is walking there too. He believed something was going on and that it was going to get worse. He asked me to check it out. Unofficially, of course. When he called, I’d just come off a case, I had vacation time piling up, and the unit wasn’t busy. So my boss okayed it. Not a formal investigation, just a favor for a friend.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Riley? We talked about the arson, the way people were getting edgy—even about the possibility of occult activities. You told me the occult was one of your specialties in the SCU. You never said it was why you’d come here.”
Because I didn’t trust you enough? Because I was afraid—or knew—that you were involved? Or only because for the first time my personal life meant more to me than my professional one and I didn’t want them to get t
angled?
Why couldn’t she think straight? Why couldn’t she make up her damn mind about him?
“Riley?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why. I don’t remember, Ash.”
Once again, his eyes narrowed. “You don’t remember? Do you mean it isn’t just whatever happened on Sunday night that you can’t recall?”
She nodded reluctantly. “When I woke up on Monday, most of the last three weeks was pretty much a blank.”
“Pretty much?” A lawyer’s determination to get things straight.
“Almost entirely,” she admitted. “There were flashes. Faces. Threads of memory that vanished like smoke when I tried to catch hold of them. I had to be told, by Gordon and by my boss, what I was doing here.”
“Then you didn’t remember us.”
“No,” Riley said. “I didn’t remember us.”
“You sure as hell fooled me,” Ash said.
Riley looked at him for a moment, then unfastened her seat belt and got out of the Hummer. She headed for the entrance to the dog park, not surprised that the area was deserted but for the bored deputy standing guard at the break in the fence near the woods.
Murders made people nervous. Particularly gruesome murders with possible satanic elements made them downright panicky. Riley figured most dog owners were taking their pets to the beach for exercise these days.
“Riley—”
When he grabbed her arm and swung her around to face him, she almost reacted in self-defense. Almost. Those instincts, at least, were very much alive in her, and that training went so deep it was an ingrained part of her character; her father had begun teaching her how to throw a larger opponent over her shoulder—and disable said opponent—before she started kindergarten.
She was more than a little surprised she hadn’t taken Ash’s head off. Interesting, that. Important? She didn’t know.
She looked at the hand gripping her arm, not moving or speaking until he swore under his breath and released her. Then she merely folded her arms and waited.
“Look, if anybody has a right to be pissed about this, I think it’s me,” he said, keeping his voice low so that the deputy some yards away wouldn’t hear.
“Oh, really?” She stared up at him, matching his quiet steel with her own. “Somebody attacked me. He or she put a stun gun to the back of my head and emptied electrical current into my brain. And not just the electrical current standard in a Taser, meant to temporarily incapacitate. This was an amped-up weapon, Ash, a weapon quite probably intended to kill. It didn’t kill me, but it put me down and it damn sure screwed up more than my memory. So forgive me if I chose to pretend nothing had happened for a few days while I tried to figure out who the hell I could trust.”
“So far,” Leah said to the sheriff, “nothing unusual’s shown up in any of the background checks.”
He scowled. “What, not even a parking ticket?”
“I didn’t say that.” She handed a printout across the desk. “Three of them have bad credit ratings.”
Jake eyed her. “Are you being funny?”
“Obviously not.” She perched on the arm of one of his visitor’s chairs, smiling faintly. “I’m just saying that not a single one of them has a criminal record of any kind. A few court appearances on civil matters—divorce, child custody, a property dispute—but absolutely nothing criminal. As far as we’ve been able to determine, the group in the Pearson house is clean.”
He grunted. “Unless somebody gave us a false name.”
“They had I.D.,” she pointed out.
“And how hard is that to fake in this day and age? Hell, you can buy a new identity on the Internet.”
Patient, she said, “The paper trail looks genuine.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He frowned down at the report she’d given him. “Keep digging.”
“And when we hit bottom?”
“Dig a little deeper.”
“Right.” She stood up, but paused before turning toward the door to say, “You know, if we don’t find anything, and they don’t want to talk to us, we won’t have a legal leg to stand on in questioning them about the murder. Not one thing we’ve found so far ties any of them to the scene, and until we find out who the victim was…”
“That’s another thing I don’t get,” Jake said. “We should have an I.D. by now. With the size of this county, we’ve had time to talk to nearly every soul; we’ve certainly had time to knock on every door.”
“Almost,” she said. “Tim thinks by the end of the day our teams will have done that. Every door on the island, at least, and most of those in Castle. The whole county will take a few more days.”
“We need more people,” he muttered.
She hesitated, then said, “Well, in general we don’t need them.”
“Don’t remind me that I could call in the state police.”
“I don’t have to remind you.” Leah shrugged. “Anyway, they’d have to waste time getting up to speed before they’d be any real help. I’m betting Riley’s going to make the difference here.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Before she could respond, he added, “She and Ash still in the conference room?”
“No, they left a little while ago.”
“To go where?”
“Didn’t say.”
His frown became a scowl. “Find out, dammit.”
Leah didn’t question or argue, she merely nodded and left his office to obey the order. She’d been one of Jake Ballard’s deputies long enough to recognize the signs of a frayed temper, and though he seldom lost his entirely, when he did it wasn’t pretty.
She returned to her own desk, nearly alone in the bullpen with virtually every available deputy out doing the house-to-house. She tried Riley’s cell first, not really surprised when she got only the voice mail.
“I don’t know why she even bothers to carry a cell,” she muttered to herself as she hung up without leaving a message. “It never seems to be working.”
A downside of being psychic, Riley had explained. Something about electromagnetic energy; as Leah understood it, it was sort of like Riley carried around with her a permanent static charge. Even her credit cards had to be carried in a special case, and the SCU-designed cell cases were only partially and sporadically protective because the phones had to be able to send and receive signals to be useful.
Difficult, Leah supposed, to design a way in which to shield a device from electromagnetic energy when said device required energy to function.
She was rummaging on her messy desk looking for the business card Ash had given her earlier with his cell number on it when the deputy manning the front desk approached her.
“Hey, Leah—we might have something.”
She looked up at Tim Deviney, her brows lifting. “Yeah? With the door-to-door?”
He nodded. “We got a renter not answering his door, and neighbors haven’t seen him at least since the weekend. Team’s been back twice, and still no answer, no sign of him.”
Leah frowned. “A single renter? Was he on our first list?”
“No, the realtor thought he was coming down with his family, and it’s one of the big houses, so they had no idea he was alone.”
“We have a name?” she asked.
“Yeah. Tate. Wesley Tate.”
After a long moment, Ash let out a short sigh. “Okay. Point taken. You have more right to be pissed.”
“Thank you.”
They stared at each other, and then he finally smiled. “So I’m the one you decided to trust, huh?”
Becoming more aware of the deputy watching them, Riley lowered her voice again. “Well, I was sleeping with you, after all. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I just don’t make a habit of sleeping with men I barely know.”
“So you said.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Want to tell me why I made an exception for you?”
His smile widened. “You know, I think I’ll wait awhile and see if that part of
your memory comes back.”
“Bastard.”
“I said you had more right to be pissed; I didn’t say I wasn’t still pissed too. You’re a hell of an actress, Riley. It might have dawned on me slowly that something was wrong, but I never guessed I was a stranger to you.”
She cleared her throat. “Not a total stranger. My memory might have been AWOL, but other parts of me were…Let’s just say some things came back to me quicker than others.”
“Yeah, we were great in bed right from the start,” he said. “I would have been seriously offended if you had forgotten that.”
“I’ll bet.”
“It’s a guy thing.”
“Uh-huh. Well, while you beat on your chest, I’m going to go see if I can pick up anything from the murder scene.”
Turning serious, he said, “Riley, I don’t have to know much about psychic abilities to guess this isn’t a good idea.”
“Probably not, but it’s the only one I have right now.” She shook her head. “Look, Gordon couldn’t tell me much because I hadn’t told him much. I’ve never kept notes or an ongoing report during an investigation—something I’ve just started doing here in case my mind is more screwed-up than I think it is—so it’s not like I left a trail of bread crumbs for myself to follow. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what I may or may not have learned in the last few weeks. All I know is that somebody attacked me and a man’s dead.”
“And your boss left you here without backup?”
Riley briefly explained just how occupied the remainder of the team was with their own cases, then added, “Bishop wanted to recall me to Quantico, but I talked him out of it. I have to report to him every day, though, and when I report in today I damn sure want a few answers to offer him. Otherwise, when he hears what happened yesterday—”
“What happened yesterday?”
Shit.
Reluctantly, she admitted, “I lost a few more hours.”
“What?”
“You heard me. About twelve hours, this time. From yesterday afternoon until this morning.”
“Riley, you seemed perfectly fine last night.”