Sleeping With Fear Page 3

  She refilled her coffee cup, then rummaged in the pantry for the high-calorie PowerBars she tended to buy by the case. It was normal for her to carry at least two of them in her purse or back pockets at all times; if she didn’t eat something about every hour or two, she simply couldn’t function at peak efficiency.

  Psychic efficiency.

  Several of the other SCU members envied her the high metabolism that enabled her to eat anything she wanted—and rather astonishing quantities of it, at that—without gaining an ounce. But they also understood the downside. It was not always possible for Riley to eat enough or often enough during the course of a busy investigation to continually provide fuel for her abilities, and at least once it had nearly cost a life.

  Hers.

  She ate a PowerBar with her coffee and placed two more in the shoulder bag she had found. She checked the contents of the purse, just on the off chance that something unusual might trigger her memories, but everything looked normal.

  She tended to travel light, so there wasn’t much. Keys to her rental car and this house. A small pocket phone/address book. Tube of lip balm; she wasn’t a lipstick kind of girl. Mirrored compact with pressed powder that was barely used, because she wasn’t a makeup kind of girl either—unless the situation called for it. Billfold with cash, credit cards in their protective case, and her driver’s license; her FBI I.D. folder and badge would be in her nightstand, or should be, since she was technically off duty.

  She went and checked, and it was.

  Returning to the main living area, Riley turned on the TV to CNN to check the date and find out if she’d missed anything crucial in the way of world news.

  July 14. And the last clear, solid memory she could claim was somewhere around June 20, at Quantico. Paperwork at the desk, nothing unusual. Feeling a little drained, which was normal for her following the conclusion of a tough investigation.

  And then…nothing but flashes. Whispers in her mind, snatches of conversation that made no sense. Faces and places she thought she knew but couldn’t put names to. Feelings that were oddly unsettled and even chaotic for a woman who tended to take a reasonable, rational approach to life….

  Riley shook that off and frowned at the TV. Okay, so she wasn’t doing so hot. How went the world?

  One earthquake, two political scandals, a celebrity divorce, and half a dozen violent crimes later, she muted the set and returned to the kitchen for more coffee.

  Same old, same old.

  “I can’t just hide in this house until it all comes back to me,” she muttered to herself. For one thing, there was no guarantee it would; short-term memory loss linked to some kind of trauma wasn’t all that uncommon, but in a psychic it could also be a symptom of bigger problems.

  Bishop hadn’t needed to remind her of that.

  For another thing, nothing here was sparking her memory. And she needed information, fast. Needed to have some idea of what was going on here. So the most imperative order of business was, clearly, contacting Gordon.

  She took the time first to bag the clothing she’d been wearing and managed to find what she needed to construct a decent package for shipment back to Quantico. And she did another search through the house, this time looking intently for anything unusual.

  Aside from the sexy underwear, there was nothing she considered unusual. Which meant that she found nothing to either answer any of her questions or raise more.

  By the time she was finished with the more thorough search, she’d also eaten another PowerBar and her headache was all but gone. But when she attempted to tap into her extra senses, she got nothing. No deeper, more intense connection to her surroundings that was her spider sense.

  As for her clairvoyance…

  She was stronger with people than with objects, so it was difficult for her to be certain that extra sense was out to lunch when she was in the house all alone—

  The doorbell rang, and Riley’s first reaction was an intense suspicion that came from both training and a lifelong addiction to mystery novels and horror movies.

  A visitor just when she needed one was not a good sign.

  She took her gun with her, held down at her side until she reached the front door. A small clear-glass viewing panel in the solid wood door allowed her to see who was on her porch.

  A woman in a sheriff’s deputy uniform, no hat. She was a tall redhead, rather beautiful, and—

  “I don’t know, Riley. We just don’t see this sort of thing around here. Peculiar symbols burned into wood or drawn in the sand. An abandoned building and a house under construction both burned to the ground. That stuff we found out in the woods that you say could indicate someone’s been performing—or attempting—some kind of occult ritual—”

  “Leah, so far it’s just bits and pieces. And weird bits and pieces at that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean something’s not adding up.”

  The flash of memory vanished as quickly as it had come, but the knowledge it left her with was certain.

  Deputy Leah Wells was her “reliable contact” inside the sheriff’s department.

  Riley stuck her automatic inside the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, then unlocked and opened the door.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing good,” Leah replied grimly. “Sheriff sent me to get you. There’s been a murder, Riley.”

  Do you think it was a good idea to leave your door unlocked?” Leah asked a few minutes later as she drove the sheriff’s department Jeep toward the middle of the island and the bridge that would take them to the mainland.

  “Like I told you, a courier should arrive in the next hour to pick up that package I left just inside the door.” She had made a quick call to Bishop to alert him to the location of the package.

  “You could have left the package in your rental car.”

  “Yeah. But doing that was a bit too…visible for my taste.”

  Leah sent her a glance. “I probably shouldn’t ask, but—”

  “Did it have anything to do with what’s going on here?” Riley shrugged. “Maybe. I’ll know more when Quantico reports back. At least, I hope so.”

  She had debated, but in the end Riley decided against confiding her memory loss to Leah. Not yet, at any rate. She was independent enough that even Bishop had never been able to match her with a permanent partner, and that independence demanded that she keep her current vulnerability to herself as long as possible.

  Plus, it was quite simply a reasonable precaution until she could wrap her mind around whatever was going on here.

  Leah sent her another look. “You know, you’ve been awfully secretive the last week or so.”

  “Have I?” It was more an honest question than a mere response, something Riley hoped the other woman wouldn’t pick up on.

  “I’d say so. Gordon thinks so too. He thinks you’ve either found something or figured out something that’s making you very uneasy.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Last night in the shower and again this morning at the breakfast table. He’s worried about you, Riley.”

  Of course. Gordon always did love redheads; that’s why I can trust Leah. They’re involved, and he vouched for her.

  Aloud and somewhat offhandedly, she said, “Gordon’s worried about me for years.”

  Leah grinned faintly. “Yeah, he’s mentioned that a few times. Says you keep digging when any rational person would throw away the shovel. That’s why he wanted you here—even knowing he’d worry the whole time. And now we’ve got this murder. I’d say the stakes just went up, and maybe we’ve all got something to worry about.”

  “Is the sheriff sure it’s a murder?”

  “I’m sure—and I’ve never seen a murdered body before, not outside the textbooks. Believe me, Riley, it’s a murder. The guy’s hanging from a tree over that possible altar in the woods. And he didn’t hang himself.”

  “Who’s the vic?”
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  “Well, we don’t exactly know yet. And it may take a while to find out. There isn’t—he doesn’t—his head is gone.”

  Riley looked at the deputy, conscious of a cold finger gliding up her spine. There was something eerily familiar about this. “And it wasn’t found nearby?”

  Leah grimaced. “Not so far, when I left. We’ve been searching, but it’s just a little patch of trees, you know that, and I’m guessing that if we haven’t found it by now, we won’t. Not in those woods anyway.”

  Nodding, Riley turned her gaze forward again. There was something nagging at the back of her mind, but she had no idea if it was a memory or some bit of pertinent knowledge.

  Or something utterly irrelevant and useless, of course, which was what lots of nagging things tended to be.

  “Leah, the sheriff still thinks I’m here on vacation, right?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “Then why call me to a crime scene?”

  “Apparently he knows you’re with the SCU. And he considers this a special crime, being as how we haven’t had a murder in these parts for, oh, a decade or more. Deaths, sure. Even a killing or three, but not like this, not anything like this.”

  Riley wasn’t very happy about the sheriff’s knowledge, although she also wasn’t surprised. Of course he had likely checked on her, and any law-enforcement officer at his level could easily learn that she was assigned to the Special Crimes Unit.

  That should, however, be all he could learn.

  Before she could ask, Leah said, “From the way he talked, I gather he doesn’t know what your specialty is. The occult stuff, I mean. Because this one has to be occult-related, and he didn’t say that was why he wanted you at the scene. Just for your general expertise in investigating crimes. All he knows is that you’re an FBI agent working with a unit that uses unorthodox methods to investigate unusual crimes—and this one is definitely unusual.”

  “He knows I’m psychic?”

  “He doesn’t believe in psychics. But there’s an election coming up in the fall, and Jake Ballard wants to be reelected. What he doesn’t want is to be accused by the voters of not taking advantage of any possibly helpful source in investigating a brutal murder. An FBI agent staying in the area has to be counted as an excellent source, no matter which unit she belongs to or what extra senses she claims to have.” Leah shook her head. “I assumed you two had talked about stuff like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it is the normal sort of chitchat for two cops on a date.”

  Oh, shit.

  “Then again,” Leah continued, clearly oblivious of having delivered a shock, “it seems you ex-army types tend to talk less than the rest of us, at least about your work. I’ve been sleeping with Gordon for nearly a year now, damn near living with him, and he still won’t tell me what wakes him up in a cold sweat some nights.”

  “He doesn’t want you to know the ugly stuff,” Riley murmured. “Things he’s seen. Done.”

  “Yeah, I get that. Still feels like he’s shutting me out of a very big part of his life.”

  “Past life. Over and done with. Let it go.” Riley forced a smile when the other woman looked at her. “Advice. I know you didn’t ask, but I’m offering anyway. The monsters under the bed and in the closet? Leave them be. If he wants to show them to you, he will. But that may not be for a long time. If ever.”

  “And it isn’t about trust?”

  Riley shook her head. “It’s about scars. And about giving them time to fade. Twenty years of scars aren’t going to fade in a hurry.”

  “If at all.”

  “Well, good men tend to hold on to their bad memories. I’d be a lot more worried about him if he didn’t wake up sometimes in a cold sweat.”

  “You know what he’s been through,” Leah said.

  “Some of it. Not all of it.”

  “But they’re his stories. He has to be the one to tell me.”

  “That’s the way it works. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I get it.”

  Riley thought the other woman probably did get it; she was a cop and even in this small coastal town would likely encounter a few horror stories of her own during the course of her career.

  Starting, possibly, with what she’d seen today.

  A silence fell between the two women. Riley wanted to break it, but there didn’t seem to be any good, reasonably casual way to guide the conversation back to her date or dates with the sheriff.

  Dates? Jesus, what on earth had possessed her to do that?

  With a reliable source inside the sheriff’s department, it didn’t seem likely that she’d gone out with him on a fact-finding mission, especially since he knew who and what she was. What he wouldn’t confide professionally he wasn’t likely to confide personally, not if he was like most of the cops she’d known.

  Was it personal? Had she set aside the training and preferences of a lifetime to go out with a law-enforcement officer while she was investigating occurrences in his town?

  Investigating, possibly, him?

  What would have compelled her to do something so out of character for her? With her busy life, she barely dated at all, but to date someone during an investigation—

  A sudden, uneasy suspicion surfaced in her mind as she abruptly recalled the fleeting memory of quiet voices and a lingering touch out on the deck of her house.

  Surely she hadn’t…surely to God she hadn’t gone further than a few casual dates? She hadn’t taken a lover. No. No, that would be so totally out of character it was unheard-of for her.

  But. What if? In a situation so torn by uncertainty, how could she discount the possibility?

  And, most important of all, what if neither her memories nor her clairvoyance kicked in when she saw the man again? How was she supposed to fake her way through that?

  The woods were dense enough that getting a vehicle to the clearing near the center was virtually impossible. So Leah parked her Jeep near the other police vehicles, and they got out.

  Riley had another flash of memory, and said, “Somebody’s dog found the body, right?”

  “Just like one found all that stuff in the clearing last week,” Leah confirmed. “Different dog, though.”

  Riley paused to study the break in the fence, ignoring a bored deputy stationed there to prevent the idly curious from entering the woods at this point. It wasn’t a particularly strong fence, meant more as a border delineating the park from the woods than a barrier to hold a determined animal in—or out.

  She frowned as she half-turned to look back at the area used for local pet owners. “Odd,” she murmured.

  “What’s odd?” Leah asked.

  Riley kept her voice low. “Rituals aren’t meant to be public. Especially occult rituals, and even more especially if you mean to sacrifice something or kill somebody. You don’t want outsiders watching or even knowing what’s going on.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Yeah. So why choose this place? There are patches of woods farther from town and much more private. Forests with a lot more acreage that would offer far greater secrecy. Places where a fire wouldn’t be seen. And where local dog owners don’t bring their pets every single day.”

  “Something special about this patch of woods?” Leah guessed. “You did say that group of boulders looked like a natural altar. Or something old that was used a long time ago. Maybe that’s it?”

  “Maybe.” But Riley wasn’t convinced. Still, she continued with Leah through the break in the fence and into the woods.

  She was trying very hard to focus and concentrate, to settle and ground herself so she could get through what lay ahead without making a fool of herself. Or betraying herself.

  Professional, that was the ticket. Cool, detached, and professional. Whatever the reason she’d dated Jake Ballard, he would expect her to behave like a professional at a crime scene, however unofficial her presence.

  Riley remembered all that sexy underwear, and winced.

/>   Christ, she hoped he expected an FBI agent and not a lover.

  Surely she’d remember if she’d taken a lover in the last couple of weeks.

  Surely.

  “Grand Central Station,” Leah muttered as they reached the clearing.

  There was plenty of activity, all right, and Riley was aware of a fleeting, though resigned, wish that she had been able to see the scene before it was trampled by many feet. Trained feet, for the most part, but not specially trained. And it showed.

  Rather than join them, Riley stood where she was at the edge of the clearing, her hands in the front pockets of her jeans, and just looked for several minutes. She ignored the uniformed deputies and technicians moving about, ignored the snatches of conversation she heard, closed out everything except the scene of a murder.

  Leah had been right: No one could see this and not know they were dealing with murder.

  Riley looked at what the killer had left. At the headless body that was still hanging by its wrists, at the blood-spattered rocks below. At the evidence of a fire nearby, which a technician was currently photographing.

  It all looked…familiar.

  “Riley, thanks for coming.”

  She turned her head at the sound of his voice, holding on to her professional detachment with an effort. It was a nice voice. It was a nice package, of the tall, dark, and handsome variety. With piercing blue eyes thrown in just for gilding.

  Okay, so he was gorgeous. Maybe that was why she’d dated him.

  Sheriff Jake Ballard wore his uniform with an air that said he knew he looked good in it. He walked with an authority that wasn’t quite a swagger. And he had the sort of smile—even here and now—that nature had designed to charm the female of the species.

  Riley was hardly immune.

  “Hey,” she said. “Nice goings-on in such a pretty little town.”

  “Tell me about it.” He shook his head, adding, “Sorry to pull you out of your vacation, but, frankly, I wanted an opinion from someone who probably knows a lot more about this sort of thing than any of us.”

  “And you thought I might?”

  He looked sheepish, and Riley tried not to believe it was because he knew it was a good expression for him.