Sleeping With Fear

Chapter 4

It was one of the bloodier scenes she'd been called to.

With the deputies and technicians out of the way and only the sheriff and Leah watching from the path, Riley moved slowly around the clearing, concentrating on opening up all her senses.

It wasn't easy to focus with so many questions tumbling in her mind, but she gave it her best shot.

The smell of blood was strongest, and she needed no enhancement of that particular sense to tell her so. There was plenty of the stuff, after all, splashed about.

Directly beneath the hanging body were the boulders. Which, if one could feel playful at so gruesome a scene, could have best been described as a chair for a giant. Well, a fairly small giant, anyway. Because the "seat" of that chair, while about four feet wide and three deep, was only as tall as Riley's waist. But the "back" of the chair was close to seven feet tall, as wide as the "seat," and only about a foot thick.

It didn't really look like a natural part of its surroundings, Riley had thought the first time she'd seen it.

Ah-a memory.

She had been here with…Gordon. That was it. He'd brought her here not long after she'd arrived on the island, because-

"…and the boys thought I'd be the one to show it to, probably because of the stories I'd told 'em about my great-grandma being a voodoo priestess."

"That's bullshit, Gordon."

"Yeah, but they didn't know that. Big black man from Louisiana talking 'bout voodoo, who's gonna call him a liar?"

"I am."

He laughed, a deep, booming sound. "Yeah, but you'd call St. Peter a liar if he introduced himself at the pearly gates, babe."

"Let's not discuss my religious beliefs, Gordon. The boys told you they'd found the bones here? On this rock?"

"Yeah, right here. A circle of bones strung together on fishing line and layin' over an upside-down cross made out of-"

"Riley?"

She blinked and looked at the sheriff. "Hmm?"

"Are you okay?"

She wanted to swear at him for breaking the thread of memory, but all she said, calmly, was, "I'm fine." It was gone, dammit, the scene frozen in her mind as though she'd hit PAUSE on a DVD. And fading by the second.

"You looked sort of spaced-out there for a minute." He sounded concerned.

Standing slightly behind his shoulder, Leah rolled her eyes.

"I'm fine," Riley repeated. She turned her gaze back to the boulder chair. The seat was roughly the right size and height for an altar, she thought, considering it. The back would be an unusual feature for an altar-unless it could be used in some way.

She took another step toward the boulders, closing her mind to the bare and bloody feet dangling above them.

She was no geologist but recognized granite when she saw it. What she wasn't sure of, what was difficult to make out, was whether there were distinct patterns among the spatters of blood on the rocks, especially the relatively flat surface of the tall, upright boulder. Was it sheer carnage, or was there a message?

"Will you give me access to the crime-scene photos?" she asked the sheriff.

"Of course. You see something?"

"Hard to tell with so much blood. Using digital photos and pattern-recognition software might help."

"We have that," he said somewhat uncertainly.

Riley glanced at him. "If not, I have a friend at Quantico who'll take a look, quietly and quickly. No problem e-mailing him the relevant photos."

Jake frowned, but said, "I'd be okay with that."

She nodded and kept her attention on the boulders for another minute or two. It was a bit like one of those trick 3-D pictures, she thought; if you stared at it long enough, you saw-or thought you saw-something hidden within the confusion.

The question was, what was she really looking at?

She turned away from the boulders, still reluctant to concentrate on the body, and walked out about four feet. There was a faint white line on the ground. She followed it in a slow circle around the boulders. All the way around.

An unbroken circle, or had been before many police feet had trampled the area.

Riley knelt and touched two fingers to the white line, coming away with fine grains sticking to her skin.

"We're having that analyzed," Jake told her.

She glanced at him, then touched one finger to her tongue.

"Jesus, Riley-"

"Salt," she said calmly. "Ordinary, everyday table salt. Or possibly sea salt. It's supposed to be purer."

Leah said, "You knew what it was."

"I suspected." Riley stood up. "It's sometimes used in occult rituals. To consecrate the area inside the circle." An area which included the boulders, the hanging body, and the fire.

Jake was still frowning. "Consecrate? You mean make it holy? Because there's nothing holy about this."

"That depends on your point of view, really." Without giving him time to respond to that, Riley added, "A circle of salt is also used as protection."

"From what?" he demanded.

"A threat or perceived threat. And before you ask what kind of threat, the answer is, I don't know. Yet." She smiled faintly. "All this is only preliminary, you have to understand that. First thoughts, hunches, instincts."

"And no inside knowledge, huh?"

Riley felt everything inside her go still and chilled, but she held on to her slight smile and waited.

"I mean, if the paranormal is your thing, then you must know more than the rest of us about this sort of shit."

She didn't let her relief show, and acknowledged to herself that it was extraordinarily draining to keep up her guard and try to behave normally when she was constantly digging for memories, for knowledge, for answers.

And, more often than not, coming up empty.

Still coolly professional, on the outside at least, she said, "The paranormal as defined by the SCU has absolutely nothing to do with occult or satanic rites or practices. That is a totally different thing, not grounded in science but in belief, in faith. Just like any religion."

"Religion?"

"To most practitioners, that's what it is. If you want to understand the occult, that's the first rule: It's a belief system, and not inherently evil in and of itself. The second rule is, it's not a single belief system; there are as many sects within the occult as there are in most religions. Satanism alone has at least a dozen different churches that I know about."

"Churches? Riley-"

She interrupted his indignation to add firmly, "Practitioners of the occult may be nontraditional and their rites and habits blasphemous from the viewpoint of the major religions, but that doesn't make their beliefs any less valid from their own point of view. And believe it or not, Satan is rarely involved-even in Satanism. Nor is any sort of sacrifice, barring the symbolic kind. Most occult groups simply honor and worship-for want of a better term-nature. The earth, the elements. There's nothing paranormal about that."

Usually, at least.

"And the SCU?"

"The SCU is built around people with real human abilities, abilities that are, however rare and beyond the norm, scientifically definable." If only as possibilities.

He shrugged off the distinction, saying only, "Well, call it whatever you like, you obviously know more about this shit than the rest of us. So you think this is somebody's idea of religion?" He waved a hand back at the carnage behind him. "This?"

"I think it's too early to make assumptions."

Jake gestured again toward the hanging body. "That's not an assumption, it's a murder victim. And if he was killed in some kind of ritual, then, goddammit, Riley, I need to know that."

Still reluctant, she turned her attention at last to that victim.

Riley had seen corpses before. In war and in peace. She'd seen them in the textbooks, in the field, at the body farm. She had seen corpses so mangled they barely looked human anymore, destroyed by explosions or dismembered by an arguably human hand. And she'd seen them on the medical examiner's table, laid open with their organs glistening in the bright, harsh lights.

She had never gotten used to it.

So it demanded even more concentration and focus, even more energy, for her to study that dangling body.

Yet, at the same time, once she began studying it, she found herself moving closer, circling it warily. Absorbing the details.

He was naked and virtually covered in blood. There were numerous shallow cuts all over his torso, front and back, all of which had undoubtedly bled for some time before what looked to her to be the final cut and ultimate cause of death.

Decapitation.

Out loud, slowly, she said, "I'm no M.E., but I think the cuts on the body came first. That he was tortured, maybe over a period of hours. And that his head was hacked off while he was hanging here."

"What makes you sure of that?" Jake asked.

"The amount of blood on the boulders directly below him; it probably came mostly from the shallow cuts, and there's a lot of it. The spray pattern out in front of his body, on the rocks and on the ground, looks arterial to me. His heart was still beating when his throat was cut. I think somebody was behind him, probably standing on the tallest boulder, and grabbed him by the hair. Then-"

Leah made a choked sound and hurried back up the path away from the clearing.

Riley gazed after her, then looked at Jake and grimaced. "I forget some cops aren't used to this sort of thing."

He was looking a bit queasy himself but didn't budge. "Yeah. Okay, what else can you tell me?" He considered, then added, "If somebody was standing on that tallest rock and had to keep his balance while he-he sawed off a head-he must have held on to something. Or somebody else held on to him."

"It takes some strength to decapitate by sawing or hacking, even with a sharp knife or other tool," she agreed. "Especially with the vic's arms in the way so that he had to reach around them for at least the first part of the job. Keeping his balance would have been tricky." She circled behind the tallest upright boulder and studied the ground intently. "No sign of marks left by a ladder."

"Just don't tell me the guy levitated or something, okay?"

She ignored that. "Your forensics people have been all over this, right?"

"Like I said. Pictures from every angle and samples of everything."

At the side of the larger boulders, a cluster of three smaller ones made it quite easy to climb up onto the seat, and it was likely many a hiker in these woods had done just that over the years.

Riley hesitated only a moment, but since she had picked up absolutely nothing clairvoyantly, she had to conclude that all her psychic senses were AWOL. Touching the blood-spattered boulders was unlikely to change that.

Probably.

She drew a breath and climbed up onto the seat so that she could look at the slightly curved top edge of the back, unwilling to admit to herself that she was glad even the usual five senses seemed to be functioning at less than accustomed norms.

The smell of blood and death would have been overpowering.

It occurred to her only as she was standing there on the blood-spattered rock that she might well be wearing the same shoes-casual running shoes-that she'd likely been wearing the day before. Or the night before. She had awakened barefoot, but there had been no blood on her feet, she remembered that much.

What if there was blood on these shoes?

She hadn't thought to check.

Man, I'm losing my mind as well as my memory. Why the hell didn't I check my shoes?

"Riley?"

Pretending that her stillness and silence hadn't lasted too long, Riley rose on tiptoe in order to study the top of the tallest boulder. "If he stood up here, it doesn't look like he left any helpful traces."

"Yeah, that's what my people said. No marks from a shoe or any forensic traces at all. Including blood. All the blood went on the flat rock you're standing on or got splashed on the upright part of the taller rock, but not a drop hit the top."

"Odd."

"Is it? That rock's not really close to the body and, as you said, most of the blood on it is from drips that fell straight down."

"Yeah, but that's the thing. He should have struggled. If the body had been moving at all, I'd expect to see at least a few droplets of blood on that top edge."

"Maybe he was drugged."

"That's certainly possible." But why torture somebody who isn't conscious of what you're doing? Unless maybe the shedding of blood was the point… "I assume you've requested a tox screen?"

"Definitely. The blood and tissues will be checked six ways from Sunday."

"Good enough."

Riley turned on the seat to study the body from this closer position, trying not to think about whether her shoes had had blood on them before she'd climbed up here. Because they certainly did now.

Since the body was hanging directly above the front edge of the seat, her position put her roughly at eye level with the small of his back. She studied the distance between the body and the tallest boulder, and said slowly, "Balance had to be a real problem, if the killer was standing up there. He also had to lean forward quite a bit in order to reach the vic."

"He could have pulled him closer," Jake offered. "At least long enough to get the job done."

"But then the vic's head would have been pulled behind the arms, and there's no arterial spray to indicate that happened. All the evidence says his head was forward when his throat was cut, or at least between his arms, not pulled back behind them."

Jake studied the body and boulder for a long moment, then cleared his own throat. "See what you mean. The doc says same as you, by the way-that the head was hacked off, front to back. Of course, by the time the killer was working on severing the spine…"

"He probably did have the head pulled back toward him," Riley finished. "But by then the heart had stopped, so the blood was no longer spraying."

She stood gazing at the body, trying to concentrate, to focus. But it was something other than deliberate thought that made her step forward and lift her arms, not touching the body but stretching upward to measure how high she could have reached.

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. "You 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."