“Code words?” she supplied dryly.
“Well…yeah. The right words, anyway. The right names. He knew people. He checked out. And it wasn’t like he was inviting us to his own place or asking for anything. Just suggesting we might want to check out Opal Island and Castle because people were laid-back here and because there were some even like-minded.”
“And have you found them?”
“No. But it’s just been a few days, after all. We’ve sort of put out the word.” He grimaced. “As you said, rotten timing, obviously. And I’ve gotta tell you—if those like-minded people are into human sacrifice, we’re not gonna have much in common with them.”
“If anything at all,” a new voice added pleasantly.
Riley looked past Steve, unsettled yet again that she hadn’t noticed the approach of the tall, dark woman now joining them on the beach. Especially since the woman was strikingly beautiful and had a strong, definite presence. Probably in her mid-thirties, she was both exotic and sensual, her centerfold body ripe to bursting and her dark eyes practically smoldering.
“Hey, Riley,” she said as she joined them. Her voice was as sultry as the rest of her, low and rather throaty. And her night-black hair fell straight and gleaming down her back all the way to her hips.
Put her photo in the dictionary beside the name of the alternative religion of your choice and she’d look the part.
Even wearing a very brief swimsuit. Maybe especially wearing a very brief swimsuit.
Riley dredged in her mind and produced a name. “Hey, Jenny.”
“Guess the shit’s really hit the fan with this murder,” Jenny said, shaking her head. “Is that what you came to tell Steve? That we should pack up and get out?”
Though the other woman’s voice was casual, the question was, in some peculiar way Riley couldn’t define, some sort of challenge. She was sure of that, even if she didn’t understand what lay behind it.
At least…I think I’m sure.
“I was just stretching my legs after lunch,” she said mildly. “Steve was the one who wanted to talk to me.”
“Should we pack up and leave?” Jenny asked.
“Not my place to say. But there’s been a murder, and plenty of evidence left behind to point toward the occult. So if I were you, I’d be careful. Maybe stick close to the house. Maybe keep my beliefs to myself for the duration.”
“If you were us.”
Riley nodded. “Something like this happens, and people get jumpy as hell. Things snowball. So I’d lay low for a while. If I were you.”
“Understood.” Jenny smiled. She linked her arm with Steve’s and with her free hand reached out to pat Riley on the shoulder. “You don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”
…the candlelight cast dancing shadows around the room and shimmered off the velvet hangings and silken robes. On the wall above the altar hung an inverted cross fashioned of some metallic material that also caught the light. Below the inverted cross was the usual platform, and upon it the altar.
She was naked. Her head raised on a pillow, she lay in the center of the rectangular platform so that one of its long edges came to the backs of her widely parted knees. Her arms were stretched out to either side, and each hand grasped a silver candlestick containing a black candle.
The candles were lit.
Her body was pale, her long black hair arranged to frame her bold nakedness with no attempt to coyly conceal. Her lush breasts were tipped with artificially blood-red nipples, and as Riley watched, the robed celebrant—the “priest” conducting the ceremony—stepped between the altar’s spread legs and dipped his thumb into the silver cup he held, then drew with the viscous liquid an inverted cross onto the pale flesh of her lower stomach.
Red. Blood.
The room smelled of incense and blood, and Riley had to breathe through her mouth to avoid coughing.
Couldn’t cough.
Couldn’t give herself away.
She peered through the narrow opening in the draperies, trying to look for anything familiar in the robed individuals. Height, build, a gesture—anything to help her identify at least one of them. But it was an exercise in futility. They were eerily featureless, their faces concealed by the hoods.
They were chanting in low voices, in Latin, and she could only catch a few words of what they were saying.
“…Magni Dei Nostri Satanas…”
Riley sat up with a smothered gasp, her heart pounding.
A Black Mass. That was what she’d seen, part of a version of the satanic ceremony known as a Black Mass.
Seen? Seen when? Seen where?
She was in bed, Riley realized. In her own bed, in her own bedroom of the beach house with moonlight streaming through the blinds on the windows. When she turned her head cautiously, it was to see Ash sleeping beside her. Beyond him she saw the clock on the nightstand.
5:30 A.M.
Wednesday?
No, that wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right. She’d been on the beach, talking to Steve and Jenny, and it had been no later than three or so on Tuesday afternoon. And then…
Here. Now. Waking in bed with Ash.
More than twelve hours later.
Resisting panic, she slipped from the bed without waking him. She found one of her sleep-shirts on the floor and put it on, then crept from the bedroom.
As usual, several lights had been left on dimly in the main living area of the house, and the blinds in there were firmly closed against the night. The latter fact told her only that she must have, as usual, closed all the blinds at dusk; Riley disliked the exposed sensation of uncovered windows at night, especially when people were likely to walk along the beach on the other side of those windows.
A holdover from her army days, when being too visible and presenting too much of a target had never been a good idea.
Riley paused for a moment and held out her hands, studying them. Not too shaky, but hardly steady. Rather the way she felt inside.
She went to the kitchen to collect an energy bar and a glass of orange juice. The TV remote was on the breakfast bar, so she used it to turn the set on, hitting the MUTE button as she did so. Automatically turning it to CNN, hopeful of verifying the date, she swore softly to see a commercial for some diet product.
Figured.
She got her juice and the PowerBar, then carried both to the small table in one corner of the living area, where it looked like she’d been working on her laptop.
Looks like? Jesus. Why don’t I remember this?
It would have been easy to panic.
Very easy.
She sat down and tapped a key to take the computer out of sleep mode. When the dark screen brightened, the first thing she did was check the time and date, just to confirm that this was indeed very early on Wednesday. And it was.
She’d lost more than twelve hours.
But there was lost…and then there was lost.
From the looks of things, she’d been functional, even working. In one window was an FBI report on recent occult activities in the U.S., while another window contained the beginning of a report apparently written by her.
“Huh,” she murmured. “Since when do I write—Oh.”
The first line explained the otherwise inexplicable: Since I have no idea what the long-term effects of my current situation might be, I’ve decided to keep this written journal/report for the remainder of the investigation.
Current situation? That was worded so ambiguously she must have feared someone else might read it. Maybe Ash, for instance, since he apparently spent most nights here.
In any case, the rest of the entry was pretty bare-bones, detailing only the previous morning’s visit to the sheriff’s department, the autopsy results on their murder victim, and her visits with the sheriff to the arson sites. Not a word about her stroll up the beach and meeting/conversation with Steve and Jenny.
Then again, maybe she’d imagined all that. Or dreamed it.
Like the Black
Mass, where Jenny had served as the altar. Maybe Riley had dreamed that? It had certainly seemed unreal, at least in a sense. Blood. Blood played no part in a Black Mass, despite popular belief; it was supposed to be a ceremony all about mocking traditional Christian beliefs and ceremonies, twisting and corrupting them. Blasphemous, certainly, from any conventional point of view, but neither dangerous nor inherently evil, and it didn’t involve blood or actual sacrifice.
At least, it wasn’t supposed to.
Riley looked around the quiet, peaceful space, listened to the surf pounding out on the beach, and wondered what was real. What she could trust. What she could believe in.
Had she actually witnessed that ceremony?
Had she dreamed it?
A touch on the nape of her neck found the burns left by a Taser. That was real. The man sleeping in her bed was certainly real.
Though the presence of both in her life was baffling.
She didn’t sleep with men she barely knew, most especially during an ongoing investigation. And her training and experience made it highly unlikely that anyone could sneak up and blindside her with a Taser attack. Particularly in a situation where all her instincts and senses would have been on alert.
Unless…unless whoever had attacked her had been with her all along. That was possible, she supposed. Maybe more than possible. Someone she had trusted could have been close enough to surprise her, to catch her off her guard.
Nice little theory, that. The problem was proving it, identifying who that someone might be, and accomplishing both objectives without giving away her own ignorance on the subject.
No one so far had volunteered any information about where she had been or who she might have been with on Sunday night. At least not that she remembered, dammit.
All I really know is that I was Tasered. That I was covered in some of the same blood found in our victim’s stomach—
Damn. Was he identified in the last twelve hours? That was the priority, to I.D. him. Though surely I would have made a note in this damn report of mine. And what about that other probable victim? Has he—or she—even been discovered yet?
She didn’t know. Couldn’t remember.
All she knew was that another twelve hours of her life were gone, and she didn’t have the faintest idea what she had been doing all that time.
She put her head in her hands and slowly rubbed her face.
“Riley?”
She looked up to see Ash approaching her and hoped her face didn’t show the growing panic she was all too aware of feeling.
“It’s not even dawn,” she told him, outwardly calm. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“I’m getting used to these predawn urges of yours to work.” He bent down to kiss her briefly, adding, “They seem to come most often after a restless night. You tossed and turned a bit.”
“Sorry.”
“Didn’t disturb me. Much, anyway.” He smiled. “I gather you’re up for the day? I’ll grab a shower and shave, then fix breakfast.”
Somewhat involuntarily, she said, “You’re almost too good to be true, know that, pal?”
“I keep trying to tell you. If you’re not careful, somebody else is going to steal me away from you.” He kissed her again, then headed off for his shower.
Riley sat there at the table, her computer humming quietly, and gazed after him. Right now, in this moment, she felt safe with Ash—but what did that mean? That she trusted him? That she felt no threat from him? Or simply that she was thinking and feeling with a part of her anatomy quite a bit south of her brain?
Could she even trust her feelings—any of them—when her senses and memory were, to say the least, unreliable? When she could lose more than twelve hours without warning and apparently without some external cause?
There’s a reason, a trigger. There has to be. I just have to figure it out.
Easily said. Not so easily done.
Riley finished the PowerBar and juice, hoping the calories would help clear the fog in her brain but not very surprised when it didn’t happen. She couldn’t seem to think except to ask herself questions for which there were no answers.
Yet, at least.
I’ve been functioning. Normally—or surely Ash would have commented. But I don’t remember what I’ve said or done. And lost hours and a restless night culminating in a dream—or memory—of some kind of Black Mass can’t possibly mean anything good.
The panic was crawling inside her now, cold and sharp and no longer something she could deny to herself. This was out of control, she was out of control, and she had no business whatsoever being part of a murder investigation. The right thing to do, the safe and sane thing to do, would be to return to Quantico.
Today. Now.
Something on the TV broke through the panic to catch her attention just then, and she lunged for the remote to turn on the sound.
Bishop. He hardly ever made the news, went out of his way to avoid being photographed or videoed, and always kept a low profile during investigations. So what the hell was he involved in that was making the national news?
“…the agent in charge refuses to comment on the ongoing investigation, but sources within the Boston police confirmed only minutes ago that the latest victim of the serial killer terrorizing the city these last weeks was indeed twenty-one-year-old Annie LeMott, daughter of Senator Abe LeMott. The senator and his wife are in seclusion with family, as police and FBI agents continue to work around the clock to catch their daughter’s killer.”
The CNN anchor went on to the next subject, her voice turning perky as she reported on something less tragic.
Riley hit the MUTE button on the remote and returned to her laptop. It didn’t require either memory of recent events or senses to tell her what to do next; within two minutes, she was reading a more detailed FBI report of the Boston serial killer. And the report explained a lot.
Bishop was hip-deep in his own investigation, all right. In fact, he was tracking a particularly vicious killer with, so far, at least a dozen notches on his belt. Twelve known victims in just under twenty-one days, all young women, all murdered with bloody abandon.
No wonder Boston was going nuts. No wonder this particular series of murders was making national news.
And no wonder Bishop had accepted Riley’s assurances that she could handle the situation here, even when she had failed to report in. She doubted he’d had much time to sleep or eat in the past few weeks, let alone worry too much about any of his primaries—people he had handpicked as team leaders because they were highly intelligent, capable agents with all the skills and initiative required to operate independently of both him and the FBI if necessary and for as long as necessary.
It just…usually wasn’t necessary.
With that thought in mind, Riley remained online and connected to a special database at Quantico reserved for the SCU, wended her way through the layers of security, and checked on the whereabouts of the rest of the unit.
Jesus.
Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Phoenix, L.A., and Seattle, plus two small towns she’d never heard of in the Gulf Coast region. The unit was literally scattered across the map, manpower and resources spread thinner than she’d ever known them to be. And every team was involved in high-risk operations ranging from murder to possible terrorist threats—the latter being investigations the unit had only recently begun to be called into as consultants.
As far as Riley could tell, she was the only agent operating without a team, partner, or any kind of backup. But then, she was also the only one who had set off on a very unofficial investigation of a few oddities—not murder or any other major crime.
Then. Now the situation was definitely high-risk. And being on her own here now was both a very bad idea, and seemingly unavoidable.
Unless she bailed. Returned to Quantico. Nobody would blame her for that, not under the circumstances. Hell, when—if—she told Bishop about this latest wrinkle, he’d undoubtedly recall her without even allowing h
er time to pack.
Riley realized she was fingering the burn at the base of her skull. She forced herself to stop, swore under her breath, and disconnected from the SCU’s database.
She couldn’t bail. Couldn’t leave.
She had to know. Had to figure out what was going on.
“Let’s pretend,” she whispered. She could do that. It’s what she did best, after all. Pretend.
Pretend everything was normal. Pretend there was nothing wrong with her.
Pretend she wasn’t terrified.
The sheriff said to Ash, “You realize, of course, that you have no business being involved in this investigation. This part of it, at least. Your part begins when we catch the son of a bitch.”
Ash leaned back in his chair at the conference table and shrugged. “I’ve gotten involved in the past long before the trial stage, we both know that.”
“Not in a murder, Ash.”
“We haven’t had a murder until now, not since I’ve been DA. And not since you’ve been sheriff. I’m betting if we’d had one, we’d have worked together. I may not be a cop, but I have experience in investigations—murder investigations included. And you’re too good a cop to ignore that.”
Leah glanced at Riley, interested to know how the other woman was reacting to all this, and wasn’t very surprised to see that Riley was apparently engrossed in reading reports concerning what little information had come in since the previous afternoon.
There wasn’t much. Teams had been canvassing Opal Island as well as Castle, literally going door-to-door in search of an identity for their murder victim. So far, the search had turned up three temporarily misplaced teenagers and one temporarily misplaced husband (the former all found sleeping off a late party and the latter discovered on a nearby golf course), but no man missing since sometime Sunday night.
Leah had read and reread the reports Riley was now studying, and wondered what the federal cop found so interesting. Then again, she decided, maybe it wasn’t interest so much as a refusal to get involved in the “discussion” going on between the two men.