“Okay, so I checked up on you when you arrived. I didn’t mention it later because…well, because I thought you’d tell me about it in your own time.”
“It?”
“The Special Crimes Unit. It isn’t exactly a secret in law-enforcement circles, you know. I made a few calls. And learned a bit more than the standard FBI line of bullshit double-talk.”
Taking a chance, Riley said, “You don’t believe in the paranormal.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Is that a problem?”
“Not for me, no. It’s the sort of thing we run into more often than not.”
“I imagine you would.”
“But if it isn’t something you believe in, then how much value can my opinion have?”
“You’re an experienced investigator, and your unit deals with murder on a regular basis. Yes?”
“Yeah.”
“I believe in that. Your experience. That’s enough for me.”
Riley looked at him and tried to find a memory, a single memory.
Nothing.
As for her clairvoyant sense, it was as absent as her memory. All she knew was what her usual but slightly dulled senses were telling her. He was gorgeous, he had a nice voice, and he was wearing Polo cologne.
“Riley, I need your help,” Jake Ballard said. “Or at least your expertise. I can call your office, make it official so you’re on the clock. No need to waste vacation time.”
She hesitated, then said, “If you make it official, my boss will probably want to send another agent or two down here. We seldom work alone.”
The sheriff grimaced. “That, I’m not so crazy about. A major FBI presence wouldn’t sit well with the civic leaders. If we scare away the summer visitors…”
He didn’t have to complete that sentence. Towns like Castle and Opal Island weren’t as dependent on summer dollars as the northern coast areas were; winter this far south was mild and brief, and visitors came year-round. But the summer season still produced the most income through higher rentals and for other area businesses.
Her voice mild, Riley said, “Well, I imagine my boss will be okay if we keep this semiofficial.” Yeah, sure he will. Bishop is not going to be happy that we’ve got a murder now. And why the hell hadn’t she mentioned that fact when she’d called him back to explain where the package for the courier would be found?
Man, what is wrong with me?
“I can explain the situation,” she continued, pushing her way through uncertainty, “and I’d be on the books as an adviser to your office, not an investigator.”
“Suits me,” he said promptly. “Look, the doc wants to cut down the body—”
“No.” She softened that with a smile. “It would really help if you could clear most of your people out for a bit. Not long, just a few minutes. I’d like to wander around, take a closer look at the scene before anything more is changed.”
“For the psychic vibes?” His voice wasn’t—quite—mocking.
“For whatever I can pick up,” she returned pleasantly.
He eyed her for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay, sure. My forensics team has done all they can do, and God knows we’ve got plenty of shots of the scene. But the people I’ve got combing the woods aren’t done yet.”
“No reason to call them in. I just need the immediate area around the body clear.”
He nodded and stepped away to begin issuing orders to send his people temporarily back to their vehicles.
Leah, who had stood silently nearby, murmured, “What I can’t figure out is if he really wants your help or just wants a reason that Ash can’t argue with to keep you close.”
“Mmmm,” Riley said.
Who the hell is Ash? she wondered.
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.