Riley smiled back. "I'm sure we can."
Chapter 5
Gordon rubbed a big hand across his bald head and stared at Riley. "Say what?"
"My memory of the last three weeks resembles Swiss cheese. Lots and lots of holes."
"The other part."
"Oh, that. I woke up this afternoon with dried blood all over me."
"Human blood?"
"Dunno yet. Probably hear from Quantico tomorrow."
"And you can't remember how you got blood all over you."
"One of the holes, yeah. And it's really bothering me, especially since we have this tortured and mangled body, which was apparently tortured and mangled in about the right time frame."
"I can see how that'd be a worry," he agreed.
They stared at each other, Gordon leaning back against the side of his boat and Riley sitting on the bench across from him. The boat was tied up at the dock behind the small house Gordon owned on the mainland side of Opal Island; he kept himself busy as well as made extra money taking fishing parties out onto the Atlantic.
"Not that I think for one minute that you're capable of doing that to somebody for no good reason," he said.
Wryly appreciative of the qualifier, she said, "But what if I had a good reason?"
"Out of the war zone?" He shook his head. "Nah. Not your style. You might get pissed and come out swingin', but nothing more, not back here in the world."
"I am an FBI agent," she reminded him.
"Yeah, so you'd shoot somebody. Maybe. If you didn't have another choice. We both know you're capable of that. But torture and decapitation?" Gordon pursed his lips, his broad brown face considering. "You know, I don't see you doing that even in wartime. It takes a certain cruelty, not to mention cold-blooded ruthlessness, and you never had either."
Riley was reassured, if only partly. Gordon knew her, probably, as well as anyone did, and if he said killing someone like that was not in her nature, then he was very likely right. She didn't think she was capable of it either.
But.
"Okay, so if I didn't do that to the guy, then why did I wake up covered in blood?"
"You don't know it was his blood."
"But what if?"
"Could be you tried to help him at some point. Went to try to cut him down before you realized it was too late."
"And then just went home and fell asleep, fully dressed and still covered with blood?"
"No, that doesn't sound likely, does it? Not for you. Not if you were in your right mind, anyway. Something must have happened in between. A shock of some kind, maybe. You sure you didn't get a bump on the head, something like that?"
"No lumps or bruises that I could find. Woke up with a hell of a headache, though. You know what that usually means."
He nodded. "Your version of a hangover, minus the booze. You'd been using the spooky senses."
"Apparently." He'd known about her clairvoyance for years, believed in it utterly because he'd seen again and again what she could do, and had kept her secret.
"But you don't remember what they told you?"
"Nope. If they told me anything."
"Must have been something bad. Bad enough to take away your memory, maybe?"
"I don't know, Gordon. I've seen some pretty lousy things. Horrible, sick things. It never affected my memory before. What could have been so bad, so totally shocking, that I couldn't bear to remember it?"
"Maybe you saw what happened out there in the woods. Hell, maybe you saw somebody conjure up the devil."
"I don't believe in the devil. Not like that, anyway."
"And maybe that's why you don't remember."
Riley considered that, but shook her head. "In addition to some lousy things, I've also seen some incredibly weird things, especially in the last few years. Off-the-chart scary things. I don't believe any occult ritual would actually conjure a flesh-and-blood devil complete with horns and a pitchfork-but I don't know that I'd be all that shocked if it happened right in front of me."
Gordon grinned. "Come to think of it, you'd probably just wonder how they managed to get the guy in the rubber suit so fast."
"Probably. It is mostly smoke and mirrors, you know, the seemingly supernatural occult stuff. Usually."
"So you've told me. Okay. So you saw the murder out there, and something about it caused the amnesia. That's the most likely explanation, right?"
She had to agree. "Yeah, I guess. Which makes it imperative for me to recover those memories ASAP."
"Think the killer might know you saw something?"
"I think I have to assume that until I have proof to the contrary. And finding that proof is not going to be a lot of fun, since I don't have a clue who the killer might be. Worse yet, the spooky senses seem to be out of commission, at least for the moment."
"No shit?"
Riley shook her head. "No shit. I should have been able to tap into something at the crime scene; that sort of situation, with everybody tense and upset, is always where I'm strongest. Or always have been. This time, nothing. Not a damn thing, even when I touched those rocks."
"So you're hunting a killer in the dark."
"Pretty much, yeah."
Gordon brooded. "A killer who might know, or at least believe, that you saw something out there. But if he does know you saw something, or even suspects you did, why let you run around loose? I mean, he's killed pretty brutally already. Why let you live?"
"I don't know. Unless he had damn good reason to be sure I wouldn't be a threat."
"Like, maybe, he knew you wouldn't remember whatever it was that you'd seen?"
"How could he know that? Amnesia isn't something you can deliberately cause, at least not as far as I know. And the SCU has studied this sort of thing, for years now. Traumatic injuries, especially head injuries, have all sorts of consequences, but amnesia other than very short-term isn't especially high on the list. Besides which-no bumps or bruises, let alone anything severe enough to be termed a head injury."
"Very short-term amnesia?"
"It's fairly common after a traumatic injury to not remember the events immediately before it occurred. But that almost always means a gap of hours, not days-and almost never weeks."
"Okay." Gordon brooded some more. "Long shot, maybe, but what about another psychic?"
Riley winced. "Christ, I hope not."
"But it's possible another psychic could be affecting you?"
"Just about anything is possible, you know that as well as I do. Another psychic might have picked up on the amnesia, or even known about it in advance. Hell, maybe caused it. Or at the very least be taking advantage of it." She drew a breath and let it out slowly. "I can tell you this much. If there is another psychic in this, he or she has the upper hand, at least until the fog in my head clears and I can use my own abilities."
If I can. If I can.
"Don't much like the sound of that, babe," Gordon offered.
"No. Me either." It was Riley's turn to brood. "Leah said you two thought I had been unusually secretive lately." The deputy had dropped Riley off and then returned to the sheriff's department, since she was on duty for another hour.
"Well, more than I liked. It was me brought you down here, after all. I been feeling responsible."
"Don't."
He rolled his eyes, a characteristic gesture Leah had probably picked up from him. "Yeah, yeah."
"I mean it. And, by the way, I haven't told Leah about the memory loss. I trust her, it's just…"
"I know what it's just," he responded. And he did know. Fellow soldiers understood the need to guard vulnerabilities in a way few civilians ever could. "I'll keep the secret if you want, but I think she can probably help. 'Specially if-"
Riley eyed him, seeing in that suddenly impassive face a lot more than most would have seen. "Especially if I don't remember my obviously hot social life these last weeks," she finished.