"I told you I'd never gotten involved with anyone during an investigation."
"Yeah, but I'm not talking about us. I'm talking about you."
"Ash-"
"You're scared. And I want to know why."
After a moment, she said, "Does it show so plainly?"
He shook his head. "As a matter of fact, if I didn't know you so well I never would have seen any sign of it. There was nothing you said or did that gave you away, not really. You've just been…a bit off the last few days. Quieter. Slower to react, to answer a question. And you've been tossing and turning a lot every night. So not quite yourself."
"And you read that as fear?"
"Not at first. I'd venture to guess very little scares you, and I'm pretty sure you've seen things that would make my hair stand on end. So fear wasn't the first possibility I thought of when I realized something was wrong."
Riley waited.
"But then it dawned on me that despite what you were telling me, the way you've been burning energy so quickly during the last few days was unusual. Even for a case. And that either you didn't know why it was happening, or you were shaken because it wasn't something you could control. Control is a big issue for you, we both know that. It's a trait we share."
"Which is why you realized I was probably afraid."
"If there's something you can't control in your life, fear is possible; it's a natural response no matter what kind of training you've had. If there's something you can't control in yourself, fear is fairly inescapable, at least for people like us."
"Makes sense," she said, echoing his earlier comment. "And it's a good read."
"Accurate?"
Riley nodded reluctantly. "Accurate enough. This is-I haven't encountered a situation like this one before."
"In what way?"
She hesitated again, her mind still racing, still torn with uncertainty and wariness, then finally took that leap of faith. She had to trust him. She had no choice. "The burns on the back of my neck?"
His eyes narrowed. "Yeah?"
"Not from a curling iron. Apparently, I was…immobilized by a stun gun sometime Sunday night."
"You were attacked?"
"Apparently."
Ash drew a breath and let it out slowly. "That's twice you've used that word. Apparently. You don't know?"
"I don't remember."
He got it quickly. "The electrical charge. It affected your mind?"
Riley nodded. "My memory. My senses. All my senses, even the extra ones. I've been scrambling ever since. To catch up, to remember. To figure things out."
"Christ, Riley. Do you remember what you were doing, who you were with?"
"Not so much. And it's been a bit difficult to piece things together without admitting I don't have a clue what happened."
"And I'm hearing this only now?"
She kept her tone even. "Imagine waking up with your memory full of holes. Imagine that when you woke up, you had dried blood on you. And then imagine that before you could get your feet under you and try to figure out what had happened, you were called to the scene of a grisly murder." Riley managed a shrug. "It took me a while just to get all the characters straight, never mind the plot. I'm still working on that."
"Dried blood on you?"
"That was the part of the report from Quantico that I didn't want to explain to Jake. First test: human. The blood on my clothes was human; my boss ordered it tested."
Slowly, Ash said, "And the second test said the blood was the same type as the donor. So the blood on you matched what was in the victim's stomach?"
Riley nodded. "I don't have a clue how it got all over me, but the obvious possibility is that I was there. At some point before, during, or after that murder, I was there. Involved somehow."
"You didn't kill anybody," he said immediately.
"I certainly hope not. But I can't explain that blood. And until I can, admitting all this to Jake doesn't seem like a good idea. Especially since he's not all that happy with me right now."
Ash frowned. "Wait a minute. On Sunday night, you told me-unexpectedly-that you needed some time alone and sent me away. Which means you knew something was going to happen."
"Or at least knew I wanted to do some investigating on my own, yeah, we can assume that."
"But you don't remember where you were planning to go or why?"
"Afraid not."
He turned his gaze forward, staring through the windshield as his long fingers drummed on the steering wheel for a moment. Then he looked at her again, this time with a certain amount of anger. "This was never just a vacation for you, was it, Riley?"
So I hadn't confided in him about that. Why not?
Dammit, why not?
"Riley-"
"It's never just a vacation for me. Never."
Mobile , Alabama
2½ Years Previously
By now, Riley could have been blindfolded and taken anywhere in the Southeast or along the Gulf and would have been able to recognize a coastal or river city from the smell alone.
She was also beginning to really dislike it. Musty, muddy, faintly sour, it made her think of damp and decay and blood.
Not so surprising, really, considering how many butchered bodies she'd stood over in otherwise lovely coastal cities.
This time, Riley didn't wait for the killer to strike. She didn't just drift into Mobile and blend in, vanish into anonymity while allowing her senses time to adjust, which had been the game plan up to that point.
After New Orleans, waiting patiently was somewhat beyond Riley. Whether because this particular killer had thrown a gauntlet at her feet professionally or because she felt personally violated, the fact remained that she was certain he had somehow managed to touch her mind more surely than she had touched his.
And that, to Riley, was a hell of a strong motivation to get this case resolved and this killer behind bars ASAP.
So, despite Bishop's warnings, despite her own uneasy misgivings, she used every trick of concentration and focus she had learned in her life to begin trying to connect the moment she hit town.
It wasn't the way her abilities were supposed to work, really. She had connected with other minds before; Bishop said her secondary or ancillary ability was telepathy, and being a telepath himself, he'd know. But generally speaking, telepathy was barely a blip on her personal radar, and her clairvoyance took the form of picking up bits of information from her surroundings or from other people. Touching objects or people tended to make it easier, but not always. Sometimes she got absolutely nothing. And on a few memorable occasions she had been slammed by a "dump" of information that had left her mentally disoriented and physically exhausted-a truly disconcerting experience she was wary of repeating but had no way of controlling or predicting.
Cosmic irony, that. A not-so-gentle reminder from the universe that the gifts given never came without strings.
In any case, her own "gifts" tended to be far more benign than those many psychics experienced. No pain, no disorientation, no visions yanking her from the here and now. Mostly, she just became aware of something rising in her mind, bobbing about to attract her notice, like flotsam on a wave. A fact, a feeling, a certainty.
Reaching beyond that, opening herself deliberately to contact from a dark and twisted killer, was a move as risky as it was unprecedented, at least where she was concerned.
She wasn't even sure how to do it other than to focus, concentrate, think about this butcher and how badly she wanted to stop him-
Welcome to Mobile, little girl.
Riley stopped in her tracks. She stood on a side street in downtown Mobile, near a well-lighted corner where people passed on foot and in cars on a typical weeknight like this.
They went about their business, oblivious, as Riley put out a hand to the building beside her, steadying herself not so much physically as emotionally.