Sleeping With Fear Read Online Free PDF Page A

her jeans at the small of her back, then unlocked and opened the door.
    "Hey," she said. "What's up?"
    "Nothing good," Leah replied grimly. "Sheriff sent me to get you. There's been a murder, Riley."

Chapter 3
    D o you think it was a good idea to leave your door unlocked?" Leah asked a few minutes later as she drove the sheriff's department Jeep toward the middle of the island and the bridge that would take them to the mainland.
    "Like I told you, a courier should arrive in the next hour to pick up that package I left just inside the door." She had made a quick call to Bishop to alert him to the location of the package.
    "You could have left the package in your rental car."
    "Yeah. But doing that was a bit too…visible for my taste."
    Leah sent her a glance. "I probably shouldn't ask, but-"
    "Did it have anything to do with what's going on here?" Riley shrugged. "Maybe. I'll know more when Quantico reports back. At least, I hope so."
    She had debated, but in the end Riley decided against confiding her memory loss to Leah. Not yet, at any rate. She was independent enough that even Bishop had never been able to match her with a permanent partner, and that independence demanded that she keep her current vulnerability to herself as long as possible.
    Plus, it was quite simply a reasonable precaution until she could wrap her mind around whatever was going on here.
    Leah sent her another look. "You know, you've been awfully secretive the last week or so."
    "Have I?" It was more an honest question than a mere response, something Riley hoped the other woman wouldn't pick up on.
    "I'd say so. Gordon thinks so too. He thinks you've either found something or figured out something that's making you very uneasy."
    "He told you that?"
    "Last night in the shower and again this morning at the breakfast table. He's worried about you, Riley."
    Of course. Gordon always did love redheads; that's why I can trust Leah. They're involved, and he vouched for her.
    Aloud and somewhat offhandedly, she said, "Gordon's worried about me for years."
    Leah grinned faintly. "Yeah, he's mentioned that a few times. Says you keep digging when any rational person would throw away the shovel. That's why he wanted you here-even knowing he'd worry the whole time. And now we've got this murder. I'd say the stakes just went up, and maybe we've
all
got something to worry about."
    "Is the sheriff sure it's a murder?"
    "
I'm
sure-and I've never seen a murdered body before, not outside the textbooks. Believe me, Riley, it's a murder. The guy's hanging from a tree over that possible altar in the woods. And he didn't hang himself."
    "Who's the vic?"
    "Well, we don't exactly know yet. And it may take a while to find out. There isn't-he doesn't-his head is gone."
    Riley looked at the deputy, conscious of a cold finger gliding up her spine. There was something eerily familiar about this. "And it wasn't found nearby?"
    Leah grimaced. "Not so far, when I left. We've been searching, but it's just a little patch of trees, you know that, and I'm guessing that if we haven't found it by now, we won't. Not in those woods anyway."
    Nodding, Riley turned her gaze forward again. There was something nagging at the back of her mind, but she had no idea if it was a memory or some bit of pertinent knowledge.
    Or something utterly irrelevant and useless, of course, which was what lots of nagging things tended to be.
    "Leah, the sheriff still thinks I'm here on vacation, right?"
    "Far as I know."
    "Then why call me to a crime scene?"
    "Apparently he knows you're with the SCU. And he considers this a
special
crime, being as how we haven't had a murder in these parts for, oh, a decade or more. Deaths, sure. Even a killing or three, but not like this, not anything like this."
    Riley wasn't very happy about the sheriff's knowledge, although she also wasn't surprised. Of course he had likely checked on her, and any law-enforcement officer at his level could easily learn that she was assigned to