Kay Hooper - Sleeping With Fear

"Look, if anybody has a right to be pissed about this, I think it's me," he said, keeping his voice low so that the deputy some yards away wouldn't hear.

"Oh, really?" She stared up at him, matching his quiet steel with her own. "Somebody attacked me. He or she put a stun gun to the back of my head and emptied electrical current into my brain. And not just the electrical current standard in a Taser, meant to temporarily incapacitate. This was an amped-up weapon, Ash, a weapon quite probably intended to kill. It didn't kill me, but it put me down and it damn sure screwed up more than my memory. So forgive me if I chose to pretend nothing had happened for a few days while I tried to figure out who the hell I could trust."

"So far," Leah said to the sheriff, "nothing unusual's shown up in any of the background checks."

He scowled. "What, not even a parking ticket?"

"I didn't say that." She handed a printout across the desk. "Three of them have bad credit ratings."

Jake eyed her. "Are you being funny?"

"Obviously not." She perched on the arm of one of his visitor's chairs, smiling faintly. "I'm just saying that not a single one of them has a criminal record of any kind. A few court appearances on civil matters-divorce, child custody, a property dispute-but absolutely nothing criminal. As far as we've been able to determine, the group in the Pearson house is clean."

He grunted. "Unless somebody gave us a false name."

"They had I.D.," she pointed out.

"And how hard is that to fake in this day and age? Hell, you can buy a new identity on the Internet."

Patient, she said, "The paper trail looks genuine."

"Yeah, yeah." He frowned down at the report she'd given him. "Keep digging."

"And when we hit bottom?"

"Dig a little deeper."

"Right." She stood up, but paused before turning toward the door to say, "You know, if we don't find anything, and they don't want to talk to us, we won't have a legal leg to stand on in questioning them about the murder. Not one thing we've found so far ties any of them to the scene, and until we find out who the victim was…"

"That's another thing I don't get," Jake said. "We should have an I.D. by now. With the size of this county, we've had time to talk to nearly every soul; we've certainly had time to knock on every door."

"Almost," she said. "Tim thinks by the end of the day our teams will have done that. Every door on the island, at least, and most of those in Castle. The whole county will take a few more days."

"We need more people," he muttered.

She hesitated, then said, "Well, in general we don't need them."

"Don't remind me that I could call in the state police."

"I don't have to remind you." Leah shrugged. "Anyway, they'd have to waste time getting up to speed before they'd be any real help. I'm betting Riley's going to make the difference here."

"I'm not so sure about that." Before she could respond, he added, "She and Ash still in the conference room?"

"No, they left a little while ago."

"To go where?"

"Didn't say."

His frown became a scowl. "Find out, dammit."

Leah didn't question or argue, she merely nodded and left his office to obey the order. She'd been one of Jake Ballard's deputies long enough to recognize the signs of a frayed temper, and though he seldom lost his entirely, when he did it wasn't pretty.

She returned to her own desk, nearly alone in the bullpen with virtually every available deputy out doing the house-to-house. She tried Riley's cell first, not really surprised when she got only the voice mail.

"I don't know why she even bothers to carry a cell," she muttered to herself as she hung up without leaving a message. "It never seems to be working."

A downside of being psychic, Riley had explained. Something about electromagnetic energy; as Leah understood it, it was sort of like Riley carried around with her a permanent static charge. Even her credit cards had to be carried in a special case, and the SCU-designed cell cases were only partially and sporadically protective because the phones had to be able to send and receive signals to be useful.

Difficult, Leah supposed, to design a way in which to shield a device from electromagnetic energy when said device required energy to function.

She was rummaging on her messy desk looking for the business card Ash had given her earlier with his cell number on it when the deputy manning the front desk approached her.

"Hey, Leah-we might have something."

She looked up at Tim Deviney, her brows lifting. "Yeah? With the door-to-door?"

He nodded. "We got a renter not answering his door, and neighbors haven't seen him at least since the weekend. Team's been back twice, and still no answer, no sign of him."

Leah frowned. "A single renter? Was he on our first list?"

"No, the realtor thought he was coming down with his family, and it's one of the big houses, so they had no idea he was alone."

"We have a name?" she asked.

"Yeah. Tate. Wesley Tate."

After a long moment, Ash let out a short sigh. "Okay. Point taken. You have more right to be pissed."

"Thank you."

They stared at each other, and then he finally smiled. "So I'm the one you decided to trust, huh?"

Becoming more aware of the deputy watching them, Riley lowered her voice again. "Well, I was sleeping with you, after all. I don't know if you're aware of this, but I just don't make a habit of sleeping with men I barely know."

"So you said."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Want to tell me why I made an exception for you?"

His smile widened. "You know, I think I'll wait awhile and see if that part of your memory comes back."

"Bastard."

"I said you had more right to be pissed; I didn't say I wasn't still pissed too. You're a hell of an actress, Riley. It might have dawned on me slowly that something was wrong, but I never guessed I was a stranger to you."

She cleared her throat. "Not a total stranger. My memory might have been AWOL, but other parts of me were…Let's just say some things came back to me quicker than others."

"Yeah, we were great in bed right from the start," he said. "I would have been seriously offended if you had forgotten that."

"I'll bet."

"It's a guy thing."

"Uh-huh. Well, while you beat on your chest, I'm going to go see if I can pick up anything from the murder scene."

Turning serious, he said, "Riley, I don't have to know much about psychic abilities to guess this isn't a good idea."

"Probably not, but it's the only one I have right now." She shook her head. "Look, Gordon couldn't tell me much because I hadn't told him much. I've never kept notes or an ongoing report during an investigation-something I've just started doing here in case my mind is more screwed-up than I think it is-so it's not like I left a trail of bread crumbs for myself to follow. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what I may or may not have learned in the last few weeks. All I know is that somebody attacked me and a man's dead."

"And your boss left you here without backup?"

Riley briefly explained just how occupied the remainder of the team was with their own cases, then added, "Bishop wanted to recall me to Quantico, but I talked him out of it. I have to report to him every day, though, and when I report in today I damn sure want a few answers to offer him. Otherwise, when he hears what happened yesterday-"

"What happened yesterday?"

Shit.

Reluctantly, she admitted, "I lost a few more hours."

"What?"

"You heard me. About twelve hours, this time. From yesterday afternoon until this morning."

"Riley, you seemed perfectly fine last night."

"So I gather. It's fairly obvious that I was…functional. Working at my laptop, starting that damn report. I just don't remember doing it."