Free Sleeping With Fear by Kay Hooper Page B

rate.
    "So
if
we have occult activity here that involved a ritual murder, it isn't likely those responsible are satanists?"
    "Some fringe groups call themselves satanists. So it's still possible. Or it's some other group calling themselves something else. Or it's window dressing to hide a murder." Riley sighed. "And then there's rumor, and speculation, and people with their own agendas who keep fanning the flames, who do their best to take a spark of truth and build it into a bonfire of trouble."
    "For instance?"
    She shook her head. "I once opened my front door to find a young woman who was attempting to raise money for her church. The spiel was that our children were being threatened by devil worshippers and her church needed money to fight this evil army. She was deadly serious about it. It was in a sweet little town where the worst I ever saw happen was egging a few houses at Halloween, and that poor woman was jumping at shadows and imagining that demons straight out of hell were a breath away from grabbing her babies."
    "People will believe in the damnedest things."
    "Especially if the authority figures in their lives tell them something is real."
    "Which is why," Ash said, "I still believe our best bet is to treat all this as a series of bizarre hoaxes."
    "Even the murder?"
    "You said the killer could be using all the occult trappings just to throw us off the scent."
    "I said it was possible. And it is. But until we know who that victim was, we can't know who might have wanted him dead."
    "Are you going to suggest that to Jake?"
    Riley once again had the vague sense of undercurrents, of some kind of long-simmering tension between Ash and the sheriff, but couldn't bring it into focus enough to even be sure whether it was professional or personal.
    Something there, though. Definitely something there. And strong, if she was aware of it even with all her senses out of whack.
    Mildly, she said, "I imagine Jake's cop enough to know the basics without needing to be reminded."
    Ash returned his gaze to his menu. "Jake's a politician."
    "I can't tell him how to do his job, Ash."
    "No, I suppose not."
    His tension was still there. She could feel it.
    Barely.
    Where's my clairvoyance when I need it? Hell, where are
any
of my senses?
    They were still dulled, blurred, as if she saw and heard and touched and smelled her surroundings through some kind of wispy veil. It felt weird and cold and scary, this sensation of being distanced from the world.
    Being unconnected.
    She was alone, that much she
could
sense.
    Even stranger, her head was hurting again, but not in any way that was familiar to her. Not a dull ache of tension or weariness, nor the rare "hangover" head-in-a-vise agony of having pushed herself way beyond her limits, but sharp little bursts of pain every few seconds, one after the other, in random spots from just above her eyes over the top of her head and back to the nape of her neck.
    Riley'd had a tooth go bad once; it was that sort of pain, like a nerve or nerves pulsing.
    In her tooth, the nerve had been dying.
    She was afraid to even think about what might be happening inside her brain.
    And here she was, in the middle of a tangled situation she didn't remember or understand, painfully aware that a killer or killers on the loose almost certainly knew a hell of a lot more about what was going on than she did.
    As independent and self-reliant as she was, Riley had never felt so unsure of herself. She was adept at role-playing-it was one of her strengths-but this? This was a very, very dangerous game of blind man's bluff, and the one wearing the blindfold-her-had cotton in her ears and a clothespin on her nose as well.
    With the exception of Gordon, she didn't know who to trust, and he could offer little more than moral support since, if she had even reached any conclusions or formed any theories since arriving here, she had not confided them to him.
    As for the other man she was intimately close to…
    "Riley? Ready to