also knew that now was no time to start speculating.
She said to Dominic, “You call Chief Crane. I’ll call the county medical examiner.”
Dominic nodded and took out his cell phone.
Before she reached for hers, Sam wiped some sweat off her brow.
It was already getting to be a hot day …
And it’s going to get a whole lot hotter.
CHAPTER TWO
Riley Paige took a long, deep breath of the cool ocean air.
She was sitting on the high porch of a beach house where she, her boyfriend Blaine, and their three teenaged daughters had already spent a week. Down on the wide sandy beach, more summer vacationers were scattered about and others were out in the water. Riley could see April, Jilly, and Crystal playing in the surf. There was a lifeguard on duty, but even so, Riley was glad she had a good view of the girls.
Blaine was lounging in the wicker recliner next to her.
He said, “So are you glad you accepted my invitation to come out here?”
Riley squeezed his hand and said, “Very glad. I could really get used to this.”
“I certainly hope so,” Blaine said, squeezing her hand back. “When was the last time you took a vacation like this?”
The question took Riley slightly aback.
“I really have no idea,” she said. “Years, I guess.”
“Well, you’ve got some catching up to do,” Blaine said.
Riley smiled and thought …
Yeah, and another whole week to do it in.
They’d all had a wonderful time so far. A well-to-do friend of Blaine’s had offered him the use of his place at Sandbridge Beach for two weeks in August. When Blaine invited them to go along, Riley had realized that she owed it to April and Jilly to spend more time away from work, having fun with them.
Now she thought …
I owed it to myself, too.
Maybe, if she got enough practice in this summer, she’d even get used to pampering herself.
When they’d arrived, Riley had been startled at how elegant this place was, an attractive house raised on pilings and with a wonderful view of the beach from this porch. There was even an outdoor pool in the back.
They’d gotten here just in time to celebrate April’s sixteenth birthday. Riley and the girls had spent that day shopping fifteen miles away in Virginia Beach, and they’d visited the aquarium there. Since then they’d barely left this place—and the girls seemed to be anything but bored.
Blaine gently let go of Riley’s hand and got up from his chair.
Riley grumbled, “Hey, where do you think you’re going?”
“To finish getting dinner ready,” Blaine said. Then with an impish grin he added, “Unless you’d rather go out to eat.”
Riley laughed at his little joke. Blaine owned a quality restaurant back in Fredericksburg, and he himself was a master chef. He’d been making wonderful seafood dinners ever since they’d gotten here.
“That’s out of the question,” Riley said. “Now go straight to the kitchen and get to work.”
“OK, boss,” Blaine said.
He gave her a quick kiss and went on inside. Riley watched the girls romping in the surf for a few moments, then started to feel a little restless and considered going inside to help Blaine with dinner.
But of course, he’d only tell her to come back out here and leave the cooking to him.
So instead, Riley picked up the paperback spy novel she’d been reading. She was too mentally fuzzy right now to make much sense of the elaborate plot, but she was enjoying reading it anyway.
After a little while she felt her whole body twitch, and she realized that she’d dropped the book at her side. She’d fallen asleep for a few minutes—or had it been longer?
Not that it really mattered.
But the afternoon light was waning, and the waves were curling a bit higher. The water looked a little more threatening now that the relentless tide was coming in.
Even with the lifeguard still on duty, Riley felt uneasy. She was about ready to stand up and wave and call out to the girls to tell them it was time to get out of the water, but they seemed to have already come to the same conclusion on their own. They were up on the beach building a sandcastle.
Riley breathed a little easier at their good judgment. At times like now, when the ocean took on a more ominous hue, it occurred to Riley that it wasn’t really a place where humans could ever quite belong. Some denizens of the deep were capable of terrible violence—at least as brutal and cruel as the human monsters she hunted and fought as a BAU investigator.
Riley shuddered as she remembered how she’d sometimes had to protect her family against those human monsters. They had been formidable enough. She knew better than to imagine she could ever contend with the monsters of the deep.
Riley’s last case had been a full month ago—a string of violent knife murders of rich and powerful men, perpetrated in posh and elegant homes down in Georgia. Since then her professional life had been unusually quiet—and somewhat boring, really.
She’d been updating records, attending meetings, and giving advice to other agents about their cases. But she’d enjoyed giving a couple of lectures to students at the FBI Academy. As a seasoned and even rather celebrated investigator, Riley was a popular lecturer, at least when she was available.
Seeing those young, aspiring faces in the classroom reminded her of her own early idealism, back when she was a trainee in the Academy. Then, she’d been hopeful about the prospect of ridding the world of evildoers. She was a lot less hopeful now, but she was still doing her best.
What else can I do? she asked herself.
It was the only work she knew, and she knew she was very good at her job.
She heard Blaine’s voice calling out …
“Riley, dinner is ready. Get the kids.”
Riley stood up and waved, shouting “Dinner!” at the top of her lungs.
The girls turned away from their sandcastle, which had become quite elaborate, and they dashed toward the house. They ran underneath the porch where Riley was sitting and to the back of the house, where they could take a quick shower by the swimming pool.
Before she went inside herself, Riley stood by the railing and saw that the girls’ sandcastle was already getting nibbled away by the rising tide. Riley couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit of sadness about that, but she reminded herself that was normal for castles made of sand.
She’d hardly spent any time at the beach when she was younger. She just hadn’t had that kind of a childhood. But from watching the girls playing during the last few
