Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  "What do you mean, he has a full laboratory in his basement? Is he rich?"

  "Yes," GJ answered simply. “He has a house with three wings and I live in a separate unit over the garage, with a fully furnished apartment that he built just for me. My parents aren't as wealthy. But between his non-fiction books, his research, textbooks, and consulting work, his career is really broad and it pays him a lot. Even his speaking fees for the Sorbonne right now are covering the cost of all this. He's used some of his money to build a full forensic laboratory in his basement. I've known about it for a handful of years, but recently I’ve been investigating. So I told you about the skeletons that have the same anomaly as Donovan?”

  Walter didn’t really have time to answer before GJ kept right on going.

  “Well the last time I was here, there was a body in the kettle. Well, no, scientifically, I don't know that it was a body, but the kettle is really only used for full human bodies. The kettle was on once, and then when I came back the second time, there was a new skeleton laid out in one of the drawers. It was untagged and it was pretty clear it had been freshly washed. So I think there was a body in the kettle the first time I came. And now this time there's actually a body laid out on the table."

  "What?" Walter said, startled. "Isn't that illegal?"

  "Walter, we both just had Legal 2 class. Yes! It's completely illegal. Whereas, previously I thought maybe what my grandfather was doing walked the edges of legal and moral and was maybe a little unorthodox. I wanted to believe he had permission from universities and institutions."

  "GJ, slow down," Walter said.

  "No! There's a body on the table here!"

  "Wow," Walter said "If there was anyone who wouldn't be upset about finding a dead body on the table, I thought it'd be you."

  "Ha ha, very funny. I'm not upset about the fact that there's a body. I'm upset about the fact that I’ve learned just how very illegal this is. And this body's partially burned."

  "Can you report it?" Walter asked.

  "Really, Walter? Is that what you want me to do?" GJ's voice had dropped almost an octave in the question.

  "Well, why not?"

  "Because you know exactly what kind of skeletons my grandfather collects. What is going to happen when somebody comes down here and finds this whole collection? Agent Heath keeps brushing me off like he doesn’t know anything and I’m about to stop believing him. And the last body I found down here had the face shifted. I really do not know what the fuck is going on here, Walter! But if I report it, I'm blowing this whole thing wide open. Not just this body, but this whole damn collection! Does Agent Heath want that?"

  Walter sat back, stunned all over again. GJ made a very excellent point, "You're right. I'll be there soon. Give me that address again."

  GJ did and, before she hung up, she added one more thing, "Walter, the body still has some of the clothes on it, so some of the body is burned and some isn't. I can't examine the face, but I found a wallet and more in the pocket and…it has an FBI badge."

  11

  GJ examined the body while she waited for Walter show up. Normally, she would never have called Walter for a situation like this—but the fact of the matter was she had nowhere else to go. While Walter was no scientist, she had a good head on her shoulders and would help make the right decision. There had to be another option besides calling the FBI or calling the police and turning this all in.

  Everything is fine, she told herself. Her grandfather surely had papers somewhere for the bodies, and everything would be easily resolved if he would just show them. However, if everything was fine and her grandfather did have papers, GJ would ruin it by calling this in. Because, until her grandfather could return and show his paperwork, the police would have confiscated the dead body that he was doing research on. They would almost certainly destroy evidence in the process. If that happened, she was going to be in a metric shit ton of trouble. Whether this set-up was legal or not, simply by notifying the authorities she would be letting her grandfather know that she'd been snooping into his business. She wasn't ready to do that.

  This dead body might change all that.

  As of that moment, she had no endgame plan for letting him know what she’d been doing. It was unusual for her grandfather to leave a body lying out on the table like this, especially while he was gone. What she would have previously called his thoroughness—and what she now was thinking of as his secrecy—would not have allowed this to happen. However, this was not a skeletal body. This body must have come in relatively recently, because it still had the skin and muscle intact. Not her grandfather’s forte. He liked to joke that he only dealt with the dry stuff. Other people got the wet stuff—human identification specialists like GJ.

  While the lower part of the body’s legs, the shoes, the pants even, were fully intact, the upper body had suffered severe burns. From what GJ could see, it appeared someone had poured an accelerant onto the guy and thrown a lighted match at him. At least, that was her scenario assessment according to her FBI training. Scientifically, she could say there was a liquid accelerant and that it had been lit.

  Given the position of the body, she couldn't have said for certain if he'd been dead or alive or maybe conscious at the time that he burned. Her initial visual assessment had her leaning toward “unconscious.”

  Burning tended to make the limbs pull in, into what was known as a “pugilist stance.” His limbs hadn’t done that. This indicated the fire had not been too hot, as it was the high temperature of the fire that constricted the muscles. However, that curled-in/almost-fetal position was also a common one for people in pain. So, conceivably, the man hadn't struggled against the fire much. That would mean—blessedly—he hadn't burned alive or hadn't been awake to feel it.

  Still, the whole thing was odd. There were a handful of reasons to burn a body, and this one didn’t seem to have any of the usual issues. This was not an old body being burned for concealment of identification. Hell, whoever had done this had left the damn wallet in his pocket. So that was out. There was no rot. Prior to the fire, this man had been very fresh. Because the lower portion of the body showed no sign of smoke or any trace burn evidence, GJ concluded that he was the only thing in the vicinity on fire when he’d burned. That meant he wasn’t the victim of a house fire or probably even an accident. Most people would say it wasn’t possible, but GJ had seen the dead bodies of people doing some seriously stupid stuff. They thought they were invincible or that the science was wrong, and then they were dead. This, however, did not look like a case of “the stoopid.”

  Given the lack of burning on his back, and the way the burn pattern faded out around the edges of his shoulders, she could make an assumption that he had been lying down, face up when the accelerant was poured. Also when the fire started. None of this was provable yet, but she was grateful it was another point in favor of the argument that the man had not been conscious when he fried.

  It was because of this odd burn pattern that he still had intact legs and pants pockets. She’d done a standard, cursory search of his things, pulling out his wallet, ID, and then a second, folded black billfold. When she flipped it open, she’d been stunned to see the shield that she'd come to know so well over the past weeks. She could now easily distinguish it from police shields, DEA, and other that looked very similar to the untrained eye. She hadn’t even needed the accompanying ID card, the kind she hoped to carry one day herself.

  More than the body, more than the fact that her grandfather had done something unusual and left it lying out, more than the fact that it was down here, those three blue letters were damning. She could not imagine a scenario where the FBI would hand a corpse over to her grandfather willingly. Sure, they might ask him to investigate a situation. She was confident they had called him in to consult many times before, but he did so on their turf. The bodies went to the morgue. They were followed by an agent. He occasionally went on site for the recovery. But at no point could she ever recall any scenario, e
ither from her grandfather's past or from her new FBI training, where an FBI agent's body would be distributed to a private residence.

  When her stomach growled and Walter was still more than an hour away, GJ headed upstairs and met up with a few staff members in the kitchen as she made herself a sandwich. She ate it rotely, not conversing, not tasting, and barely chewing. It was just enough food to get her stomach to shut up so she could go back downstairs.

  She watched her phone like a hawk, hoping that Walter would arrive soon. She knew the mere arrival of a friend of hers, and a friend like Walter specifically, would surprise the staff. Still, GJ didn't think they'd think anything too much of it, though it would certainly be out of the ordinary.

  She headed back downstairs to continue examining the body when the message came in from Walter. Her new partner was only thirty minutes away. Setting a timer, she tried to stay at her work for as long as possible.

  It was difficult to tell if this body had the same anomaly as the others, given that the flesh was either still intact or burned onto the bone. Most of what she understood said the anomaly was not visible at the surface. While she hoped Agent Donovan Heath had not gotten too concerned with the thorough way she checked him out, she had watched him like a hawk. She noted the way he moved, the way his joints flexed, how his feet rolled against the ground when he walked, all of it, looking for some outward evidence of the small changes that added up in his skeleton. She wanted to see if she could find something, since her grandfather was likely hoping to put his name on the mutation.

  As the timer went off on her phone, she gave up. Unable to make the distinction with this dead body while the flesh was still attached, she shoved the body back into the cooler, headed upstairs, out the front door, and down the drive to wait for Walter. She guided Walter's car in and did only the barest of formalities of briefly introducing her partner to the staff before the two of them disappeared into her apartment. Her apartment was on the exact opposite side of the house from her grandfather's lab. Now she was beginning to wonder if that was no coincidence.

  He’d had her apartment built specifically for her. She was the other family member who understood the science like he did. Yet it now seemed that he’d wanted to keep her as far away from his work as possible.

  Did he not want to incriminate her? Or was he concerned she'd figure it out? Unable to quell the questions in her head, GJ tried not to let them show in her frustration. She and Walter snuck out the back door of her apartment and around the back lawn, hoping the gardener wouldn't see them, and down into the basement laboratory.

  At the bottom of the steps, Walter paused and looked around, her expression a combination of wonder and horror. GJ tugged her along, pulling the body back out of the walk-in cooler and showing Walter what she’d already found. Then she handed over the wallet.

  As she examined the badge and the FBI identification, Walter stopped dead in her tracks. "I know him. That's agent Wade de Gottardi. He's one of Westerfield's."

  12

  Walter stared at GJ. "I know this man. Or . . . . I did."

  There was something in the way that GJ looked at her that let Walter know that she was used to people not having the correct verb tense when speaking of the newly departed.

  "You actually know him?" GJ asked. "Or you just met him once?"

  "Somewhere in between," Walter replied. "We have to contact Westerfield."

  "No! We can't contact Westerfield, I already said we can't call the authorities."

  "You've got to be kidding me!" Walter looked at GJ like she'd gone insane. "This man is not only a federal agent, he is an agent that I know. He's an agent that works—worked—for the same division that you and I now work for."

  "We don't work for NightShade yet," GJ countered as she began pacing the room. It was the first time Walter had seen GJ Janson nervous.

  Shit, Walter thought to herself, this is going to be tough. In order to do the right thing, which was turning over the body to the FBI, they were going to have to incriminate GJ's grandfather. It wasn't something Walter was looking forward to. On top of that, it looked like she was going to have to override GJ in order to do it. But that was Wade on the table. She had met him and worked alongside him. He was like Donovan, she knew. Then she paused. Wade is like Donovan. The thought ran through her head, reminding her that Walter knew it but GJ didn't.

  "Do you think he's down here because he's like the others?" Walter posed the question as innocently as she could. She wasn't as good a liar as she wished, and she wasn't as good a liar as the FBI agency had tried to train her to be. Certainly not to GJ. It turned out lying to GJ Janson was hard.

  One, she was this woman's partner. GJ knew her well, since they’d been living in each other’s pockets for the past months. She had a very good meter on what Walter’s “normal” should read like. GJ would recognize anything that was off from “normal” in a heartbeat. Two, Walter had to add in the fact that she actually liked GJ. That made it harder to lie, harder to force that needle back into position than it would be to lie like that to another person.

  Luckily, GJ—too worried and caught up in the ramifications of what they might be about to do—didn't notice. "I don't know, he might be. I can't tell from what’s here. I still haven't been able to find any outward signs of what the anomaly does in a live human being,"

  Walter almost startled at that.

  She knew. And GJ should know. Right about the time that the thought was passing her brain, a second one dogged its heels.

  Damn Special Agent in charge, Derek Westerfield! He'd put her in this shitty position. She should be right now explaining to GJ exactly what the anomaly was. Instead, she was concerned that if she told—and certainly if she did it before they graduated Quantico—that she and GJ were going to get kicked out. Then again, if they held the body of a NightShade agent without reporting it, they were also going to get kicked out. This was a lose-lose situation every way she looked at it.

  As a Marine she'd been in unwinnable scenarios before, but in that training she'd also been taught to deal with them with one tactic: if you can't win, burn the place down. Sadly, that was not an option here. There were way too many problems with burning the place, even metaphorically. On top of the fact that it was GJ's family home, it was actually a civilian’s home and not a war zone. There was also the problem that Wade de Gottardi’s body was here and someone would want it back. What was his boyfriend’s name? ... Randall, his boyfriend’s name was Randall.

  For some reason, Walter found it comforting to try to remember everything she could about Wade, as though she had somehow now become his keeper. Burning even just the body would mean concealing the death of an FBI agent, let alone that of a man who was friends with her boyfriend. She’d just had a class on the charges for interfering with law enforcement. She could do it under the guise of the FBI, but that umbrella would not reach to this decision.

  Another problem with burning the place down was that this place was evidence. This place held a wealth of information about Donovan and his kind. Since it was so far from her own profession and hobbies, Walter had no idea how much of this evidence—how many of the things in the drawers and boxes—Donovan might want or at least want to know about. Burning it down would mean burning down what Donovan needed to know.

  "What if we move the body?" GJ offered.

  "Okay, that's an option,” Walter conceded. “Where do we move it to?"

  "Anywhere! Anyplace where we can claim that we found it. Then we turn it in, get it the proper processing. That keeps it away from here and away from being tied to my grandfather."

  "On the one hand," Walter offered, "that works pretty well. But there are two other hands."

  "Oh good, we already have a problem. We have too many hands," GJ quipped, sounding more irritated than snarky.

  "Listen to me," Walter told her, trying to get her to focus. "One big problem is moving the body. How do we remove it without leaving evidence that we moved it?” She watche
d GJ’s face and knew that if they couldn’t pull this off to her partner’s satisfaction that the evidence wouldn’t trace back, then they couldn’t do it at all. “That's just part of the issue. The other part is, how do we sneak a whole human body out of this house?"

  "Well, I don't know." GJ snapped, "but I bet we can figure it out. Because the fact of the matter is, my grandfather routinely sneaks whole bodies in. There's got to be a way."

  Something about GJ’s face made Walter stop for a moment.

  Her partner sighed, her expression crumbled, and for a moment she looked so young. “It’s all illegal, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe not.” Walter didn’t believe that, but she wasn’t going to twist whatever knife GJ seemed to have just found plunged into her own gut.

  “Yeah, it is. He keeps sneaking them in.” She practically yelled it as she waved her hand, gesturing around the lab. “If it was legal, he would have showed me. He would have called me, excited, every time he got a new body. Shit!” She cursed the last part out with the weight of world on it.

  This was her family. Though Walter didn’t really have one, she understood. Instead of going on down the sad path GJ had just taken, she steered back to her original problem. "Okay, one hand, we can probably move the body. Maybe not so it looks undisturbed, but at least so that it doesn’t specifically trace back to here. But the other problem is worse: what happens when your grandfather comes down here and finds his latest specimen missing? I mean, is he going to walk in now? Is there any chance he's going to show up while we’re sitting here yelling at each other?"

  "I'm not yelling," GJ replied at a high decibel level. "I am calmly debating."

  That was a load of crap if Walter had ever heard one, but once again, she didn't contradict GJ.

  "No, he won’t come back now. He’s out of the country," GJ replied to the question. "But yes, when my grandfather comes back and his body's gone, this whole thing turns into a massive shit show. I have no idea what that means. Honestly, there's still a mild possibility that this is all legal somehow, and that everything is on the up and up. If we steal the body and my grandfather has paperwork for it and now it's gone, we're in trouble."