Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  Walter had ducked back into the dorm room and grabbed her go bag, returning to the hallway as soon as Westerfield told them to gather their things. But he only looked at her oddly.

  "No, pack everything."

  For a moment she stood there, stunned, the bag hanging from her good hand while she stared back at him. "Everything?"

  "They're clearing you out. I need you. Now." He'd looked away while she absorbed the statement and it was only later that Walter really began to question things. He’d put the two of them into the back of his car, all their belongings shoved into the trunk, and driven them away from Quantico at three a.m. with no one the wiser.

  "Are you failing us out, sir?"

  "No,” he replied, but it was all he offered.

  "So, we're not going to graduate," GJ. said.

  It should have been a question, Walter thought, but GJ had merely stated it, unable to keep the disappointment out of her voice. Walter felt it, too. They were pulled” She couldn’t see or think of anything they’d done to cause their Quantico experience to go the way of Hank and Brian.

  Westerfield's voice remained gruff, his eyes glued to the road, the darkness pushing in around them. Walter had no idea where they were going, and the words he said startled her. "You just graduated. I graduated you."

  He said nothing else for almost thirty minutes and the two sat in the back, more stunned than they’d been when they thought they were failing. They occasionally looked at each other, as though that would answer any of their questions. When it didn’t, they spent their time glancing out the windows. Walter turned the evening over and over, wondering what the hell was happening.

  At some point, they must have passed a mark that Westerfield had predetermined because he suddenly began speaking. It seemed he wanted to get a few things cleared before they arrived wherever they were going.

  He directed his first question to GJ. "Do you know how much money your grandfather has?"

  Her partner shrugged, and Walter assumed they were truly partners now.

  "I don't know. I mean, he's wealthy. That’s obvious from the estate. He’s made a lot of money from his lectures and his books. I don't think he was always this well off. My mother didn't really grow up with that much money. She was raised more modestly, as far as I know." Then GJ faded off, running out of information.

  It was Westerfield who filled in what Murray Marks’ granddaughter didn’t know. "That's actually not true."

  "What?" GJ's startled tone bit into the darkness around them.

  Westerfield didn't even notice the yelp. He barely looked into the rearview mirror but kept talking. "We'd been looking at him before this but now, with that body on the table and it having a wallet that contained all of Agent de Gottardi’s credentials, Marks’ case moved to high priority. That means we put analysts on it full time and ramped up our efforts in our fieldwork as well. The fresh bodies mean this isn’t someone we could simply keep on our radar but someone we needed to actively follow."

  Walter watched as GJ slumped back in the seat.

  "Where was he last weekend while we were roaming his lab?" Westerfield asked, but it appeared he already knew the answer.

  "The Sorbonne." Walter put the word in for GJ, knowing that GJ was struggling to absorb everything Westerfield was saying.

  "He wasn't at the Sorbonne." Westerfield dropped the words like a brick at their feet. "We don’t know exactly where he was, as he eluded our tails.” Westerfield produced a short, sharp sigh that expressed his irritation about his agents being given the slip. Maybe more so because they’d been given the slip by an old anthropologist. Once he’d expressed it, Westerfield went back to his information dump. Surely, he was expecting them to memorize this as they listened. Walter tried.

  “He has bank deposits of large amounts coming from a variety of sources. Many are in Europe, many across the U.S., some in Canada, a handful in South America, some in Africa. Know about these?"

  GJ. was shaking her head, but her answer sounded like she did know. "He’s had speaking engagements all over the world."

  "That's not it," Westerfield quashed her response immediately. "There is money from the occasional speaking engagement. Do you know how many he went on last year?"

  Walter watched as GJ calculated, then said, "About eight."

  Again, he shut her down. "No. He only did three and they only netted him about forty-five thousand total."

  Even Walter frowned at that. There was no way that kind of annual income would support the house in which they’d found the basement lab. That income wouldn't support the lab alone or even just the kitchen or the grounds. And it certainly wouldn’t cover all of it.

  As GJ. appeared to struggle to find information and put pieces together, Westerfield changed the topic. "We found de Gottardi. He's safe but shaken up."

  Walter dove into the conversation head first now. "De Gottardi's alive?" Her heart was beating fast at the news. She’d held off asking, fearing she wouldn’t like the answer. There was a dead body with Wade's FBI badge. She’d first dealt with the idea that Wade was gone. She'd liked him when she met him and more importantly, he'd been a friend to Donovan. He was a friend of Eleri's going way back, but Eleri had been willing to share. To help Donovan understand that he wasn't alone.

  "De Gottardi went home to visit his family. He took his new boyfriend, Randall," Walter supplied as her brain searched to find what she’d last heard from Donovan’s updates.

  "Yes," Westerfield agreed. "Randall Standish. Apparently, Wade told them about what he was, maybe more. Took him home to meet the family and it didn’t go well."

  Walter understood it in her head. "Is that who the body is? Is it Randall?" she asked. It was the only thing that made sense. Maybe it was a different family member, but someone had gotten ahold of either Wade's pants or his wallet and badge and taken the ID with them and gotten killed in the process.

  "It's Standish," Westerfield confirmed with no emotion behind the words. Next to her, GJ flinched.

  "It’s his boyfriend?" she asked.

  Walter nodded. "He and Randall—” she tried again. “I think Randall is the first one he really loved."

  "Well, shit," GJ muttered under her breath.

  And that’s the thing, Walter thought. In their jobs—in their old ones and now in this new one—they disconnected from death. They looked at bodies. They killed people. They removed themselves as far as they could from the idea that these were actual people with families and loved ones. They'd examined the body with the respect they thought it deserved when they thought it was Wade and once GJ had told them it wasn't, they'd disconnected. The body became, for Walter, a thing. For GJ, a piece of the puzzle, a mystery to solve. To Eleri and Donovan, it was evidence. Now it was Randall—a man she’d never met but heard so much about, all of him tied to Wade and the fact that Randall was the first one that made him want to tell his family they were together. Walter’s heart broke, and she’d gone a long time not sure that it could.

  Looking back, she thought about all the things they hadn't done. For Wade. For Randall.

  "Randall's body," GJ began, softly posing into the dark of the car what would become a question. “What will they do with it? Can they get it from my grandfather?”

  Walter too was wondering the same thing. Would they be able to get it back? Offer Wade some kind of closure, a funeral?

  "No idea," Westerfield said in that flat, emotionless tone that was beginning to bother even Walter. She’d been a Marine and sat in her ghillie suit with a sniper rifle, waiting for hours to take out insurgents at 600 yards. Never seeing their faces. Never knowing if they had families or not. Only knowing that she'd successfully ended their lives. But right now, she was bothered by what she’d done.

  "We left the body there. We couldn't put any trackers on it. We'll have to go back down again and find it. See if he's boiled it down."

  Jesus, Walter thought, He probably boiled down Randall. Holy fuck.

  But Westerfie
ld kept going. "Surely, he's added it to his collection. I have no idea if we should use this to go in and raid the place, figure out what he's doing or leave it and watch him."

  "Maybe we can switch it out," GJ said. "Perhaps he's not familiar enough with it yet. If he hasn’t had a chance to do a full exam, we can find another skeleton and swap it out."

  "I like the idea," Westerfield said, "Can we make a resin cast and pass that off?"

  "No. He'll notice that right away," GJ said, shaking her head in the dark in the back of the car.

  Walter barely caught the movement and added her two cents. "My thought exactly. He's too much of a professional to be fooled by a fake, which means we need to swap it with another skeleton with nearly identical marks."

  "I'm not sure where we're going to get that and how we're going to get in and out and swap it. Do you know when he’s coming home?" Westerfield glanced briefly into the rearview mirror.

  "No, I don’t," GJ said. But she pulled out her phone and seemed to be checking the date as though she should have known. She muttered again under her breath.

  "What do we do?" Walter asked.

  "That is the million-dollar question," Westerfield told them, taking a right-hand turn down a lonely road and into a dark area. Finally, Walter recognized the place. He was taking them to Donovan's.

  Off the beaten path and down dark roads, the home of the man who was probably her boyfriend sat at the edge of a national forest in South Carolina. The location was near where he'd previously held the position of medical examiner, though Walter hadn’t known him when he held that position.

  "Agents Heath, Eames, and de Gottardi are already here waiting on us. We're the team. This is now your case as much as theirs."

  As they pulled up, Walter looked at the familiar little house where she had spent many a weekend recently. Only this time, it looked a bit sinister.

  16

  GJ hung back. They’d left all their belongings in the trunk of the car Westerfield used to drive them here. Too clean to actually be his, it must be a rental, she’d thought.

  Though Walter seemed comfortable walking into the home, GJ wasn’t. This was the home of a superior agent, and while she didn't have innate respect for a lot of things, she understood this. She watched as Wade stepped forward, clearly grieving the loss of his partner, and hugged Walter. Walter stepped readily into his embrace. "I'm so sorry, Wade."

  He had tears pushing at the corners of his eyes, as did Eleri, and the two hugged for a moment. GJ hung back in the awkward space around them. Westerfield also did not hug his agent, but he did it out of sheer brick-headedenss, not the feeling of misplacement that GJ seemed to have embraced while everyone embraced each other.

  Did Agent de Gottardi know that she'd handled his boyfriend's remains, that she was the one who argued that it be left there, and that he not be given it back for a proper burial? Shit. She had no idea. All she could do was hold out her hand and say, "Hello, I'm ..." but she was cut off.

  Westerfield began more formal introductions. Everyone else knew each other already. Walter had worked with Agents Eames and Heath before, in a more formal capacity than GJ had. Walter apparently had never been handcuffed to anything, and she had even worked with Agent de Gottardi once before as well. GJ was the only odd man out, but Westerfield held his palm out toward her in a more formal introduction.

  "De Gottardi, this is Agent Arabella Janson."

  Holy shit. The sound of the words stunned her. She should have been unhappy. She should have been sad for Agent de Gottardi. However, at that moment, the new idea ricocheting through her brain was that she had just been called Agent Janson for the first time. He really had graduated them. Holding her hand out, she returned her brain to the situation and shook Agent de Gottardi's hand.

  "Thank you for helping," he said, seeming to hold no ill will against her or her decisions, and she wondered again if he knew about them, and if his feelings would change if he did.

  De Gottardi offered a small smile and said, "Call me Wade. Seems like you're going to be up in my business quite a bit for the next few days."

  She nodded and decided it was best to come clean early. "I know one of the people involved is my grandfather, and it may have been him who killed your boyfriend."

  Wade nodded, "I understand"

  GJ felt the need to apologize for her part in all of it, for how she’d admired and studied the skeletons her grandfather brought in, for how she’d been stupid enough to think it was all legit for so long. "I thought the skeletons were on loan from museums, and only recently did I discover that he didn't have the proper provenance for them."

  She rambled for a little bit before Westerfield put a hand on her shoulder, effectively stopping her. "We've given him the information.” Then he turned to de Gottardi. “Wade, Agent Janson tends to go by GJ."

  And that was it. Her apology was effectively ended. Wade only nodded his understanding, and they got down to the serious business of figuring out what the hell had happened to Randall. They all sat around Donovan's dining room table, a beautiful old piece that he must have picked up or inherited from somewhere entirely unlike the places he had found the other pieces of furniture, but GJ only got a moment to glance around. Westerfield naturally seated himself at the head of the table, which put Wade on his right.

  "De Gottardi, you’ll have to tell them what you know."

  Even Eames and Heath leaned forward as though they had not yet heard this story, and for a moment Westerfield looked around and seemed to assess his agents. Then he explained to GJ and Walter, "They only got here twenty minutes before us. They found Wade in…. well, you tell it, Eames."

  Eleri looked around the table.

  "We tracked his cell phone. So we found his last known location by triangulating it, and we simply went there. But it took three days to locate Wade."

  Wade shrugged. "I'd been running. Once Randall didn’t come home, and I knew he'd taken my wallet, I'd gone out looking for him. By then, the others had started coming in, telling us there had been a problem. Hunters. So I tracked him to his last known place, but he wasn't there. I smelled blood, but the trail was cold."

  "You told him about you, right?" Westerfield asked. "About your family? About the anomaly?"

  Had they adopted her term? GJ wondered. She'd always referred to it as an anomaly, not a mutation, not a trait. It was a full set of changes that always seemed to come together and were clearly linked. She turned her attention back toward the conference table.

  Wade had nodded. "I was in love with him. He said I was keeping secrets, and he was right. I figured the relationship couldn’t move forward if I didn’t tell him. I thought he’d leave. Hell, I would have. So I told him."

  The confession came out with a world of pain behind it. GJ could hear it from further down the table and across the space.

  It was Wade who looked at Donovan. "Remember when you asked me about telling people what I am? This is why I don't tell." The words came out with a painful rasp. "I got him killed."

  "You didn't get him killed, Wade." Eleri put a hand over Wade's, reaching out easily from where she was sitting next to him. She leaned her head on his shoulder, though GJ wasn't sure which of them was leaning on the other for comfort.

  "Ell, I did get him killed. I told him everything. I took him to meet my family, and he realized many members of my family can do this too. They changed in front of him. They showed him everything. They took him in as a family member. Probably assumed we’d get married. I know that, by then, I was thinking along those lines. So they didn’t think anything of it when he asked if he could go with them. And then they went out for a run."

  Wade looked around the table. Apparently divulging information no one had yet heard.

  "They started out together. Randall must have gotten curious about whether there were things I hadn't yet told him. Or maybe he just understood that it helped to see it.” The tone of Wade’s voice told of loss.

  He’d never know now
, GJ thought. He’d lost many things with Randall’s death. Things big and small like this. Why had Randall gone? Wade’s words interrupted her morbid thoughts.

  “He grabbed an old pair of my pants. I didn’t know he had my wallet and my ID for quite a while. I was completely asleep when he left. I had no idea."

  That was clearly something that weighed heavily on Wade's shoulders, GJ could see.

  But the man didn’t let it stop him from giving information. She and he had something in common, she discovered: they were both inextricably intertwined with this case. He’d already suffered his loss. She feared hers was still to come.

  Wade continued. "He didn't come back. The family did, and they told me something terrible had happened. My cousin was seriously injured by a gunshot wound he'd gotten at very close range. He said some of our people had gotten into fights, hand to hand, but since they were in form then, hand to hand isn't the right term." Wade said it bitterly, without a scrap of humor.

  "My cousin barely made it home. He came back in wolf form because it was easier to move. They all said they smelled someone else, someone else’s blood. They thought it might be Randall, but they didn't have time to go back and check. They weren’t all accounted for because their homes were in different places depending on who you were talking to. So we didn’t know who was missing yet or who Randall might have been following when everyone scattered.

  “When I went back, he was gone. I changed form and tracked him as best I could until I gave up. Some of the family suggested he'd run off, scared about what he'd seen. A few were just angry at me for telling someone who wasn't one of us. It was maybe worse that I’d brought him to the farm. But I stayed close to the area and I kept going back out. I tracked and I tracked. His scent disappeared into almost nothing. I figured he'd been put in a car. By the time I put it all together, I knew he was no longer alive."