Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  Wade’s story was hard for GJ to hear. She dealt with dead bodies, and occasionally, every once in a while, she dealt with the families of those who'd been murdered. That was the hardest part of her job. She always saw herself as granting closure, but it was something she wanted to hand out like a report, maybe pass it along with well wishes for whoever received it at the end. She did not like being face-to-face with the pain that prompted her work, but here she was.

  "Once I realized he was dead," Wade said, as he looked around the table. "I just stayed gone. I'm sorry, I should have come in."

  "Totally understandable," Eleri told him, her hand creeping across the tabletop to hold his again. "You just scared the shit out of us. And since he had your ID, we thought it was you on the table, Wade."

  Wade nodded. Though learning that the dead body wasn’t Wade had been a relief to Eleri, it wasn't much of one to Wade.

  "So," Westerfield said to the table at large, "it appears someone was out hunting Wade's family. They found Randall, and maybe being human, not being prepared, not understanding what was going on, he got caught in the fray, and he got killed. They took him, probably because they thought he was one of them. Whether he looked like a human or not, they wouldn't know."

  "No," GJ said, "not until they tested the bones."

  "So the first thing we have to figure out," Westerfield said, "was how Randall’s body ended up at your grandfather’s lab.”

  17

  "You're asking me to turn in my own family." GJ looked at Agent Westerfield.

  No matter how good it had felt to be referred to as Agent Arabella Jensen, this assignment was for shit, and her boss knew it.

  "I'm asking you to do your job," he said in monotone.

  "Yes,” she agreed. “Against my own family. This job ends up with my family losing our home, losing our inheritance, my trust fund, and being generally devastated."

  He looked at her again. "Is your trust fund really more important than human lives?"

  "Absolutely fucking not!" She almost yelled it. "However, it's going to destroy my family and significantly affect all our income planning. It might be a little nicer if I wasn't the architect of that."

  Even as she said it, even as she looked at the expression on his face, she understood this was her job now. She’d signed up for this without having any idea what she’d truly agreed to when putting her signature on the dotted line at the bottom of the page. She looked again to Agent de Gottardi.

  "I'm sorry," she said. She understood. It was his family that was already lost. When she thought about it—when she thought back to all the times she'd seen her grandfather bring the body of a wolf in and claim that he'd been hunting—she had to wonder if those were people he’d brought back.

  "Fine." She looked at Westerfield, both her hands flat on the table, her spine ramrod straight as she made her decision. "Let's go tear apart my family."

  "I'm sorry, Agent Janson," Wade told her, his heart in his eyes.

  Ironic, wasn't it, that the one who lost the man he loved was the most sympathetic to her plight?

  "GJ," she said, and tried not to grind the nickname out though gritted teeth. If he was Wade, she was GJ.

  Eleri reached over, taking Wade's hand again. "Is Wade really involved in this? Is he officially on the case?" She looked back and forth between Wade and Westerfield as though the answer would come from both places.

  "Technically, he's still on leave," said SAC Westerfield.

  "Technically, so am I," Eleri replied sharply.

  If GJ remembered correctly, Agent Eames had been looking for her sister. But this was a wild enough and personal enough case to pull them all back in.

  “I'm on it," said Wade.

  From everything GJ had learned at Quantico and everything she understood of US law, that was absolutely not okay. She looked to Westerfield. He had to know it was basically illegal for agents to investigate their own families. All evidence would be tainted. In fact, why was she being asked to do this? Westerfield seemed to understand the glance she had sent him.

  He voiced his reply to her silent question. “This is what we do. We investigate no matter what. We're the only ones who can do it. I think it's time to say a little bit about ourselves around the table.”

  Oh, good, she thought, say a little bit about ourselves. What the fuck was that? This wasn’t a boardroom ice-breaker meeting. She looked back and forth.

  Westerfield opened with, "You understand what Donovan can do, and Wade is the same.”

  Randall, unfortunately, was not.

  "Randall is just a regular human," Wade said. His use of the present tense, and the longing in his voice for that regular human, was almost more than GJ could take.

  But Westerfield ignored it and turned next to Eleri. “Agent Eleri Eames. I stole her from the BAU. She’s from our profilers pool. She was a little too good at it.”

  Eleri tipped her head. "It turned out I'm too good at it not because I had good hunches, but because I have a lineage of witches going back to Salem and beyond."

  Holy shit! A real, live witch. Then she said it out loud. “A witch and a werewolf.”

  Her surprise was interrupted by Donovan’s exasperated response, "There are no such thing as werewolves."

  Clearly, there were. GJ didn’t voice that reply. Instead, she turned and looked to Walter. "So, Walter Reed here—Special Agent Lucy Fisher—is The Terminator. And me? My special talent is that I'm a grad student?"

  For a moment, they all laughed at her. Even GJ joined in. The fact of the matter was she truly had no idea. What Donovan and Wade could do was extraordinary. If Eleri had a background that went that far into witchcraft—and clearly Westerfield believed there was something to it, and apparently the Behavioral Analysis Unit did too—then why was GJ here?

  Walter may not have those kind of skills, but Walter was the fucking Terminator. GJ had seen the woman in action. She had several tours of duty behind her as well as MARSOC Training. That shit was hard to come by. But what was GJ?

  It was Agent Eleri Eames who looked at her and said, "You haven't figured it out, have you?"

  GJ shrugged. No, she had not.

  Eleri began explaining. “You are the granddaughter of Dr. Murray Marks. You're the daughter of a physicist and a lawyer. You were raised in science.”

  GJ shrugged it off. So were a lot of people.

  Eleri was already shaking her head, "No, not like you. People did not cut their teeth on formal logic and common right triangles like you did.”

  Well, that much was true. She referred to it as “super-nerdy.” Who knew it was a superpower?

  Eleri shrugged. "I'm a scientist. Donovan's a scientist. Wade's a scientist. That's kind of how we all wind up here. It makes sense. When a person can do what we do, they start investigating it. But you ... You don't just have science degrees. You have it bred into your bones. When we were working on the Atlas Project, you thought of things that none of us did. You look at things in a way that the rest of us don’t. I think that's why Westerfield recruited you.”

  Westerfield offered only a short nod in return. Then he was done with it. They were back to the matter at hand. "We need to find Marks," he said to the table at large.

  GJ shrugged, musing on the fact that her nerdiness was a superpower. "Well, he's in France right now. And there's a tracking device on his car for when he gets home."

  "I told you: he's not in France," Westerfield replied. The words short and sharp.

  "He's at the Sorbonne lecturing," she returned, just as short and sharp, just because she wanted to believe it. Because it was her go-to answer.

  "He's not lecturing at the Sorbonne. This may be what he told you, but that's not where he is. And you're absolutely right, the tracking device on his car currently does us no good because he's not using that car right now."

  GJ was starting to put the pieces together. They’d told her he wasn’t earning his money lecturing. So why would he actually be doing that now? What
was there to prevent this trip from being a lie like so many others? For a super-nerd, she’d sure missed that connection.

  "Here's what we know," Westerfield laid out. “Murray Marks came into possession of a body that was last seen three states over, thirteen days ago.

  "Where exactly was Randall last seen?" GJ looked to Wade, trying to ask professional questions about a thoroughly unprofessional situation.

  Wade answered in kind. "We were in Arkansas, in the Ozarks. At my family home."

  Well, shit, she thought. It turned out there were werewolves running loose in the Ozarks. She shouldn't have asked. "That's where we start looking."

  Westerfield looked at the table in general. "At some point GJ's grandfather got a hold of Randall's body and brought him back to the basement. He managed to get him there prior to GJ arriving.”

  “Could he have gone to the Sorbonne after that?” GJ pushed the issue. She wanted her grandfather to not be lying to her. It bothered her that he was lying to everyone, but mostly that he hadn’t trusted her. “You said he's not there, but what evidence do you have? He could've made the trip after this incident.”

  “Nobody has seen him in France. We have people looking for him, and it’s the first place we checked. There’s also no record of his lecture at the museum. Nothing in public access nor at any associated university using the museum for space."

  "Of course, he’s not there,” GJ muttered to herself. It would not be that easy. Westerfield wasn’t going to let her off the hook, either.

  “He wasn’t in France. He was possibly in the Ozarks, participating in a hunt." Westerfield looked at everyone as though the words he was saying were not as thoroughly damaging as they were to all sides of the table. "He possibly bagged the body. He possibly brought it back. It’s definitely there now. And he has definitely disappeared. His car remains untouched. There’s no evidence he was seen at his own home, though we assume he at least made it into the lab." Westerfield looked to GJ. "The question is—and hopefully you know something—where did he go?"

  18

  GJ was shocked to find herself in the Ozarks less than twelve hours after sitting around Donovan Heath’s dining room table. She was in a family compound outside the small town of Bull Shoals. Her job now was to interview members of Wade's extended family. While doing that, she was trying to come to grips with the idea that these people—although she didn't know which ones—could truly shift form and become the large dogs or wolves that Wade and Donovan had told her about.

  She saw and understood what bones with this series of anomalies could do, but she was still unsure whether it was a dominant or recessive trait. GJ desperately wanted to interview the family about it—but that was a job for another day. Right now, she had to follow the case and figure out what had happened to Randall Standish.

  Westerfield divided them into two teams, sending Wade with Eleri and Donovan. This kept de Gottardi away from interviewing his own family and preferably away from the scene of the crime. The SAC then sent GJ and Walter here—into the Ozarks—to meet with the de Gottardi family.

  He'd driven them to the airport with all of their unnecessary things from the dorm room pushed into the trunk and their go bags pushed into the footwell on the front seat of his SUV. GJ and Walter left much of what they had behind with Westerfield. And GJ had no idea where he’d taken it. They’d hauled their things into Donovan's dining room and repacked it all with an eye for what they guessed they would need as the case progressed.

  Their belongings from their dorm room made it clear they were not prepared to go out and work a case. Though they had some non-khaki pants and some shirts that weren’t the labeled, blue NAT pullovers, there weren’t quite enough. They'd have to purchase more normal clothing along the way, and GJ was getting used to the idea that the FBI had a budget for these things.

  Westerfield had told them to sleep in the car on the drive to the airport. Though Walter went out like a light—probably well trained to grab sleep whenever she could—GJ simply hadn't been able to. At the airport, they’d been put onto a plane with a degree of speed GJ had never before known and flown to another location, still three or four hours away from their final destination. Walter had driven that rental car, as this time, GJ found she was tired enough to sleep. Now, here she was, just outside of Bull Shoals, Arkansas. She wasn’t even in the town, but she was up to her eyeballs in members of the de Gottardi family.

  Extended members came and introduced themselves left and right. Although they were unsure what to make of the two FBI agents, they seemed to be willing to let them in and talk to them. She and Walter had begun by interviewing family members, splitting the group in half to go faster. They first tried to assess how the family members really felt about Randall. What did they think was happening to the family? Why would they be hunted?

  GJ found the answers ranged from, "Little fucker shouldn't have been out there, he's not one of our kind," to "Oh dear God, I can't believe they shot a guest.”

  It wasn’t so much that Randall had been killed, it was that his murder made Pam into a bad hostess. Mostly though, GJ got the feeling that they were equally horrified that someone had been shot on their property as they were that someone was specifically coming after them. Wade's cousin, Burt, was an interesting interview and GJ, of course, had drawn him.

  "Look," he said, “I've been hearing rumors about this for years. There’s always talk about people hunting us. If you think about it, it goes all the way back to Red Riding Hood days—literally centuries. People don't like what we can do and we stay away. We try to keep to ourselves, but then this shit comes and finds us anyway."

  Though GJ almost spit her drink out at his mention of his family’s historical relationship with Red Riding Hood, she worked to keep her focus on his point. More bitterness came through his tone more than fear. GJ, drawing on all her Quantico training, nodded and agreed along with him. She made sure to respond as if clearly, things had happened exactly as he said they did. The more he felt at home, the more he would say. At least this kind of interview was something she was good at.

  The weight of the gun on her hip comforted her, and it was still shocking that it did so. She found she was wearing a blazer to cover it up, and almost laughed at the idea that FBI agents didn't necessarily dress that way because they liked it or because it was protocol. She understood now; they did it more because it was the easiest way to get fast access to your gun without openly carrying it on your hip all the time. Though Burt had clearly seen the gun, he didn't seem to care that she was sporting firearms directly on her person inside his house. He was ready to talk.

  "There were three of them. And one of those assholes shot me, too." GJ knew this. Burt had not been taken to a hospital—apparently a family rule—since he'd been in an altered form when he was shot. She’d also learned that three family members held degrees in various kinds of medicine. One was a veterinarian, one was an MD, and one had obtained a PhD in experimental medicine with an animal research focus. She'd seen some of that in the Comparative and Experimental Medicine Department where she had completed her own forensics master’s. These people weren't just different, they were prepared.

  Once Burt finished griping, GJ asked if she could inspect his bullet wound, even going so far as to let him pull up his shirt and gingerly remove the taped-on gauze. She noted what appeared to be surgical marks and clean, neat stitches made with Vicryl, all appropriate for the wound. Donovan would know more about it than she, but he wasn't here now, was he?

  "They did a good job," she told Burt. "You're on antibiotics, right?"

  Burt nodded. "We have a whole stash. We know what we're doing. We can't go to the hospital looking that way."

  GJ had nodded along again, though this time she actually did agree with him, thinking that a wolf being wheeled into a human hospital was asking for far more trouble than help. She didn’t want to contemplate what might happen if they took one of their men in as a big dog to the veterinary hospital. What if th
ey opened him and found human organs?

  She startled herself for a moment. Did these people have human organs? She assumed so, though she’d only seen the bones and the full, live humans that tended not to show their organs well. Another conversation for later. Right now, she needed to know about that gunshot wound. "How did you get it?" she asked. "Can you give me the details?"

  Burt explained about the handful of his family members running through the woods. He told about Randall asking to go along and how they’d sent him back to change into old clothes. Burt had been surprised Randall came back so fast. Wade’s boyfriend hadn’t seemed like the type to have a dirty pair of khakis lying around.

  GJ nodded. It seemed even Burt had picked up on that. She hadn't realized the distinction until she'd seen pictures of Randall. The body on the table—though she was certain now that it was Randall—wasn’t dressed like Wade’s boyfriend would dress. At least, not the way any of those pictures of Randall suggested. Though the ID on the victim hadn't been completely confirmed, Eleri wasn't holding her breath that Randall might have escaped.

  "There were three of them," Burt said. "Two guys, older men, coming after us. One younger, smaller, might have been a woman. One white guy, one black guy, all dressed a little too nice for the woods. They were wearing camo though, and all carrying modified rifles. I didn't get a lot of chance to look. I mean, I got my own guns. I'm pretty good. So I can tell you, it was a single shot rifle, but they were reloading fast. They each had several firearms on them. My brother, Art, he's the one who dug the bullet out of me." The vet, GJ remembered. "He said it was a silver bullet. Fuckers shot us with silver bullets," Burt complained.

  GJ only nodded again, as though everything the man said was gospel. The silver bullet part made a bizarre sort of sense. Werewolf legend was that they had to be killed with silver, and she couldn't help but ask, "Are the legends true? Obviously, you're still alive."