With IDs confirmed, Westerfield had sent his newest agents away, despite the fact that both Walter and GJ had looked at him oddly. With only him and Wade left to further interview these people, it meant Westerfield was the only one who could interact with them. Wade would be left outside the room handling things from a distance. However, he didn't seem to care, and since they’d been ordered away, the best Walter and GJ could do was discuss it as they drove off. They weren’t going to change any minds.
They’d headed immediately back toward Bull Shoals with only a stop for fast food to quell the growing crescendos from their stomachs. Walter knew the de Gottardi-Little family might be under attack and, despite the fact that it was a homestead and reasonably well armed, they would need help to protect everyone. There was still another person out there, most likely with a gun and a vendetta. The threat had not passed.
Now, Walter sat at the dining room table in the main house again. Across from Will, another agent joined them. She'd introduced herself as Christina Pines. Westerfield had told them that she was acting as a solo agent, having been pulled into the case from a leave she’d been granted. And for another moment, Walter contemplated the idea that Eleri also had been on leave, Wade had been on leave, and now Agent Pines, too. Was there something underlying the way Westerfield was building this group?
Though she longed to ask what it was about, Walter held her tongue. She figured if she waited, GJ would pipe up and ask for her. Instead, she’d arrived back at the homestead and was staring down Will Little.
"What did you do?" Christina asked.
"I texted several of my cousins and we took our guns to protect ourselves," he clarified, as though they might think he would go out shooting. "And we went out and checked the area. We found shell casings."
He’d put them on the table earlier. Walter inspected them briefly, not realizing quite what he'd intended them to be.
"You shouldn't have moved those," GJ chided. "They were evidence.”
“They still are," he told her.
GJ was shaking her head at him, not in an angry way, but in the way of a parent finding a teachable moment. Walter still didn’t think it was quite the right way to go.
"Now, once you've touched them,” her partner continued to explain, “we can't guarantee that any fingerprints that are on them actually lead back to a crime."
"Well, if they're not mine, then they're theirs," he said.
“That does make logical sense," GJ started and Walter breathed a sigh of relief, but it was a moment too soon.
GJ began spouting the ethics and science of evidence contamination. This was not anything that the general populace enjoyed hearing about and she needed to be kinder. So Walter was grateful when the tone turned.
"So while it seems reasonable,” GJ told him, "it's a set up for a court of law, we need chain of command."
"Are you really bringing a court of law in here?" He looked back and forth between the three agents sitting at his table, his expression suddenly on high alert.
At that moment, Art walked in. The last words he'd heard coming from his grandfather's lips were clearly deeply concerning. "You can't bring the courts into this. We'll have to lie on the stand, and some of us aren’t very good at it. That's why we live out here like we do."
Walter held her hands up. "No one's bringing in the courts. However, as GJ said, just for the sheer issue of us being able to read the evidence, you have to leave it out there. If you'd like, you can mark it and tell us where to go find it."
"Well if we did that, then they’d have the opportunity to come back and collect it. Seems to me these guys have been cleaning up their casings as they go. They only leave them behind when we run them off scared."
Unfortunately, there was nothing Walter could say to argue. The shooters were doing a good job of cleaning up their tracks and she desperately wanted to get out there now to see what was left behind. There should be footprints and, hopefully, more casings. Surely Art and Will hadn't found them all. The hunters had to have arrived some way.
The acreage here was far too big. You couldn't get to the de Gottardi-Little property without driving in from somewhere. Even if they parked at the edge and managed the five-mile hike, she should be able to trace some level of foot print, hopefully in the right direction to figure out where the car was. Or had been. Perhaps there was another car waiting. They had two people in custody. If they came in two cars, that meant only one driver left. Then she paused.
"What do we know?” Agent Pines asked, fitting her words perfectly into the gap of Walter’s thoughts.
"We know, GJ and I," and she looked at Pines then, who nodded for her to go on, "that there were two of them that we managed to get into custody. During that time, someone else took a shot at us. We believe it was another person associated with these two,” She turned to Will. “But I have to be sure that it wasn't one of your people. Will?"
This time, Will looked back and forth between them. "My people wouldn't do that."
"I don't know that," Walter replied. She wasn’t harsh or mean, but she wasn’t pussyfooting around this, either. "To be honest, we received a little bit of open hostility when we got here. Some people weren't all that fond of Randall and Wade's relationship—"
"Look," Will interrupted her. "We're not in any position to judge." He glanced then at her robotic hand as though this—in some way—related her to them. She wondered if he'd been talking to Donovan. Maybe she got it: they all had some level of freak status. But the fact of the matter was, a prosthetic arm was nothing like being one of them. Nothing like having a pack of hunters on your tail and possibly letting a family member or a visitor get killed.
The second time he started, Will looked a little more put together. He was the grandfather of this family, and it was becoming clear that he was the leader, though he didn't seem to do that from out in front. While Walter appreciated his style, she wasn't sure she appreciated the clannishness of the de Gottardi-Little family and the doubts that raised in her mind.
"Y'all told us you were going out looking. So I made sure we were in." He looked to Walter then GJ. Christina Pines had not been here then, so he ignored her for the moment. "I called everyone. I gathered everyone. I made sure we had a head count. I don’t normally keep that close of tabs on everyone, but this isn’t normal. The last time several of us went out, someone died, and one of my guys took a bullet. So you can sure as hell bet we were holed up where we knew we were safe."
Walter wanted to believe him. She wasn't sure, but for a moment she watched as Christina Pines’ fingers splayed across the table and clenched ever so slightly. When Will finished his sentence, Christina nodded at Walter and GJ as though to indicate the man could be believed.
Not knowing what to make of that, and certain now was not the time to ask, Walter asked her next question instead, aiming it again to Will. "You had eyes on everybody?"
"Not me, personally, but we did a head count. And I have to say, I've checked in today, specifically because this new agent comes in and says y'all are getting shot at. She wants to know where everybody is." As he got angrier about the questioning, his Arkansas accent deepened even more. "I've got several people who can vouch for each family member being present."
Walter looked back at him, her brows pulling together. "And do you trust them not to lie?" she asked. “Not to cover for each other?”
27
When everyone else was tucked in for the night, GJ found herself up late on the phone, dialing the number for Agent Eleri Eames. Normally, she'd never call someone at this hour—but normal had left the building a long time ago. There was nothing about this case that even approached regulation or reasonably sane. Now, they were suddenly working with a new agent, and it appeared nothing about her was normal, either.
GJ needed help. Westerfield had made it clear that they were to trust agent Pines. In fact, she was now the senior agent on the scene, though she seemed to be deferring to the two newbies. GJ found herself wishin
g Christina would just take over, would take the burden off their shoulders. But she hadn’t stepped in with any orders yet, so GJ and Walter continued running the investigation to the best of their very new abilities.
In their first order of business, they’d brought the whole group together, and then split up the de Gottardi-Little family into three separate houses. Though there were many more places where the family lived—small houses along the sides of the property and nestled in various secluded spots on the land—they gathered everyone into the three biggest for now.
Their working theory was to not be one big target. The multiple locations might let them flank any attackers trying to get close. Though they expected a shooter—or possibly two or three—each house had more than enough fighters and firepower to handle it. No one said it, but they didn’t want to put everyone in one building in case their missing perp decided to start a fire or throw smoke grenades and flashbangs.
Christina, Walter, and GJ each stood guard at one of the homes, waiting out the night in case something went horribly awry. As she sat there in the quiet dark and hoped their predictions were wrong, that no one would come, GJ had tried to imagine what might happen. She was grateful two of the three known members were in custody. But the fact of the matter was, her grandfather was not accounted for.
Given that Westerfield said Eames and Heath remained unable to find him, GJ had decided to do a little more recon on her own. She hadn't lied to anyone; she truly was not able to find her own grandfather at the time, but she hadn't mentioned something. In fact, she had hardly even thought of it. However, on the ride back to the compound, she’d scrolled through her contacts, and when they stopped again for a restroom break and drinks, she let Walter step into the convenience store and buy a few snacks for them while GJ stayed outside on the phone. She called up the number of her grandfather's longtime assistant and good friend, Shray Menon.
Shray wasn't answering his phone, either. He often traveled with Dr. Marks, though she had no idea if he'd gone along on this trip or not. No one knew, since her grandfather hadn’t actually gone to lecture at the Sorbonne like he’d said. After leaving a message, all she could do was hope Shray would call her back, giving her some idea of where to start looking. But if her grandfather knew what she knew, and what she’d figured out, then Shray had been tipped off as well. It was a chance she felt she had to take. Her concern lay in the numbers, because the two they had in custody, as well as one more who had shot them, made three. Her grandfather made four. She had a hard time believing her grandfather was involved in anything that Shray didn't know about, let alone wasn’t actively involved in. That made five.
Her next question was, just how big was this organization? It was a new thought that was worrying her, pecking at her brain. Three together was hard to swallow, but five? Two academics—who weren’t present—and three hunters? It didn’t add up. She sat up straight on her chair, searching as well as she could in the darkness outside the windows and hoping no one was sneaking up on the compound. If it was more than a couple people, she wasn't sure that she alone would be able to fend them off.
Then, there was the issue with Agent Pines. Later, after the impromptu questions when Walter and GJ had returned, the leaders of the de Gottardi-Little family and the FBI agents had dismissed the others and talked. They had themselves a reasonable discussion about where things stood and who could and couldn't touch the evidence. About what might happen and what had the family maybe seen before. Most of their trespassers had been presumed to be poachers. Now, they had to reassess what they remembered and figure out what those trespassers might actually have been doing...
The men had departed the meeting, leaving the three agents there to discuss amongst themselves.
In low tones, Christina Pine said, "Will was telling the truth."
GJ had picked that up from her subtle nods earlier. She and Walter both seemed to notice that Christina would stop, pause at odd times, and take a deep slow breath when the situation didn't really warrant it. A moment after that, she would usually nod. GJ had no idea what it meant. But later, when Pines had said, "He was telling the truth," both she and Walter had asked, "What do you mean?"
And that was when Christina Pines had told them what she could do. Christina believed she could influence people, make them think or see what she wanted them to. When she wanted Will Little to tell the truth, she pushed him to do just that.
"Do people know when you do this?" GJ asked, appalled beyond measure.
"No," Christina said. "I'm good at it. I've known I could do this since I was very young, and I've practiced for a long time."
GJ didn't say it, but she thought, That doesn't sound like a very good skill. The distress she knew she was showing on her face appeared reflected in Christina's own expression.
Unfortunately, along with Pines’ skill came a sad level of acceptance. Maybe that's why Christina was an agent on her own these days. GJ did not appreciate Westerfield not letting them in on these “special powers” before he sent the agent to them. If GJ was right, she and Walter were actually the “freaks” in NightShade, because everybody else had some sort of supernatural talent. Everyone except the two of them. She understood about Heath. She understood about Eames. Wade was like Heath.
To a very solid point, the men—the wolves—made a kind of scientific sense. She hadn't had time to study them, but she'd known from seeing the bones that they moved in an unusual way. She’d intuitively understood their bone structures clicked or locked into place in a different position other than the standard human form. So while seeing what they could do had been a shock, it wasn't too much of a surprise.
Eleri, on the other hand, got seriously good hunches. Some people did that. GJ had always believed those people were simply better in tune with their subconscious minds. They remembered little bits and pieces that others didn't and their brains put the pieces together. GJ wasn't a neuroscientist, but what she'd seen of it made sense. Eleri's talents were legitimate.
But Christina Pines seemed to think that she could get inside the human mind and push it one way or another. That she could make a person think or say or see something that she decided. That was well beyond GJ’s scope of science.
In her hand, GJ heard the phone in her hand ring through to the other side. A sleepy voice answered, "Agent Eames?" as though she were asking rather than stating. She’d woken up her superior agent, but she was in it now.
GJ didn't even allow the other woman to get an introduction or a brief hello. "This is GJ. I'm really sorry to bother you late at night."
"It's okay. What's going on?" The voice was stronger now, the brain behind it clearly coming around.
GJ appreciated that the other woman seemed to naturally assume that since she’d called late, it must be important. She explained that she was sitting watch at the de Gottardi-Little family compound, with an eye out for possible threats. But then she got to the heart of the matter and explained what she heard from Christina Pines.
"Oh, that." Eleri understood immediately.
So maybe she had been freaked out by Christina Pines as well or someone like her? GJ didn't know.
For a moment, Eleri stayed silent. "Look," she said. "Part of me believes that it's not my place to tell you this, because it's Christina's talent, but I've worked with her, and she's very good. I've seen her work.”
“She can make people see things, right?"
"Yes," Eleri answered, no qualms, no hesitation, and that shocked GJ just a little more.
"I mean, come on, Eleri. That can’t make sense. You may get hunches, but I'm a scientist. Christina seems to think she actually has some kind of psychic ability.” Her incredulity must have come through.
"GJ, that's what NightShade is. It's why we're off the books. Everybody in the unit was called in from other places. Westerfield pulled me from the Behavioral Analysis Unit. He pulled Donovan from the medical examiner's office in a small region of South Carolina. Donovan wasn't even an agent until W
esterfield got his hands on him, more like you and Walter. Some of us came from inside the bureau, already trained. Westerfield simply recognized what we could do."
"What we could do?" GJ interrupted. "I don't understand. Do you mean everybody in NightShade can…do something?"
"Yes," Eleri answered.
"But they're all like Donovan or like you, right?"
"No, not at all. I've seen things you wouldn't believe. We've solved cases that seem perfectly normal, and we've solved cases that we could never tell the world about.” There was a slight pause. “GJ, Christina Pines is the real deal. You should listen to her. What did she tell you? Did she use her skills on you? Make you say or see anything?"
"Oh, good God, no," GJ said, suddenly growing wary. "Did she make you say or see anything?"
"Yes. We practiced so we would know what was an illusion and what wasn't." Another pause. "I don't see any reason why would she would ever have any need to use this skill on you, but she's there, and she can see things that nobody else can. She can keep other people safe by using those skills." Eleri finished her sentence, and GJ sat silent for a moment.
She figured she'd probably gone still more times and for a longer duration since she'd joined the NightShade division than at any other time in her life. After a moment, when Eleri didn't speak again, GJ asked, "Should I let her make me see something? Is it that important?"
"I don't know," Eleri shrugged. "If you ask, ask kindly. She appreciates being respected for what she can do and not being distrusted simply because she has a skill that you don't like."
"Well, shit." GJ felt like a bit of a heel now. That was a very good point. She was acting like those kids she hated in elementary school, the ones who were mean when she raised her hand all the time. She said she understood and thanked Eleri for helping her out. She was about to hang up when she was distracted by a faint rustling noise from beyond the walls.
Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel Page 16
