The NightShade Forensic Files: Under Dark Skies (Book 1)

by A. J. Scudiere

  Eleri stifled a giggle as their burgers arrived. Well, the counter girl came out, scanned the room and called out the order, because she had no idea who Eleri Grace Eames was nor that a six-foot man had stood at the counter. She did not recognize his long angled face, short dark hair, dark skin, curt, non-localized accent. All in stark contrast to the owner of the card.

  He stuck to Eames’s established segregation of the table, keeping his tray on his left. A quick look and an inhale and he was shocked the burger order was actually correct. The girl was so slow she hadn’t even yet made it back behind the counter.

  Eames proved some of his earlier assumptions as she refused to speak with food in her mouth. Her dainty hand coming forward, covering her full lips, should she be forced to say something before she finished chewing. But she shattered others. She dug into the burger with the gusto of someone long denied good food. And while she was petite, she wasn’t all that tiny. She was athletic rather than starving, and she wasn’t hurting for food. She swallowed and smiled. “That’s a good burger. My senior agent called a lunch here the one other time I’ve been in this town.”

  He watched as she dug back in, then made short work of his own food. For someone who looked like she was going to town on that sandwich, she sure didn’t make any real progress on it. Stopping again, she set the burger down, wiping her hands on a paper napkin before leaning forward just a little. “I have to confess, I’ve never been the senior agent before. This is new to me.”

  Donovan shrugged. “I’ve never been an agent at all before. So you can screw it up seven ways to hell and I won’t notice.”

  They catalogued what they could about the mysterious Ruth. Then she surprised Donovan by asking his assessment of the medical records of the woman who disappeared. “I really work best on dead people.” The look on her face said she figured as much, but she didn’t look like that was necessarily a bad thing. Eleri Eames smiled and waited. She knew the trick: first one to speak loses. But she smiled and acted as though her waiting was the most natural thing, as though she wanted to hear what he had to say about the medical records. So he caved and spoke.

  He’d been thinking on this but wondered what she’d say. “Ruth apparently escaped the compound, afraid for her life. Sought out medical treatment at a hospital—not with a physician—and then returned to the compound. According to the nurses who treated her, all one of them the locals managed to get on record, she regretted her decision and went back to the City of God to beg forgiveness.”

  Eleri nodded. That was a matter of record. “You know it doesn’t mean the local police bungled it.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “Of course not.”

  He looked at her in a new light. She was already a contradictory mass: driven but not as ambitious as he originally thought. Sheltered but open-minded. Privileged in a way only the American upper class could be. He was almost stunned to find she was nice. She seemed to veer to the best case scenario—not something he saw much of in the agents from the Academy. His teachers had thought the worst of everyone around them. One even stated he didn’t care if your spouse died during the training, he would simply assume you were lying. But here was Eames, telling him the botched record was fine.

  “The woman was clearly an adult. There were no signs of abuse. She wasn’t carrying a contagious disease—the diagnosis was shingles, of all things. She didn’t even dress oddly, not that anyone reported. She simply wanted to remain anonymous. There was nothing to suspect, except that she kept referring to a city they’d never heard of. As busy as local stations often are, it’s surprising there’s even a record.” She leaned back and looked through him a little, and he felt the moment her inner senior agent reared its head. “I don’t go into things assuming errors are the result of poor work or that they even are errors. Don’t worry, I’ll call bullshit if I see it, but the locals often hate us on principle. The problem is we need them and they need us.”

  He was getting the “play nice” lecture. Donovan wondered if he remembered what “nice” was. Instead of playing nice, he played his card. “I don’t think the diagnosis was right.”

  “What?”

  He wasn’t certain and he said so, but she asked him to go on. “Shingles used to be rare in someone that young. But it’s currently moving into a younger population as the varicella virus evolves.” She didn’t seem to need the explanation of the chicken pox virus, so he continued. “But it presents along the dermatomes.” He gestured oddly at his sides and arms, there was no good way to explain it. “It makes specific patterns on the skin and rarely shows up on both sides of the body at once.”

  Eames was nodding, her eyes looking into the middle distance as she absorbed that. “Which doesn’t match her record.”

  “Right. I think she might have had measles. Misdiagnosed.” He leaned forward. “If the hospital maintained a blood sample, we can check it.”

  “Okay, but what does it mean if she had measles instead?”

  “Measles is a universally vaccinated disease. Well, for anyone who attended public school, that is.”

  Once again, he could see the gears turn in Eames’s head. “So she wouldn’t have been vaccinated, no public school records. Thus looking in the missing persons records might be pointless if she was City of God born and bred.”

  “Right. And if we can identify the remains of the dead woman—” no one had yet tried, but now she was FBI property, “we might be able to find Baxter and his followers.”

  He had tonight to run, to sleep under the stars. Then Donovan Heath, lover of woods and foliage, was off to the middle of nowhere Texas, to find human remains and a cult leader. He had, at the same time, a bone-deep dread of what he was about to do and a gut-deep certainty that he would be good at it.

  3

  Planes were always a bitch. While many people didn’t fit in them, Eleri did—and she still thought flying was a bitch.

  She would have driven, but Columbia to Dallas was just too far to make it worthwhile in a rental car. There was the added problem that a case could take you anywhere and often speed was of the essence. So she was driving a different airport rental car through the backwaters of Texas with her new partner by her side, thinking that he finally fit into the seat allotted to him. He’d been practically folded into the airplane. Thank goodness he was fresh from the Academy, which meant he was in good shape. Anyone of his height carrying spare weight wouldn’t have fit into the plane seat at all, and it wasn’t that small.

  She had worked during the flight, refusing to sleep in the company of strangers. Clearly not everyone had been taught this gem of etiquette, as many of her fellow passengers fluffed pillows and dropped off into oblivion. It had been ingrained into her, embedded during childhood, like not wetting your pants or always using a fork. To Eleri, the act of actually sleeping with someone was far more intimate even than sex.

  Pulling the car into the lot the GPS led her to, Eleri sighed to her partner. “Tell me you brought jeans.”

  They stuck out like sore thumbs—or rather like FBI agents—here in Brownwood. They needed to blend into the crowd so they could do their job, so they could go as long as possible before the locals started wondering why the Feds had shown up in their little town. They now needed to get checked in and change clothes before they headed out, and they needed lunch first, too.

  Finally, after they slogged through registration, they silently filed up the elevator. The hallway looked long, and Eleri worried that she was already tired of it. If not the case, then the trip.

  Brownwood was nothing to shake a stick at. This hotel, all two stars of it, was the nicest guest spot in town. It was on the other side of town from the hospital, but that was a whopping eight-minute drive according to her map program. Hopefully it was enough distance that small-town word wouldn’t travel faster than they did and beat them to their interview.

  Her phone buzzed five minutes later. Donovan’s text read “ready.”

  Damn him. She hated bei
ng the girl. But dammit, she was going to brush her hair. It was going into a ponytail given the heat she should have expected. She was still wearing her lightweight slacks even though the temperature was pushing eighty. These trips always required a super-size suitcase. There was no way to predict when she might get home. They might get sent to the next place from here, and the third place from there. It was also impossible to know what she would need when she got to a new location—case in point: Brownwood, Texas.

  Looking the town up online was not enough. Maybe it was because she had compared Brownwood to the smaller nearby towns of Brookesmith and Zephyr. But she’d overshot on the clothing. They were nowhere near the point in a case when she would need to make anyone nervous, and the nurse they were looking for wasn’t under investigation at all, so casual was the way to go. She texted Heath back and stepped into the hall, already feeling the push of the air on her skin again.

  Her stomach growled in greeting as he stepped through the door. Relief that his attire was in the right range warred with embarrassment that her GI tract had decided to alert everyone in hearing distance that it had not been properly fed. She could feel the blood creeping up her cheeks. Luckily her skin didn’t show it too much and the lighting in here wasn’t the best.

  Heath still grinned at her. “Tex Mex?”

  She nodded. Two could play the minimalist word game, but it would only work for a little while, only for logistics. They had a cult leader to track and several missing kids to find. Her stomach turned; she wasn’t supposed to be on cases like this.

  Following their Internet search, they followed small streets to the restaurant, which Donovan rejected on some vague principle. He got out of the car, gracefully unfolding himself from the passenger’s side, but before he was fully upright, he made a face. Looking as though he had already tasted bad food, he shook his head. “Let’s try the next one.”

  She didn’t question him. Eleri believed in gut instincts, she believed in the brain doing things the conscious user wasn’t aware of. It didn’t mean they weren’t valid. She just hoped that Agent Heath’s instincts extended beyond Tex-Mex and maybe into more valid investigative fields.

  He grinned as he got back into the car and gave her the address of the second option. “Hey, nothing derails an investigation faster than bad Mexican food.”

  She shrugged. “Bad Chinese food.”

  “Bad sushi.”

  She shuddered, but he was right. At the second stop he gave his seal of approval and while they ate she asked him about Ruth’s hospitalization. “I was wondering last night, wouldn’t the hospital see that the treatment for shingles wasn’t working and realize they misdiagnosed her?”

  “Not necessarily. Shingles is viral and it’s embedded in the nervous system. There’s not much to fix; mostly they treat for the pain. So if she had measles, whatever they treated her with would have made her feel better while it passed.” He shrugged.

  So it could have been a missed diagnosis. Eleri understood shingles but apparently not the finer details. She was finding it interesting working with an MD. Normally, she was the agent with the biology background. Of course she also had psych and forensic science, but far more agents came up through the ranks with some kind of criminal justice degree: criminology, legal ethics or an actual J.D. It was odd to have someone pull out the biological minutia she missed. And it was probably good for her.

  They found the nurse who spoke to the local police about Ruth. It had been two weeks since the mystery woman left the hospital against medical advice, but RN Elaine Coates’s recall proved solid. When she was asked about other patients, she recalled details there, too. They’d struck gold finding someone with a sharp memory and a reason to pay attention to this particular patient. The nurses all simply found Ruth “odd.” It wasn’t normal for a conscious person to have no identification other than a first name. With Ms. Coates’s help, they expanded the file to include that she had been taking Ruth’s vitals one night and heard the young woman muttering to “take her north.”

  The nurse also reported hearing secondhand statements about Ruth having hitched a ride to the hospital, though Eleri and Agent Heath weren’t able to find anyone who claimed to have heard that directly from Ruth. If they put those unconfirmed pieces of information together, Ruth could have come from the open area between Brookesmith, Zephyr, and Mullin. Satellite activity indicated that something was there; whether it was the City of God remained to be seen.

  After setting the nurse up with a cup of coffee and a video link to a sketch artist, they checked out the security system. Not shockingly, that turned up a big goose egg. A place like this, small town, there was no such thing as three-week-old footage when nothing wrong had happened. Of course they didn’t still have it. So there was no image of the mysterious Ruth, not even a grainy profile shot.

  Hours later, they gave up in favor of a steak dinner. They were in Texas after all. In fact, if you looked at a picture of the state, they were practically under the X. As though Baxter had chosen a spot so obvious he could hide his cult in plain sight—already marked on the map.

  Sitting in the back of the restaurant, under a chandelier made of antlers, on a seat upholstered in cowhide, Eleri wondered if the seat cushion was going to shed on her. Maybe they offered complimentary lint rollers after dinner with the hot towels? But she listened to what her partner hadn’t said before.

  “There’s no blood sample. Small place, you know? They focus on those that are there, not those that left.”

  “Which means no diagnosis of measles and we could be chasing our own tails.” Brilliant. Westerfield had warned them this case was going to be a bitch.

  “But from what Nurse Ratched said when I interviewed her, the diagnosis was definitely not shingles and could have been measles.”

  Frowning, Eleri took another bite of her tiny steak surrounded by mounds of buttery mashed potatoes and tried not to feel her arteries hardening. Her brain turned. Confirmation bias could always be a problem; had he asked leading or limited questions? She should have been there. Though he was stamped with the Academy’s seal of approval, it was her ass on the line. Not only was she the senior partner, she had a full-on newbie sitting beside her. Oh, and he was apparently recruited—as evidenced by his lackadaisical regard for regulations. He followed them but without the hyper-aggressiveness of those who fought to be there. She should have been given an eager new agent, one with a clipboard and heartfelt desire to help the American people, not a cynical cadaver cutter looking for a change. So she questioned Donovan closely. What did he see that made him think it was measles? What other diseases or symptoms did he ask the nurse about? Did the nurse believe the diagnosis?

  While he answered everything calmly, she could feel tiny spots of resentment welling up on him like blood from pinpricks. So she threw in a last question. “Why did you call her Nurse Ratched?”

  “Because I’m older than you. Because I wanted to see if you got the reference.” He sighed. “Because I wanted to see if you have a sense of humor.”

  She’d sat straight-faced until then, but at that last one, Eleri lost it. Her head went back and she laughed loud enough to turn other patrons her way. She laughed loud enough that her mother could probably hear and disapprove from all the way in Virginia or Kentucky, whichever home she was holding court in this month. “Heath, I have a psychobiology degree with so much abnormal psych your head would spin. Of course I’ve seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

  “You’re not old enough to have seen it.”

  “Shut up.” He almost looked surprised. Good. “Neither are you. It’s a damn classic, Heath.”

  “Donovan. Please.” His plate was empty. Moreover it was bone dry. The bread basket had been reduced to a pile of crumbs, which might explain the missing pool of butter on his plate. But she had to pay attention to what he was saying. “I was Dr. Heath until now. I was just ‘Heath!’ all through med school. I was Heath in high school and undergrad on the track team. I co
uld stand to be Donovan for a while.”

  “You’re still Agent Heath in public.” She sat back, dinner no longer appealing. “I’m not surprised you were a runner.”

  “Good sport for poor kids. You only need shoes. No equipment, no court, no animal.”

  “Animal?” She envisioned hawking, dog training, or snake charming. Something of his look whispered of the Far East. Maybe the long straight nose, the dark chocolate of his hair, or the ink of his eyes.

  “Are you going to eat that?” He distracted her from her odd thoughts with his request.

  She pushed the plate his way, wondering how much he ran and trying not to calculate the calories.

  His smile was amused. “I was talking about horses. Tell me you didn’t have horses growing up.”

  “I did.” She had a USDF medal, a wall full of fluffy colored ribbons and more than one shiny gold sculpture from winning her level.

  He nodded like he understood. He couldn’t.

  Little girls loved ponies. So her parents bought Eleri and her sister ponies. Then, later, she couldn’t quit.

  “English?”

  “Of course.” Out here, they rode western. They’d passed a man on a horse—just out on the side of the street—as they headed toward the hospital. It had been all she could do not to tell him to sit up straighter, use both hands on the reins, and for God’s sake, get his horse’s feet off the pavement! She’d held her tongue. Clearly, the animal was not being tortured. That was just her. “I swam in college.”

  “Still requires a pool. Pools are expensive.”

  “Your college didn’t let you into the pool? Did they charge a fee?”

  Her plate came back to her, clean as his was. He’d better run far.