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

by A. J. Scudiere

  This led her right into the question she most dreaded. If foster care was Jonah’s future direction, then he might clam up, but she didn’t know a way around it. So she asked, “Do you have family outside of the City?”

  “City people are the only people I know. I’ve seen and read stories about people who have a single mom and live in a family that’s just the mom and the dad and the kids, but I don’t know which woman gave birth to me, or which man sired me. No one ever says. We’re all one family.” He looked out the window, as though the trees wouldn’t judge. Neither did Eleri. She’d seen and heard some weird shit in her time, but she never held it against a child. “Once I got older, I figured a lot of it out. I mean, Ruth was pregnant, then she wasn’t, then baby Rachel was around. You know, two and two makes four.” He shrugged with one shoulder as though it was just a “thing” and her heart nearly broke for him.

  She didn’t want to mention the government, foster care, any of it. So she shifted the topic. “I’d like to ask you a favor. Could you work with one of our artists? Describe what these people look like? Name them?” It was manipulative, but the wounds still on his body and his lip, swollen more since they’d found him last night, only served to instill that they needed everything he could give them. “There are other children in there. We need to keep them safe.”

  Jonah nodded at her, his expression grave.

  Whatever had happened, his switch had been flipped. He’d been a teen on his way to becoming a full-fledged loyal member of the City of God, and now he was ready to take them down.

  His smile came out of nowhere, and Eleri was concerned that he’d cracked mentally, but his words stunned her.

  “I don’t need an artist. I can draw it. I’m right-handed, so it’s okay.” He flexed the fingers on his good hand, showing that—despite the bloody knuckles where he’d fought back—he could still function. “I won’t go back. But I can draw you everything.”

  13

  Eleri was exhausted. In yet another room that would have looked much like the first except it was clearly set in a smaller town, she felt that bone-deep knowledge that she was “on the road.”

  It was a traveler’s conundrum—the ability to see the country, but probably not enjoy much of it. When people asked her if she’d been to a place, she often answered, “Not really.”

  “I was on assignment” was a phrase that all kinds of travelers understood. And Eleri understood it now on a cellular level she had managed to forget.

  Here, they sprung for the “suite” type rooms. A king bed—a godsend to restless FBI agents—and a desk/sitting area. She’d already taken over the desk; it would have looked like she made herself right at home, except that no Eames ever chose peeled birch furniture. A flat slab of an old tree trunk was planed and polyurethaned within an inch of its life. Four legs from saplings made it a desk. The chair matched and would have been comfortable if she didn’t have to look at it.

  So many travelers complained that all the hotel rooms looked the same. Not true. This one would not let her forget that she was in Texas.

  No mini fridge here. No gourmet coffee shop down the street. It would be even harder to pass unnoticed in this even smaller town. For a moment, Eleri contemplated moving Jonah to Dallas. More people meant more anonymity. It would have to happen, but not today. But it wouldn’t be long before all of Hamilton knew the FBI was in their midst.

  Jonah had been given a drawing tablet and a series of art pencils. Donovan had gone two counties over to find them. Currently, the kid was sketching away, page after page of the City of God. Donovan had checked in and sent pictures of two of the first sketches. They had asked for a likeness of Baxter first, to use as a reference regarding Jonah’s skill.

  They shouldn’t have just told Jonah okay. What if he’d drawn stick figures? Or even art that was very good, maybe even the best in his whole community, and they couldn’t be used to ID anyone? She blamed the lack of sleep for her poor decision making.

  But they’d gotten damn lucky. Donovan had checked in on the kid after they posted a police officer on the ward—plainclothes, in case someone showed up—and they went back to their own rooms. But so far no one had come for him. Each time he visited, Donovan sent her pictures of Jonah’s sketches.

  The kid was incredibly talented. Which was good for him. He’d need a way to earn a living out in the world.

  His sketch of Baxter was spot-on when compared to the few old photos they had of the man. They asked for Ruth next. Jonah had quietly and reverently drawn the woman in three-quarter profile. Intense in her expression, kind in her eyes. The nurse at Brownwood had already used the drawing to match the woman they had treated earlier that month as “Ruth.”

  Eleri’s heart broke for the kid.

  According to Jonah, Ruth was dead.

  That was what had made him snap. The men in charge of the City had gotten so mad about Ruth seeking treatment that they incarcerated her upon her return. For three weeks she’d waited, punished before convicted, held in a closet with rare restroom breaks, no light, and little food.

  Jonah had started full conversion away from Baxter’s teachings then. Clearly forming a sharp logical streak of his own, he’d begun to question the interpretation of the Bible that the man ran his colony by.

  In a farce of a trial, Ruth had been publicly convicted, placed in front of a wall and stoned by the citizens of the City of God. There had been no room for appeal.

  She had walked miles, ill, seeking treatment, had been returned, cured, and killed for her efforts.

  Jonah wanted no part of it. Eleri wanted no part of it either. But it was her job to stop it. They had to find proof. They couldn’t go in on the story of a minor—a minor who had clear memories of a wolf bringing him pointy sticks and fighting off a puma for him.

  When Jonah protested the stoning of his friend, Baxter turned on him. Wrapped his body around the smaller teen’s and picked up rocks, putting them in Jonah’s hand, making the boy hurl them at a woman who raised him.

  He cried openly when he told them that some of the others turned on him, beating him, breaking his arm, bloodying his lip. It was their sick zeal for Ruth’s last moments that distracted his tormentors enough for him to get into the woods.

  Donovan had shaken his head. He should have seen or heard some of this as he approached the area, he said. But he had nothing.

  Jonah then told them the main building had a basement. And Donovan agreed that worked, in theory.

  There was no evidence of a basement, but none against it. They had no body. He didn’t detect any of this while he was there, but clearly the City of God was literally trying to stay off the radar. Publicly stoning one of its citizens under the big Texas sky would have gotten the attention of some satellite or other.

  Having recorded two hours of Jonah’s story, they had to take a different attack. Jonah was drawing faces, places, everything he could produce before he was given the go-ahead for stronger pain medicines. What they needed was hard evidence, something to back up the kid’s story.

  It was broad daylight and it was time to get out the drone.

  She and Donovan rode out in the opposite direction, away from the camp, put the drone parts together, and did a test run. Always a test run. She sent Donovan out in the heat and followed him with the drone. Had him duck under trees, tried to find him. When he took the controls, he danced the machine around the car, seeing how well he could control it, how close he could get. They both agreed that coming drone-to-face with a City of God citizen was not a good idea. While the thing was relatively quiet, coming out in the open or being obvious would blow they whole thing wide open. They couldn’t afford that.

  So there would be short, furtive runs. Their goal was to gather data quickly and get out without getting seen.

  Their plans and good intentions didn’t change the fact that they stood in a field by the side of the road. The temperature had climbed into the upper seventies, which wouldn’t be too bad, except that t
he humidity had no respect for life. They had a drone, they had a witness, they had secondhand information. But they had no evidence.

  Standing in the heat in her lightweight jeans, she wished they made lighter-weight jeans and shaded her eyes with her hand even though her sunglasses had already turned as dark as they could. And she looked up at Donovan.

  “Are you ready?”

  DONOVAN PUT his head in his hands. Eleri had called time of death on the drone mission.

  They had done their job.

  They now had aerial footage of the City of God—or at least of a cluster of camouflaged houses in the location that Jonah and Donovan had pointed them to.

  There were a few relatively clear, telephoto shots of faces that matched the drawings Jonah had produced.

  And they had managed to not get caught. That was maybe the most important thing.

  So they had a group of people in the middle of Texas with no incorporation papers. The land was registered to a Marcus Aebly, but there was no current record of him. He hadn’t paid taxes in years, other than the land taxes. He might live in the City of God, or he might not live at all.

  They knew Jonah had been in the group, that he ran—bleeding—away from the homestead on Thursday night prior. They had a few matches on faces. But no hard evidence to support any broken laws.

  It was frustrating.

  Before they gave themselves away, they left.

  Eleri had dunked yet another steak fry into ketchup and looked him square in the eye. “It’s only a matter of time. We stand out. We’re newcomers and not even related to anyone around here. We have frequent trips to the hospital, and you know that second officer won’t keep his mouth shut. We have to leave before we tip our hand.”

  He thought the steady diet of steak fries might be tipping her decision, but he didn’t disagree with it. He was a steak and potatoes man, but fried, fried and fried didn’t make anyone run well.

  Jonah had amicably moved to Dallas. His easy agreement might have been morphine induced, but Donovan didn’t look at that too closely. Another agent from the Dallas office was getting involved with Jonah. Agent Bozeman was a nice sort, but again, Donovan couldn’t tell much.

  Robert Bozeman had made the transition easy for Jonah, coming to Hamilton and escorting him out. He’d even done it wearing khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. Donovan didn’t trust people in Hawaiian prints—he never had and didn’t know why. But Eleri liked the guy. Said she’d worked with him before and he was good people. Donovan tabled his feelings and let it go.

  He was glad to pack up and get out of the deer-head-heavy Inn at Circle T. He didn’t like woodland creatures watching him from dead eyes. And he’d rather suffer a generic print of a forest or a lake than a metal cut-out of a praying cowboy, complete with horse, hanging over his bed.

  They went home.

  Eleri to hers—which he still didn’t know where it was. And he to South Carolina.

  Though it was five p.m. when the car delivered him to his doorstep, he dragged his luggage inside, showered in his own shower, fell into his own bed, and slept like the dead for twelve straight hours. Then he’d eaten enough eggs to empty a henhouse and walked right out his back door, through the wooden gate and onto national park ground.

  And he ran.

  Hikers passed him, though he tended to stay away. A bear lumbered across his path once, but they’d stared at each other and went their separate ways. He didn’t know how many miles he covered, but he loved every minute. This was his humidity. The smell of loam was his dirt, his area. The cypress knobs he leapt over were ones he recognized. And his heart settled squarely into his chest.

  At thirty-four he was just now learning what he was made of, what he wanted, and what he needed. And he’d needed this.

  Reaching out was something he started, but he needed to pull back, too. As much as his father had been wrong, Aidan Heath had been right, too. People like them, they had to keep their secrets.

  Eleri had called the next morning and they spent the day working back and forth. Donovan dug into Baxter’s background more. Eleri worked with the drawings Jonah had done and tried to create matches to missing persons.

  She reported back that his drawing of “Charity” certainly could be a ten-year age progression of Ashlyn Dakota Fisk. But it couldn’t be definite. Growing changed faces, sometimes dramatically.

  Two hours later, Eleri came over the computer system again, this time sending him files as she talked. “What do you think here?”

  She sent five files in rapid succession, making him turn off the stupid notification blurp that his computer made. Then she sent a drawing that was clearly Jonah’s.

  Donovan blinked. The kid had real skills. He was well educated. He wore jeans and a cotton T-shirt. And he grew up in a community that stoned a woman to death for seeking medical treatment. Donovan could not wrap his brain around the incongruity.

  After the amazing portrait of Ruth featured her in partial profile, they’d instructed the kid to draw the faces straight on, thus making it easier for him to compare these pictures to the “missing” photos. “Maria Parker. I think we follow this up with the agency that investigated her initial disappearance.”

  That was his vote.

  He could hear Eleri breathe in. “Me too. The age matches. I called and asked Jonah about her arm, and he confirmed she has a mark where her parents noted a burn scar. He wasn’t confident that it was a burn, but he also said he didn’t know what one looked like. Bozeman is showing him burn marks as we speak.”

  Donovan cringed. Lucky Jonah. He escaped. But now he was the key to unlocking the City of God and—willing or not—he was going to suffer for it. No kid should have to look at burn marks to identify a missing girl. It wasn’t in the job description of being a kid.

  It put Donovan’s own lonely childhood into perspective. At least he hadn’t been kidnapped. At least he hadn’t been raised by a cult. At least he hadn’t been beaten. Just told not to have any real friends. Just uprooted every time he started to settle in.

  Throughout the day, Eleri made preliminary matches on two other missing kids, a girl and a boy, patching the photos through to him for back-up decision making. He worked just as hard though he couldn’t say he accomplished as much, but he did find some signs of Baxter after he left Zion’s Gate. JHB had been arrested in Pecos County by the Fort Stockton Military Police, but it was a sealed juvenile record. Donovan was having fun chasing that down. Apparently there were better and worse ways for an agent to get information out of other government organizations. Whatever he was doing was not the better way.

  Luckily for him, his “boss” said they needed at least one normal work day in this whole mess and said she was signing off at five p.m. sharp and he was welcome to as well.

  Not needing to be told twice, he cooked up a pot of rice and hamburger, and watched some mindless TV before heading to bed. It was nearly three a.m. when he woke up. The moon was high and only somewhat thicker than it had been when he was out in Texas.

  It was easier to open the gate first and simply run through. His own yard was safer. A naked man was not thought of well in the woods. It nearly hurt his sinuses to pass through the gate at first, but he’d gotten used to it. Three tries it had taken him to figure out how to leave the gate open but protected. Three tries and a family of raccoons and then a bear in his yard and too close to his home. But he didn’t want to have to shut the gate.

  The lion urine had been a stroke of genius he thought. Obtaining it had been harder, but the Internet being what it was, things could be had. In the end, he’d only had to go as far as his local zoo once a year. He told them the truth: that his yard bordered the national forest and bears liked to wander in. They gave him a mason jar of the stuff for free. He didn’t ask how they got it.

  The first time he put it at the posts for the gate. That had made his eyes water. He’d learned to put it at the outer corners of his property. On the park side. Putting it out there still killed
him; he was nearly blinded when he opened the jar, but there was no way around that. At least the gate was now much safer and could be left open.

  He passed through, steered clear of the reeking corner, and headed southeast. The trees above filtered the moonlight, almost as though the beams were the source of the constant high-frequency static and not the crickets and frogs. Deep croaks and the occasional plop of a fish followed the very slow moving river on his left. Donovan tracked it, staying just far enough off shore to not get muddy and to give the mink chances to scurry away from him.

  The air here was clean, though he could guess that the Texans thought the same of theirs. He wasn’t much for traveling, but his new job would require that. He’d adapt. He always had in the past. Only now he had a home base. He had a safe—well relatively safe—place to run. And though he hadn’t yet solved his first case, he had a sense of satisfaction he hadn’t felt since the early days of medical school.

  He was making a loop but was still far away when the sun came up.

  Time to head back and log onto the computer again, get back to finding out what was in Baxter’s sealed juvenile records. He aimed straight for home and picked up speed.

  He was maybe ten feet from his back gate, forty feet from finishing his run, when he heard it.

  The side gate at his house unlatched. The large wooden door swung open. He hadn’t oiled it. He knew that squeak. That meant someone had come into his backyard.

  All the maintenance—the meter readings, everything he didn’t specifically request—was in the front. On purpose. He trotted through the back gate thinking who would come in here?

  He knew before he saw.

  There she stood, looking right at him. Eleri Eames was planted in his backyard staring like she had no clue what she was seeing.

  She didn’t.

  14

  Donovan stared back at Eleri, knowing she didn’t recognize him—thankful she didn’t recognize him. His mouth was open, his breathing heavy, as he’d run most of the way back.