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

by A. J. Scudiere

  Nodding sagely, Cassa showed another set of photos. Fists, held out side by side, large fingered with faded tattoos stretching across knuckles that were arthritic but intact. “Driver’s hands. Girl and driver both say she had the injuries before she got in the car. She had a bad headache, and we had a doctor check her for head wounds but found none. The trucker waited around to be sure she was okay and we photoed him as evidence. He agreed readily, knowing that a photo now saves him trouble in the future. Both said he’s the one what talked her into coming to an officer.”

  Donovan nudged her, but she ignored it. If they started doing hand signals or that head-tilting-thing to signal each other, it would only look bad. When he nudged her a second time she nudged back to stop him, keeping her attention on Detective Brinks. “So you brought her in, turned the driver loose?”

  “Yes, we had all his information and no grounds to hold him. He had a delivery, had really gone out of his way already for the girl.”

  “Of course.” Eleri nodded in agreement. She wanted to come across as sincere and she hoped that was easier because she was. Despite the accent and the occasional word misuse, Cassa Brinks was sharp, though Eleri guessed the officer was often underestimated. “What else have you learned from your interview?”

  Brinks also seemed to know that she was playing with the FBI, and she wasn’t going to be able to leverage her knowledge against theirs; there was no quid pro quo expectation here. At least she didn’t seem to mind. “Only that she calls herself Charity—says she has no last name, none of them does—and that she wants to see her brother Jonah from the City of God.”

  Giving one of those exasperated blinks, Cassa missed the shock on Eleri and Donovan’s faces as she rubbed her eyes and continued. “She’s been here five hours now, won’t say anything. Someone beat her up pretty bad. She’s clearly a kid though she doesn’t know her exact age—says they don’t celebrate birthdays.” A head shake punctuated the next line. “We don’t have a lot of folks from those religions in this part of the state. You know, the God-doesn’t-like-birthdays kind. We’re really more of the God-loves-a-good-party-and-a-good-beer kind of people. . . . But we can’t help this girl if she won’t help herself. Keeps asking for Jonah.”

  Eleri and Donovan didn’t speak. Donovan hadn’t spoken the whole time and she didn’t know if he was listening, sniffing the people and hallways, or just tired and checked out. She, at least, was trying to get Cassa to continue.

  The detective shrugged again, pulling her shirt tight with the motion. “I asked her everything I could think of. If she knew that woman, Ruth, the one that come in about two months ago? Charity didn’t answer, but she stiffened real bad, so she knows something she’s not telling me. I asked her if Jonah was that kid over in Hamilton, got beat up real bad and saw wolves and she seemed really excited—”

  “How did you know about the kid in Hamilton?” Donovan suddenly joined in, leaning forward, pushing, coming on stronger than Eleri would have liked. While she thought she already knew the answer, she waited, wanting to hear it from Cassa.

  A sweet, pitying smile crossed the almost too red lips. “Where are you from, sweetheart?”

  Eleri grinned. She didn’t think anyone had called Donovan “sweetheart,” maybe ever.

  “Just outside Columbia, South Carolina. Why?” He seemed taken aback that his home place mattered.

  “Where’d you grow up then?”

  “All over.” He was still frowning, though Cassa was now nodding and clearly understanding his lack of comprehension.

  “Well, honey, there are no real secrets in a small town.” She splayed her pink-painted nails on the table in front of her and leaned forward. “We don’t have to find out what happened—everybody already knows—we just have to prove it. We’re all related, too. My sister’s in Hamilton, works as a nurse there. My brother’s a cop in Dallas—left us for the big city, but I’m detective here and he’s still on patrol. Seriously, the best kept secret in the state is that I’m not as dumb as I look.”

  Donovan nodded slowly and Eleri put together what she’d known but not acted on: there were no hiding places. Bringing in the FBI made people speculate. Bringing in the locals meant soon everyone knew.

  He asked what Eleri wanted to. “So why doesn’t anyone know about the City of God?”

  Cassa sat back, sighing, shaking her head at that one. “None of them are local from what I can tell. They don’t venture out, don’t call their mamas, and don’t celebrate birthdays.”

  “Apparently, they also beat their kids.” Donovan was clearly disgusted, not with the detective, but the situation. Eleri hoped Cassa could distinguish that herself. Her next statement made it seem like she could.

  “Is that what happened to Jonah, too?”

  Eleri bumped his knee with hers under the table. Senior officer, she would be called to the mat for leaks in information. She leaned forward, too. “Seriously, Cassa, how well can you keep this information under wraps? I mean, if we give you something to follow, can you dig without letting other people know what you know?”

  The bright smile burst into guffaws of laughter. “I planned my Daddy’s fiftieth birthday party, brought in people from five states, and he didn’t know dick about it. Oh, and he’s the mayor of Temple, two towns over. My sister’s husband came to me to find out what engagement ring she wanted. I didn’t know, but I got it out of her and she still had no clue a proposal was coming. And my chief is the only one who’s seen my test scores. If you need more than that, well, I can’t give it. But I understand that helping these kids takes priority over bonding with my sisters.” She sat back, apparently resting her case.

  “Yes. That’s what happened to Jonah. Only Jonah was worse: broken arm, cut on his leg down to the shin bone.” Reaching into her bag, she made a decision to tell more, and she made it based on her gut instinct about the woman. As she grabbed one of the photos that had slipped to the bottom, she saw that Donovan had leaned her way a little, bringing his hand near and giving her a surreptitious thumbs-up, though she didn’t know why. Popping back up, Eleri held her arsenal in her hands. Cassa was trustworthy. Eleri knew it, even if she didn’t know how she knew. “Jonah told us about Charity, as well as other adults and children there. He’s an amazing artist—we didn’t need to bring in a professional.” Eleri smiled. “The kid has a career ahead of him. This is his drawing of Charity.”

  Sliding it across the table, she watched the detective’s eyes light up.

  “Oh, wow. He is good. She’s beautiful.”

  Eleri was beginning to wonder if that wasn’t part of the problem. Maybe Baxter liked pretty kids. Some were born there, some were brought in, but she scrubbed the thought from her brain and stayed focused. “This is Jonah’s drawing of the man who leads the place.” She pushed that one over. “We believe this is Joseph Hayden Baxter. He was raised outside Nolan in a small cult called Zion’s Gate. We met with them and they seem open and friendly.”

  “A good cult?” Cassa’s eyebrows disappeared under all that red hair.

  With a sigh, Eleri gave the best answer she could. “The best we can tell, yes. They gave us a full tour, cleanly answered our questions. There’s no sign of abuse, they educate all their kids. And we’ve tracked down a few people who left and they tell much the same stories. But Baxter’s parents told us two people died and one went missing while Joseph lived there. He left when he was sixteen.”

  That bit of bad news made Cassa jerk back. “Straight up sociopath?”

  “Looks that way. Until the third incident, they didn’t have a clue. But with the third, and his subsequent disappearance, they started putting some of the coincidences together.”

  Eleri made another decision. She pushed her print copies of Jonah’s art across the table, the whole stack. “You can keep these, but don’t share. Not with anyone—I’m trusting you to keep it to yourself. Anything you can find will help.”

  There was a moment of silence as Cassa tapped her finger on the t
op drawing, a pretty landscape of the hidden houses, but she didn’t look under it at the other sketches.

  Eleri had done what she could here, so she pushed the chair back. “We’d like to take Charity with us.”

  It was couched as a request, but they all knew it was a statement made with the full authority of the FBI behind it. “We’ll take her to see Jonah. But we’ll have to question her more first, before they see each other. If you’d like to come along, if you think you can help, we’d like that.”

  “I don’t know what my chief will say about that.” Cassa shook her head and Eleri understood. There was old blood—both good and bad—between local precincts and national divisions.

  “I can make it an order if that helps?”

  Cassa shrugged. “Let’s see what Charity says. Lord knows I haven’t slept in a full day. So if she’s willing to go without me, I’m happy to end this damn shift.”

  Eleri understood that one far too well, so she just smiled and nodded.

  They rearranged, packed up papers. Brinks put her copies of the sketches into a file folder so she could walk them down the hall without flashing them. Charity’s file was duplicated, and Brinks explained what would be happening, but the girl stood and went to Eleri and Donovan of her own will. She opened the door and stared them in the eyes. “You’ll take me to see Jonah?”

  “Yes.” Then Eleri went with honesty, knowing how it would ultimately help. “But first you’ll have to tell us everything that happened. If you don’t, we can’t take you to Jonah.”

  “Is that blackmail?” The girl stepped back.

  “No.” The voice startled both the females. Donovan had stepped in and Eleri figured he had a reason, so she let him go on. “We need to have a statement from each of you. If you both tell the same story, it helps us show that you are innocent and that the bad guys are bad. It helps the evidence if you two don’t have a chance to get together and make up a story first.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.” She didn’t seem offended or anything, just stated it as fact. Though looking in her eyes, Eleri was more convinced than ever that she was looking at Ashlyn Dakota Fisk. She wondered why the girl didn’t tell anyone about that name; surely she remembered it.

  While Eleri tried not to stare, Donovan stayed on point. “I believe you, but the protocol is this way so we can prove it. After your story—which will probably take several hours, because you know a lot more than you may even think you do—we’ll take you to see Jonah. I promise.”

  Oh, “promise” was a bad word, Donovan. Eleri smiled to cover the sigh that wanted to escape, but all those concerns were diverted when Charity said “Okay!” and grabbed the stuffed animal and the blanket and headed out the door.

  Nearly two hours later, they were on the road, Charity in the back seat, answering questions on record, when Eleri’s phone rang. Holding up a finger and turning off the recorder, Eleri took the call. It was Brinks.

  “This Ruth woman. I know her.”

  16

  Donovan drove the three-and-a-half hour trip to Dallas mostly staying quiet. He listened to Eleri talking with Charity in the backseat. The recorder on, his partner asked her questions, figuring the car was as good a place as any.

  This way they could finish the interview and get her reconnected with her friend as soon as they arrived. Agent Bozeman had been alerted of the development but instructed not to tell Jonah of Charity’s arrival. Eleri and he agreed the best thing was to see how the kid reacted to the new addition. They both expected it to be a welcome arrival, but how this meeting went would tell a lot about the two.

  Charity handled the interview well, answering questions clearly and without Jonah’s innate outrage. She was quieter, more accepting of her fate.

  He heard Eleri asking if the girl had ever had another name and noted the pause that followed. He was confident the prints would match Ashlyn’s and he wondered how it would feel to tell the Fisks their daughter had been found after five years. And how it would feel to tell Westerfield they still had nothing about Jennifer Cohn.

  The phone call from Cassa Brinks had changed things.

  Unfortunately, the detective didn’t remember exactly where she’d seen the woman, but she knew her as a friend, years ago. The woman who now called herself Ruth had been much younger, giving Cassa difficulty placing the memory. But she assured them she hadn’t ever lived out of the area, even for college, so Ruth had been close. She would, of course, tell more when she remembered it. Donovan thought it would likely pop into her head about three a.m. when he was good and asleep.

  Eleri went back to interviewing Charity, who thought for a while, then said yes, she’d once been called “Ashlyn” but had been told if she ever uttered the name again, she would die. Then she turned to chatting cheerfully again, painting a story of a happy community, growing vegetables, getting raised in a group of kids, going to school, working hard, building, weeding, worshiping.

  But lately—she couldn’t really tell the time, a year? Maybe two?—Joseph had been getting meaner. The punishments for infractions had gotten harsher, the justice swifter. Then Jonah had started gathering the children.

  Donovan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Baxter ran the cult and Jonah was starting a cult within the cult. From Ashlyn’s telling, the kids were all turning to Jonah for leadership.

  She said Jonah believed in a kinder God. He cited the Bible as being more full of love than hate, that God would not punish them for being too good to each other, but he would punish them for judging, for meting out judgments that were God’s and God’s alone to give.

  Donovan had never had a bible, a church, a group. He saw the value in the community and the support, but didn’t understand the rest of it. He was a man of science and strangeness but couldn’t maintain a grasp on the idea that one could blindly follow something intended to lead people in primitive cultures and assume that it applied today. To his way of thinking that was like reverting to a Mesozoic-era cookbook, eating found plants, only cooking over open fire, and drinking unfiltered water. Then again, he’d been hearing of people doing exactly that. He was equally baffled by both.

  His own longing for a community was the only thing he could pinpoint, that maybe the group was so wonderful it was worth following any law to be accepted. As a man who’d never been accepted by any real group, he tried not to judge. He had no meter for it.

  It was clear Charity loved Jonah and worshipped at his feet before Baxter’s.

  Was that part of what had led to Jonah’s more severe beating? That the kids were following him rather than Baxter? What little psychology Donovan had studied didn’t give him any insight.

  Eleri would know more, reams more, but he couldn’t ask with the girl in the car.

  Charity told how she was held in the basement after Jonah escaped. Baxter became convinced she helped Jonah—and she had, but she now readily admitted to lying to her leader about it.

  She also knew she was held in the open because Baxter believed that a variety of aids had been snuck to Ruth during her incarceration, and he believed that keeping Charity where all could see her would reduce that. According to Charity, it really hadn’t. The women brought her extra food. The kids came and asked her about Jonah. Any time she wasn’t where Baxter or one of his men would see and report it, someone was helping her out: feeding her, walking her to the restroom, playing games. Then Sarah, one of the women, told her Baxter wanted to make an example of her, and in the next hour, the man had come in and beaten Charity for her insubordination. She was released from her punishment and the others were told not to help her in any way, just let her hurt. So the girl had limped to her own room, as the others stared.

  Donovan’s heart twisted with the thought of this poor child, now going on fourteen, on this ultimate walk of shame. Broken, bloody and bearing the weight of the grief of her community. He braced himself for the story to get worse.

  Instead, she said the women packed her a bag, gave her food, extra socks, the ja
cket, money and told her what to ask for when she found someone to help. They said one of the men knew Jonah was first in Brownwood and had later been moved by the FBI. The women picked Austin for Charity, thinking the men would expect her to go to Jonah first, which meant Dallas or San Antonio, where the nearest FBI offices were located.

  Donovan cringed at being predictable, but Charity had played it smart. Got herself into a police department that was far enough away to protect her and was capable of getting her to Jonah without leading Baxter and his men to the boy. Someone inside the cult, an adult or group of them, was playing a dangerous game and Donovan wondered when they would push the next kid to the border and what it would take to trigger that. He wondered if the next kid would make it.

  Eleri managed to achieve quite a bit on the trip. She convinced Charity to eat something and got them to stop for a late lunch-slash-early dinner. Donovan was soon convinced the girl had a hollow leg.

  Unfailingly polite, she still scarfed down the meal, offered to pay for her own ticket, and said, “I haven’t had a burger like this, ever. Thank you.”

  Only his partner had any scraps of food left on her plate by the time they paid the check. Then they loaded back into the small car and were set with a recording and notes of everything but the initial abduction or confirmation of Ashlyn Fisk’s identity by the time they pulled up to the safe house where Jonah was being kept.

  Agent Bozeman was on duty, probably on purpose and he opened the front door before Donovan even put the car into park. Recognizing them on sight now, he didn’t make them flash badges. Still, while they got a more formal greeting, Charity got a winning smile and a sweet introduction.