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

by A. J. Scudiere

  “Last time, I took her to Brownwood and she was real sick. She needed medical help, but though she was barely upright, she insisted on walking into the ER herself.” He looked up at them expectantly. “How is she doing? I checked later and heard they released her.”

  Oh, shit. Eleri nodded at Donovan and he took a breath in. “She did improve, she headed home.”

  “That’s great.”

  But Eleri had nodded at him. It was a go-ahead; probably she wanted to see how Bernard would react, too. So Donovan gave him the dirt. “We have word that she died after returning to her home.”

  “What?” He blinked. It looked like this was news to him. Or else he was a stellar actor.

  Donovan went for the next jab. “We don’t have evidence, but we do have two corroborating stories that she was beaten to death by people in her group.”

  He’d kept his language purposefully vague, avoiding words like “stoned to death” “cult” and “murder” so he could see if Collier himself added them to the conversation.

  Collier added nothing; he simply broke down and cried. “She was such a nice lady. So friendly. Very religious but not pushy.” His shoulders heaved and he buried his face in his hands but didn’t try to hide the fact that he was openly crying over a woman he’d met only a handful of times.

  A few looks passed over Bernard’s back between Donovan and Eleri, so Donovan felt safe with his next question. “Is it Ruth that you buried in the field?”

  That at least stopped the crying. Face tear-streaked, the old man looked up, confused. “No. Ruth was a grown woman and I didn’t know she was dead. The girl I buried was a girl. And she died while she was with me. I didn’t know what to do.” He looked away, shook his head, exhibited classic truth-telling tics.

  Eleri nearly interrupted Collier, though he was looking out the window at the clouds rushing by and didn’t seem to notice or at least he wasn’t offended. “Tell us about the girl you buried.”

  He thumbed through the pictures again, pulling out another girl, late teens. Jonah had ID’d her—on the back of the picture—as “Faith.” Collier tapped the nose in the picture. “This girl. She’s the one I buried. Said her name was Faith.”

  The older man’s sadness played into the interview. The reaction of the person being interrogated changed how the agent proceeded. If the agent was any good at all, it was by conscious decision and not reaction. Eleri appeared to be very good. Her voice was softer now, soothing, probably in an effort to make Collier more at home, get him to give more details. Maybe let a secret slide out because he didn’t know or wasn’t paying attention. Donovan was paying attention though, taking mental notes at Eleri’s kind tones and wondering if this girl had been Jennifer Cohn or if they were barking up the wrong cult.

  “When was the first time you met Faith?”

  “About a year or so ago. Same thing.” He shrugged. “There were two others, too.”

  “What?” Donovan had reacted. Bad choice. He glanced quickly at Eleri and saw that she didn’t fault him for it.

  “Ruth I carried most. I think she told the others.” He looked away again but kept speaking in that gravelly voice underlined by a faint wheeze. Donovan could smell a medication on him, menthol from his skin, but also the sharp undertone of albuterol for asthma or emphysema probably. He didn’t carry even a faint tinge of cigarette smoke, but he might have given it up years ago or simply spent too long too close to the engines of the big trucks. Collier looked back at Donovan. “My truck is very recognizable. I don’t think I am, but the cab is. One girl found me in Zephyr and flagged me down. Said Ruth told her my route and my truck and that I’d carry her home. So I did.”

  Placing her hand over his, Eleri pulled his attention back toward her. If Collier had any idea Agent Eames was directing the conversation as she was, he didn’t show it. “Is her picture here?”

  In the end he pointed out three women and an unidentified male he’d given rides to. Someone not in the pile of drawings. He’d carried two of the girls, alone, in or out of the area. Neither had given him names. Collier stated that he hadn’t pushed them to.

  Eleri then steered him to a description of the boy—obviously wondering why Jonah didn’t have the drawing in the pile. They had asked him to first draw portraits of every person in the camp. It had taken a while, but Jonah had produced. There were forty-two faces. But none of the boy Collier described.

  While his partner asked more pointed questions about the boy, Donovan rummaged through her bag. Behind Collier, he held up the photo of Jonah to show her. Understanding dawned in her eyes and she asked the man, “This photo my partner is holding, is that the boy?”

  Turning took longer than recognition. “Yes, that’s him. Is he okay?”

  “He is.” Eleri smiled.

  Jonah had not drawn himself in the batch.

  Collier said he had suspected something like an Amish community, deeply religious, overly protective of their children. He wondered if what he was doing was right, but felt—hoped—that it was. When Faith died on him, he realized he had no alibi. He didn’t know where to find her kin or how to keep from going to jail for a crime he didn’t commit, so he buried her.

  So while Eleri called the Dallas office to check in and create a backup system, Donovan called Bozeman and told him of the new development. He apologized about the Fisks and emailed the questions the two of them had come up with last night. “It looks like you’re on your own.”

  “Nah,” Bozeman sounded as laid back as ever, a trait Donovan was beginning to get jealous of. “I’ll call another agent in from the center. I won’t go solo with distraught parents. How in hell did you find this guy?”

  He almost stumbled but in the end got his voice together. “Lucky break, I’ll have Eames tell you about it later.” Yeah, right after I have Eames tell me.

  After borrowing an officer from the Brownwood PD, then making her wait in the car with a book, they traipsed out here at Collier’s arthritic pace. Donovan wanted to run ahead; he could easily find the body. Knowing he couldn’t say anything in front of the trucker, he instead held back. Catching Eleri’s eye, he made a phone motion to her.

  She shrugged in return, like “call who?”

  He mouthed, “The team.” Then he pointed toward where Collier was heading and pointed toward his nose.

  Yeah, she got it now. But then she didn’t. Using her actual voice, she called ahead. “Are you still headed the right way, Mr. Collier?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He kept high stepping as best he could, rolling forward through the tall grass.

  Then Eleri held back a little, allowing them to at least whisper with a modicum of privacy. As long as Collier’s hearing wasn’t as good as Donovan’s they would be okay. “What do you smell?”

  “A rotting body.” He wasn’t sure how much more specific he could be.

  Eleri was. “Can you be sure it’s human?”

  Ah, yes, a rotting cow carcass would not be worth dragging the FBI’s site team out. “Yes. I know the smell of dead human flesh, and it’s about sixty more feet in front of him.”

  She swept her hand by him, palm up, indicating that he should go with Collier. Turning, he saw she was moving farther away, pulling out her phone. He caught the first strains of the conversation as she called in the team, telling them approximate coordinates from where she stood and saying she would give them an exact location as soon as she had it.

  He was surprised by the pride that swelled slightly in his chest. Though there was no visual on the body yet—nothing but an old man and Donovan’s word—Eleri had just mobilized a full site team.

  His moment of positivity was cut short by the wheeze of Collier’s voice calling back over his shoulder. “It’s right up here. I brought her flowers just a few days ago.”

  Bluebonnets.

  He’d brought her bluebonnets. They were starting to rot, too. Donovan knew it moments before he saw what was now just a smear of purple in the near distance.

 
Collier pointed, his finger misshapen under the faded tattoos and his arm shaking slightly. “It’s right there.”

  At his side in a moment, Donovan grabbed the man’s shoulders, keeping him upright and his lungs as open as possible. Too damn many live patients these days. He was going to have a dead one if he didn’t act fast.

  Collier began coughing, or trying to.

  “Sir, do you have your inhaler with you?” Bernard Collier, leather-tough truck driver, turned cherry red and nodded, reaching toward his back jeans pocket but not making it. Donovan pried the small apparatus loose and put it to the man’s mouth. Quick bursts of the medicine escaped around his lips. It always did. Albuterol had a bite to it, a scent that bordered on taste, and that would cling to the back of Donovan’s throat until he drank something strong.

  He gave the man a second dose but couldn’t let him sit. Settling him into the very grass that was shrinking his bronchi could kill him. Instead, he held the man upright, Collier’s weight not insignificant, and yelled for Eleri. In half a moment, she had hung up on the team, called the backup officer, and arranged an ambulance.

  Eleri’s expression as she handed Collier over to the arriving backup officer was dark as night. “Fucking everyone will know about this now.”

  Donovan agreed but was almost more shocked by the use of the f-word.

  Eleri walked a tight circle in the grass, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” as the other two walked farther away. Nearly a full minute later, her head popped up, her eyes clear of the angry rage that had shown there a minute before, making them appear nearly black in the midday heat. “Okay, I have that out of my system. Now that we know Collier will be okay, let’s get to this shit before the others do.”

  She started off in the wrong direction, but Donovan corrected her quickly, pointing out the bluebonnets, ripped from the ground, gathered in a bundle and dropped on the marred surface of the earth. It was a good thing Collier hadn’t seen this.

  Animals had been at the gravesite. Dig marks showed in several places. A hand snuck out from exposed earth, a foot—sneaker still intact—was twisting out of the ground in another spot.

  Donovan pulled gloves from his back pocket as Eleri did the same, the snapping sounds of latex popping oddly in the still air.

  When they were a few feet away, Eleri stopped dead. “I figured it was long hard work for Collier to drag a body out here. We aren’t that far off the road, just far enough not to be seen. But he couldn’t even walk it. He started wheezing and keeled over before he made it to the site.”

  Donovan was looking at her, the body in the ground almost at his feet, begging for inspection. But Eleri held her hand up.

  “How did he do it?”

  20

  Eleri was mad. She thought she was onto something—how could old, nearly-hunched, asthmatic Bernard pull a dead girl’s body out here then bury it? He couldn’t even walk all the way to the site.

  But Donovan sighed at her and the whole theory went away.

  “He may be wheezing, but he’s strong. The arthritis will definitely cause him pain, but never let an arthritic person tell you they can’t do something. The pain itself can be physically limiting, but when they can push past that, it doesn’t often cause other hindrances. This was not a fine-motor-control situation.” He waved his hand at the ground despite the fact that she was clearly pissed. “Also, Bernard’s asthma is in response to allergies. You and I both know it wasn’t this bad last week. All we have to do is check the date Bernard says he buried her. Cross-reference that with her decomposition and check the pollen count. Add in adrenaline and I’ll bet it plays out entirely like Bernard said.”

  Just in case she wasn’t pissed enough, she sneezed right then. As though to punctuate his total breakdown of her theory.

  Fine. Bernard buried the girl. Eleri bought that now, but they still had to dig her up, be sure she was what Collier claimed she was. Right now they could only see a hand and a foot. So they weren’t even certain they had a girl. These parts could just as easily belong to a boy or an adult.

  She knelt down on one side of the grave, looking, but not wanting to disturb anything before the full team got there. Donovan knelt on the other side of the grave, looking much like a child on Easter morning, told he couldn’t yet touch the basket, but almost able to peer inside. She tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Surely he was excited because this was what he was best at.

  As she watched, he gingerly moved his hands, placing them flat on the earth several times in slightly different positions. It wasn’t until he leaned over, using his arms to brace himself from falling on the girl, that she realized he was trying to get close enough to smell the body.

  All of the things she’d thought, all the pieces she put together, the accusations she was almost ready to make came flooding back. For a moment she imagined the black wolf hovering over this girl, sniffing at her hand, and Eleri’s brain sprang back into action and she analyzed the area of the disturbed earth. “Something dug at her!”

  Donovan looked up slowly from his precarious position. “Yes.”

  “So why didn’t it eat her?” She didn’t let him answer. “In shallow-grave situations like this—spring time, creatures are out with babies to feed—scavengers will come and make use of what they can find. They scatter the bones over miles. But she looks intact! You could smell it, so could they. Why didn’t they eat her?”

  Carefully he tipped himself back on his heels and pointed at the exposed hand. “She was sick.”

  Looking more closely, cataloguing what she hadn’t yet paid attention to, Eleri realized he was right. The skin was gray with a slight pink hue. It should have been nearly black at this stage. The girl should have passed into the active decay state, but she seemed slow to turn despite the heat and humidity of the early Texas summer.

  “Larvae?” She asked Donovan rather than looking for herself. After all, he already stuck his face near the body.

  He shook his head in response. “I didn’t even see any eggs. But look.” He pointed several times at the back of her hand, moving his finger slightly with each jab in that direction.

  It took a second for Eleri to see he wasn’t pointing at the hand itself but at the mottling and—more specifically—at the small dots marring the smooth skin. She looked up. “Measles?”

  “I think so.”

  She almost whispered, though she didn’t know why. She hoped the team was coming soon. They would have to bring in the flood lights because the day was already heading into the last phase and this would keep them most of the night. “Can you smell it?”

  “Sometimes.” He tilted his head as if trying to figure out how to describe it. Eleri wondered if it was like describing color to a blind man. She had only the most rudimentary reference when it came to smells.

  He offered what he could, “The last case of measles I came across had a distinctive smell. But it was a hospital death, in quarantine. There’s so much else around here that it’s all overlapping.” He waved his hands a bit as though that helped explain. “But this has the same tone as that one.”

  She nodded. “You remember the smells that well? You can classify them better than ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’?”

  His nod was small and hard to follow. But it was there.

  Interesting.

  He looked up and over his shoulder, “The team is here.”

  She couldn’t hear anything, but she had already reached the point where she trusted that he could. Sighing, she pulled out her camera. “I’ll get some active light pictures. Can you call and just see where Bernard is and what’s happening? I’d like him sent to Dallas and let Bozeman get his hands on him. Get a full formal interview, since we really didn’t get to finish.”

  She got high shots, making sure her own shadow didn’t get in the way. She took low shots, lying on her belly in the grass and ruining a few with sneezes. When she looked closer she saw that tufts of long hair had been dug up. The strands caught in a
small breeze, lifting as though still attached to a living person.

  Stepping a few feet away, she rummaged through the kit she had hauled out here. Given the walk and Bernard’s certainty of the situation, it had seemed easier to just bring it than have to return to the car.

  After the preliminary photos, she pulled out her tape measure, laying it out along the body. She staked bright, tiny flags at the visible corners of the grave. There were five, as the grave was not rectangular, which she mentally attributed to Bernard’s lack of practice and need for speed. Once she was set up, she took several more shots from each direction, wanting extras to be certain at least one had readable measurements in good light.

  She was itching to get out her small trowel and begin digging, when she heard the team finally walk up. For a moment she tried to back calculate how long it had been since Donovan told her they were coming and how far away he must have heard them from. Whatever it was, it was significant. And it was another piece of evidence about him. Forcibly, she pushed her focus away; there would be time to consider Donovan’s oddities tomorrow.

  Eleri held herself back from digging at the body—the right procedure was tedious. She knew that criminals were put away or turned free based on the minutiae that came from proper processing. Still, she itched to just dig.

  The team said hello from a distance and faster than she could pay attention they erected a closed tent, emerged in paper suits and began staking out lights. One of the members came with a clipboard and took statements from her and Donovan.

  How had they discovered the site? It what condition had they found it? What had they moved?

  Eleri fought to keep her eyes from narrowing despite the fact that she had asked other trained agents those very same questions herself in the past. It was annoying even if it was necessary. What if there had been some reason to move something? Often there was.