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

by A. J. Scudiere

  Eleri was thinking, not blank like he’d tried to be. Her stance changed. Her fake-relaxed position was abandoned and she sat up straighter. Her hands twisted a bit before she realized what she was doing, and she laced her fingers and looked at them for a moment before lifting her gaze to his. The directness was unnerving.

  “I dreamed of the truck. About a week ago.”

  “What?” That was not what he expected. He’d suspected she was holding out research on him and never thought this could be the issue.

  She nodded, confirming her words without saying them again. “I have clear dreams. I see things that seem like dreams, but they’re real.”

  He leaned forward, suddenly engaged in her story rather than his. The brick wall never even tumbled, it had simply disappeared. “Maybe you saw the truck before? And put something together?”

  Her smile was sad, and worse, it traced that bleakness all the way into her eyes. Her words were flat, scientific—she’d put thought into this. “That’s possible. Though, since I never met the man before, I’m not sure how I would have deduced that. We never drove by that road where he buried her, so I couldn’t have seen and subconsciously matched the tire tracks.”

  “Maybe you overheard something?” For all his oddities, he believed in science. He was a mutation, certainly, but mutations themselves were not abnormal.

  Her head shook softly from side to side, denying that possibility. “If I overheard a conversation, then you should have, too. We’ve hardly left each other’s sides.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  She did.

  “I dreamed that the orange truck with blue flames saw Ruth on the side of the road. I saw Bernard help her into the cab.” Eleri frowned and looked into the distance at the telling of it. “Ruth opened the passenger door, but Bernard leaned over and helped haul her in. That’s when I saw she was sick. She could hardly climb in.” A long, low sigh punctuated the story. “Of course, when I dreamed that I already knew that Ruth hitchhiked into town to get to the hospital when she was sick. I only thought he could give us some information about . . . I don’t know. More information. I was shocked to see him, nothing about the dream seemed to be anything but a dream mixing up elements from the case.”

  “Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe your subconscious put together some pieces for you.” He’d studied that a little in med school. There had been classes on healing, on patient attitudes, and how to deal with the different personality types.

  She didn’t look at him. Instead, she studied the slim strip of carpeting between the beds as though it was fascinating. “I would dismiss it if it were the first time it had happened.”

  “What?” Something inside him melted.

  She looked disconsolate. Lost. Like no one understood.

  He needed to hear what she said. Needed to put the empathy that he felt in its place. He didn’t do empathy. He didn’t do feelings at all if he didn’t have to. But his shell was dissolving. Eleri—normally so bold, strong, smart, even sweet—looked hollow and alone.

  She looked like he felt.

  Her words only knit the ties tighter.

  “When I started with the FBI, I was a field agent for the first year. I think I was pretty average in most respects. I’m a good marksman, I pass my tests easily, but I wasn’t winning top honors. In the Academy, I got called out as much as anyone for my mistakes. I wasn’t the first over the wall or through the course, but I was never the last. But on a case, I was great at thinking ahead of the suspect.”

  She blinked as though trying to hold back tears. Donovan could see the gap between them was larger than the space between the beds. Theirs knees were about a foot apart, but he couldn’t reach across. He had no idea why she would look like she was about to lose it when she was describing something she was good at—something that made her valuable at the thing she’d chosen to do with her life.

  After a breath or two, Eleri kept going. “I was really good at it and they moved me to the profiling team where I became a star. I was the best. I could tell you our perp’s make and model of car. I could tell you what his house looked like and how neat or messy it was. That he would keep magazines stacked on the corner of his coffee table. Or she would have a drawer stacked with tiny shirts from the babies she’d stolen from the hospital.”

  Oh, shit.

  He saw where it was going. He saw in her face, in her eyes, before she spoke it.

  Donovan didn’t know what to do. He’d never felt for anyone before. His father kept him from others. There were just the two of them—a growing boy who was denied friends and left only with the company of a cold man who often drank more than he should have. Donovan had built his walls early, and he’d built them high and strong. Now he wanted them back. He had his own pain, his own shit to deal with. He didn’t need Eleri’s. But it assaulted him, piercing him as surely as silver bullets.

  Silent tears rolled down her cheeks. “I dreamed them. I dreamed them all. Sometimes I just had a hunch. Maybe it was something I dreamed and forgot. I don’t remember everything when I wake up.”

  Her fingers were twisting in her lap, to the point where Donovan realized she wasn’t paying attention, and he was getting concerned that she might inadvertently hurt herself. Finally reaching out, he settled his hand over hers, thinking it would break the spell she was weaving. It only stopped her hands.

  “I saw the woman take the babies and I couldn’t stop her. I could get ahead of her and we returned six of the kids to their homes. But four of them died. Three were taken while we were on her tail. Five were stolen from different hospitals—despite those silly store-theft tags they put on the babies, she still got them out. It took two more to triangulate her and it took three dreams. Three dreams where I saw how two of the babies died in her care.”

  There was only a beat, only a moment where Donovan could have said anything but he was too slow.

  “I saw the Trail Killer take two of his victims. By then I knew what was happening. I knew my dreams were predictive, real. I knew what I’d seen and I knew no one would believe me. So I had to gather evidence, work up a vague profile, send the agents in the right direction.”

  He interrupted. He was prepared this time, hoping his question would break the chain, disrupt the ride she was on. “Doesn’t the FBI understand that hunches are valuable? Especially from people who produce consistently good ones?”

  She nodded. “But how do I tell them I have a hunch that he put a sticker family on his car specifically to be more approachable? How do I tell them that he chose his parking lots to have several cars, so it would look inhabited, even if there were no people in earshot? That he would stand next to the car and play with his phone and act frustrated? He’d ask to borrow theirs then Taser them, take their keys, push them into their own car, and drive off with it . . .” She looked up at him, her round features red-rimmed with the tears that slowly made tracks down her face, her eyes wider and greener than usual, and so bleak. “How am I supposed to save anyone when I can’t tell them how I did it?”

  His internal organs sank to the bottom of his ribs. He ached for her. It would have been easier to admit to her accusations than to hear this. He could have stayed cold and given her the facts about himself. But this was killing him.

  Eleri’s next words came at a whisper. Harsh and biting, they tore through him.

  “So I told them. I saved the women he would have attacked. We pulled the last one from the basement where he taped her to a chair and . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence. Donovan had read about the case; he didn’t need the details. What he had read had been chilling. Imagining that Eleri saw it as it happened was sickening.

  “She’s a mess, but she’s alive. And I spent eleven days in holding. I was interrogated up and down. Barely fed. I asked for a lawyer, but as an agent, I was told I had to be accused of something first—”

  “What!” They held her?

  “They didn’t formally accuse me of anything. They were just ques
tioning me.” She looked at him as though he didn’t understand.

  They thought it was her?

  “I had airtight alibis. I was with a senior agent during two of the abductions. But they still thought I knew more about it than I said. That maybe I knew Jeremy Kite personally and was trying to gain credit for turning him in like I was a rockstar or something.”

  Donovan tried again to shift the subject. “Was this the agent you told me about? The senior agent you like?”

  “No, that was my senior partner when I was in the field. In Profiling, we often worked in groups rather than pairs. So I didn’t have a specific senior agent there.” Always Eleri, she headed right back on track. “They eventually cut me loose. There was no evidence against me except my overwhelming knowledge of Kite.”

  “You stopped the Trail Killer. You should be proud.” He understood the burden of what she saw, but he didn’t understand why she still carried it. “Your balance sheet is firmly in the positive. That’s good.”

  “They pulled my assignment from the Profiling division.”

  “But you were so good at it!” These people were his new bosses?

  “Too good. And too crazy.” She looked away. “They put me in a mental hospital for treatment. And I actually kind of liked it there.”

  Donovan didn’t like this. For a moment he fantasized about standing over a dead body. Lifting a heavy liver and smelling the poison there. He imagined writing the order for the tox screen, weighing the organ, noting the color, bagging it. He imagined making an incision into dead flesh. Popping his shoulders into place, his hips, his face and running wild through the woods. He didn’t do connections, but he was connected now, even if he hated hurting for her.

  His eyes were closed when she spoke again, though now the whisper was gone. Her words were clear, strong. “You should know. You should know that I was in the hospital until three days before I met you. I was pulled out to run this case.”

  Holy shit.

  She seemed so normal. Not at all like the basket case she described. Not like an agent that should be questioned for days at a time, stripped of her badge and tossed in the bin. He didn’t know what to say. The words that came out of his mouth shouldn’t have been said. “But you were declared sane, right? That’s why you’re here now?”

  He would have been good if she’d said yes.

  “No. I wasn’t. They weren’t ready to release me. Westerfield signed me out against medical advice.” She looked him dead in the eye, as though she wanted to be sure he knew what he’d gotten himself into. “He wanted me on this case. Apparently, he handpicked us. Since the hospital had signed off my adjustment over—” she raised her hands and made air quotes, “—‘the Jeremy Kite incidence and the subsequent questioning,’ Westerfield decided I should join NightShade.”

  “If you were declared better, then why were you released ‘Against Medical Advice’?” Patients left AMA all the time. He knew that. But better was better, not AMA.

  Again, a big pause. A big sigh. A look off into the corner. “Because while I had apparently cleanly adjusted to what happened with Kite and my stint as a profiler, I made the mistake of telling my doctor about my sister.”

  This could not be good. He didn’t even really want to know. He was her junior partner. Under her thumb, and now he wondered if she was batshit crazy—though he’d seen zero evidence of that himself. All he’d seen was a series of odd incidences that, if he had to add them up, mostly supported what she said about her profiling days. She had something normal people didn’t and, burden or not, she was using it to keep the FBI out front. Even when they slammed her for it.

  He was already tied too tightly into this assignment. He was wrapped in a web he couldn’t escape. He’d helped train the replacement ME at his old hospital in Columbia. He couldn’t go back. He could only go forward. Right now, forward was with Eleri.

  “What about your sister?”

  23

  Eleri had opened her fat mouth thinking that she should give a little to get a little. She told Donovan she thought he was the wolf. When he asked about Bernard Collier, she thought she would tell him just enough to make the exchange more even.

  She did not expect the empathy she saw from him. Nor did she expect it to affect her the way it did. The words poured out, the stories coming like a flood, though she knew from her months of therapy that she was still attached to what she’d suffered—both what she saw and how she was held and questioned over it.

  When she started talking, she promised herself she would give just enough to make him spill and instead, she did.

  About three sentences in, she realized that she was simply bleeding herself. She was finally voluntarily telling someone about what happened, not having it ripped from her in an office with a doctor taking notes. Just telling Donovan. And damn him, he was as close to a werewolf as existed. He had to listen to her without judgment.

  Simply stating how she’d been removed from her post and questioned sickened her all over again. But it was lessened a bit by the way he was outraged for her. Hardly a stranger, he was still hardly a good friend. They had common training—studying in biological fields, both working with the dead, going through the Academy—but even these paths only put their language and logic on the same road, they weren’t shared experiences in the real sense.

  Eleri got the feeling Donovan didn’t have shared experiences with much of anyone. She was also convinced he didn’t have shared feelings with a soul. His outrage felt all the better, all the more soothing for its rarity.

  Empty by the time she made it through her work history, the story of her sister was already passing her lips. It wasn’t so much that Eleri chose to share it, but that it would tell itself. Emmaline was a burden she’d carried in her soul for far too long. The resulting feeling of hollowness was itself a welcome relief. Hollow wasn’t heavy.

  Feeling her spine straighten and her breathing deepen, Eleri went almost into a trance. She didn’t look at Donovan, just remembered happier times. “I was only two when my sister came along. So all my remembered life, I had a younger sister, Emmaline. I was named for my grandmother on my father’s side, Emmaline for the grandmother on my mother’s side. I don’t know why. When I got older I learned that grandmother Emmaline had a drug problem and left my mother—just a girl at the time—with my grand-mere Remi to raise her.

  “My Emmaline and I grew up in my father’s family and culture. The Eameses trace back to the first families of Virginia, having settled there before the US became the US. His mother was Eleri Hale, and the Hales were a first family of Massachusetts. We can trace that lineage back to the 1500s in England. Emmaline and I were brought up mostly outside Charlottesville, Virginia, at Bell Point Farm. We traveled back and forth to Kentucky a lot though. It wasn’t our home, but we have a house there, too, Patton Hall.”

  Donovan frowned at her. She knew he hadn’t grown up the way she did. Money wasn’t even discussed in her home. Eleri didn’t really understand what money was, other than something her father complained others wanted from them, until she entered high school. She had come up the polar opposite from kids like him, but she had become aware as she became older. Surely he did, too.

  “You had multiple houses? With names?”

  Ah. She nodded. “Bell Point was in my father’s family forever. I think his father or grandfather purchased Patton Hall in Kentucky when the Pattons lost everything. The way the story is told in my family, the sale of the house saved the Pattons from destitution.” She said it before she realized the Old Kentucky family’s idea of destitution was probably still miles above Donovan scraping and saving for running shoes for the cheapest sport he could find.

  He laughed at her, not in humor but in that “oh, God, I should have known” kind of way. “Any other grand homes with names?”

  “Just one.” The wrong thing to say, given the way his eyebrows climbed. “A beachfront home in Hatteras. Foxhaven.” Done with listing her family properties, she went on.
“We were at Patton Hall in Kentucky. I was ten when we lost Emmaline.”

  His breath sucked in. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “I lost my mother when I was seven. She died suddenly and unexpectedly.” Death and the pain of it were universal, and he absorbed some of hers. “I know you never get over that really. At least my mother was an adult. She’d had a child and a life. I can’t imagine a child dying.”

  He didn’t have the right of it though. “No. We lost her. Literally.”

  Eleri’s eyes burned. They always did, the pressure at the back of them leaking forward. Though she tried not to cry outright, she could never stop the jagged pain that accompanied the memory. “We were out for a riding lesson, Emmaline and me. We were with David, our instructor. It was my turn to take a run, and I went over some tiny jumps that I thought were so high, and David told me to do it again. So I did. By the time I got it right—or right enough—we told Emmaline it was her turn and she was gone.”

  She saw the horror in his eyes. Missing children were the bane of the FBI. The Feds were brought in on any case that was a legitimate abduction and only the coldest agents didn’t cry themselves to sleep, even when the child was returned relatively safely. Even in the best cases, you stood at the end when the reunited family walked away and tried to hold the shreds of yourself together.

  And she wasn’t the attending agent in this case. She was the sister. She was partly responsible, though she told herself over and over that she wasn’t. She was ten. She was with an adult. Sometimes these things just happened. It didn’t change the fact that her heart still stopped beating at the very thought of that day.

  “We looked for her for about half an hour, yelling for her and for Biscuit, her pony. But we got nothing.”

  Donovan’s face fell. Eleri knew why. It was exactly the wrong thing to do. People looked for their missing kid first, sometimes for hours, before notifying the authorities. The police loved finding kids who had wandered off, but a time lapse like her family created allowed predators to get farther and farther away. Allowed the trail to go cold before anyone even knew to look for it.