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

by A. J. Scudiere

  Both the kids were devastated to learn of Faith’s passing but not surprised. Bozeman played a recording of Jonah—looking as distraught as he sounded—saying how Baxter told them Faith was likely gone, that she had been sneaking out and that God had punished her by making her sick. When others had gotten ill with the same disease, Baxter claimed Faith and Ruth had brought the punishment down on the group. The community had been smart enough to quarantine the babies and the kids didn’t think any of the little ones had gotten sick. But because they hadn’t seen the infants in a while, they had only the reports of the adults to go on.

  By the time Donovan had finished his candy bar and drink, Bozeman had headed back to the safe house to check in on the kids and relieve the other agent for dinner. Which left Eleri and Donovan with the last of the material.

  They put away the interviews from Jonah and Charity. They put away the Bernard Collier information, and they spread out all the print photos across the table, old school.

  Grouping Faith’s autopsy photos on the left, Eleri let Donovan sort out what they had from the dead girl found on the side of the road. Then he pulled out pictures of Jonah and Charity. Photos from when they first made contact with the FBI, with Donovan and Eleri. The Grady PD had taken Charity’s photos, but Cassa Brinks had done an excellent job.

  Under all the photos they lined up the paperwork. Sometimes there was a stack; sometimes just a page or two. Jonah and Charity each had hours of interview footage, but there was no way to put that on the table. Standing back, he surveyed the organized mess, wishing he had another candy bar. “Baxter is one sick fuck.”

  Eleri nodded. “Yeah, and we have no evidence against him.”

  “His own parents are glad he’s gone. They think he’s a sociopath.” He shook his head thinking Joseph Hayden Baxter could not have come from a more loving couple.

  “Yeah,” Eleri sighed, echoing his internal monologue. “The Baxters seemed like the nicest people. Like fundamentalism done right, you know?” When Donovan only nodded in return, she kept talking. “Do you think maybe they were monsters? That they abused him in some way we couldn’t see? We were only there for a few hours. And we were only there ‘now.’ I mean, we can’t ever see how they were when he was growing up. Maybe they’re different now.”

  “That’s possible, but I have seen some pretty sick stuff. I’m sure you have, too.” He shouldn’t have said that. She’d seen her own sister for years after the little girl disappeared, and the haunted look on Eleri’s face when she said it indicated her sister hadn’t lived a happy life with a loving kidnapping family. He kept talking to cover his mistake. “I’m guessing JHB is your garden variety indication of the fact that sometimes monsters happen, and they are going to be monsters regardless of how they are raised.”

  When he looked at a dead body, sometimes Donovan got angry about what had happened to the person. Sometimes it was a bad physician who had screwed up and missed a diagnosis. He could forgive that, eventually. Sometimes it was the way the body was desecrated. The person died or had been killed and dumped, left to scavengers. Donovan couldn’t abide by that; given what he did, the dead were to be revered. But sometimes it was about what happened before they died. That was the worst. But it was almost always only one body at a time.

  Here he had four. Two were still alive, but those two were kids. The third—Faith—was a very young woman. He knew there was a common thread here, something that would tie it all together. He already knew that thread would sew up Baxter, too, though he also knew he wasn’t supposed to think that way. While he was supposed to stay open minded, he couldn’t. Not really.

  And he couldn’t see the damn thread.

  Most frustrated with Faith’s information or lack thereof, he tried not to stare at it. In general, time sensitivity in the ME’s office was about the importance of the people who wanted the information—how much someone was willing to push to make results come back faster. Here, the importance was on lives, not wants. There were more children in the City of God, and who knew what was happening to them? Donovan worked hard not to think that Jonah and Charity’s escapes might have made things more difficult for the remaining ones.

  Donovan and Eleri stood side by side, shared stances and shared frustration. Eleri shook her head and her frown grew to match his internal anger. There was no solid evidence on Baxter.

  As Donovan watched, she sucked in a breath and put her hands back on her hips. It didn’t mean she had anything. No epiphany shone on her face. Her unusual coloring only served to highlight the scrunched expression as she walked around the table to get a look at things upside down. Not knowing anything better to do, Donovan followed her.

  She was only a quarter of the way through her slow trek when her phone rang and she stepped aside to answer it, letting Donovan pass. Given the way her entire body stilled, it had to be Westerfield and there had to be news.

  “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. . . . Yes. Of course.”

  It was all he heard and he tried not to pay attention, tried to focus on the photos and information before him until she slid the phone back in her pocket and turned to face him, her eyes shining. “There’s a match. The girl in the red shirt, the bones. A family came forward from the missing files and volunteered DNA. It’s their daughter.”

  His shoulders dropped. Bitter taste filled his mouth. It didn’t make the girl any less human to be unidentified, but it did stop another family from entering the painful mourning process. They had probably hoped and worried for years about her. He wondered how Eleri felt about it, and he wondered why he was wondering how someone else felt. Trying not to let any of it show on his face, he jammed his fists into his hips, a much harder version of the “thinking stance” he and Eleri had adopted and he suddenly saw it.

  Rapidly he reached across the table, pulling certain photos together, pushing others away, praying that he was right and that there was enough information here.

  25

  Eleri’s heart was in her throat thinking about the family that had come forward. For a moment she wallowed in self-pity, torturing herself over the closure her own family didn’t have for Emmaline.

  Eventually, her mother gave up, decided that it was over. It took eight years to get to that point, and Eleri leaving for college had certainly helped trigger it. For Eleri, college had changed everything, too. It led her to this point, to standing here, getting news about another family too much like hers, and watching Donovan practically crawl across the table to rearrange the photos.

  She was opening her mouth to ask what he was doing when he anticipated her voice, holding his hand up to stop her before she even started. He dug frantically through his bag, coming up with a grease pen, which he used to scribble something on the pictures. Not wanting to bother him, Eleri didn’t move, but it meant she couldn’t see what he was writing. It was several long moments before he turned to her, a look of triumph across his bold features.

  “They were all hit by the same person.” He pointed at the pictures he’d aligned.

  Bruises, all of them. On Faith’s upper arms, matching handprints. On her leg a fist, the faint outline now traced in red wax. On Charity’s face, the same imprint. The left side of her face, matching the inner plane of Charity’s right leg—indicating a right-handed punch. The size indicated a grown man, a good-sized hand. There were more matches, Jonah’s temple, his lower right back, just above the kidney. There was a marker in the impression, in the third finger, probably caused by something like an old healed break. That finger didn’t fold down quite all the way, didn’t form a plane with the other carpal bones. Or maybe it was the pinky that folded down too much. Either way, it was a distinctive fist.

  “Here.” He held up the photo of the bones from the red-shirted girl. The clothing and the smell tied her to the City of God, though only the shirt was admissible evidence and even that was a bit shaky. But they had photos of the autopsy, and while her bloated state didn’t help identification purposes, it showed the bruising relativ
ely well.

  Donovan’s voice was clear, “It’s not a match to JHB yet, but it ties them all together. They were all hit by the same man.”

  “Person.” She said it calmly and even managed a little grin. “Don’t be sexist.”

  “True,” he conceded, allowing her to slightly lighten the moment as they looked at all the markers of pain and mistreatment on the photos in front of them. “But statistically—”

  “It’s a man.” She finished. He was right about that.

  Eleri was tired. She was still wrung out from the day before, when she’d talked for one hour and slept for twelve. Of course, they had worked the twenty-six hours prior to that interviewing Collier and then digging up the body—no mere vacation, that day. The twelve hours were warranted, the eight she added to it after her too large dinner, maybe not so much. Today she feared she had overslept a bit. Anything over ten put most people into a dulled state that left them with a siren song from their pillow all day. Though the work in front of her was interesting, the lack of food and the fading light outside the large windows were signaling her brain to shut down. While she knew all the neural processes behind it, she was still having a tough time fighting the urge to find a soft place to sleep.

  “I need dinner.” She announced. “And we need to get to San Antonio.”

  “What’s in San An?” Donovan looked up at her from where he continued to sort through photos.

  “Westerfield. He’ll be there tomorrow, wants to meet us in person so we can hand in our Collier report and talk about the next phase of the investigation.”

  This time her partner looked up. “There’s a next phase? We don’t have enough to implicate anyone yet.”

  Her shrug was somewhat exaggerated as she didn’t know anything about that either. Unable to provide information, she provided labor and started gathering up the photos and paperwork. They would have to clear everything out of here. “Eat first or pack first?”

  “Pack?”

  “San An. Our meeting is in the morning. Pack and drive tonight or get up early. I’ll let you call it.” She had most of the pictures stacked, the bruises grouped together, writing on the back of each photo now clearly delineating whom it belonged to and what body part had been photographed. As she gathered them, Eleri realized they would need to print off clean copies to replace these. Oh joy. She could stay up late in her room setting up the photo printer from the trunk of the rental car. It came to her that she could just do it in San Antonio at the branch office. She felt better just thinking she didn’t really have to haul out that little brick of a printer again and wait while it chugged out more photos.

  “How far is it?”

  “Door to door? About four plus hours.”

  “Ugh. Let’s do it tonight then.” Donovan looked like she felt.

  Eleri had long ago learned to turn off any tracking feature on the GPS she used. She really did not want to see all the times she backtracked, all the ground she crossed three times, four times, ten times. It almost always seemed to produce a literal map of the investigation—interesting at the end with clear points of far reach and little knots of frustration—but nothing you wanted evidence of while you were in it. “Luckily there’s a real freeway between the two cities.”

  It was disturbing they were both that pleased about it, but it would be a big improvement from the off-roading they’d been doing with their little rental.

  Putting the last of the papers into the bag, Donovan ticked off their itinerary. “So pack, check out, get dinner, drive, check in, sleep, meet with Westerfield?”

  “That sounds about right.” Pushing the heavy door out of her way, she started down the long hallway. The building was quieter this late. The traffic buzzing just beyond the window had finally settled down, normal people were home with their families, having meals cooked in real kitchens. But no one here was normal.

  For a flash of a moment, Eleri considered that she and Donovan were the most abnormal of all.

  They were climbing in the car when he turned to her again. “So dinner? How about steak?”

  “I hate you.” She deadpanned. “I really hate you.”

  DONOVAN WASN’T PREPARED for Eleri’s agenda in San Antonio. She came into the hall in the morning ready for the meeting with Westerfield and spouting plans for the afternoon. She had an old friend who had moved to the area and she was going to meet him for a late lunch.

  Having not gotten to sleep until around 1 am and then not having slept well in general, his brain wasn’t up to comprehending the logistics Eleri was laying out regarding dropping her off, picking her and her friend up. He hadn’t had his coffee yet, so he trusted that because Eleri was normally good with planning and organizing, she had it all worked out.

  “Coffee?” he croaked, and her answer was a smile and a nod. It was not fair hanging out with a person who slept that well in strange beds. For a moment he wondered if owning the variety of homes you lived in and not worrying about food or being ousted from your shelter made sleeping in a new bed all the time easier to swallow. Having been raised in as many as five different cities in one school year, he would have thought he’d sleep like a baby in a nice hotel room paid for by his job. But no.

  Inside thirty minutes, she’d found them breakfast including fruit for her, coffee for him and a chance to sit a minute and open his eyes. Silently he thanked her for the time, since he had to be on his A game with Westerfield. Donovan had met the man only twice before, though there were additional phone conversations. Still his initial interview and subsequent introduction to Eleri were the sum total of his exposure. In both cases, though Westerfield wanted something from him, there were terms to negotiate. Now Donovan was returning as the employee, his plans pending approval.

  So used to working for himself, answering to bureaucrats, but not so much bosses, this was a new concept.

  They didn’t review at breakfast, figuring they had everything set for Collier, and that Westerfield would come up with questions they weren’t prepared for no matter what they did. So when Donovan followed the San Antonio branch administrator down the hallway, he wasn’t nervous. He knew there was no way to prepare.

  Westerfield waited for them in another room that looked both the same and different from the one they spent their day in yesterday. Though his hand fidgeted with a quarter again while he waited, the man looked impeccable in his suit and tie and for a moment Donovan wondered if his boss followed Einstein’s model and had fifteen copies of the same suit hanging in his closet. Donovan wasn’t sure but he might have seen the exact same tie before, too. Then Westerfield stood, shook hands, and said hello to them, breaking Donovan’s train of thought.

  Only as they all sat back down did Donovan see that all the blinds had been drawn. But he didn’t get to think about it as they got right to business, Eleri laying out their proposal to put Collier back in his truck and on his routes.

  They had already spoken to his agency—without letting them know one of their independent employees had picked up a hitchhiker and then buried her on protected park land when she died. The trucking company was willing to work with the FBI to keep Collier on his regular routes, thus improving his likelihood of finding another City of God member out in a nearby town.

  Westerfield asked only a few pointed questions. Wanted to know what exactly Collier got in exchange for his work and whether he would be kept on a watch list.

  Donovan fielded that one before he even thought about it. “With all due respect, sir, the man is nearly seventy and set to retire soon. Had it not been for the burst of adrenaline I’m assuming he suffered, he would never have physically been able to bury the girl.”

  Eleri chimed in. “He became asthmatic when he showed us where he’d buried her, barely even able to walk back to the site. And the majority of the good information we have came because he volunteered it.”

  Donovan tried not to stiffen at her comment and immediately spoke, trying to steer the conversation in a different way before Westerfie
ld asked how they found Collier in the first place. “I think he’s an asset rather than a threat to society.”

  Westerfield only nodded then went through the motions of granting formal approval for them to offer clemency to Bernard Collier, dependent upon his cooperation with their operation. Done.

  Now all they needed was for Westerfield to let them in on this “next phase of the investigation” he mentioned yesterday and Eleri would be able to go meet her friend and Donovan could continue his research on just how many really great steaks a person could find in Texas.

  Westerfield tapped the quarter on the table twice, as though to punctuate what he was about to say. “In addition to keeping an eye out for Jennifer Cohn, I need you to gather physical evidence, statements, whatever you need to find out if Baxter really is behind this. If he’s killing his own people. Find out where his money comes from.”

  Eleri nodded as though in complete agreement, then said what Donovan was thinking. “We want that, but we don’t have enough to get a search warrant. All we have to show that Baxter’s DNA should be tested against Jonah’s is a picture Jonah drew and our belief that they look alike. That’s not warrant worthy. Also the land is privately held, and it appears the owner is living on the property with them. We can’t even get them on trespassing yet.”

  Her shrug went unanswered by Westerfield. “You don’t need a warrant.”

  “Yes we do.” Her response was calm but solid.

  “No you don’t. You have reasonable cause. You can’t barge in, you can’t force, but you can collect for yourselves.” Westerfield matched her tone, more matter of fact than his words were.

  “But sir, that won’t hold up in court.” She kept going, obviously confused. “The chain of evidence will be screwed. Everything will be thrown out if we obtain the fingerprints without full cause and a warrant.”