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

by A. J. Scudiere

  She knew too much already. She knew the big secret. What did a wish he’d never spoken out loud matter? “I wanted to get a dog, a running buddy. But my hours were too crazy, it just never happened. But I made some plans.”

  He wondered if it showed in his eyes that he had always wanted a dog. Even when he was kid, even long before he knew what he was, he wanted a companion like that. It seemed he would never have one, but it would pay off that he knew some things.

  Eleri kept going. “A light-up tag means you go in under darkness, or at least dusk. What if they see your eyes and they shoot you? You said they patrolled with guns at the ready.”

  He almost answered, but she didn’t let him. “What if that doesn’t happen, and you’re the perfect friendly dog and they figure you’re lost and they try to feed you? Or keep you? If they get their hands under your collar, can they control you?”

  Having never been around people in that state, he’d never even considered what wearing a collar would allow. Still, he had a ready answer. “You’ll be there. You can distract them or something. I’m quick.”

  Her head maintained a back and forth motion. “How am I supposed to stay close enough to keep you in sight and not get detected myself? That’s exactly what these guys are out there looking for. And if I’m far enough away, how can I stop them from doing something very sensical like locking you in a cage or a room?” She’d set the soda down by now and was just waving her hands to emphasize the amount of questions that were piling up. “I could mount a rescue operation, but I can’t bring in more agents and take down a commune to get back a dog.”

  Admitting the reasonability of her protests, he sighed. “If we could get Baxter out alone, it could work.”

  To her credit, Eleri was a listener. Though she had wound up adamantly against his first plan, she didn’t wave his second option away just for its similarity to the first. “Maybe. . .”

  She was still mulling it over when her phone rang.

  Her eyes lit up at the number and she answered with a sharp, “Hello, Agent Eames here,” even as she hit the button to put the phone on speaker.

  “Ma’am. This is Bernard Collier. I’m the one—” He sounded like he was going to go on, but Eleri smoothly interrupted him, and Donovan grinned at her.

  “Oh, Mr. Collier, how good to hear from you.” She smiled as she spoke the words, maybe so the sound would penetrate her tone.

  “Yes, ma’am. Well, I just picked up another hitcher. Young girl. She’s real sick, too.” There was a brief pause on both sides as Eleri’s eyes flew up to meet Donovan’s.

  A break! Maybe he didn’t have to wear a damn collar after all.

  The thought was passing through his head as Collier cleared his throat. “Ma’am, where should I bring her?”

  29

  Eleri was grateful that Donovan was driving to the hospital. Unfortunately, the woman Collier picked up was very sick. When Eleri asked the trucker to put the woman on the phone, he said she was moaning and rolling her head from side to side, complaining of a headache and coughing. Since Eleri could hear that much over the phone, and since Collier was doing this to get himself out of jail time, there was no reason for him to lie.

  Fortunately, he was very close to the Brownwood Regional Medical Center. Sadly, Eleri and Donovan were much farther away. Also Brownwood, via roadways, was exactly in between Dallas and San Antonio—which meant even Agent Bozeman couldn’t get there any faster than they could. They would to have to rely on the Brownwood PD.

  No matter how good the department was, someone, somewhere would slip. Dispatch would hear. Someone on a trucker radio would talk to Collier. If nothing else, some staffer at the hospital would say something to his or her mama and in a few hours the information would be everywhere. Eleri needed the PD to hold back the gossip for nearly three hours.

  With Donovan driving, Eleri paid no attention to the road. Even before she was buckled into the passenger seat, she was on the phone, talking with Brownwood dispatch, getting put through to Detective James Hill. When they were in town before, she found him to be the best at keeping his mouth closed.

  As soon as dispatch pulled him from duty, she directed him to the hospital to meet with Collier and his City of God escapee, then hung up and found the next number. Elaine Coates was the RN they interviewed about Ruth. Eleri wanted her on this case, too. Wanted her eyes looking for similarities in symptoms, test results, behaviors, etc.

  Trying not to bark orders, since she’d clearly woken the woman up, Eleri attempted to stress the importance of both speed and secrecy. Coates was willing, but had just finished a shift, cared for her ailing mother, and finally gotten to sleep. She was coming around from a dead stop. Though Coates’s brain wasn’t quite at full function yet, Eleri had to ask her which supervisor could help get her back onto the floor and keep it from looking suspicious.

  Eventually, Eleri was out of calls to make.

  She and Donovan heard back that Collier had arrived, his patient passed out and barely rousable. For a moment the woman had spoken, saying her name was Grace, and making Eleri flinch at hearing her own middle name associated with the City of God. It shouldn’t have grabbed her in the gut and taken hold, but it did.

  Grace—a little older than Collier had made her out to be—was taken immediately into the ICU, only because it would be the easiest to quietly monitor her there and keep people out. They assigned one nurse to her case until Elaine Coates showed up. Since Coates wasn’t an ICU nurse, even after she arrived the other nurse stayed on. Eleri felt her lips press together when she heard, but there was nothing she could do.

  Word would get out. There was no way around it. Having an extra nurse on the case—a nurse they didn’t know from Adam—didn’t help things. All Eleri could do was try to hold back the tide.

  The drive was tedious even if Donovan did manage to convince her they should pull off for a fast-food lunch. Though her system balked at the thought of a burger, she agreed. They had to eat, and eating while they drove saved time. Passing out at the hospital would do no one any good.

  Despite eating food that put her system into even more of a tailspin, Eleri didn’t complain about it. When they finally arrived at the hospital—the last ones to get there, arriving a good fifteen minutes after Agent Bozeman—they found that the patient was resting peacefully. She was on IV fluids and antibiotics, electrolytes, and pain medications, not able to speak coherently even if she was awake.

  Sighing in defeat, Eleri proceeded to round up the troops and manage a brief meeting before giving up and checking back into the Hampton Inn, sadly just a few rooms down from where she and Donovan had started this investigation a few weeks ago.

  Pushing his card key into the lock on the door next to hers, her partner managed to be more optimistic. “We’re here now if she does become lucid and that’s important. Also, we’re closer to the mark. It’s time to re-think a way in. We need fingerprints.”

  She would have shushed him, standing in the hallway, talking about an ongoing investigation, but it was late afternoon on a Tuesday and she hadn’t seen another visitor in the entire hotel. Eleri refused to be paranoid enough to think someone was listening in on hallway conversations. Who would even want to hear most of what went on here? Suppressing a shudder, she pushed her way into her own room and gave up, flopping back onto the bed. It was firmer than the mattress in the last place they’d stayed and it resisted her flop more than she expected, which was a fitting bit of punctuation for this day.

  Flopping didn’t help and Eleri found her breathing was still fast, her shoulders still tense, and her need to accomplish something still dangling in front of her even as the daylight drifted west. Despite Donovan’s very logical points that they had gained a new witness and were at the ready, Eleri still didn’t feel the day had yielded what it needed to satisfy her work ethic.

  Attempting to accept that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted led her to some deep-breathing exercises. With her eyes closed, she s
melled the staleness of the room, picked up the fake-lemon scent of the cleaner used a little too recently and a little too heavily. Well, that’s what you got when you checked in at three in the afternoon. Smells were followed by sounds of cars outside, not passing by with enough regularity to become white noise but often enough to be disruptive. She wondered if this was what Donovan’s whole life was like—one smell after another, faint sounds coming from all sides, knowing things he shouldn’t because to a certain extent he functioned like the only sighted man in a school for the blind.

  Turning her attention to her muscles, Eleri then worked on ignoring her sensory input and one by one releasing some of the tensions she felt. She carried her stress on her shoulders—as though the pressure she felt was borne on a physical yoke—but even though she knew she carried it here, she couldn’t seem to change it. Now she actively rolled her shoulders, twisting her head from side to side until she heard the small popping sound that simultaneously made her shudder and feel better.

  It took a few minutes, but she achieved some semblance of relaxation. Though the bed was not soft enough and the air not fresh enough and the day not late enough, she just lay there, breathing deeply.

  Eleri was on breath number five—she was counting—when her phone rang. Why had she left her phone on the desk? Because she thought she’d be more relaxed than if she was holding it in her tense little hand. But now she had to abandon her laid-back position and actually get up. She couldn’t ignore it because she suspected it was the hospital or the police officer watching “Grace” and calling to say she was ready to talk.

  Trying to hold onto the modicum of Zen, Eleri glanced at the screen on the phone and promptly lost all of it. Shit. “Hello, sir.”

  Westerfield barked through the line. “Three days. No updates. What’s going on, Eames?”

  Eleri admitted his tone was probably not as harsh as it seemed, but given her hard won and easily lost relaxation, his demands were incredibly grating. She scrambled to retrieve some of the calm she possessed just moments ago. It didn’t happen. “We don’t have anything to report. We’re trying to figure out how to get into the City and get evidence on Baxter without getting caught. And the woman Collier brought out is on so much medication that anything she says isn’t valid at all.”

  Silence came loud and clear from the other end of the line. Eleri knew she should be affronted by it, that Westerfield was probably upset, but she didn’t quite have it in her to muster up the disturbance. She was battling her own concerns about the new directive, and she wondered how Wade had reconciled it all. Then again, it was turning out there was a lot more to Wade than she had ever known. So she too stayed silent and waited her boss out.

  “Tonight. I’ll be there. Get food and a conference room at the local PD—” he sighed audibly, “—if there is one.”

  “There is, sir.”

  Lovely.

  Hanging up, Eleri laid back on the bed again. Her arms splayed out, her legs dangled over the side. This time the phone fell only inches from where her hand, palm up, had decided to land.

  She stayed there a while, sprawled across the bed like a victim. This time she didn’t want the phone to ring, didn’t want the woman from the City of God to wake up and tell them anything, not tonight. Eleri wanted to meet with Westerfield. Though she dreaded the dressing down she figured she was in for given their lack of progress these past few days, she also had some questions of her own.

  Lying there, she tried again to find the peaceful state she remembered from her early childhood—the core belief that everything was fine and would be good in the end. Since she was ten, she hadn’t been able to achieve it without the help of a masseuse or a strong prescription.

  Figuring Donovan was attempting the same beyond the wall that was probably more plastic than plaster, she fumbled her hand around on the bed and when she finally located her phone set the timer for fifteen minutes of nothing.

  It beeped at her almost immediately, ending her failing attempts to relax, so she peeled herself from the bed and knocked on the adjoining door.

  “Whaaat?” the stretched word carried through the panel, Donovan clearly not any happier than she was with the development. The sound of dragging feet came, then he undid the lock. So she explained the logistics of the new meeting while he looked at her like she was trying to tell him the moon was made of cheese.

  It was nearly an hour later when they came through the front doors of the Brookwood PD. This time they stood out even more than usual, their tailored suits incongruous to the plastic bags of Styrofoam and Tex-Mex they carried. Eleri balanced a drink tray with even more Styrofoam in the form of three large cups. Each was big enough for Eleri to bathe in and she had all she could do just to balance the things.

  Westerfield was late. Not a surprise, but Eleri and Donovan were halfway through the meal when he walked through the door, the ever-present quarter walking across his knuckles. It quickly disappeared into his suit jacket pocket as he closed the door behind him, deftly seating himself in the remaining seat.

  Always a meticulous man, he first arranged the to-go box and plastic ware and drink. Always direct, he then looked from one to the other of them and said, “Tell me why you’re balking at taking out Baxter.”

  Donovan nearly choked on his enchilada sauce, but Eleri didn’t flinch. “Because I don’t just shoot people. I’m not a killer. I’ve worked hard to take the killers out of society. I won’t become one of them, no matter the purpose.”

  The man stayed calm, her affront worthless to him. “This way you keep him out of society. He won’t appeal his way back in. None of these people will have to testify at his parole hearings to keep him locked up. He can’t disappear and pop up under another name in ten years, doing the same thing only worse.”

  Clearly Westerfield was convinced of the job. Eleri wasn’t. “I don’t have the information yet. All we have is hearsay. I can’t just go in and take him out on that alone.” She tried to stem the tide rising in her voice but she was pretty sure she failed.

  She moved her meter to “definitely certain” when Westerfield sighed at her, sat back, and folded his hands across his chest. “That’s the problem.”

  “Yes, it is. If I’m out of a job, so be it.” She didn’t want to be out of a job, but she would leave before she would simply execute.

  Westerfield only stared at her a moment before turning to Donovan. “Do you feel the same?”

  A brief nod was all her partner gave. Eleri had expected more. Hadn’t he taken an oath? Could doctors kill if it saved more lives? She had no idea and her boss was staring at her, so she figured this—like so many things—could wait to be pondered another day.

  “You have the job description wrong.”

  No, she was pretty sure he’d given her a kill order.

  Eleri raised her eyebrows and waited.

  “Your job is to gather evidence. If you feel you know that Baxter is the one behind it all and if you’re certain beyond doubt that his removal will save other lives, then you have an executive order to remove him. That’s it.” He looked at her again. “This is not an assassination. You’re right, we don’t know about Baxter yet. But you are no longer stuck waiving evidence and losing opportunities because of structured methodology and evidentiary proceedings for future court cases. I’ve untied your hands. That’s all.”

  She leaned back, her food no longer appealing and she was suddenly glad he’d been late. At least she managed to get a good portion of her meal consumed before he showed up and ruined it for her. Being judge and jury was both appealing and concerning, but better than the kill order she thought she’d been issued.

  Until she came to grips with it, they were at a bit of a standstill. She and Donovan were still stuck on how to get Baxter out of the City, and they didn’t know how to get one of them in—or at least how to get the one they did get in back out safely—but she pushed that aside too. Waiting until Westerfield started to eat again, she asked him, “What about t
he quarter?”

  His sigh was nearly a laugh. “It’s a NightShade rite of passage to ask me that question.”

  Suddenly she wondered if Wade had sent her on a fool’s mission, a mild hazing passed from one generation of recruits to the next.

  Westerfield didn’t let her ponder that long. “I won’t even ask who put you up to it. Usually the more senior officer tells the new one. We rarely put two rookies together.” His voice trailed off as he pulled the quarter from his pocket and spoke in the softest, easiest tone she’d ever heard from him.

  “Welcome to the NightShade Division.”

  The quarter, sitting in his palm to start, slowly lifted, and began to rotate end over end.

  30

  Donovan closed the hotel door behind him, still in shock. He and Eleri hadn’t spoken a single word on the way home.

  Oh, they had chatted up a storm with Westerfield, his senior partner throwing accusations at his boss like darts.

  “That’s a trick quarter.”

  “So give me one of yours.” The man had calmly stated.

  When that one acted the same way, Eleri suggested he was using magnets. Westerfield asked for something plastic from her purse. Less than thirty seconds later, she pulled out a bottle of medication, popped the lid, and pushed the white plastic disk into his hand.

  After that danced like the quarters had, Donovan asked if that was the limit of Westerfield’s trick.

  “It’s not a trick. Get a pencil or a round pen. Put it on the table.”

  Pulling the grease marker from his bag, Donovan placed it near him. After a brief twitch, it rolled to the far edge of the table. When Eleri flashed her gaze toward him, Westerfield looked at the pen again and it rolled back the other way.

  Almost before Donovan could think it, Eleri shook her head, dipped low to look at the man’s knees. “You’re tilting the table.”

  Without a word, Westerfield stood, hands out, palms forward and walked backward until he was against the wall. The pen jerked slightly, this time rotating first and strolling off in another direction as though it had simply decided it didn’t like the conversation and wanted to leave.