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

by A. J. Scudiere

  She pulled a pack of gum from her purse and smacked it onto the table. Westerfield rolled his eyes like a ten-year-old. That was almost more disconcerting to Donovan than any of the rest of what he was seeing. Still the gum twitched and in small fits and starts scooted across the table to sit right in front of Eleri, as though asking her to believe. Her frown indicated that she did not. Not yet.

  She was looking around when Westerfield sat down and waited expectantly.

  “You rigged the room.” Her voice lacked the conviction of her first statements.

  “You chose the room.” He rebutted her. “Can we stop now? I’m getting a headache.”

  After reaching into her purse and pulling out the pills she had just shoved back in there, Eleri had practically slapped the bottle in front of him. It was both an insult and an offer of help. Westerfield, still looking too buttoned-down for the demonstration he’d just given, sorted through the colors of pills she had obviously stashed over time. He laughed when she said gruffly, “I think the unmarked white ones are breath mints,” and he tossed the pill back with the last of his of soda.

  Bracing his palms against the table top and looking weary, the agent in charge nodded briefly in their direction. “I’m very tired. Report in as soon as you have anything.” Then he left.

  They had quietly thrown out the remaining food and walked toward the front of the building. Donovan had been the only one to speak, letting the front desk know they had thrown out leftover food in conference room B. The last thing they needed was to be known for leaving Tex-Mex to stink up the rooms.

  She’d driven them in silence. The click of the key, the roll of the engine, the road under the tires were all disruptively loud with nothing to contradict them. The elevator made noises as though it was tired and wanted to clock out at the end of a long day, but neither commented.

  In his own room, alone at last, Donovan slipped between the sheets and stared at the ceiling as he had for so many nights now—each night for a seemingly different but equally sleep-disturbing reason.

  Looking back, he could see that Westerfield had done this many times before. The man was, if not content, resigned to being center ring of this little dog and pony show for a short while. Donovan figured that made him the dog. And what was Eleri? Eleri visited her dead sister in her sleep and when she wasn’t doing that she was having revealing dreams. How had Eleri become the most normal one of them?

  His eyelids pulled back, his eyes widening suddenly. Donovan sat up with the revelation. NightShade. How many more “agents” were there and what could they do? Westerfield was recruiting an incredibly elite group. How had he figured out about Eleri? Had he gotten into her hospital records? Had he done it any normal way?

  How had Westerfield found Donovan?

  Donovan smelled Wade from down the hallway. So if any other wolves had come around and smelled him, wouldn’t he have smelled them, too?

  There were too many questions to hold on to. Too many links that when put together more resembled the web of a schizophrenic spider than anything organized or revealing.

  He tossed and turned for hours it seemed. But he must have gone to sleep at some point, because he woke up at precisely 3 a.m. according to the red-lettered hotel clock next to him. It was pitch black but he got up anyway. He had an idea.

  “YOU’RE NUTS.” Eleri shook her head at him.

  “I’ve been up for four hours checking everything. It matches.”

  He was still nuts and she was still hungry. “I want breakfast.” She didn’t want to listen to him, but she conceded if they could go eat something.

  He was dressed, if a little scattered looking, holding his tablet to his chest as though it were precious, as though it contained evidence. In the elevator, he started to say something, but she slickly cut him off.

  “I’m not talking about this until I get breakfast.” There was a beat where he nodded in agreement and she took advantage. “Until I get the breakfast I want.”

  She wanted the place that served fruit salad with two kinds of melon, pineapple, grapes and blueberries. Her mouth watered just thinking about it, and her head felt just a little less like it would explode. But that place wasn’t in Brownwood. Sadly, it was far from here.

  Resigned to the local fare, she drove them to the Red Wagon and was surprised by the crowd this time in the morning. There would be no place to sit and have a conversation. So Eleri took the next blow and agreed to take-out. She would eat—yet again—in a hotel room. The food would come—yet again—in Styrofoam. And it would—yet again—be less than it’s hottest, the service would be non-existent and anything missing or needed could not be fixed.

  She must have looked as despondent as she felt, because Donovan sighed. “Let’s eat here. Get served, keep the coffee hot—” Oh god, that sounded like heaven right now. “—and we’ll talk when we get back. It can keep.”

  She’d spent too many of the hours she was supposed to be sleeping trying to figure out Westerfield’s tricks. In the end, she couldn’t come up with anything on her own. Breathing heavily, angry at the world for being out of whack, she lay stiff in bed, wide-awake for about an hour, before she realized what she should do.

  At 3 a.m., she picked her way across the room, plucked her phone from her bag and called Wade. As asleep as he sounded when he picked up his end of the line, he still managed to answer with, “Took you that long to get Westerfield to show you the quarter trick?”

  “So it’s a trick.” Her heart released the mad rhythm it had held tight to, her shoulders drained tension like a jug pouring water, and her breath flowed freely out of her lungs for the first time that night.

  “Not like you mean. It’s real, Eleri.”

  Well, fuck.

  “Are you shitting me?” It was not a phrase she used often. Not one she’d been brought up with, but one she’d gotten from her first senior partner. He’d taught her about cowboy boots, Colt .44s and colloquialisms of the Deep South. Agent J. Birkley Raymer was one of a kind; he also taught her why she should let people underestimate her and he taught her to call a spade a spade. “I find it hard to believe you, Wade.”

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  She met that with a cold, hard silence and a moment of evil joy that she’d pulled him from a heavy sleep.

  “Yes, I omitted, but I never lied—”

  “Such an art form.” She cut him off, angry and letting it roll out the way she did with so few people. In her family, people were always happy and perfect and when they weren’t able to fake it they claimed some modern-day malady akin to “the vapors” and disappeared. Agent Raymer had done her huge favors.

  A sigh came from the other end of the line. “Have I ever lied to you about physics?”

  “No.” She had to answer that one. Wade thought Westerfield’s talent was physics? “So he’s manipulating magnets or something?”

  “No, Eleri. He’s manipulating energy. In a way the rest of us can’t.”

  Damn. Wade was telling her he’d reconciled it in his perfectly quantum world. Her eyes squeezed tight with pain and pressure and she was suddenly very tired.

  After hanging up, she crawled across the bed and dropped like a stone into the deepest pools of sleep. She awoke with neither dreams nor improvement to claim. And now she was eating a banana that was actively crossing the boundary of ripeness. It was the only fruit they could offer her, a rescue from the pile waiting to get to near rotting for their legendary banana bread. She muttered to herself as she ate the blueberry pancakes. “I’m going to Foxhaven after this case is over. I’m going to Foxhaven.”

  “Was that the name of the hospital?” Donovan tipped his head. It was a legitimate question, but she glared at him anyway.

  “It’s the name of our beach house. I’m going there after I escape this state with no fruit and I’m cutting the phone lines.” She would check with her father first, in case he was there, but her mother never went. Though Nathalie Eames had faked her return to sanity, s
he still never strayed far from Bell Point Farm or Patton Hall—the two homes Emmaline had lived in.

  Breakfast sat like a Civil War cannon ball in her stomach. If the food hadn’t been so easy to chew, Eleri would have thought it might have been cooked with actual lead shot in it. After all, two men sat at a nearby table, both wearing Civil War army caps, one gray, one blue, having a normal conversation while Eleri looked on. Surely she was hallucinating.

  “I assure you they are quite real.” Donovan had followed her gaze as he sipped the last of his coffee, his plate once again clean and his expression revealing absolutely no gastric discontent. Donovan only shrugged. Suddenly she wanted to get out of there as much as she’d wanted to get out of the hotel in the first place.

  On the drive back to the hotel, she spotted a grassy area with park benches. Cutting a sharp left and squealing the tires as she pulled into a spot, Eleri used all her FBI aggressive driving skills and earned some dirty looks from the moms and dads dotting the edges of the nearby playground. She stepped from the car and felt the warm air wrap her like a blanket, the day still too new to do too much damage. Marching away and figuring Donovan would follow, she planted her butt on a park bench. When he did the same, she turned to him and simply said, “Spill.”

  He nodded. “I’m going to do another recon run. We’ll use GPS like before. I won’t go in, won’t make contact, but I’ll see what I can find out. I can stop and listen in to conversations. See if anything has changed.”

  Eleri agreed to that. Though if it was rational and well planned or just the best thing she’d heard, she couldn’t tell. She did know they had successfully sent Donovan on a run before; they had even gotten Jonah out of that event. This one would have to go better now that Eleri knew what she was dealing with.

  “Also, we get the elder Baxters down here. We test them against Jonah. Screw JBH’s DNA, we don’t need it.”

  “Sure, but we don’t need to bring them here for that.” It was too much, they could mail DNA samples, and—

  He cut through her thoughts. “But we do need them here. We install them in town. Send them to church.”

  Eleri saw where he was going with this. “And draw Baxter out.”

  His nod confirmed it. It also confirmed that he’d done at least something productive with his awake hours last night. She’d only harassed a good friend. She was mentally composing her apology to Wade when Donovan’s next words cut through.

  “And you start carrying Baxter’s picture with you. Sleep with it. Look at it. Keep it in your wallet. Touch it whenever you can.”

  She knew she was looking at him like he was five kinds of batshit. Donovan held his hand up as though there was a logical explanation.

  “When you were on the profiling team, you touched things all the time. Victims’ clothing. Photos of the suspect. Evidence.”

  She really wished she hadn’t told him all that. This was not going to be good.

  He didn’t seem to notice her disdain.

  “I think part of what you are doing is called psychometry.”

  31

  Eleri stared blankly at Donovan. Psychometry? He didn’t know what he talking about. And what did he mean “what you are doing”? He stared back, not comprehending that she was not comprehending.

  A few weird predictive dreams didn’t put her in the same class as him and Westerfield.

  Donovan apparently disagreed.

  The people in the park had decided to ignore them, probably since her wild driving hadn’t resulted in an actual accident. She knew she should care. Pissing off the locals in general was a bad idea in a town this small. Chances were good that at least one of the parents monitoring the children on the playground was married to a local cop. Given that the obvious parental activity was gossip, her parking skills were probably the least of her worries.

  The woman in the hospital should come around any time now—Eleri checked her phone, not caring that it was a bit rude to Donovan. Sadly, no one had called her so she could call back and be a little ruder.

  Slouching back on the hard bench, Eleri crossed her arms over her chest. This sucked. There were too many things to deal with and too much to do, leaving her with no time for sorting the rest of it out. While she was originally just threatening to disappear to Foxhaven after this was all over, she was now considering actually tapping out for a while. She had a trust fund, and while she generally preferred to earn her own way, not going insane—again—had a lot of merit.

  “Eleri,” Donovan tried to get her attention. “You can do something amazing.”

  “Not on command. It just happens.” She still didn’t look at him, just stared up into the trees and listened to the sounds of the birds overhead. For a moment she worried that they would poop on her. Then she worried that it wouldn’t make her day that much worse.

  “But I think you can start to do it on command. Like everything else, it’s a gift if you make it one.”

  “Not so much.” She didn’t like knowing her sister was dead. Not being able to tell her parents made the burden heavier. Nathalie and Thomas Eames already thought she deserved to be in the loony bin just for joining the FBI. They had no idea that she knew from a young age the life they had prescribed would surely make her crazy. What she hadn’t known was that the Bureau would make her nuts, too.

  “I spent hours reading up on it.” Donovan’s hands twitched as though he wanted to use that tablet, produce actual evidence and convince her. Well, he had her number on that one. But since she didn’t want to be convinced, she didn’t want to see this evidence either.

  “Psychometry is actually one of the more common types of extra sensory perception. It’s believed that the person touches an object and picks up on energy or ‘residue’ left by a person who handled that object.” He paused as though letting her soak it in. “Precognitive dreams are actually relatively universal. Almost everyone has experienced a dream that, at least in some part, has come to pass.”

  “Shut up.” She still didn’t look at him. Eleri spent far too big a portion of her life being good. Staying close by, never being out of her mother’s sight, and never complaining. After all, she was still there, and wasn’t that supposed to be good enough? Appearing as if all was well was better than actually being well. So her odd dreams and the fact that some of them came to pass was nothing she ever told her parents. That she saw her sister, living with another family, being seated at a dinner table the likes of which a thirteen-year-old daughter of a first family had never seen, had never been discussed.

  Eleri did what she was good at: she deftly changed the subject. “How do we get the Baxters down here?”

  Donovan’s head jerked back a little, as though affronted that she had ignored his great revelation. Then he got it together and joined into the conversation she was willing to have. “I was thinking by plane.”

  “They may prefer to drive. Do you think they’ll talk to us over the phone or do we have to go back up there in person to convince them?” There were always more questions generated than answered.

  This time, Donovan leaned back on the bench. Being taller than her by a reasonable margin, there was no way he could slouch enough to rest his head against the back slats the way she had. Eleri could not call her position comfortable; Donovan’s had to be worse. Though she waited, he didn’t cry foul, and in fact seemed to act as though he had committed to the position regardless of the pain. “I really don’t want to fly back, but we need them here and we need them here under solid pretenses. I’m not confident of the best way to do that. Won’t JHB get suspicious if his parents turn up right around where he’s settled down? So I don’t know if the tourist routine would work.”

  “I’m thinking we get them here and have them actively look for him. If someone is getting word in and out of the City of God—and they must be, because they have guns and ammo and military outfits, which don’t grow in gardens—then JHB should know relatively soon that they’re here.”

  “Do you think we ca
n convince them to help? They seemed to want nothing to do with him.”

  She had been thinking the exact same thing, which was why she was one step ahead. “I think they’ll want to meet their grandson. And if, on the off chance he’s not their grandson, they may apply to be foster parents and take him home with them anyway.”

  “You’re matchmaking foster families now?”

  “I think I’m reuniting a genetic family. And I think I’m putting a kid with a deep religious belief in the kindness of God into a family that shares that belief, and into a community not too soul-shockingly different from where he grew up.” She felt her jaw clench and realized that she had bonded to Jonah far more than she should have.

  Donovan saw that. “Shouldn’t we leave that to the professionals? Don’t you think that’s out of our jurisdiction?”

  Using her hands, she scooted her butt back into the appropriate place on the bench and sat up straight and tall. Her chest ratcheted down and she felt her eyes sting at the thoughts. “I think you’re a fucking mythical creature. That’s what I think.”

  He started to protest but she steamrolled him, paying attention not to his feelings or hers, but only to not being overheard in this sunny little patch of park that was getting far too warm. “I think I just saw my boss bend gravity. I think you just tried to label me as psychic and I think we don’t have any jurisdiction at all anymore. So if I can’t do this one good thing for this kid who really deserves it, then screw it all.”

  DONOVAN WAS STILL LEANING BACK on the bench, in no position to pop up, when Eleri stood sharply and walked away. He scrambled to follow her, nearly dropping the tablet he’d hauled around all morning for no apparent purpose.

  She was hitching her purse over her shoulder, a normal enough movement if it hadn’t been so stiff, and he saw that she already clutched the car keys in her hand. Not trusting her to not drive off, Donovan praised his long legs and her short ones and strode to catch up.