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

by A. J. Scudiere

  Later, there were images of the men digging, a long black bag laid out on the ground beside the grave-sized hole. Though there were no pictures of the men putting the bag into the hole, pulling back the cover to expose the corpse or even killing the man, it was relatively damning.

  Now he had photographic proof—time and location stamped—of them digging in the exact location of a grave that would turn up a corpse. It had taken him hours to find it, but he was glad he did.

  Turning to Eleri, he asked, “Any ideas?”

  ELERI SHOOK HER HEAD. She knew exactly what Donovan was asking about. How were they going to get those bodies out?

  The graves were on private land, and they had no evidence except the scent of decaying flesh. Even that information was suspect because it came from a dog who didn’t really exist and certainly wasn’t trained to be a cadaver dog—aside from being an ME.

  Her head hurt.

  She swiveled her chair, bumping her knees into the side of Donovan’s. Scooting back, she stood swiftly and declared a break. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s get out of this damn stuffy little room, do something and brainstorm.”

  “What is there to do here?”

  “I don’t even begin to know.”

  That was how they wound up talking about digging up graves while eating ice cream and sitting on a picnic table at Lake Brownwood. With the pavilion empty and shading them from the sun, the ice cream and the thought of having to return to the hotel room made it just bearable enough to sit outside and talk.

  Eleri attacked the three scoops of various chocolates. It was about two scoops too many, but she ceased to care when she stepped outside and was wrapped in a blanket of humidity. She threw out her opening gambit. “Okay, any idea at all will be discussed regardless of merit. We have no shame here.”

  With a nod from Donovan, his mouth full with one of the last bites he was going to get, she threw out the starting pitch. “Okay, the wolf goes in and digs stuff up. Very under the radar, he can use his paws, no tools needed. If anything is discovered it’s just animals digging up the bodies. All normal. Once the body is dug up all the way, I’ll come in, bag it, and drag it away.”

  It was a bad plan right from the start. But she knew why she thought that, she wanted to hear what Donovan thought. He didn’t disappoint.

  “Why would animals dig it up now? I think the men originally put the bodies deep enough to keep things out, which is why we never saw a graveyard on satellite images.” He set his empty bowl aside with the clack that sturdy cardboard cups made, and spoke again. “Also, if they catch you, they’ll shoot you. And they’ll know they’ve been robbed—probably by the next morning.”

  Shit.

  She had thought about getting shot. She was even ready to wear Kevlar, but body armor was heavy, and every bit you wore slowed you down and restricted your movement, thus making you more likely to get shot. But she had not considered that, without a body in the ground, there was no good way to make things appear undisturbed. “Actually, even if we return the dirt, once we take the body out, the ground will depress.”

  He was nodding, but she continued.

  “Even if we cut the grass, roll it out of the way like sod, and roll it back when we finish, there will still be a depression in the ground.” She leaned back on her hands. “So even being as careful as possible, we can only postpone their recognition that their graves were robbed. Maybe by a few days, a week, but that’s it.” She sighed. “As soon as someone sees that series of bowls in the field, they’ll know something is up. And they’ll check.”

  With her, Donovan added, “It may be as soon as the next morning. They only need to dig up one to see the body is missing.”

  “So we need the bodies, but we can’t take them. Not until after everyone is arrested and parceled out.” Not until after they didn’t really need the information anymore. Eleri tamped her frustration down with ice cream. “Even if we can figure how to get them out without alerting the men and getting killed while we do it, we have to cover our tracks so thoroughly to keep from getting discovered that there’s almost no way to do that.”

  “Okay, other side then. What do we need from these bodies? What will get us the kind of evidence we can use?”

  “We need the bodies. We need them to get the evidence!” She hated the knots in her stomach that told her it was all in vain.

  Donovan tried again, “But what specifically will you get from those bodies?”

  “Height, weight, ID.”

  “What if the body is so decayed that we can’t see that? Some smelled really old, and these were non-casket burials, all of them are degrading rapidly. It’s not going to be like a normal exhumation.”

  “I know. But if I can see the pelvis or maybe the skull, a few long bones, I can ID male or female, make a ball park estimate of age. If we have DNA, we can check against the parents’ swabs from missing kids and maybe lay some people to rest. Maybe prove how they died and when. It may prove that Baxter or even this Zeke guy was involved.”

  Donovan stared off into the distance. “So what about GPR?”

  Ground penetrating radar wasn’t quite ready for what they needed. “It shows disturbed earth, where burials happened, but we need the bones. We already know where the graves are, we know where to dig. With your senses you can probably even estimate how deep. Since you can tell how old they are, you’re already way better than GPR.”

  They were quiet for a minute, looking out over the water, watching boaters and wakeboarders off in the distance. Eleri figured there were probably a few bodies down there. The lake was big enough. Probably someone who disappeared, someone murdered and weighted and dumped over the side of a boat in the middle of the night. They wouldn’t be found without sonar, she thought.

  “Donovan! Sonar! Ultrasound. There’s a new device, it uses the full range of waves and returns a picture.” Excited now and popping up from her seat, she threw out fully half of her remaining ice cream. Now waving her hands, she went on. “It’s experimental, but it returns a picture. It’s better if things are shallower. The images get fuzzier at greater distance, but we might be able to get our hands on one.”

  Following her, Donovan threw out his empty container and added his two cents. “If we can find the bodies, we can take core samples without disturbing the ground. And we can do it relatively quickly.”

  “Yes! Then we can match DNA. If we can find the body and get a sample, that’s good. If we can get a picture of the body, or the bones, that’s better.” Okay. They had something, she hoped. Lots of the GPR systems she’d seen had more resembled a heavy lawn mower than a metal detector. Though the experimental machine operated differently, she had no reason to think it would be smaller. Still it might work.

  She was already making plans: she’d call the branches, see what she could requisition, how long it would take to get it out to Brownwood, and would they need a tech? A lesson? Her brain was churning and when her phone rang she answered absently. “Agent Eames.”

  “Miss Eames, this is Mark Baxter.”

  “Oh!” She stopped dead for a moment before remembering her manners. “Hello.” Unsure if they were reporting something useful or just asking questions, Eleri stopped walking and focused on the phone call. These people were doing the case a huge favor and they were very out of their element; they deserved her full attention despite her own scattered thoughts. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, we went out like you said. Used the old picture of Joseph and sometimes that mug shot you sent us.”

  “Thank you again for that.” She inserted the words when he paused, wondering if he needed to hear that he was doing it right.

  “We went around Zephyr and then around Mills.” Another pause. “We’ve found eight people who know our son. They say he comes by all the time.”

  39

  Eleri was stunned.

  In a little over twenty-four hours the elder Baxters had done far more than she had even dared to imagine.


  The four of them were waiting on dinner—Mark Baxter had requested steak and Eleri didn’t have the heart to refuse him—at yet another back table. For a moment, Eleri dreamed of sitting in a coffee shop right in the front, the sun streaming through a plate-glass window, maybe even greeting other patrons that she knew as they came in. It was a pipe dream. There were no places like that anywhere, not for her. While she could sit by a window and sip a coffee, there wasn’t a single town where she knew the people well enough to say hello.

  Her daydream only lasted a second or two. Mark Baxter clasped his hands before he spoke, managing to look pious even at the glossy thick wooden table, even beneath the cowboy art and horseshoes hanging on the wall beside them. “We did just as you said, ma’am.” He offered a respectful nod toward Eleri, making her wonder if she deserved this man’s deference in reality. “We showed the picture, said he was our son and that we were looking for him.”

  He sighed shallowly and his wife softly touched his arm, offering silent support. “I don’t know that I could have lied about it. I’m not proud of the fact, but I couldn’t say I wanted to see him again.”

  Eleri offered her own support, but she didn’t offer a touch, she offered science. “We do believe that Joseph is a sociopath—his morals are simply nonexistent. But it’s nothing you did. There are many studies showing that it’s simply something that happens in a certain percentage of the population.”

  When she finished speaking, Eleri realized that wasn’t necessarily as comforting as she wanted it to be. Since she didn’t have anything else to add, she shut up.

  Mark Baxter gave her the acknowledgment of a nod, pausing briefly before talking again. “The people who recognized him described him like in that drawing you showed us.”

  Which meant Joseph left the City of God recently enough that he bore the same hairstyle and look. Eleri pushed with that. “Did you find out when they last saw him?” She’d given them specific tasks, things to ask should they find anyone who had seen him. Operating under the assumption that JHB was running the show from the safety of the City, she assumed all of the instructions were just wishful thinking. Now Eleri was glad she pushed.

  He nodded sagely, and his wife let him speak. They were interrupted by the delivery of the food, and Eleri found herself staring at yet another piece of cooked cow. The others looked at it reverently as she forced her own matching smile.

  Mr. Baxter slowly ate a bite of steak, savoring every moment, while she willed her shoulders to relax, reminding herself that this man had the right of it.

  The likelihood of anything being solved tonight was slim to none. The Baxters would give her the information eventually. She simply needed to learn to wait for it, and she needed to find the joy in another steak. Deciding she was going to hit the nearest grocery store tomorrow and eat lunch right there in the produce section, Eleri cut into the meat.

  It took a surprising amount of effort to keep her attention where it belonged. The work was incredibly tense—people were being hurt, no doubt about it. But one of the key things an investigator needed to remember was not to live the case. Eleri was in danger of doing just that. It was difficult not to when she was stuck in a hotel room, and the only person she knew was her partner—and she didn’t know him that well or in any capacity outside of work. While she ate, she added a second directive for herself, get to know Donovan a little better. It would help them work together. When they went to San Antonio to pick up the GPR, she was going to have that lunch with Wade; the one where just the two of them chatted and caught up. The one that had been replaced by werewolf conversation last time.

  “They said he was there two days ago.”

  Jolted from her thoughts, Eleri slapped back to the present. “When did they first see him?”

  Finally, Lilly spoke up, maybe only because Mark had his mouth full. “They didn’t remember when they first saw him. Said he’d been a regular around there for a long time.”

  This time, Donovan turned and looked at her, clearly thinking the same thing she was. Joseph was out and about. He was doing something, the question was just “what?”

  Lilly shrugged and gave a cute smile. “The towns out here are just so close, and so small. There were only a few businesses to check—you know, the post office, the diners. So we went on to Mills. Then back to Early. People knew him in each place.” Another shrug. “Don’t know about Brownwood. We didn’t ask here. We wanted to wait and see what you thought.”

  Only able to nod through her churning thoughts, Eleri chewed her bite before speaking. “Tell me everything else they said.”

  She and Donovan ate and absorbed what information the Baxters had stored. Lilly even commented that she made notes each time she got back into their car—recording the name of the person and location where they had spoken. She added job title and everything she could remember that the person said.

  Eleri was about ready to choke on her dinner she was so impressed. When Lilly and Mark finally ran out of information—long after Eleri would have predicted—she turned and nodded to Donovan.

  At his agreement, she offered them a return. “We have some news for you.”

  Lilly’s eyes widened in fear, but Eleri rapidly quelled that. “The boy we told you about, we did a DNA test between you and him.” She paused as the implications seemed to set in. “He is your grandson.”

  Voice smaller than she’d heard from him before, Mark Baxter put his hand on his wife’s arm as though he were holding her back. “Joseph’s child.”

  It was simply stated and left to sit there, like the dishes that were near empty but clearly now abandoned on the table.

  Eleri again turned to science. “We have nothing to test against for Joseph, so we only know that Jonah is your grandson. But there’s no other way it could be, as far as I know.”

  Eleri added that last phrase as she always did. She was no longer surprised by the number of people who had illegitimate children, second families, decaying skeletons in their closets. But both the Baxters nodded.

  Mark Baxter followed up with, “What’s the probability of error?”

  No dummy there. He may be plainspoken and slow to respond, but it wasn’t for lack of intelligence. “Almost nothing. Not only does he match the correct percentage of DNA to be your grandson, he also matches key markers—dominant traits—that are gene-wise identical to yours. Which means he got them from you or from one of your near ancestors.”

  Eleri didn’t add, “Even if your wife had slept with your brother and that child had a child, the match wouldn’t be as good.” But she didn’t think insinuating anything other than the most pious behavior for Lilly Baxter would go over well at all.

  As she looked at the older woman, Eleri saw tears forming in her eyes. Turning to her husband, Lilly absorbed the shock. “Mark, we have a grandchild.”

  DONOVAN CLIMBED into the driver’s side of the rental, grateful that the car had been parked close. Grateful that at nine a.m. there hadn’t been a long walk, because even this early the heat was ruining his fresh feeling from the shower he’d just taken. He hoped the air-conditioning in the car would crank up quickly and the sickly, sticky feeling that had pressed upon him would go away. Just then, Eleri slid into the passenger seat and as she closed the door, the picture landed in his lap.

  Shit.

  Joseph Hayden Baxter stared up at him from a mug shot about fifteen years old. The tape at the edges told Donovan all he needed to know. This was the picture he had slid under Eleri’s pillow the first night they had checked in here. He was just surprised it had taken her this long to find it, when she spoke.

  “No, I didn’t have any dreams about him. Sorry.”

  The press of her lips into a thin line told him she was far angrier than her relatively light tone and words suggested.

  “I’m sorry.” He almost wasn’t. She was a goldmine and they needed her.

  “Fuck off.”

  He was pulling out of the parking lot, but her words seared through h
im and he slapped the brakes before swinging the car into the only shady spot. Throwing the car into park, he left the engine and the air running; there was a shitstorm brewing in the passenger seat and he didn’t want to melt or wreck while he figured it out.

  Though she appeared outwardly calm, Donovan knew better. She smelled angry and he could see the tension in her muscles under the smooth outer skin. She was furious, and it rolled off her, filling the car while she looked out the window as if waiting for them to go somewhere.

  Speaking softly, he broached the subject carefully. “It was just a picture.”

  “Physically, yes, you put a picture under my pillow. I finally let the cleaning service in yesterday. The maids found it.” The fact that it was far more than a picture was left to sit between them in the words she didn’t say.

  “What you can do, Eleri, it’s amazing. And you can help the case.”

  Finally, she turned to look at him. “Yes, but it’s what I can do. It’s mine. You don’t get to do it to me.” She looked out the window again. “I’ll officially be requesting a new partner when we get to San Antonio. If you’d like we can switch the order of events today and go there first. I’ll take care of the Colliers myself.”

  “I’m off the case?” Stunned, Donovan leaned back almost as though pushed.

  Blinking as if that would right a world tipped horribly off kilter, Donovan fought to control his racing heart. It was a slap, a stab at him, certainly far more than was warranted. Until right this moment, he hadn’t realized how much he enjoyed this job, how much he had needed the change in his life. Fundamental things had been missing and NightShade—particularly Eleri’s leadership—had brought them to him.