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

by A. J. Scudiere

  As she watched, he lifted his head, sniffed at the air, and occasionally stilled to listen. Eleri trusted his senses, but after what she’d seen last night, she wasn’t sure she trusted him.

  She couldn’t say why. It wasn’t just because of what he was. She still trusted Wade and Wade was the same kind of beast. There had been something feral in that trailer, in the way Donovan was raised. Could he outgrow that?

  They encountered a fallen tree and she automatically grabbed for the groundhog, helping to lift it over and set it back down on the other side. The motion didn’t interrupt the disturbing path of her thoughts. His father had been unfettered, a killer. Was that genetic? Was it simply part of the wolf? Maybe Wade just hid it better.

  She should ask him if he hunted—if he killed—while he was out. She should ask both of them. But now was neither the time nor the place to wonder. They approached the open grounds and were ready to start.

  The tech had reiterated their standard evidence collection training—make a grid, only giving a closer look if the initial pass showed something. But they didn’t need to grid. Donovan could smell it. They knew exactly where to go.

  Though her night vision goggles were handy, Eleri didn’t reach for them. The moon had passed full just a few nights before, giving enough light to her adjusted eyes and presumably even more to Donovan’s adapted ones.

  They stood at the edge of the trees, his signal telling her that, except for the bodies below, they were alone. Eleri now held the poles, ready to be snapped into place when they found the first body. Staying back in the shadows with the equipment, she watched as Donovan walked out into the open.

  Fully man, his walk was still wild, more leonine than anything. It was there in the way his head slid forward to catch a scent, the way he would turn, literally following his nose. Eleri could almost see molecules floating by on small currents. When he was on top of the first body, he dropped fluidly to all fours and while he still appeared human she could see the wolf underneath as his head dipped close to the grass. His eyes turned glassy for a moment, his hands gripping the earth as he focused on the scents. When his head tipped up, the eyes that locked on hers were not those of the man she knew.

  Confident that it was her mind playing tricks in the moonlight, Eleri came forward, poles in one hand, machine rolling along behind her.

  Donovan stood, her partner again, taking the poles and stepping back while she ran the machine slowly over the spot. It did not produce a clean picture of the buried body, but it did give enough. The changes in ground density showed clearly where the head was, the legs, that the arms were folded in across the chest in a disturbing rendition of a hug.

  Bone density was different than flesh, fresh tissue different than decay, and she could see now what Donovan could smell. She wouldn’t have known how to identify it without the training yesterday. The tech had run them over a small batch of prep tissues so they could learn the difference.

  “It’s relatively fresh.” She spoke softly, looking up to see Donovan nodding in response. The ground was flat, the grass grown back in, so this wasn’t from a week ago, but it wasn’t years old either. In a few moments she had a fuller picture and they began the tissue extraction. The two of them hovered over the groundhog, watching the screen send back images as the tip of the pole inched closer and closer to the body. Eleri was aiming for what was left of the liver. When Donovan removed the pole and collected the core sample of tissue from the tip, she directed him to go back for another. They were trying for muscle this time; she aimed for the quadriceps.

  They worked slowly, her own muscles aching from the tension. They bagged and marked samples from three more bodies, one barely a toddler, before calling it quits.

  She would have loved to stay and work more, but her watch told her they were approaching the dawn hours. They would be back the next night and the next, if need be.

  Reversing the process at the back gate of the SUV, they peeled layers of weapons and samples, loaded in the equipment, and headed back to the hotel. Parking the car in another out-of-the-way spot, they entered the hotel through the same side door they had left from hours earlier. Quietly parting ways, heading into their separate rooms, Eleri presumed Donovan did the same as her and showered off the night. She scrubbed at the knowledge that she’d been walking through the woods with samples of decaying human flesh in her pockets.

  Never mind that it was what she had come for. Never mind that it shouldn’t give her the willies. It did.

  Clean and tired, she pulled the blackout curtains though it was still dark out. Daylight was coming and she wanted to sleep through it. Eleri forced herself to read for a while, wanting to fall into a normal sleep. While she managed that beautifully, she forgot to put the Do Not Disturb sign back on the door and was awakened by the cleaning crew mid-morning.

  Upright, in spite of the fact that she didn’t want to be, Eleri set to work, calling into the Dallas branch and finding a courier to get the samples into the lab as soon as possible.

  After fetching a plate of disturbingly rubbery eggs at the hotel continental breakfast, she parked herself at her computer for a while, culling missing children reports looking for Grace’s family, and not thinking about the DNA she had sent from Mercy to check against the Cohns.’ Her chest squeezed each time she thought about it.

  As it had been the last time she searched the missing children database, the hunt to match Grace was also flooded with too many possible matches. Eleri had weeded out boys first, then children who went missing in non-summertime months. She weeded out the blondes. She weeded out children with single parents. She weeded out the possible runaways. And then she began hand sorting. Or she started to.

  The list was still too big, too depressing. It should be manageable with all she had dismissed out of hand, but it wasn’t. Her data was old and even more disturbing for its lack of completeness. Her list also was only comprised of the kids who were still missing all these years later. The facts were, a lot of kids went missing and no one had really been able to put a dent in those numbers.

  More upset than anything, Eleri busied herself printing pictures. The face on the posters was only one of many in a police file. When she checked through the records, some had family pictures from the time of abduction. She printed them all, hoping Grace would recognize someone.

  In the meantime, Donovan had woken up and messaged her that he was uploading and reviewing the images from the groundhog. He was manipulating the pictures for clarity, marking anything he could ID—like height, weight, estimated burial date, male or female—then sending them on to Eleri.

  She let him work on his own, only occasionally stopping to think that he was probably sitting less than five feet away at his own desk, as his room was a mirror image of hers. If she looked at the wall, was he looking back from the other side? While she didn’t think he could smell her, there was every likelihood he heard her walking around over here.

  So he probably heard her put on a skirt that she unrolled from the bottom of her bag and slip on a pair of sandals and head out the door with a click that reverberated down the hallway.

  Swinging by the hospital first, Eleri let Mercy know that she could move to the safehouse in just a few days. Charity’s parents were ready to take her home, having been in Texas a week already, and Jonah would need the company. They had enough statements from these witnesses that this wouldn’t damage any court cases. Regardless of what Westerfield said, Eleri still thought in terms of evidence and prosecution.

  After spending only a few minutes with the girl and still not finding anything that suggested she was or wasn’t Jennifer, Eleri headed to Grace’s room. Grace was older, no longer a minor even if she didn’t know her exact age. Reuniting her with her parents wasn’t a priority for the FBI. But to Eleri it was. If she was going to pull the trigger on Joseph Hayden Banks, then she wanted to control where the debris rained down as much as possible.

  It took longer for Eleri to introduce the pictures she w
anted Grace to look at than it took for Grace to race through them. The shots were old family photos, click-camera versions, printed from actual film. Though they had been scanned, there wasn’t the time or budget to touch them up. The clothing and even the tint to the pictures were from another era. Still Grace rapidly sorted out five possible matches, her choices making it obvious that she didn’t remember her father very well, but the mothers all looked remarkably similar.

  Eleri took a quick cheek swab to add to the next days’ courier batch into Dallas and noted the five couples to test against. Warning Grace not to get her hopes up, she left the woman to her monotonous existence and went to check in with Officer Traynor, currently standing guard. When she asked, he informed her no one unusual had tried to get into see either woman.

  Disappointed, and reminding the officer to arrest on the spot with the authority of the FBI, Eleri headed out of the sterile confines of the hospital, finally hungry. Doing what she’d wanted to do for days, she found her way to a local grocery store, but even that felt foreign. Every place seemed to follow Texas rules: lots of meats, lots of processed, pre-packaged food, few vegetables. Nothing organic.

  Sighing and realizing it was the best she was going to get for a while, she grabbed a plastic basket and headed into the small produce section. She managed to pick up a bag of tangelos, promising herself she’d eat them all. Even more limited by her lack of a kitchen, Eleri grabbed two bananas and a bag of grapes, suddenly disproportionately grateful for the tiny refrigerator in her room. She snagged a Braeburn, the most exotic apple she could find. She managed carrot sticks and a small, overly expensive bag of weak-looking sugar snap peas, but she took it anyway.

  She was drooling over her purchases when she turned around and spotted two men heading directly down one of the aisles. They moved with purpose straight through the store, pushing one of the larger carts, entirely empty. There was something else about them that tickled her brain. So Eleri followed them to the back, checking out the goods on the shelves as she went and adding two cheap cans to her basket as though she were actually shopping. After cautiously listening in, she figured out they were picking up a large special order of beef. Enough to feed the City?

  When they turned around to talk while they waited for their order, she could see them better but still wasn’t able to look at their faces clearly, not without giving something away.

  While she hadn’t come face-to-face with any of the men from the City, there was nothing to prevent the good people in town from talking about the two FBI agents who’d showed up. If these guys were good and paranoid, they would have at least an idea what she looked like, so she spent another moment studying cans before grabbing a third can she didn’t need and walking away. But it had been long enough to see that one of the men had a cough and was rubbing his hands oddly due to a rash there. Both wore body armor beneath their jeans and T-shirts.

  43

  Donovan woke from a bright dream where he was caught in daylight as a wolf. That, in and of itself, wasn’t the problem, it was the crowd of people standing around, all of whom knew what he was. Eleri was there, Dr. Wade de Gottardi in his plaid shirt and khaki pants, Senior Agent in Charge Westerfield, his buttoned blazer and full suit not bothering him in the Texas heat. Donovan panted as he scanned the circle closing in on him.

  He spotted an unfamiliar face but recognized her voice as Agent Annie Kinnard, the one who’d done the recon on the Colliers. Several of the women and kids from the City of God were there. They, too, pointed as the crowd turned angrier.

  On the verge of pure terror as the dream morphed into a good old fashioned lynching, Donovan woke in a sweat worse than any the sticky humidity had visited upon him.

  Even when the dream began to recede, his thoughts washing it back like the tide, the things that replaced it weren’t comforting. Though Eleri said she’d forgiven his trespassing on her personal space, they had never gotten back to their original camaraderie. He considered bribing her with fresh vegetables, but aside from stealing them from the gardens at the City, it wasn’t going to happen. He kept offering her ice cream, but she turned him down each time.

  Other than that, he didn’t know how to get back into her good graces. They worked, they ate. In several weeks they hadn’t had a break. He only knew what food she liked because eating was a necessity. She had mentioned her family home on Cape Hatteras more than once, but he couldn’t buy that for her, she already had it, and he couldn’t even send her there.

  He was out of ideas, stuck waiting to see if she would come around.

  On the other hand, information on the case was coming in almost faster than they could process it. They had gone out two more nights, collecting samples from the unmarked cemetery. The last night, as sunlight peeked over the trees, Donovan had gone on high alert, letting Eleri do all the work—handling the machine as well as the collection device. With the light, it was far more likely that someone was awake and wandering their way.

  They became better and faster as they went, their motions complementary, each seeming to sense what was needed to complete the task. Eleri bagged and tagged the samples, while Donovan scouted the next gravesite. He stalked the perimeter, checking for danger while she scanned the body.

  They completed six bodies the second night and eight the third, capturing samples from each corpse, and bringing the total to a disturbing eighteen. Given the way the dead were wrapped, they were retaining at least some of their tissue for a handful of years. The data was coming back that the oldest corpse was seven years dead—though that had an uncertainty of two years either way. Donovan’s math said even the low end was a high death count for a smallish cult, even under conditions lacking medical treatment. On the other end, eighteen in five years was significantly higher if the results were off on the short side.

  More concerning than that were the DNA matches.

  The toddler they found the first night matched Jonah as a half-sibling and the Baxters as a grandchild—which meant this was Joseph’s child, not from Jonah’s mother. It also had Down Syndrome. Donovan wondered about the death, unable to avoid thoughts that Joseph would kill an imperfect child without compunction. So he examined the images from that small body more carefully. He asked Eleri to do the same—she was the forensic specialist after all—but neither could find anything convincing one way or another.

  Several of the older bodies didn’t match anyone. Not each other, not anyone they had tested. Grace, for example, matched to no one in the cemetery. She claimed she had no offspring but that all the members were her brethren. Genetically, that was not the case and she was definitely an import. Charity also matched to no one. On the other hand, Jonah showed relationships to three of the bodies—the toddler, a woman (probably an aunt, though they hadn’t heard anything about Joseph bringing in his wife’s sister), and a cousin, as it matched as the woman’s child.

  The odd chains of cross matches and solo tests got Donovan thinking. So far, many of the linked people had been raised there, and many of the unlinked were possibly kidnapping victims. But he wondered what the likelihood was of matching them to old records, whether it was worth the time. They certainly had a lot on their own table and that clock was ticking.

  Mark and Lilly Baxter had decided not to leave for home until Jonah was ready to go with them. Jonah and Charity wanted to be sure their friends were safe before they left the area. The agents at the house reported the two were growing more anxious over time rather than calmer—the opposite of adjusting. Adding Mercy to the household had apparently not helped. Instead of placating the group, showing that people were exiting the City and finding safety, she brought agitation. They began to fear Zeke even beyond the boundaries of the City and they were growing more afraid for friends left behind.

  Agent Bozeman reported that the group was holding prayer meetings several times a day, with the elder Baxters joining in and Charity’s parents standing by, bewildered. Jonah had even picked up the phone and called Donovan on several o
ccasions to plead with them to get the others out. Given his lack of phone etiquette and poor conversational skills over the line, Donovan was pretty certain the kid had never used a phone before. If, like the Amish, they believed links to the outside were links to sin, then the kid was pretty determined and thus very scared.

  Mercy and Grace had said the men in the City were crazy and getting worse. When Donovan questioned them further—he and Eleri were working separately a good bit now—he asked specific questions and found out that things in the City had been steady for a long time after Joseph took over, but they had begun changing lately.

  It seemed the men had started something that “brought God’s bounty” to the group. The women said there had been more meat and more weapons, recently. And as the men had more success, they became more volatile, quicker to anger, more lenient in their interpretation of God’s words.

  His computer chimed with a pop-up message from “AAKinnard.” Donovan read it hoping that the encryption held, that none of the City guys had computer skills or knew anyone who did. After downloading and watching the video she’d sent, he knew they had just hit endgame.

  Standing, he stretched, avoiding his task for just a few moments longer. Eleri was on the other side of the wall, the two of them holed up in their hotel rooms for yet another day. Mostly, the workload was so heavy that it was engrossing and he didn’t notice, but right now, he felt the walls pushing at him.

  Knowing it wouldn’t be any better in her room, Donovan knocked on the adjoining door and waited until he heard the noises of the chair rolling back on the small tiled area of the floor, Eleri’s feet on the carpet. She hadn’t put on shoes and was possibly even shoe-averse. So much he didn’t know. But he heard her bare feet padding up to the door and the metal of the lock offering a slight song as it slid back. “Yes?”