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

by A. J. Scudiere

  “It’s time.” He stepped over the threshold. Though the carpet was exactly the same from one room to the next, there was a seam at the doorway, an almost invisible barrier, separating what was hers and what was his. But they had orders. “I just got a message from Kinnard. She’s got three of the City of God brothers dealing bricks of coke to some local distributors. She tried to buy off them directly, but they sent her to another guy who was, quote, selling their shipment.”

  “Shit.” Eleri’s eyes widened. “That sounds like she tied it up.”

  “She knew exactly what she was looking for, who to follow and where to pick them up leaving the City. We gave her everything.” He was grinning. That was the way the FBI was supposed to work, fieldwork led to stings or busts, which garnered arrests and takedowns. It was pretty ideal right now, but it was less than an inch from becoming downright ugly.

  “What does she give us? I mean, besides the info. Specifically.”

  Donovan grinned. “How about video of three exchanges of drugs for money? She has the car—license plate included—leaving the privately owned property that the City is on. Same car at the deals, and when she spoke to them she wore a wire and took a pair of glasses with a small camera embedded. She got all of them dead to rights.”

  “Wow.” Eleri sat on the bed. “What about Joseph? Was one of the guys Joseph?”

  He sat next to her. “Of course not. She has him on other video, saying things that are pretty obviously instructions on the deals. But since it isn’t plain language, he’ll wiggle in court.” Donovan had watched it all the way through, hoping for incriminating wording. Joseph knew exactly what he was doing, what he was saying. His men did not.

  “Crap.”

  She looked off into the middle distance, beyond the walls with their textured wallpaper and sterile tone.

  Knowing she was processing, he started loading her up with data. “We have dead bodies. We can place men from the City of God burying them. We have missing children—”

  “None of whom seemed to go missing on Joseph’s watch.” Eleri was looking at him now, like him, building her own case in her mind.

  “True, but he led the City for years, he had to know where they came from. He has stores of illegal drugs, some of which are getting sold. Tonight we go in. I’ll make a run and check if they’re still there.”

  Nodding absently, she was looking into nothing again. He could see she was calculating the odds, checking her numbers. She was the senior agent, it was her call. The only thing Donovan could possibly see changing their trajectory was if Westerfield pulled them from the case.

  This time when she looked at him, she seemed more focused. “Let’s assume the drugs are still there. The evidence is overwhelming at this point. We know—even if we can’t prove it—that Joseph Hayden Baxter is a sociopath and that he’s killed several people himself. We also have multiple witnesses corroborating that he’s given kill orders in other instances.” Her eyes glazed a little and Donovan wondered if she was struggling the way he was with their orders to remove Baxter. “We have to shut the place down. Standard FBI procedures state that we have to stop the drug trafficking unless we’re keeping them in place for a specific sting operation. We aren’t, are we?”

  “Not that I’ve been told. There are no other agencies that I know of.” He shook his head. He was about to say it when she did.

  “Time to call Westerfield.”

  Pulling out her phone, she hit a few buttons and had the phone on speaker and ringing before Donovan was quite ready. At least this call was her dog and pony show; he for one was grateful not to actually be in charge here.

  “Eames!” the voice was hearty, pleased to be getting the call. Not at all weird and gravity defying, though Donovan couldn’t shake the image of the quarter and the message that they were all freaks. “Is Heath there, too?”

  “You’re on speaker, sir. And yes.” She spent just a few moments outlining the basic data, but she didn’t get through all of it before the Senior Agent in Charge told them they had more than enough.

  “Sir,” Eleri started. “What if other agencies are investigating this group? We don’t want to step on a Homeland Security inquiry or screw up a DEA sting.”

  Donovan thought maybe she just didn’t want to be the one running the raid, one that would surely leave dead bodies in its wake. But it was time to pull the trigger on this and Westerfield put her concerns to bed quickly.

  “That’s my job. I checked all of this before you started. In fact, it’s NightShade’s rule not to overlap.” He was calm and seemed to understand that Eames was balking slightly, but Westerfield wasn’t giving her room to wiggle. “It’s go time.”

  As Donovan watched, Eleri absorbed the words. Slowly she settled herself into the task. He could see it and he wondered if Westerfield could hear it over the phone.

  Her voice steadied as she asked, “What do we have at our disposal to run this op with? And what tips do you have for taking out our target without crossing standard boundaries?” She paused just a minute before adding, “And by the way, sir, we found Jennifer Cohn.”

  44

  Eleri woke in a cold sweat, clutching the picture of Joseph Hayden Baxter that she’d gotten back from Donovan. Opening her hand, she looked into the eyes of the crumpled face. She’d mangled the print in her sleep. She still hadn’t decided if she regretted taking the photo into bed with her.

  She didn’t want to see, but felt she needed to. She didn’t necessarily trust what she saw in dreams—the original dream about Bernard Collier had simply seemed like any ordinary dream. Until she saw the truck itself outside the truck stop diner, she’d had no idea any of that dream had been anything other than her subconscious stirring the stew of her daily thoughts for nighttime entertainment.

  But the dream of Donovan and his father had been too real, too raw, too fascinating, too frightening. Because of it she both ached for Donovan and mistrusted his instincts, though she was trying to put those thoughts away. Nothing he had done while she worked with him had given her cause to think he would turn on her. Nothing in his previous professional reputation had been anything other than stellar, if reclusive. Simply knowing he was his father’s son was concerning though.

  So Eleri now clung to the picture. The cup had worked so well—maybe too well—that she figured having the photo in her hands might be the key. Though she had dreamed of Joseph ruling over his family, and she had dreamed terrifying things, she still wasn’t sure she could follow orders and take him out. Dreams weren’t evidence.

  Still, what she’d seen was chilling. In her dreams, Joseph was King of the City of God, usually benevolent, but when she was close to him she could see inside.

  Joseph Hayden Baxter was blank.

  His decisions for benevolence—extra money for the gardens, even the seemingly simple and generous acquiescence to certain City members’ wishes—were all carefully calculated. He had figured out the minimums he had to give in order to get what he wanted, so he gave sometimes. Sometimes he put up a fight just to be able to back down in the end, appear as though he truly listened to the City members.

  And he was smart. He didn’t pick wildly outrageous fights. He chose things that would make sense, then graciously backed down. Outside of the community, he ran cocaine all over central Texas. He used his men to sell bricks to distributors, never dealing directly. While he was at it, he sold lies to his own people.

  Most of the men were true believers. Joseph told them God had directed them to come to him. He told them it was righteous to feed themselves from the gains of the sinners of the world. They couldn’t be expected to live in evil, they could only live on top of it.

  Despite the fact that he sold the American government as a nonentity to his followers, he knew he was breaking laws and he seemed to know exactly which ones. He was cautiously always in the back, setting his men up to take the fall should things go sideways on him. He didn’t say certain words nor did he ever handle any of the produc
t. His deniability came from his own capacity to lie straight-faced. It wasn’t so much that he believed his own lies, it was that he believed there was no consequence to the truth. Joseph felt no guilt for the fact that he had an exit strategy if and when the drug-running collapsed. He felt no guilt for throwing his people to the Feds to take the blame while his plans left him scot-free.

  To Eleri, his lack of concern about anything other than his own wants and needs was a revelation.

  A freedom.

  She craved his casual dismissal of the most heinous of his crimes.

  For Eleri felt guilt for everything. It was a mantle she wore every day. Not so much self-imposed, she worked hard to shed every bit she could, but in her past and her present she saw so much that it was impossible to save everyone. She understood that.

  It was like she’d told her therapist: it was the missed connections that brought the guilt. The opportunities she didn’t take. The signs she hadn’t acted on. Those weighed heaviest on her.

  It was only since her stint in the hospital that she was beginning to trust the dreams. Only at Donovan’s behest that she was trying to manipulate them. In the past, she simply saw what she saw, and only after several things correlated did she act on any of it. Even then, under full FBI protocol, she considered it her job to collect evidence, prepare the prosecution. She had to come up with a connection, a reason, that she followed a certain chain.

  NightShade was the first time she’d been cut loose.

  The first time she was told to follow the hunches, her gut, her dreams.

  The first time she was weighted by the trust of those very same things.

  She sat on the edge of her bed in the camp fifteen miles from the City of God, shaking, sweating, and reaching for her gun.

  DONOVAN WAS READY FOR ACTION. Unfortunately, his team’s action was currently limited to listening to reports come in.

  Three trailers housed fifteen FBI agents, mostly from the Dallas and San Antonio branches. Two other trailers offered support, one with food, amenities and weapons, the other with surveillance equipment. The entire unit was led by Eleri, and by all rights Donovan should be second in command. Instead, he abdicated the position, believing he shouldn’t be any part of “in charge” on his very first sting. He’d laughed loudly when he resigned and Eleri soundly and readily agreed with him.

  Inside of the next minute she managed to appoint Agent Bozeman as her second in command. They’d looked over Bozeman’s record and he had operations under his belt, not only successful ones, but a few that had gone to hell in a hand basket—which Donovan fully expected this one to do. Bozeman had also spent as much time talking to the escapees as the two of them had. Of all the local agents, he had the best idea what to do, whom to trust, and who was most likely going to shoot on sight. So Donovan wasn’t surprised when she set Bozeman into place then immediately requested de Gottardi.

  Donovan also wasn’t surprised by the look on the man’s face when she handed him his gun and Wade looked at it like it was a spoiled avocado that he’d been asked to make guacamole out of. Fascinated, Donovan had watched the physicist—hopelessly out of place in his white T-shirt, khakis, and ever-present plaid button-down—as he maneuvered through the agents already stuffed into the trailers.

  De Gottardi’s hands almost immediately began the ritual of checking the gun. He slipped the clip out, tested the weight, chambered a bullet. While Donovan had developed the patterns via Academy training, on Wade it was almost as if the gun made his hands do it. It was fluid, point-by-point, a virtually uninterrupted dance despite the numerous agents who came up to him and welcomed him back.

  Each time they asked if he’d re-upped, Wade smiled and answered, “Just consulting.”

  Only in the FBI did a man “consult” with a gun, Donovan thought, but he liked Wade. Didn’t hurt that the other man understood something of what he went through on a daily basis and didn’t seem to mind the odd questions Donovan wanted to ask. It also didn’t hurt that Eleri seemed to trust him with her life and clearly with her sanity.

  As he watched Wade and Eleri smile at each other and joke despite the gravity of the situation, Donovan realized that he could no longer tell himself Eleri was just under stress. He had to accept that she was actively avoiding him.

  He’d fucked everything up with that picture. Even though she came back yesterday and asked for it. Even though he was pretty certain that she was sleeping with it, hoping for insight, even though it was his idea to do that in the first place. The idea didn’t matter, his mechanism had been for crap. He screwed her over and he screwed up. No two ways about it, but they still had to work together tonight.

  The agents took shifts in the different trailers. The sleep trailers stayed dark, the beds tiny cubbies stacked into the walls, blackout curtains ran on rods so each bed could be plunged into near total darkness. But Donovan couldn’t sleep there. Not well.

  He’d never gone to summer camp or been to sleepovers. He didn’t even have a sibling. He could sleep in the woods, changing and practically burying himself, but he almost never slept with other humans nearby.

  Of the fifteen here, only two knew what he was. Only two were NightShade. Donovan didn’t think the others would take kindly to his reality. He didn’t even usually sleep over with the women he had sex with, so he had no idea if he snored, kicked a lot, or tossed and turned.

  The bunk was small and confining, and as soon as he would get comfortable, someone would come in and pull back their own curtain, the ball bearings on the sliders zipping as they opened. The cheap covers and cheaper mattress rustling as the person climbed in. Then everything would zip again as the agent closed himself into his little hidey hole and maybe drifted off into a nice steady snore.

  No, Donovan hadn’t really slept for nearly forty-eight hours.

  Luckily, the finale was almost upon them, if the days’ events went as planned.

  He tried to sleep again in the afternoon. Given that the noises seemed to wake him up repeatedly, he must actually be falling asleep. He tried not to do the math, not to divide the number of hours—two—since he’d crawled in, with the number of times he specifically recalled getting awakened—five. It wasn’t a good ratio.

  Crawling out, deciding he should check the incoming intel just for something to do, Donovan pushed back the curtain on his sleep cubby and dropped to the floor. The whole trailer rocked with his landing, the noise mostly obscured by the generator outside.

  The FBI had struck a deal with a nearby landowner and they set up the self-contained trailers, paid for use of the property and threatened the landowners with lawsuits should the couple reveal the agents’ presence.

  It was the only way to keep this many agents this close to the City. His and Eleri’s travels in and out of town had been enough of an alert. Knowing what they did now—that Baxter and others from the City knew people in each of the towns—they couldn’t put the agents in hotels without certainly alerting the men.

  Two nights ago, just before they had set up this sting, Donovan had gone for a run around the City. Though the intensity of the smell revealed that some of the product had been moved, some was still there. Luckily, there was almost no way to package and move the product without leaving some kind of trace. So even if the barn was empty, the men and the building would test positive. Even so, the scents told him there should be plenty left to incriminate anyone they wanted to.

  As usual, Eleri had tracked his run with the GPS. He’d gone straight for the sheds, waited for the armed men to make their loops. He noted that they seemed just as paranoid as they had before, then he trotted right up and past, sniffing as best he could before looping back. He’d been afraid, holding tightly to the FBI’s rule of three. The third time would be the time you got yourself killed.

  The first time you were on high alert, no familiarity with the situation. The second time you did a better job, enough knowledge to make things work. But the third time, you got complacent. Felt you understood thin
gs. Forgot to check your back and got dead.

  Donovan stayed strung tight. He sniffed, he headed off.

  He came back with a headache, but he came back. They had evidence. That was what mattered.

  Now he walked the short distance between trailers, his new, non-Newtonian liquid body armor in place. Never mind that it was lighter weight than what he wore previously, he was happy he could move more freely but disturbed that they had been ordered—by Eleri—to wear it every time they weren’t inside the trailer. Just in case the City boys got wind of the operation and thought they would come pick off some agents.

  He didn’t open the conversation about how the body armor wouldn’t help if the City boys blew them up. Luckily, he hadn’t smelled explosives or the chemical derivatives to make them any of the times he’d been near there. So he hoped this tiny encampment didn’t blow without notice. He hoped bullets didn’t come. He hoped the City boys had no idea they were being picked off themselves, one by one.

  45

  Eleri watched the various screens around her as information rushed in. It felt to her as though it came directly into her gut and twisted the workings. She hadn’t eaten much in the past two days—not since Donovan had come back from his test run around the City, telling her that the product in the shed was mostly intact. They had known: it was time.

  Joseph was selling drugs, the men were becoming meaner and more paranoid, and the women and children were afraid—with good cause. There was no time to wait, so Eleri effectively pulled the trigger on the operation and was now deathly afraid that she was going to have to literally pull the trigger on Joseph Hayden Baxter.

  Though she’d shot a man before—more than once—she only had one kill under her belt. That man had been a pedophile of the worst kind and still Eleri lost sleep over his death. She wondered sometimes if she didn’t have the most perfect skill for this job (her ability to see) and also the most imperfect ability (her ability to remember what she saw). Her guilt would live with her forever, even though she balanced her karmic tally at the end of each day. She had no idea how she would react to taking out Baxter.