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

by A. J. Scudiere

  Along with Agents Bozeman, Kinnard, and several others, they had created a plan to pick up the men in town, one by one. Hopefully they would leave each one unable to communicate back to the group regarding his capture. They needed to grab and detain as many as they could, as fast as they could. No matter how well they did, the City would be on alert by the time darkness was falling, but as many of the men as possible would be missing.

  The agents planned to raid the City before full dark, before the remaining members became too worried that some of the men hadn’t come back that day.

  Right now Eleri watched her screen as details came in from a pair of DEA agents on the streets in Brady. Eleri and Donovan had invited the other agency in to handle the busts. It was probably already well known through the City that a pair of FBI agents was popping up in nearby towns and investigating the cult.

  It was clear the men in the City at least knew that Grace was in the hospital and probably also that Mercy was. So having FBI agents swarm the streets was about as much of a red flag as the Feds could possibly throw into the air. They might as well distribute flyers with time and date for the raid.

  As an alternative, they offered the DEA a trade—local dealers and implicating videos in exchange for running the arrests and handing over the men from the City. The DEA had been happy to step in on that one. In small towns like these, cutting the local hand-to-hand distribution as they shut down the pipeline could make a real difference.

  There were already five men from the City waiting behind bars thanks to the DEA. Eleri just hoped the captives didn’t put two and two together and realize the busts were linked to the FBI. She also hoped they had no way of communicating to the City itself, and thus there would be no warning other than some people who were late returning for the day.

  She was pegging a lot on nebulous hopes. So she was planning for every worst case contingency.

  As Eleri scanned the new information, she saw mug shots post of the two men they had just taken into custody. Once again, the agents were using Jonah’s art to ID them, as the men refused to speak. According to the pictures, these two were Zeke and Job.

  They had been distributing their brick to a local dealer who was now left in the same holding cell with them. The kid was flapping his jaws, waving his hands, and generally bitching about the situation. Though Eleri couldn’t hear him, his movements made it clear he was not happy about being caught and he wanted to know what Zeke and Job were going to do about it. They stayed stoically silent, not responding or making eye contact with the dealer despite his growing antics. They didn’t even look at each other, just sat quietly on the benches. It struck Eleri that they had done this before—cooled their heels in a jail cell.

  Though the men had been processed in the standard manner, Eleri and Donovan had called in an AFIS tech who was ready to go. As soon as the fingerprints scanned, the tech started matching. It wasn’t a fast process. She was still working her way through the fifteen possible matches for one of the first two men they’d brought in several hours earlier. Jacob had not matched to the only thirteen possibilities the computer had offered for him, and Paul had matched to none of the twenty options the system considered possible.

  Seeing that they were already getting behind, Eleri called in a second tech. The DEA was arresting the guys faster than the fingerprint matching could keep up. The sooner they knew who these men really were the sooner they could lean on them for anything that would help the Feds get into—and out of—the City safely.

  The day was wearing on. The other tech couldn’t arrive until later as she lived several hours away, so they were having her work from her local office. She could provide computer-based matches, but Eleri knew that would only get them so far. The locals were using ink-and-paper prints and the local AFIS professional would have to confirm anything the distance person came up with, but she was doing a great job of sorting things. It was saving them a lot of time.

  Eleri only wondered if it was enough. She was starting to lose hope that they would find a match to some crime that was big, or big enough. An old warrant for a petty B and E wasn’t going to give them the leverage they needed to make anyone give up state secrets. Given that what she was seeing from the detainees in Brownwood, who were also put into a cell with a live video feed, they all knew what to do: keep their mouths shut and stare straight ahead.

  Dammit.

  It was four p.m. The men had been back by eight the previous times they went out, usually by seven or seven thirty, though they hadn’t run like clockwork. Still, it meant by eight they would probably be missed. Today, it wouldn’t just be a few that had gone out had not come back, it would be all of them. And at seven thirty it would only just be starting to get dark.

  She had about three hours for something truly incriminating to turn up. If it didn’t, the team would go in earlier and relatively blind.

  Her stomach turned.

  DONOVAN LOOKED to Eleri and she shrugged at him in response.

  He was ready for this. His vest was in place as was his helmet. He had the heavy weight of his gun in his gloved hand. Crammed into the single trailer with sixteen other agents, he listened carefully as Eleri and Bozeman described the operation.

  He wasn’t ready for this.

  He was a doctor. He’d taken the Hippocratic Oath even though he’d never saved a single life aside from med school. Even then he’d only suffered through the live patient rotations so he could get back in the lab, back into the morgue. Those were his kind of people: dead.

  They didn’t need anything from him except his quiet expertise. He could solve mysteries, be useful, help people without actually having to talk to them.

  But it had been slowly killing him.

  So he’d thrown himself headlong into this FBI unit, attended the Academy, took his first assignment, worked diligently to improve himself—only to see now he wasn’t really the agent he thought he’d be. Standing here in the middle of a busy, multi-agency operation, it became very clear how out of place he was.

  Though he hadn’t taken his Hippocratic Oath with the seriousness and gravity that his classmates had, Donovan now found that it didn’t throw away as easily as he expected it to.

  He’d pulled the trigger in mock assignments at the Academy, but knew his bullets wouldn’t kill. Today he knew no such thing. Cold weight settled in. Fear mixed with the determination to keep a steady head. Regret for things he had not yet done reminded him why he was here. Though he had personal goals, those didn’t change the fact that the job was to tip society back toward the sane, the safe, the wishful. He couldn’t let Baxter win.

  Donovan reminded himself it was Baxter who decided this game was deadly, not him. It was Baxter who started this war. He ran drugs. He held kidnapped children. He refused medical care to the ill. He ordered beatings and murder and he hid the bodies.

  Piece by piece, Donovan talked himself into pulling the trigger.

  The voices came back to him in a hum. Agents were asking questions, refining strategies. Eleri was reporting new information.

  “One of the men in holding is known as Job—”

  Next to her Wade held up Jonah’s sketch and a quick print of Job’s mug shot from a few hours ago. The agents all looked.

  Eleri continued. “His fingerprints matched to those found at several kidnappings, around twelve years ago.” Her gaze met Donovan’s as she paused for a moment and even under the heavy gear, he saw her sigh. “DEA agents are leaning on him for us, but he’s said nothing. Won’t even ask for a lawyer. So we are heading in at six forty-nine.”

  She outlined the plan one more time though they had all heard it before. “We’ll go in full gear, in small groups in civilian cars. Leave the roadways at designated points and coordinate entry from multiple directions simultaneously. Don’t forget to keep an eye out for razor wire coils and spikes in the grass! Two stations will be set up for holding City members once they are out—X to the east and Y to the west. Any questions?”


  As Donovan scanned the faces around him, Eleri spoke of the women and children. Reiterated that it was expected they would be unarmed, but the City was their home and they would probably take this as a personal threat from a government they didn’t acknowledge. It was a grim reminder that the agents would likely have to fight against the very people they were trying to help.

  Donovan would have said to leave them there, let them be. But Baxter was killing them off as surely as disease.

  Eleri’s words pulled him out of his morbid thoughts and into the morbid plans they were past making and well into executing. “Timing.” She called it out and they all synchronized their watches. “X and Y, go. Start setting up.”

  The timepiece felt odd to him. He hadn’t worn one in forever, but an agent on search and seizure couldn’t be pulling his cell phone from his pocket to check coordinated timing. He had an earpiece hanging from a coiled cord down his neck, and he would push it into his ear, wear the attached microphone sooner than he was ready.

  For just a moment he thought about raising his hand, asking if they could just come back and do this tomorrow, but before the thought even finished, Eleri made another announcement. “Far side groups have to leave now. Units F, G and H group-up, head out. D and E will leave inside of fifteen minutes. Dismissed.”

  The tightly packed group started to wiggle as agents near the door opened it, letting the cold air rush out. Breathing in the heat, Donovan suddenly began sweating beneath all the gear. It wasn’t just him. It was actually from the temperature and humidity, or else all the agents were as nervous and sick to their stomachs as he was.

  His skin itched. He wanted to become his other self and just run. He flexed his fingers, fighting the urge. Donovan was willing to bet none of the other agents felt that specific need. He was unit F, far side entry, almost due north. Agent Sweeney was his partner—female, mid-forties and smarter than him and Eleri combined from what he could tell, given his few minutes of interacting with her. She probably couldn’t believe she’d drawn the rookie as her leader, but if she did, it didn’t show.

  Sweeney simply nodded at him and let him lead the two of them to the tiny compact car. They looped west, taking one poorly paved farm road after another until they came to the other side of the City of God. They didn’t speak during the drive, and at six twenty-two Donovan reached their designated point, pulling the little car carefully off the road, grinding his teeth as it bumped and scraped.

  Using the last few minutes to pull an energy bar from his pocket and a bottle of Gatorade from the cooler he’d stashed in the back of the car earlier, Donovan tried to calm his stomach. The erstwhile meal tasted like dust and sugar water, but he looked over to see that Agent Sweeney was doing the same thing, though with much less tension.

  “That’s the right thing to do, eating.” She took another bite of her own snack before continuing. “I know you’re a doctor, but you don’t know about these things until you get into them. I’m going to tell you what my senior agent told me before my first raid: you’ll be fine.”

  His laugh was a harsh, fast sound that forced its way out of his mouth. “Were you in charge of your senior agent on your first raid?”

  She laughed back at him this time and his heart pinched. He could do this. He could have friends, or at least have friendly conversations. Maybe he wouldn’t ever be really good at it, but with the right person he could pass for operational as a human being. The good news was tempered with the reminder that he’d fucked up what he’d already built with Eleri.

  In that moment, he promised himself he would get out of this just fine. Just like Sweeney said. And even though he’d never had a relationship in the past, and even though every time before when he got close he dropped it in the dust and left, this time he was going to fight for it.

  Sweeney’s response came through to him. “No, I wasn’t in charge of my senior agent, but you have to remember what ‘in charge’ means here. I’m likely going to be separated from you soon enough. I’ll have to make my own decisions, but you’re the one who knows the area. They said you’d even done reconn out here?”

  He nodded but didn’t go into detail.

  “Then there’s nothing in my experience that can supplant that. You should be in charge.”

  Her comments made him feel better, but just as he was achieving a little bit of calm, she smiled at him. “Earpieces in. We are go.”

  46

  Donovan walked carefully through the woods. Their “go” signal had come about half an hour earlier and he and Sweeney had begun their trek through the woods.

  There was no night to cover them; they traipsed in broad daylight, the trees their only cover, their uniforms mottled green rather than all black.

  Drifting up to him was the scent of his own sweat, more unpleasant to feel than to smell. In his ear, soft words came, and as the units reported positions he could almost feel them converging. He was division leader here. Though he was not in charge of the op at all, it was his job to get units E, F, G, and H into position.

  Though everyone had studied the satellite photos and maps, Donovan was the only one who had actually walked the area. No one questioned how. It was considered his specialty, to get in and out of places unseen, so no one called him on it.

  He and Sweeney came up closer, guns in hand but not raised. They didn’t want to be seen yet, didn’t want to frighten the residents into reacting.

  If this went according to Plan A—which was the operating plan—they would walk in, calmly discuss the need to abandon camp, arrest those who had warrants, and move the others. Plan A was not going to happen. The men were jumpy. They carried guns. Their brothers had not returned yet today.

  Plan B was to start with Plan A, show superior weaponry, training, and group cohesiveness, and to simply outnumber the remaining members, convincing them to surrender peacefully. Plan C involved gunfire. Plan D—Donovan didn’t like to think about Plan D.

  His groups were coming together and he reported in. “G, F, E in place. H one minute out.”

  Eleri’s voice came back to him, to everyone, “A, B, C, D, in place.”

  Of course, all of hers were where they were supposed to be. He and Sweeney stood ready. He could see two other agents at a distance to his left, but only because he knew exactly where to look for them. H was further down, but as Donovan stood listening, the agents reported in. He relayed their position to Eleri, who called time. “Coordinated start in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1.”

  Donovan stepped forward, heart pounding. He was no longer in charge of anything. Now it all fell to Eleri, Bozeman, and de Gottardi, letting Donovan think about keeping himself where and when he needed to be. He hated the helmet, it blocked too many sounds, so he tipped it back the way de Gottardi had shown him. It was improper, didn’t leave his brains covered the way they should be. But the two men, wolves—or whatever they were—agreed that hearing what they could was worth the exchange. He could almost detect the thrum of Sweeney’s blood in her veins. Despite her years and number of missions on him, she was tight, tense, alert.

  They were one of the first groups to start moving. Their position was visually blocked from the center of the City by one of the buildings. Only two guards were on duty now, and they only came around the backs of the buildings periodically. That was part of this plan, because Donovan and Sweeney were wide open, most of them were now approaching the City across open grass, no longer hidden by the trees.

  A sharp sound came into his ear as Unit G reported in. The two of them had run across a lone woman in the woods. She was frightened, protesting, and as far as they could tell had no communication to the City—except for screaming for help, which she tried to do into the agent’s earpiece. Donovan fought his own reaction even as he watched Sweeney wince.

  While it was good to have one person so easily in custody, the trick was not to use two agents to one unarmed citizen. Donovan and Sweeney pressed forward, having to assume the others could handle moving the struggling woman to S
tation Y for keeping.

  Five more precarious steps and the two of them were flush against the back of the building. If anyone had looked out the window and seen them, they had done so quietly and without getting noticed. Donovan leaned against the siding, the small house tucked under several nearby trees, unseen from satellites passing overhead. He was still the voice for Unit F and he reported their current position. In moments, other units came through with the same.

  He was waiting for the signal to go when the tip of the gun came around the corner.

  ELERI SLID INTO PLACE, an agent she didn’t know by her side. They all agreed it was best to split up the agents who knew the case. So she didn’t have Donovan or Wade or even Bozeman with her. This other agent was just part of the machine, called in to help with the takedown, something she had experienced herself on several occasions.

  It worked because all the agents had full Academy training. They all had the same game plans and protocols. She wondered if Bozeman was looking around the City for the first time. He’d only ever seen Jonah’s drawings. Hell, she’d only ever seen Jonah’s drawings. And she wondered if Wade and Donovan were sniffing at the air. Neither had offered anything specific yet.

  She waited just outside the compound, settled against the back of a building that Donovan had marked as possibly being important. Given that, she pulled a listening device from her gear and put it to the back wall.

  The full minute seemed like forever, but all she could tell was that someone was inside. She would have guessed it was an animal, except that Jonah and all the escapees swore they weren’t allowed to keep pets.

  Eleri waited quietly, not letting her helmet knock against the siding, thus alerting someone that they were there. As long as no one came around the corner she and Agent . . . Agent . . . Karyeva should be able to stand there forever.