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

by A. J. Scudiere

51

  Wet and dripping, but still mad and ready to kill, Joseph glared at her. His gun was held steady between them, aimed not at her heart, where she was protected, but at her head. Her kill area was thankfully small and, without the girls as coverage, his was large.

  She could see he was thinking; she was thinking, too.

  Pull the trigger, pull it. End it.

  She was convinced the world would be a better place without this man. If she didn’t do it, and do it now, he would kill more people in the future and that would be on her conscience. She was confident she could sleep soundly with his death under her belt.

  But still her finger didn’t even twitch.

  Joseph was clearly wondering why she was willing to shoot if it would spark an explosion and he steadied as she watched him think it through.

  He smiled. “You won’t shoot me.”

  “Yes, I will.” This time the bullet left the chamber before she even finished the sentence.

  A stunned look appeared on Joseph’s face beneath the neat hole she put in his forehead. She hadn’t aimed for the chest, hadn’t wanted to afford him even a few moments of revenge before he died. Eleri needed it to be instant, so she’d gone for the brains. Now she wished she hadn’t, the cracking of a headache suddenly striking her. Probably sympathy pains, though Joseph didn’t deserve her sympathy.

  She was about to tell the guys to gather up the kids and get out, when Donovan yelled, “Get out, now! Run!”

  Doing as her partner said—or screamed at her—she turned and plowed into Johnathan. How long had the kid been standing there?

  She didn’t get time to process the thought. Wade and Donovan were racing up behind her, Donovan yelling about a device on a timer in the back room.

  Eleri grabbed the boy, hauling him with her, her thoughts on his safety and the click of the mental puzzle piece as she realized that was why Joseph had looked at his watch. It wasn’t a psychological move, he was actually checking time, calculating how long he had before his bomb went off.

  She probably dislocated Johnathan’s shoulder, she pulled him so hard, jumping from the small landing at the front door and down into the quad. She hit hard. Her charge did, too, but she hauled them both back up. Out of her peripheral vision she saw each man carrying a clinging child—a clinging gasoline bomb—and coming out of the house, running with a fluid grace that spoke of the creatures they truly were.

  Donovan took a single large step off the porch platform, clearing the four foot drop and never breaking stride. Wade was right behind him, using the middle step to launch himself even farther as they broke for the other side.

  Eleri beelined for Station X, dashing across the center of town, toward the space between two still-burning houses, the heat trying to push her back as she fought her way forward. Her legs churned and she was grateful that her charge was on his feet.

  Still she wasn’t fast enough. Donovan—holding tight to the tiny Hope with one arm—grabbed Eleri’s hand as he shot by, yanking her, dragging and pulling the chain of them between the houses.

  Fire reached out for her, licked at her, and tried to get her to join it, to light and burn. She wanted to tell Johnathan not to breathe but couldn’t catch her own breath well enough to speak. It seemed forever before they cleared the other side and the air began to cool.

  She watched as Donovan swore and threw Hope at the ground. Though he had held her front to his, effectively sandwiching the gasoline between them, and though he’d thrown water on her at the house, something in her clothing had caught as they ran the gauntlet.

  He smacked at the little girl’s leg while she screamed, trying to put out a fire that was eating gasoline. Dropping Johnathan’s hand, Eleri pushed the kid toward the others who had come forward to pull them to safety.

  “Get back!” She yelled at them, her voice already hoarse. “Explosion!”

  The first command hadn’t done it, but the second did. So she dropped down beside Donovan, doing what he didn’t. She ripped at the little girl’s jeans, her gloves both protecting and hindering her, and she pulled the burning pants off the little legs.

  Throwing them on the ground behind them, Donovan picked up the child again. Still screaming, obviously in pain, Hope was too shaken to fight him as he ran as fast as he could.

  Wade and Angel had made it to Station Y and he was directing them all farther into the woods. There was no telling how big an explosion a house full of gasoline and bombs could make.

  They were all running, Agents and City dwellers alike. Spreading deep into the woods, trying to get as far to the east as they could before the house on the west side of the City of God blew up. The going was slower than they wanted, though all fought their way forward. They fought against the narrow width of the trails. They dealt with roots that tripped them. Those who ran off trail fought sticker brushes and undergrowth.

  The group was maybe twenty or so yards farther away when the explosion flattened them all.

  DONOVAN HAD BEEN TREATED for minor burns on the backs of his legs and neck. A patch of small abrasions climbed the right side of his face from where he skidded across the ground as the house exploded, throwing them all head first into the trees and brush.

  Eleri and Wade looked much the same, though the physicist had returned to his desk job as quickly as possible. He’d tapped out of cleanup duty, taken one more day off work to get himself together and back to San Antonio. As far as Donovan knew, Wade de Gottardi was sitting at his desk, neck deep in quarks at this very moment.

  Donovan and Eleri were standing in the middle of the wreckage of the City of God.

  Agents Bozeman, Kinnard, and Sweeney had been tapped to help clean up and catalogue everything. And everything was a mess.

  A full seven of the City people had disappeared into the woods immediately after the explosion. No body parts or blood had been found, so there was no reason to believe they had died or even been harmed. They must have simply gotten up and left. It was believed two of those were under the age of eighteen. So now no record of those kids ever existed, other than Jonah’s drawings and the words of the City members. The two men and three women who’d disappeared were spoken of by the others as good Christian people. The men said these two were never brought into the drug running, simply because they would have balked.

  Of the seven men incarcerated on drug charges, only two started talking. And then only after they learned of Joseph’s betrayal. The other five clung to the belief that the Satanic American Government had killed a man of God in cold blood, or at least their attorneys were delivering that message. Regardless, the message back to them was twenty to thirty hard time with no parole for a minimum of fifteen years. Eleri almost smiled over that. She couldn’t think of a more deserving bunch. The two who were singing like canaries were singing their sentences down. So now she and Donovan and the last remaining FBI agents were out here picking up the pieces and searching for the evidence they had described.

  Two local volunteer firefighters were helping them get safely through the buildings or what rubble remained. Eleri was walking into one when the firefighter, who must be sweltering in all his gear, held a hand out. “Wait.”

  So she did. She had on work gloves, and was left using her bare forearm to wipe the sweat from her face. What she wouldn’t give for a cold shower right now. In another three minutes the firefighter declared the crawlspace room under Joseph’s house safe enough for her to go in and confiscate the guns, cocaine and bomb-making equipment.

  If it hadn’t been hot enough outside, it was worse inside. Breathing through the filter mask didn’t do her any service either. Three days of airing the place out hadn’t removed the burned smell, and it seemed to slide right through the mask into her lungs. She wondered how Donovan was dealing with it, but since he didn’t complain, she didn’t ask.

  They had been ready to start this two days earlier, but preliminary tests had revealed something disturbing. The area was contaminated with carbon monoxide.

&
nbsp; Joseph and the men had tapped a nearby private oil well to steal fuel for the City. Natural gas was entrapped along with the shale oil in most Texas wells, and it came right up the pump with the oil. Most wells with gas deposits simply lit the leaking gas and burned it off. The one they stole from did that, too. But in the process of hacking into the well to steal gas, they did way too much, or did it wrong, or maybe it was just bad luck. Eleri didn’t know the details, but the well had been perforated. Perforated wells leaked carbon monoxide in large quantities.

  With the lack of wind, the heat, and the location of the City, the carbon monoxide had mixed with the air and settled in. Because the well was closer to the drug shed, the men got a bigger dose. Carbon monoxide brought its own problems, but one of the side effects was lowered oxygen intake. They had been slowly killing their brains. Other side effects were headaches, paranoia and lowered immune function—all things the City people had suffered from.

  As Donovan pointed out, carbon monoxide also killed your sense of smell. Which was probably why he and Wade couldn’t tell that Joseph was burning up the houses, why they had trouble following him, why Donovan hadn’t been sure about the drugs in the shed the second time around.

  The DEA hadn’t waited until the well was fixed and the air was reading normal oxygen levels. They had simply stormed the sheds wearing full yellow hazmat suits and taken their drugs into custody. Kilos and kilos of cocaine had passed through the City of God.

  So the drug sheds had been cleared and catalogued and the data turned over to the FBI before the rest of them had even begun taking care of this stuff.

  Eleri now laid out guns on tables. Marking each one, she removed bullets, checked to see what kind of shape the weapon was in after being burned, exploded, doused in gasoline and/or lit on fire.

  She was drinking a cold bottle of water from the cooler they’d hauled out. When Donovan came over, she gave in and asked him what she’d wanted to for days now. “Do you think I killed a man because he was poisoned?”

  Donovan shook his head at her but didn’t speak.

  Maybe she hadn’t been clear. “I mean, do you think he was running drugs and beating his people because he was high on cocaine and going nuts from carbon monoxide?”

  Having practically yanked the lid off his own water bottle, Donovan pulled his mask aside and shook his head again before chugging most of the volume then wiping his mouth with the back of his arm. He left a trace of soot wide enough to make his face look sinister. Eleri would have said something but had to assume she looked worse. The parts of her she could see certainly did.

  “El, he started killing people when he was a teenager. Even if you take out the C-O poisoning, he was still deadly. Isaac was a horrible leader, stocking his clan by kidnapping children. Though Joseph didn’t continue the practice, he knew about it and kept quiet. And that’s the least of what he did. The C-O may have made him more paranoid, but it would have killed them all if it had been here for years. Which means Joseph killed Isaac, and he killed the people that knew about the tunnel out from under Isaac’s old house long before he was poisoned.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s legitimate information. I dreamed it.”

  “You found the access tunnel from that dream.” He finished the rest of the water, crumpled the bottle, and ground the lid back into place, effectively sealing it into its wadded up state. When she was starting to deny the reality of that, Donovan spoke over her. “The other guys got just as big a dose as he did, but they didn’t threaten to shoot a child, and they didn’t douse the whole place in gasoline. You have nothing to lose sleep over. He could not have been rehabbed. No way.”

  She was putting the mask back into place when he touched her arm. “There is something you need to know.”

  This didn’t look good. His dark eyes were making sure he held contact with her.

  “Johnathan’s statement says you shot Joseph first. That he wasn’t firing at you. And Johnathan quoted that whole exchange, ‘you won’t shoot me,’ ‘yes, I will,’ word for word.” His hands were on his hips, he was exhausted, she could see. So was she.

  “Shit.” Shooting first was not standard FBI behavior.

  Donovan nodded, but—still breathing a little heavy from whatever he’d been hauling around—he added, “No one believes him. He’s a kid, his brain is altered from prolonged C-O exposure, and his story doesn’t match any of the agents at the scene.”

  “What?”

  Donovan shook his head at her, not understanding. “You know they sealed our statements and altered them. Westerfield ordered it. You aren’t going down for carrying out orders. I just thought you should know that the kid saw everything and he nailed it. Just in case someone says something later.”

  They were interrupted then by Agent Sweeney. She was chugging her own bottle of water, her filter face mask hanging around her neck by the elastic. The way it hung, Eleri could see the white inside, in stark contrast to the dark color on the outside of it. Black smears of soot and debris covered the outside of the mask, and she was grateful they weren’t breathing that in.

  Sweeney looked at her strangely. “Bozeman says you told Baxter that his gun would spark when it fired and he’d ignite himself?”

  Eleri nodded. That part of it—well, most of it—she could share accurately with other agents.

  Throwing her head back, Sweeney let out a howl of laughter that pierced the stillness that seemed to hang over the City. It almost said, “the air is clear now” and something in Eleri’s chest that had been knotted loosened.

  There was a lot to clean up here, still miles to go cataloguing things, finding out the secrets of the City, but they had made headway clearing out the bad juju already. They found the dugout basement where Ruth had been kept, then killed. They found the secret room where people were tried and chained to the wall for infractions. Eleri had stopped at each place, spending a reverent moment for the pain that had passed there. Now she thought about the good that had come.

  Charity had traveled back home with her family. Jonah was excited about having grandparents, though he didn’t mention that their name was Baxter, and Eleri was pretty certain he was in denial over the fact that his own father had ordered him beaten and killed. But he seemed to be holding up well, and Mark and Lilly Baxter couldn’t be more excited about taking him back to Zion’s Gate with him. Through a special emergency foster parent clearance Eleri had helped orchestrate, Elizabeth, Hope, Jeremiah, and Angel were headed out with them. The state of Texas seemed happy to have so many of the kids placed. Some of the others had linked up with some of the adults that weren’t charged with crimes and were finding local places to stay.

  Mercy’s DNA had matched the Cohns’. Though she hadn’t been there, Eleri heard a reunion was in process. She’d also gotten a call from Agent Cohn himself, thanking her. Eleri hadn’t known what to say to him. His daughter called herself Mercy. She hardly recognized her parents and the meeting had been stilted. But the Cohn’s at least knew she wasn’t dead. They had her back and were thrilled despite the hard work ahead.

  The City had been blown apart. But there were some happy endings.

  The conversation around her pushed back into her thoughts and she heard Sweeney yell to Bozeman, “You were right!”

  Then he yelled back, “Told you! De Gottardi repeated all of it when we were waiting at the hospital.” Their laughter made the space a little brighter.

  So when Sweeney asked if they were about to be done for the day, Eleri declared that they should be. It wasn’t like they were almost done and they should just stick it out and get finished. They would be back tomorrow and the next day, too. So she peeled her work gloves, sucked down another half of her water bottle before holding it to her forehead, and told them all, “Let’s get out of here.”

  As they walked away, Kinnard led the progression back to the big SUV they had four-wheeled into the area each day. Sweeney and Bozeman walked just in front of where Eleri and Donovan trailed
at the rear of the little group.

  Elbowing Bozeman, Sweeney shook her head. “I owe you fifty dollars. I can’t believe she actually talked that psychopath down with that.”

  Even Eleri had to laugh. She was just grateful Baxter had bought it. Not willing to put the face mask back in place, she turned to Donovan and really reached out as she should have a while ago. “Hey, I was wondering if you wanted to come to Foxhaven with me after this is done?”

  He stopped in his tracks. “Seriously?”

  Shit. She’d been lousy to him lately. She’d threatened to have him removed from the case, she’d shut him out, and she’d done it all over one bad move. “Really. I invited Wade, but he turned down the beach in favor of subatomic particles.”

  “Ah, so I’m your backup friend?”

  “No.” Time to mend fences. “I was always going to invite both of you. The place is huge, seven bedrooms.” She shrugged, trying to brush off the fact that her family owned so much—especially after seeing how Donovan had been brought up. “Wade just immediately turned me down. You can have your own wing.”

  She was used to having the big house to herself these days when she went out. But it was more important now that she have friends. And even more important that she and her partner have each other’s backs.

  Donovan had hers when they faced down Joseph. It was time to return the favor. “Westerfield says we should have two weeks off after working this thing nonstop like we did. So what do you say?”

  52

  Donovan had run on the beach each day. He’d never run free in the sand and surf before. Hell, he’d never been to a beach before.

  The first day, when he stood on the wide, white-washed back porch and stared out at the surf as the sun set behind him, he told Eleri.

  “What!?” she almost dropped the glass of white wine she’d poured nearly the moment they stepped through the door. “You’ve never seen the Atlantic before?”

  “I’ve seen it. You know, from airplanes, but I’ve never seen it up close. Never set foot in it.”