The Camelot Gambit

by A. J. Scudiere

  Jivika waved them off as though the matter was decided, and the interview had quickly come to an end. They still had to walk out the front door and go back to their car as though they were old friends saying goodnight, but Eleri felt her blood pressure boiling. She wondered if anything else in the kitchen was rattling.

  They'd told Jivika that she would come to their house for their regular interview the next night. Not surprisingly, Jivika had protested that she’d already told them everything she knew. Now Eleri found she simply didn’t care.

  They couldn't keep showing up on Das’s doorstep like this, especially not after they'd been seen by Marshawn and had learned that Emersyn was often next door. It was already possible that Emersyn had seen them more than once. If she had, it would only lend credence to Joule's theory about them being FBI agents. In fact, Joule's theory held a lot of water—because it was true.

  Donovan, clearly the calmer of the two, had swung them by a Chinese place and picked up food while Eleri waited in the car, still stewing that they’d missed the topic on Jivika’s collaboration with Marat. If it wasn’t the human brain interface or the need for more biological-type parts on drones, then what had they been working on? How would Jivika have helped him solve the mapping problem?

  Eleri’s brain hurt. But just as she was about to give up, Donovan slid back into the car with a bag of cardboard boxes that smelled good enough to make her forget about Jivika Das and drones and murders.

  Eleri went to bed with no new insights about how to solve the case. But at ten a.m. the next morning, she was growing concerned. “Donovan, Jivika should be at work already, but her car hasn’t moved from her driveway.”

  46

  Donovan tried to find alternative explanations, because he didn't like the expression on Eleri's face or the growing worry in his own chest. “Did she maybe catch a ride with someone?”

  “She never has before, not that I know of. She's always arrived at work well before eight. So I called around eight thirty and left a message and she hasn't responded.”

  “You texted her again?” he asked, even though he assumed Eleri had done it. He was looking for an easy out.

  She nodded. “I’ve texted twice more. It's now been twenty minutes since the last one and there's no return text, voicemail, or even a missed call.”

  Donovan sighed. They couldn’t wait; they'd already lost somebody on their watch, so he looked at Eleri, “Okay. We should go over and check things out, but what's our excuse? Why would we show up at her door in the middle of the morning on a work day?”

  “I don't know, but we need a good reason.”

  There was every possibility they would go over and find that Jivika had simply taken a sick day. Maybe she was asleep and had left her phone off. That was about the best-case scenario Donovan could come up with—no harm, no foul.

  While that was a good outcome safety-wise, how would they explain to Jivika that they knew that she hadn't moved her car? They'd not yet admitted they put the tracker on it or the police detail on her. Donovan tried to stay focused on their excuse. “Why did you text her?”

  “I told her I wanted to meet up for lunch today instead of our usual evening interview.”

  “Good one.” However, it didn't quite allow for them to go by the house and knock on the door. Or did it? “So we say we were in the neighborhood and you hadn't heard back from her via text, and we decided to stop by,” he finally offered. “It's the best I've got. I don't want to wait any longer.”

  “Agreed. The last time we didn't hear from somebody, she was dead,” Eleri said, the last word coming out flat, mirroring his own feelings.

  Apprehension crawled farther up his spine with each passing moment. But he knew, that was no reason to go in without a plan. “Okay, what's near Kangaroo Court that allows us to say we were close enough to drive through her neighborhood?”

  “The theater,” Eleri blurted out, clearly just as agitated as he was, but Donovan shook his head.

  “I don't think we can claim we're going to the theater at ten a.m.”

  “Valid.” Eleri sighed the word, her hands going to her hips as she tried again. “There's a pharmacy on the corner. We can claim we were getting a prescription.”

  “We don't have any prescriptions to fill.”

  “I know, and you would write them for us anyway, but at least it works as a first-pass excuse. It would hold up unless someone demands to see the prescription. The cover doesn’t have to hold to her, just to everyone else.”

  “Okay, let's run with it,” Donovan agreed, swiping his keys off the counter as he grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair.

  Eleri was fast on his heels and running around the car. The speed at which she slid into the passenger side letting him know just how worried she was. They were pulling out before the garage door was all the way up. Had there not been something so dire on the line, he would have found the moment comical.

  “Remember,” she intoned, as he started to back out, “don’t do what I did the other night. We can't drive too fast.”

  “Good point.” Forcing himself to at least pretend to be calm, he took the first turn slowly. “Besides,” he added, “chances are, it's nothing.” But he didn't like that phrase, and Eleri's lack of response showed how little respect she gave it, as well. He didn't have any bad feelings about it but …

  "El, do you know something in your gut?”

  “I want to say I do, but I don't. Or I do, but I can't tell.” She sighed in frustration this time, and he understood. He knew that she wished she could read these feelings better. Even though she'd been having them all her life, it was his understanding that she'd merely taken the hunches as they came. Trying to design them or even to understand them for more than just “I think that felt like a feeling,” was something that she was only now trying her hand at. It seemed by her reaction that it hadn’t been going well.

  Donovan stopped at the pharmacy and ran inside for a pack of gum, telling her that if anybody was watching them—or God forbid, tracking the car—this would need to show up on the radar. He told himself the same thing, though he desperately wanted to get to Das's house.

  Once again, he slid back into the driver’s side, this time with a pack of mint gum stinking up his car, and he turned the corner, heading into Kangaroo Court. Luckily, with the story they'd concocted, he could now head straight for Jivika's house.

  She had two garage doors. Her car sat in front of the door nearer to the house, and he parked right next to her on the far side, hoping it would look normal. Climbing out, they both headed up to Das’s front door, knocked, and waited. But nothing happened.

  "Do you hear anything?" Eleri asked quietly, but he shook his head. They knocked again and waited quietly. Once again, even with his superior hearing skills, he heard nothing other than the cat probably coming down the stairs.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Code.” They’d made Jivika hand over her door codes, despite her obvious reluctance the first night. But the flashed FBI badges and threats of moving her to a safe house had pushed her to finally share them. Donovan punched it in, trying to look normal—whatever that meant.

  “Now,” he paused, “let’s hope she hasn't changed it.” The knob turned gently under his hand and they walked in as though they were supposed to be there. That was ninety-nine percent of subterfuge: acting like you belonged.

  Eleri headed inside first, and Donovan followed as they peeled their jackets. Only when they got the door closed did Eleri look at him and shake her head. They hadn't hollered out. What if someone was here? What if someone had heard them knocking? Any reasonable person who didn't know what Donovan was, who didn't know his special skills, would have run out the back door, but he hadn't heard that.

  “I don't think there's anyone here,” he said. And then he sniffed the air and smelled it. “Shit.”

  “What?” Eleri asked.

  “I think I smell. . . Come on.”

  With a motion to he
r to follow him, he bounded up the steps. The odor was faint but growing stronger, and he knew what it was. It was a human body.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered under his breath, even as he threw the door open. He didn't smell a fresh human here, though he could smell that one had been here. It was distinct from the other smell, the one that became clearer as he hit the top of the steps.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered again, and he threw the bedroom door open, almost stumbling across the body as he entered. She was lying between the foot of the bed and the dresser, arms and legs splayed out ever so slightly. He noticed, of course, the rope marks and the dull eyes staring at the ceiling. Jivika Das was gone.

  47

  Donovan sniffed at the air again as Eleri pulled blue latex gloves out of her back pocket. She said she was a scientist and always liked to be ready, but Donovan knew they were for cases just like this.

  "It's a crime scene," she declared, and he nodded in agreement, thinking he was glad they hadn’t touched anything yet. She watched him for a moment. "What do you smell?"

  "I smell him. I smell the killer. This is recent enough that. . . "

  "Who is it?"

  And damn, but he couldn't tell her. He shook his head. "I don't know …” Donovan sniffed again. “He was sweating, nervous. It's an interesting hormone combination. I get the feeling that he didn't like doing it."

  "That does sound odd," Eleri mused. "Though maybe not surprising. If he's killing for information and he's doing it to get these people out of his way, he may not particularly enjoy the job. He might even regret it deeply."

  Donovan took another slow inhale. It was there, a faint scent behind the odor of Jivika's corpse, which was slowly beginning to decay. It pissed him off.

  He had an excellent sense of smell. Maybe not by dog standards, but he had to be ten or twenty-five times better than the average human. It bothered him that he could smell the emotion, but not the person.

  "It's a man," he told Eleri, though he didn’t look back at her. He wished he could identify the individual, but it wasn’t there. Even though he’d been making an attempt ever since he got here to remember individuals, it wasn’t enough. He could recognize LeDonRic walking down the street to him. He could recognize Maggie if she came up behind him. But that didn't make them anything different than people he regularly knew. He could tell when Eleri had been in a room, but he knew her well enough to track that now.

  If he were wearing a blindfold, he could identify each member of the Mazur family, and each of the Jameses. He could ID Whitlow and, of course, Vergheese. This, though … it wasn't a person he knew well enough to know the various emotional states and be able to smell the individual identifiers underneath the anger and the fear.

  Tamping down his irritation, Donovan walked the perimeter of the room, sniffing into the corners until he almost got a headache. He was hoping that something would have drifted or lingered or there might be a scent of a cologne or an overwhelming soap or deodorant. Instead, he got nothing, and it frustrated the hell out of him.

  Eleri, meanwhile, had squatted down near the body. Using her first two fingers, she reached out and touched Jivika's neck. She did it even though Donovan had told her he already knew the woman was dead. No one smelled like that when they were alive.

  He'd never gotten a live person on his table when he'd been an M.E., but he'd hoped for it. He would not be the one who was making the Y incision when the person sat up screaming, because Donovan could smell the decay, even when it was just starting to take hold. If the person was even just very, very barely alive and cold, they wouldn't smell like decay.

  So Donovan had always leaned over and huffed a faint sniff each time he got a new corpse, and each time he'd been disappointed to find that they were well and truly dead. This time it was doubly so. He wished Jivika would be alive enough that he could bring her back.

  "Can you come smell her for drugs?" Eleri asked.

  He came over and squatted on the opposite side of the body. Neither he nor Eleri wanted to put their knees or hands onto the floor or touch anything they didn't have to.

  He took a slow inhale, probably his last as the odors were wanting to mingle together and his brain was wanting to swim with it. "Yes, it's there."

  "Butter and dairy?" Eleri asked, almost with a smile, and he nodded. He understood there was a dead body of a person who'd been in their charge and Eleri was almost smiling about the smell. Though it would seem wrong to anyone else, he understood. She’d compartmentalized Jivika’s death—not fully, but for now and until her job was done—and this was the only thing they could smile about. At least they had something.

  "The ligature marks don't indicate struggle. Even less than Johanna," she said, the frustration having replaced the small amount of humor she’d found.

  "Bet if we black light her some things will show up.” Donovan suspected she might be covered in unbloomed bruises, the same way Johanna Schmitt had been.

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Interesting, Eleri disagreed. He tipped his head and waited until she said, “Notice the ligature marks are less deep."

  He hadn't noticed that. He’d been too busy sniffing.

  "Which means she wasn't tied up as tightly. Which may mean that she simply didn’t struggle as much. And what do you think about the smell? Do you think she was maybe drugged more heavily?"

  Hating that it was all he had to go on, Donovan shook his head. "I can't tell. This is fresh, right off the body. The last time I smelled it—off Johanna—it had been several days old and through cold storage."

  "I would guess from the ligature marks that he did drug her more heavily."

  Donovan nodded, but it didn’t matter if he agreed with her or not. Eventually, they would get a tox screen back. They just had to wait for it.

  He looked down at the body again. Javika’s eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Eleri looked the body over one more time and left Donovan to it as she moved around the room, inspecting it for peripheral clues.

  "The bed looks wrong," she announced suddenly.

  "What do you mean?" He stood up and turned to look. He'd been at the foot facing toward the body, but now he pivoted to aim toward the headboard, leaving Jivika's corpse on the ground behind him, unmoved though not untouched.

  Eleri frowned and waved a blue-gloved hand at the upper right corner of the bed. "It looks like it was pulled back. It looks like it was made and then pulled back."

  Donovan saw what she was saying. Almost three quarters of the bed was made up neatly. On the left hand side of the bed, the covers were still tucked up under the pillows, but the right hand side was a bit of a mess.

  "And nobody's slept in it. So, why would he pull the bed covers back?"

  Donovan frowned, seeing exactly what Eleri was talking about. Jivika had not been dragged from bed. The bed had been made and only partly disturbed, but not in any of the normal ways a person would.

  "How old do you think this is?" Eleri asked, motioning to the room, and Donovan understood she meant the crime scene and the body.

  “Eight, nine hours maybe. I don't think this bed was remade this morning. I think this is from last night."

  "Shit," Eleri muttered. He guessed she hadn't felt any gut reactions in regards to the slaying of their subject. No niggling sensation at the back of her brain letting her know their person of interest was already dead. In fact, had she had any warning at all, he knew Eleri would have dragged him over to check on Jivika at midnight rather than waiting until the morning’s unanswered voicemail and unreturned texts.

  Letting that response lie, they split the room and walked up either side of the bed looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything that might tell them what had actually happened. Donovan had no doubt that the cause of death would be unknown again. And he hated it.

  This time he knelt down and looked under the edges of the bed, once again trying to see if maybe she'd been splayed out across the top and tied down th
e way Marat had. But it looked like this time, the killer had tied her to the feet of the nearby heavy objects—the bed and the dresser—leaving her to die on the floor. Donovan leaned over and sniffed at the bed covers.

  "She didn't die here."

  “I wouldn’t think so. It would be hard—or pointless—to put the bed back afterward and just leave the body on the floor.”

  His sense of smell concurred with the visible physical evidence. The covers weren't rumpled like the body had been laid on it and again, as Eleri had pointed out, it looked like she'd never been in—or even on—the bed.

  When he stood up and looked over, he saw Eleri frowning at a pillow. "What is this?"

  "I don't know." There was some kind of dirt on the pillow.

  "Pillows get dirty." Though even as he said it, he knew that was the wrong response here.

  "No. It's right in the middle of the pillow. And look at the other pillows," Eleri pointed them out.

  He followed her instructions. Donovan knew bodies. Eleri knew crime scenes better than he did. So he listened.

  "There's something on this pillow and it doesn't belong. When we get the crime techs in, we have to make sure they test it."

  "When we get the crime techs in …" he repeated her words. "You mean, after we leave because someone will have spotted us here at Jivika's house now and there's a dead body found here? How is Marshall Bennett going to explain that we were here and now she’s dead?"

  48

  Another string of swear words ran through Eleri's head as she stood in the bedroom looking at everything in the room they still needed to check.

  "Goddammit, the only way out of this," she said to Donovan, "is for us to call it in.”

  "Which means,” he sighed out the words, his frustrations as clear as hers felt, “we have to explain that we went to the pharmacy just for a pack of gum because we now can't claim a prescription. They'll check it."