The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five (Book 2)

by A. J. Scudiere

  "How did you find the connection?" Donovan broke in again.

  This time Vasquez looked at him. "Too much reading. First victim was just a retired man. Turned out he was retired military. Second was a psychologist in his own office. Cooper Rollins is the only name that showed up twice. It's tenuous at best, but the fact that no one can find him to question him is concerning."

  "He knows you're trying to question him?"

  Vasquez answered to Donovan again as Eleri watched like a spectator at tennis. "He must. I told people to tell him we'd like to meet with him."

  This time Eleri added her own two cents. "Military history like his, highly decorated, why wouldn't he come in?"

  "Exactly." Vasquez's face held that same disturbed look.

  "Is he dead?"

  This time the woman shrugged, once again disturbing the curls that wanted to stay on her shoulders. "Could be. But there's no body. I've checked every death record, every morgue, every John Doe and every body that was IDd but could have still been him. Nothing."

  As Eleri stood gathering the file, she assessed the other woman. Vasquez was young, at least occasionally irritable, and so far very good. "When did you graduate the Academy?"

  Donovan rolled his shoulders and felt the city pressing in. Eleri may have been happy to leave the beach house behind; she seemed to be dreaming of her sister more often there than when they were out.

  He, on the other hand, had loved the place with unadulterated joy. It was big, airy, beautiful, and stocked. Maids changed the sheets and brought food. Eleri cooked sometimes. There was sand on the beach and no one much around in the off season.

  Now, in the city, his skin felt like it wanted to stretch and pull. Just the thought of being surrounded by all these people made him itch. He'd been offered a Medical Examiner's position here once. He was good at what he did. Though the pay had been crap, that hadn't been the deciding factor. No, he'd turned down even the idea as soon as he heard "Los Angeles."

  The rental house assigned to them was small, and he wondered how rich-girl Eleri handled coming from such a privileged background to this. For him, it was a step up from the trailers and one-bedroom apartments of his youth, but a step down from his own home in South Carolina. A far cry from a large backyard and a gate that opened onto a National Forest.

  His sensitive nose felt the pollutants moving up through his sinuses and down into his lungs. His ears picked up on traffic and the horns that people here seemed to apply as liberally as they should have applied sunscreen.

  Setting his bag in one of the two small bedrooms, this one at the back of the house, he wandered out to see where Eleri had gone.

  With the small square footage of the place, he could easily hear her in the front bedroom. A drawer rolled along a runner, and a slight whisper of fabric told him she was actually putting her things in the drawers. They would be here a while.

  Given the last case in Texas, then FoxHaven, and now this, they'd been in each other's pockets for over a month. And he didn't know when he'd get home again, get alone again. His chest pressed in, and he guessed the sooner he got the case solved the sooner he could run in his forest and breathe clean air filtered by trees. What he wouldn't give for a single dead body laid out on his table from a suspicious death.

  But it wasn't his table now. The job had gone to someone else. Now he had a soldier to find and two dead bodies that weren't bodies anymore.

  Eleri called out, seeming to know he was standing in the hallway. Maybe she wasn't quite human herself; he had been pretty quiet. "What do you think of Vasquez?"

  He paused. There was something more, something Eleri wanted, but he didn't know what. So he just listed his impressions and hoped that helped. "She seems competent, but she was unhappy about having to hand the case over to us. She seems young. She's well put together, well spoken, pretty . . . Why?"

  "Alyssa Rollins is Alyssa Gutierrez Rollins—Hispanic and young. You and I don't have an initial visual connection to her . . ."

  Click. Eleri's gears were now obvious. "But Vasquez does." Even the name “Marina Vasquez” might appeal to Alyssa Gutierrez Rollins. As long as she didn't figure out she was being psychologied up to. "You want Vasquez to run the interview? I got the impression she'd never been out of the box."

  "I don't think she has either. But she's young, ambitious, and . . ." This time she appeared in the doorway, her slim fingers holding some underthing he couldn't readily identify. She didn't seem to notice. "Honestly, right now she knows this case and knows about Rollins better than we do. And she wants it."

  "So we let her in on the case and we'll be her heroes?"

  Eleri shrugged. "Doesn't hurt anything."

  He agreed with her until an hour later when they were all standing on the doorstep of a row townhouse in Los Feliz, one of the areas east of town. The place was an old, two-story with outside entrances to the units.

  Donovan knocked, and the door to one unit over opened up. An older woman stuck her head out and immediately pulled it back in.

  Shit. Despite the t-shirts and casual pants, the three of them practically screamed 'feds.' He’d agreed with Eleri on every point about Vasquez coming along, but none of them had thought about the fact that they were massively outnumbering a young woman with a small child.

  He was hoping the woman wasn't home, that they hadn't screwed this all to hell already, when the door in front of them finally opened.

  Alyssa Rollins was easily identifiable from her file pictures. Even there her expression had been wary.

  It was Vasquez who introduced them. Names first, then FBI credentials, then an oh-so-soothing reassurance that her husband wasn't wanted for anything but his help.

  "I don't know where he is." Alyssa Rollins looked over her shoulder, presumably at the child Donovan could hear in the background, but she didn't open the door any wider. "What is this about?"

  Vasquez surprised him. She was a master in action. Her eyes darted left, then right, then she leaned forward, whispering to Alyssa Rollins. It still took a few back-and-forths to get the woman to let them come in. They could have insisted, but even Donovan knew that wasn't in their best interests.

  He ended up sitting politely on an old couch that didn't quite distribute his weight and he watched the small child playing just out of reach. The kid stacked cheap plastic blocks and babbled occasionally as he threw them. Right on developmental target, Donovan thought.

  He listened for noises coming from the back rooms, as though maybe she was hiding her estranged husband back there. But the only thing that came out was a cat. It slipped down the hallway, stopping in the door, and stared beady-eyed at Donovan, before hissing and running off.

  Ignoring the conversation up until now, he was pulled back in by Eleri's voice. Less soothing than Vasquez's 'let's-be-friends' tone, hers clearly took the reins. Where Vasquez was asking open, general questions about Rollins, Eleri Eames brought focus.

  "He was previously in the care of a Dr. Walton Gardiner . . ." Eleri let it hang and Donovan cringed. That name. No wonder he'd gone into psychology.

  Mrs. Rollins didn't seem to notice that Eleri knew the name from memory. "Yes. But not for a while now."

  "Dr. Gardiner has passed away." She waited. So did Donovan.

  Nothing happened. There was nothing odd, no fear smell, no strange twitch from the wife. "I'm sorry. I didn't know him."

  Clearly she didn't. The doctor wasn't an old man. His death would be a surprise. The fact that he'd blown up suddenly while sitting in his office chair was even more shocking. Alyssa Rollins didn't seem to have any idea about any of it.

  Donovan took over. The wife looked like a dead end. "Was your husband seeing him regularly?"

  "He was supposed to, but he quit . . . About eight months ago."

  That was when it hit him. The smells here matched her and the child, but there was nothing indicating a man had been in this unit other than him. "Does your husband live here?"

  "No." She looked
down, "We're separated."

  This time, Eleri jumped in again. "You haven't filed paperwork."

  "No, ma'am." Her voice was starting to get nervous, though Donovan couldn't read if that meant she was lying or was just a regular person unused to being questioned by three FBI agents in her own home. "I don't think we'll reconcile, but we haven't started any proceedings or even filed any papers." She looked down at her hands.

  His partner offered a tight smile and leaned forward. They were almost done. One last question. "When was the last time you saw him?"

  Alyssa Rollins shook her head. "I haven't seen him in six months."

  Donovan shook her hand, as did Eleri and Marina Vasquez before they left. They thanked her, Eleri left their number, and it was all a very by-the-book dead end. Cooper Rollins had not been in that apartment. Alyssa and the child had lived there a while. As had the cat. He'd smelled all of it. While he could tell Eleri that, there was no repeating that kind of knowledge in front of Agent Vasquez, so he held his tongue.

  Good thing, too.

  As soon as Eleri pulled the rental car out into traffic, Marina Vasquez announced from the back seat, "She's lying."

  3

  Eleri stuck her gloved hand into the box and pulled out another zipped baggie. A series of broken and re-taped seals revealed who had been handling the remains of Dr. Walton Gardiner.

  Of course, a good part of the remains were already disposed of. The ME's office couldn't keep a nearly liquefied man for very long. They did, however, keep many samples. In the bags were small clear bottles filled with a DMSO and formalin mix to preserve the tissues. Tiny pinkish or yellowish blobs or even strips wafted under the surface as she looked at each.

  Eleri lifted bag after bag to the light, sorting them as she went. Adipose tissue. The tip of a finger. A larger jar with a strip of skin that had survived intact. A partial lower jaw bone with a small handful of teeth still anchored. It was cleaned of any clinging tissue and sat alone in its marked bag. She set it aside and kept sorting.

  Her mother, the perfect elite Southern wife, had never understood Eleri's need for the science. But after she'd been questioned repeatedly at age ten by FBI agents trying to glean information regarding her sister's abduction, Eleri had known what she would do. This was where it had all led her—holding the last piece of this man's jawbone and trying to balance dignity for him in death with justice.

  Eleri didn't test the tissue samples. They'd been tested already. DNA tests had been run on the adipose tissue and matched to a sample provided by the therapist's wife.

  It should have been enough. The L.A. County Coroner's Office had matched one of the pieces they'd cataloged, but they hadn't checked odontology. They hadn't checked several other things. If this was as big as her Senior Agent in Charge Westerfield thought it was, then Eleri needed more certainty than one small sample and a DNA match brought in by a family member.

  More effort than that had gone into simpler things like defrauding insurance companies. If this was a conspiracy, she wasn't going to trust a lone test.

  But the fingertip did look like Walton Gardiner's fingertips in the pictures she'd been given. She'd checked the face in the photos against his legal California ID. Eleri didn't doubt that could be faked—she'd heard tales of the California DMV. Right at this moment, Donovan and Marina Vasquez were at the Gardiners' home collecting more samples for their own cross check.

  The match they already had was from a root ball on the end of hair plucked from a hairbrush the wife claimed was the husband's. So easy to fake.

  Setting aside the fingertip, Eleri pulled the jaw out of the bag it was in, breaking the seal before signing and dating the attached record. She flipped open the file Vasquez had gotten from the man's dentist and set to work. Pulling the most recent dental x-rays, she set to matching the teeth on the side of the jaw she had left to work with.

  Luckily, Dr. Walton Gardiner had fillings and some relatively extensive dental work on the molars. No implants—which would have really helped, but she had a lot to work with.

  By the time Donovan and Marina showed up with their collected samples, Eleri was convinced she was in possession of the jaw of one Dr. Walton Gardiner, psychological therapist.

  She held it up as the others came in through the doorway to the lab. Donovan also showed off his baggies as he entered, but Marina gave away her newbie status by clenching a smile. She didn't seem to be able to fight turning a pale shade of green.

  Eleri didn't pay much attention to her. "This is Dr. Gardiner's lower right mandible."

  Marina slapped down the baggies she'd been holding as though they burned her, while Donovan came in for a closer look. At home holding portions of dead people in his hands, he almost didn't seem to notice that his partner for the day looked to be on the verge of vomiting. Vasquez’s color change was growing more pronounced the longer she was in the lab.

  "If that's Gardiner's jaw, then he's definitely dead."

  Donovan turned to Marina, still not seeing her distress. "There's virtually no way to get that portion of the jaw from an otherwise intact head. Thus, this is evidence that his head is no longer functioning. And if his head isn't, nothing is."

  As Eleri watched, Marina Vasquez turned away and started puffing short breaths through her nose. She offered a short glare at Donovan, who only now seemed to realize what he'd done. He shrugged back, like 'how was I supposed to know?'

  Suffice to say, his skills lay with dead people, not live ones.

  Eleri didn't put down the bone. She called out to the younger woman before she could exit the lab. "Grab some gloves, then grab a trash can to barf into. You need to come handle these samples."

  "Why? You've got it covered." Vasquez started to push the door open.

  Eleri stopped her. "Because you won't get far in this job if you can't handle the evidence with your own dignity intact. So come handle this now, it's some of the worst you'll see—tissue wise—and you'll barf and you'll learn."

  Marina hadn't turned around yet. "Maybe I'll do it later."

  "You'll do it now." Eleri kept her voice soft, but firm. "I know you want to be on this case and I know we're better with your help. But I can't have you vomiting on my evidence or ruining our credibility at a scene. There’s a high possibility that we're going to come across a fresh case just like this one. "

  Marina Vasquez did not leave the lab. In fact, she turned around so rapidly that Eleri was surprised how fast she'd committed. Until she realized that Marina was only committed to making sure her vomit made it into a waste bin.

  Donovan frowned and looked away, finally setting down the samples he'd been holding. Maybe he was trying to ignore the heaving woman behind him or give her some space, Eleri didn't know. He snapped on gloves and took the jawbone from her hand. "You certain on these?"

  She showed him the x-rays and talked over the sounds of the younger agent losing more of her lunch. She showed each of the points she'd compared and when she'd felt confident to call the odontology a match.

  Just about then, Marina Vasquez reached out and pulled a pair of medical gloves from one of several handy boxes, then grabbed the trashcan and walked over.

  Eleri looked at her. "Are you ready?" She didn't wait, just held up one of the bags she'd set aside. "This is skin. We're going to test it against the DNA you and Donovan gathered today."

  Vasquez turned green and buried her face in the can while more sounds emerged.

  "That's it." Eleri tried to be a little soothing. "Donovan and I won't tell anyone. Get it out of your system now."

  Pale-faced, the other woman looked up at her, "You mean literally."

  Eleri busted into a laugh at that one. "Yes, I guess I did."

  "I think Vasquez is right." Donovan bit into the burger he'd ordered from takeout, mayo and juices dripping down into the Styrofoam box as he ate with one hand.

  Vasquez wasn't here to either confirm or deny his appraisal. She'd left after Eleri had made her scrape several of the
tissues to gather cells. Eventually, he'd had enough of the younger agent squirming while she held the samples at arm’s length and just blurted out, "They aren't going to bite you. They're dead!"

  He wasn't normal. He knew that.

  Eleri wasn't either. And he wasn't certain he was completely on board with his partner's 'barf-til-you-make-it' training plan. Still, she was the senior partner, even if she was a solid five years younger than him. She was also right that an agent who couldn't hold their shit together on scene wasn't much of an agent. They couldn't bring Vasquez along if she couldn't keep her lunch down.

  Donovan had no such problems. He loved red meat, nearly bloody, and even rotting body parts didn't stop him from getting hungry. His sensitive nose smelled everything, but was offended by very little.

  He looked up to find Eleri watching him. Her words startling. "You're like a dog."

  "I'm not a dog." It felt like his lungs compressed when she insulted him that way, and he remembered why he didn't like having friends. He stared.

  "Dogs have very sensitive noses, but they sniff each other's butts." She took a bite of her own burger, then said almost exactly what he'd been thinking. "You clearly have a fantastic ability to distinguish and catalog smells, but nothing offends you. Even I'm offended by some of it. But not you. It's like you have good smells—" she pointed to his burger, "—and neutral smells, but no bad smells."

  "There are bad smells."

  "Like?"

  He sighed. Did they have to talk about this? "When I mention them, I remember them. I'm eating."

  "Oh." She nodded and dropped the subject. She hadn't washed her hair this morning, he thought. He could smell yesterday's scents on it and wondered if he should tell her.

  His own hair was thicker and slicker than normal and smells didn't absorb into it the way they did most people's. If he'd had Gardiner's whole head, he might have been able to sniff the hair to detect where the man had been recently. But he didn't have it. The man was mostly pink mist.