The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five (Book 2)

by A. J. Scudiere

  Donovan didn’t say anything. Just stood by, looking official. Though Eleri knew he was waiting for her to explain what the hell had just happened. Why she’d run. If she was even okay after passing out on the porch. Given the way she’d felt so sick, so fast, and that she’d come around to find herself lying on the back deck, she was quite confident that’s exactly what had happened. Donovan needed an explanation. One he wasn’t going to get until she was good and confident that Davies and Harding were long out of earshot.

  Harding put his hands back on his belt in that casual way that officers had of resting them there. It was authoritarian, but not immediately threatening. “I don’t know that we have a copy. But I can call in.”

  “That would be wonderful.” She smiled at him as he and Davies stepped back through the gate, into the tiny front yard as though they were getting out of the way. She could hear him radio in for information on the case—or lack thereof as best she could tell from the files Marina pulled.

  As their backs finally disappeared from view, Donovan turned to her, laser-sharp eyes questioning her health.

  “I’m fine.” She mouthed it to him. No need to give the officers any indication that she was other than spot on. If they didn’t know what they’d almost walked in on, she wasn’t going to tell. More loudly, she said, “We’ll need a search of the house. You and I should start.”

  She said the words in an even tone, not wanting to shout them, but not wanting to sound like she was hiding anything from the officers, either. No need to make them suspicious. Though, chances were good that Davies already was.

  When Donovan wandered over toward her and asked what they needed to do to get things started for the search—clearly having picked up on the ‘be casual’ directive—she turned to face him, thinking to let him read her lips.

  Then, almost laughing, Eleri turned away and spoke in a very low voice, knowing Donovan would hear it. “Davies—” she pointed at a window while she looked at the back side of the house as though making decisions, “killed Ratz.”

  She looked up at him casually, finding his eyebrows raised and his mouth nearly open. He didn’t have the same opportunity to talk to the grass and have her hear it. Donovan was reduced to hand gestures and crudely over-emphasized mouthed words. He pointed to the back porch. “Did he kill her?”

  She shook her head. They didn’t need to search the house. They needed to search the grass. The yard had been pretty before the woman died, as best as Eleri could tell. Watered, mowed to an even height, then left to whither when Mrs. Sullivan went missing. It would be harder to find what she was looking for in the tall, dead grass.

  She tried not to look at it. Didn’t want the officers to see that what she really wanted was on the ground when she was supposed to be requesting access to the house. Eleri had just tipped her head to see Donovan checking out the detached garage at the back of the property when Harding and Davies came back through the gate.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.” This time it was Davies. She hated the sound of his voice, and hid her bristle at his slight. Ma’am? That’s “Agent” to you. But he wasn’t just an asshole. He was a murderer. “We don’t have any access to house keys.”

  “No worries.” She smiled at him, but wished he would catch a venereal disease. “We’ll contact the family. Thank you.”

  It almost hurt to thank this man, but she reminded herself that she was going to take him down. And now that she was with NightShade she didn’t have to say exactly where she got her information.

  She would double-check. She would be certain that she hadn’t simply had a dream that happened to have his face. Then she would shut down the whole damn cell.

  A clean feeling of liberation washed over her suddenly, as Davies nodded at her and said, “We’ll leave you two here unless you need anything else.”

  Donovan told them “No, thank you,” and watched as the two headed out through the front yard. Eleri stood there, breathing in air that she knew wasn’t quite clean, but cleared her out nonetheless. There, in Loreen Sullivan’s tiny back yard, a weight lifted from her shoulders as she realized that her NightShade directive set her free more than it tied her down.

  “Eleri.” Donovan’s voice broke the spell but didn’t bring her back to full gravity. Maybe nothing could. “Are you all right?”

  22

  “I’m fine.” But she wasn’t, Eleri knew. “I’m okay.” She didn’t say it a third time. The third time indicated the lie. And she knew better.

  “You look off.”

  She shook her head, because she couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t explain it to herself.

  Donovan waited, his head tipped toward the front of the house. For a moment, she wondered what he was doing, then she realized he was listening for the police car. “They’re gone.”

  Implicitly, that meant they could now speak freely. And he did. “What happened?”

  “I had my hands on the railing, and I guess it was the way I placed them—”

  He didn’t let her finish. “I mean: you passed out. You asked for Emmaline. And ‘Grandmere.’” He looked confused, but Eleri felt her hand reach up for the grisgris around her neck. Had she seen them when she was out? She’d seen Emmaline in her sleep numerous times before now, though it had been a while since she’d dreamed of the sister she’d lost so long ago. And Grandmere?

  Eleri shrugged. “I don’t remember seeing either of them.” Donovan knew a good bit about her sister. Though she hadn’t really sat down and poured her heart out—didn’t even know if she could where Emmaline was concerned—Donovan knew more about her sister’s kidnapping, and Eleri’s subsequent dreams, than anyone else. Though he didn’t know much of anything about her grandmother, she must have muttered the name or he wouldn’t even know she used the French, or actually Acadian, term in that case.

  He brought her back around. “Are you physically okay? You may have hit your head.”

  Eleri reached up, her skull throbbing slightly now at the mention of the possibility, but with no single source of the feeling. Her hand wandered, the bones revealing nothing as Donovan shook his head. “Let me.”

  That was almost weird. But he was a physician. It took a moment with his fingers carefully sorting through her hair, checking for cuts or bumps. He didn’t push or massage, probably in case she did have some damage, but he quickly came to a conclusion. “I don’t see anything. If you don’t feel anything, you probably didn’t hit it.”

  Shaking her head slowly, Eleri denied the slow creep of tension through the muscles, it was at such odds with the feeling of lifted weight. But whatever she was feeling, Donovan didn’t see it. He simply kept interrogating her now that he could. Her small epiphany was not the order of the day.

  “What did you see when you touched the railing?”

  Now that she was deemed physically whole, her mental issues, visions, could be addressed. He was such a doctor; she almost said so. Instead, she gave him the story. “She was really sick. Fever, stomach upset, joints hurt. I could feel it all.”

  He nodded, “You looked like it. Your stance changed.”

  That shocked her a bit. Had she become Loreen Sullivan just for a minute? “The person at the door knocked and came in. In this neighborhood, that would mean she had a key.”

  “Why ‘in this neighborhood’? This is a decent place.”

  Eleri shook her head. “No, I mean, L.A. In general here, people don’t talk to their neighbors much. Maybe they’re just too on top of each other. The one older gentleman next door is the only one who noticed something was up. No one else did, or else they didn’t think it was their business. So you can bet, around here, doors are locked.”

  Donovan nodded, then his eyes popped. “It was a woman? Did she stab you—Sullivan—while you were seeing it?”

  He became more frantic as he spoke and Eleri worked to calm him down. “No, she didn’t stab me, Sullivan passed out when the girl told her she’d been poisoned with ricin. The girl pulled the blade and said it
was kinder than letting her die in pain.”

  “Ricin?” Then he paused, “You coughed and looked at your hand. Did you see something?”

  It took only a second to think back to what he asked about. “Yes. The cough was painful and there was a spatter of red on my hand. She didn’t realize quite what it was, but she was afraid.” Eleri looked off to the side, her eyes not focusing as her brain worked.

  Donovan nodded again, his brain obviously churning too, and when pieces fit together, the next question would come out of his mouth. “Girl? Aziza? Alya?”

  “No. Someone different.” She purposefully lowered her voice. Just because the neighbors didn’t check on each other didn’t mean they weren’t above listening in over the wall. “The thing is, we have four murders each performed—nearly identically—by four separate people.”

  He nodded again, his eyes wandering a path similar to his thoughts. “It does make it really hard to track. I don’t think they even know each other. I mean the murderers. Do you?”

  “I don’t even know if they know about each other.” She shrugged again. It seemed to be her rote response to this case. “This girl was white, blonde, blue-eyed, maybe early twenties, and said Mrs. Sullivan was the very devil that needed to be eradicated from this land before she triggered the end of days.”

  “Those words?”

  “Pretty much.” Eleri looked at him, “Can you hear the neighbors? Is anyone snooping?” She’d given up trying to figure it out herself. Might as well use his super-powers. She almost laughed.

  “No, no one’s there. I made sure the officers had driven off before I started talking.” Then he thought for a moment. “The wording sounds very Christian. So we have a Muslim killer—Aziza, and an Indian killer—the unknown man at Vivian Dawson’s, and this Christian girl?”

  “Don’t forget that Davies killed Ratz.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Literally.” Eleri sighed. “So we have what? Three different ‘fractures’ all carrying this out?”

  “That’s what it sounds like.” Then he finally looked at her. “Why are we still in the back yard? Shouldn’t we be on our way to the office and getting Vasquez on some of this?”

  “Not yet. We’re here, and we need to do what they didn’t do the first time. We need to search.”

  “Okay. What am I looking for?” He scanned the yard, looking way too high up for Eleri’s purposes.

  “The grass. Bone fragments. Teeth. Any small part that might have survived a blast.”

  He nodded, not any more disgusted by the thought of finding tiny bits of body parts than she was. It took a certain kind of person to go into a forensic field and for all their many differences, they were both it.

  She was getting ready to suggest they grid the place, or at least sub-divide it, when he walked back up onto the porch. He stood, facing the doorway. “So she was here when she was stabbed? Facing this way?”

  “I don’t know. I passed out at the sight of the knife.” Then she perked up. “The knife! I saw it.” Excitedly now, she started to describe it. The metal blade that scared the shit out of Mrs. Sullivan, but that Eleri recognized as a little too wide. “I think it was hollow. The explosive was likely inside it. So there might well be metal fragments from the blade exploding. We need to look for that, too.”

  She told him of the handle, that it was dark in color. That was the plastic, with a button that she assumed was a timer trigger. “That would mean that a smart person—or a psychic one who knew the knife would blow—could pull it out and throw it and maybe survive the stab wound.”

  “Would anyone know enough to do that?”

  Her breath soughed in and out. “I doubt it. I don’t think anyone really even has a clue people are dying this way. And the standard treatment for a stab is . . .”

  “Don’t pull out the blade.” He finished for her. “In fact, you should bind it. At which point you are sure to blow.”

  “I don’t think there’s enough time between trigger and explosion for any real first aid. I get the feeling the victim staggers back and it’s just long enough for the killer to get away.”

  Again, he looked up at the house. “So, we’re assuming she’s facing the killer in the doorway. And it’s someone she knows. She’s what? Shocked?”

  “Betrayed.” The word rolled out of her. Eleri had felt it. Mrs. Sullivan had trusted the girl, and only in that moment had she realized that every move between them had been a ploy by the girl to get to this point.

  Donovan seemed to understand, but kept mapping out what happened.

  “She would have blown up back this way.” He gestured behind him, out into the yard. “Some will go up,” but there was no awning over the deck, just a small one over the door. “Maybe something up there?” he pointed to it, but continued talking. “Some will go out. Maybe even as far as over the fence, but definitely into the grass in whatever the radius is.” He turned and looked over the yard.

  “I doubt anything specific got over the fence. If a neighbor found pink mist or a tooth in their yard, they’d complain.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Her smile was grim. “I’m sure the homeowner’s association would frown on that kind of thing.”

  She could see he almost laughed, but he kept going. “And some would go down.” He pointed to his feet. “Between the slats.”

  “Lovely.” She sighed. This day just kept getting better and better.

  Donovan looked at her. Eleri seemed okay. More importantly, she seemed like Eleri. He was still concerned, but he was starting to breathe easier.

  Oddly, she seemed a little lighter, didn’t smell quite as stressed out. It wasn’t a bad smell, not like full stress-sweat, which he could never actually imagine the Southern, money-raised Miss Eames smelling of. No, it was just a warning, like a person snapping at you, only it came right before that part. The stress of this morning had clung, even after she’d come around and leapt from the porch. But then, after the officers left, it was suddenly gone.

  “How do we get Davies?” He asked her.

  “We’re NightShade.” She smiled as though that solved everything.

  He was concerned by that, though he did his best to make light of it. “If you were grim, you could have said that like ‘We’re Batman.’”

  At least she laughed. She’d sure looked at him like he was nucking futs when he said some of the human debris from the explosion would have gone under the deck. It was going to be the most likely place it would be preserved too.

  “No, we’re not Batman. But we have a directive to do what we need to.”

  Almost like adrenaline, alarm shot through him, starting in his chest and spreading through racing tendrils until it hit his fingers and toes. “We can’t just kill him. We need evidence.”

  “Actually, we don’t.” She returned the volley quickly, and though there was no malevolence in her voice, his blood ran colder. “And that’s the problem.”

  He sighed out relief as the tension left him. “So what do we do about it?”

  “We have to fully agree before we order anything. Before we pull any trigger in anything other than flat-out self-defense. And we—you and me—we never operate from my dreams alone. We go for arrests rather than kills, if possible. You got me on that?” She stared at him, as serious as he’d ever seen her. She had good cause, too. There had been no arrests on their first mission. Apparently, she wanted some this time.

  “Of course. So we have a lead on Davies—a good one.” Though they would never do anything based solely off her dreams, they’d proven to be nothing but solid. “How do we track him?”

  “Let’s put Walter on him.” She grinned.

  Oh shit. He nodded. Walter was good. “Can we give her a pay raise?”

  “Sadly, no. The rates are set by the Bureau, and we already operate outside the norm. I don’t think we should raise any flags we don’t have to.” She headed for the corner of the yard, just to the side of the deck. “We can contact her later t
oday. Give her intel and set her on her way.” Then she slid right into the next topic. “I’m taking this area. You can pull up the deck if you want.”

  He tried. He knelt down, and worked to get his fingers through the spaces between the wood. Only it wasn’t wood. It was pressed, hard plastic composite with wood-grain etched on it and it had zero give. So he went to the end of the deck, away from Eleri and tried to pry it up. It did not give. There was no way he was getting under here on his own. Wolf, yes. Superhuman strength? Not at all. He might want to consider working out a little more.

  “I’m checking over here.” He announced, pointing away from the stupid back deck. But Eleri barely nodded at him and didn’t look up from the grass she was leaning over.

  Standing again, he started looking at the ground, actually the driveway. This entire side of the yard was paved. Just slightly wider than the average car, it reached from the edge of the house to the property line. If the police had driven in here, they’d likely inadvertently picked up, crushed, or otherwise ruined any evidence. He didn’t blame them. They’d been investigating a missing person, not a death, and certainly not a person who exploded from the inside.

  Very quickly, he finished his spot—meaning he didn’t find anything. When he looked up, he saw Eleri almost on her hands and knees on the other side of the yard. “Should we bring in a cadaver dog?”

  Almost instantly, she shook her head at him. “He’ll alert everywhere. If she exploded—” Eleri cut herself off, seeming to realize what she was saying. “I don’t think it will find what we need. Just reaffirm what we’re already certain of enough to start looking.” She turned back to the grass, pushing her flat hand over it, bending the blades this way and that to see if anything was covered.

  His stomach growled at him, but Donovan ignored it and started on the ground at the edge of the driveway. The grass was disturbingly uniform, probably sodded—the yard was small enough that it could be done on the salary of a working woman in L.A. His eyes crossed as he searched for any changes in the pattern, anything that might be useful. He was hungry, and finding a scrap of a candy bar wrapper and a bit of foil didn’t help.