The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five (Book 2)

by A. J. Scudiere

  “Yes.” She stared, unable to reconnect to him, to figure out what he needed.

  But Donovan supplied a slightly dazed answer. “I need chili. Can we go back and get some of that chili? And something good on draft? Just a little.”

  It was three p.m., really too early for dinner, but she didn’t care. “Of course.”

  Grabbing her jacket, which she didn’t need other than as a part of her uniform, she headed out the door, figuring he would follow.

  Inside fifteen minutes she was sitting at a scarred wooden table with a pool table at her back. In another two minutes, she had a pear cider in her hand. And it didn’t seem to do jack shit for her mood.

  Somehow, she’d thought it would.

  Donovan looked much the same. Leaning forward, he looked at Eleri and managed to push out a few words.

  “Are we really . . .” he trailed off.

  “Yes.” Fucked. That was the word she would use, but instead of saying it she sipped at the cider in her glass. It wasn’t often one found pear cider on draft. She decided to enjoy it.

  It wasn’t often one met a professional hockey player with a decent sense of humor or a seemingly solid understanding of her dedication to her job, either. One with all his teeth. But that had happened, too. And the guy really floated her boat.

  She’d even managed to text him back a few times. Though he was almost always prompt, he didn’t seem at all disturbed by her poor response time. Eleri wondered if Avery Darling would miss her when the city blew up around her.

  Surely it would. Surely the whole city exploding would be her fault, too. Not able to stop what she’d seen coming. This time she interrupted her own slow sips of cider. “Is there anything that would even indicate an end date?”

  Donovan breathed in, out, and she wondered what he smelled. Did he like all the things he could pick up from the kitchen? He seemed to like the beer. “I don’t think of anything. Except that someone has to be smart enough to see that the murders will eventually get linked.”

  She blinked, nodded, and understood where he was going. “So even though each group doesn’t seem to know about the others, and each may fully believe there are only one, maybe two murders—”

  “If we have them all.” He interrupted.

  “Good point. But let’s say one—maybe two—then the groups may believe they’re in the clear at least for a while. But someone higher up the chain knows what’s going down, and has to understand that someone will put murder and murder together.” She leaned back. “That means someone up top knows that the timeframe is getting shorter.”

  He seemed to agree, if taking a sip of his cider indicated agreement. “And that means whatever the endgame is, it’s getting closer.”

  “I don’t think that’s a ‘whatever.’” She thunked her glass onto the tabletop. Had she not already drunk more than she intended to, it would have sloshed.

  This was the part that disturbed her the most. Until this morning she thought she was the only one thinking that. “If three of us independently put the pieces together to make up the same endgame, then it’s not a whatever. That’s what it is. And God bless us if we’re wrong, because if we are then it’s even worse than we think it is.”

  Donovan had seemed startled; he leaned forward, then back. Almost as though he were going through all five stages of grief in a single minute. When he hit ‘acceptance’ he spoke. “What exactly are we tasked with?”

  “We have to stop it.” How could he not see that?

  “Obviously, we do. But I was under the impression that the general goal was to hang out and see if we could get bigger fish.” This time it was Donovan plunking his glass onto the table. “But if we wait for bigger fish, people could die. Hell, we could.”

  “Oh.” He was right. They had been tasked with that. If they stopped this attack, but not the attackers, then the top brass could come back and plan it all over again. “Then I guess we’re really fucked.”

  She’d finally said it out loud and it felt good.

  “Why?” he asked, tipping his head as if he had no clue.

  “Seriously?” She blinked and wondered just how fast the alcohol had hit her. Was he that dense? Or was she that drunk? Peering into the glass at the pale colored liquid, she didn’t think that was possible. But then again she was investigating a pear cider instead of a bombing.

  “Yes, I’m serious. I want to know why you think we’re fucked and if it matches with my ideas of why I think we’re fucked.”

  “Oh.” That did make sense. She set the drink away from herself, deciding she’d had enough. Obviously. “I think we’re fucked because we have to find the big fish and take him/her down. And the chances of doing that, within a timeframe before everyone—” she looked around the restaurant and saw that it was virtually empty, but she still whispered the words, “blows up, are just high enough to make us believe that we might stand a chance. So when it all goes sideways, we’ll be as guilty as we possibly can be.”

  “Yeah, that’s about where I was.” He leaned back. “If it was truly impossible, I’d consider getting out of town and handing it over to the task force. Screw Westerfield’s orders. I’d just like to be alive later to have him yell at me.”

  She looked at him for a moment. It was a bad day when you considered that your best recourse involved Westerfield yelling and probably pulling your badges. She’d never even seen Westerfield yell, but she didn’t doubt he could do it or that it would be bad.

  So she did what she did best. She thanked the waiter politely for her salad—it was kind of anemic—and her bowl of chili—which was piled high with rice, sour cream, cheese and olives and definitely not anemic. Then she waited for him to leave and got down to brass tacks.

  This was the best Eleri, Donovan thought. This was the Eleri who would help him be his best and maybe even lead them to solving the case.

  “So we have Cooper Rollins that we can get our hands on pretty quickly.”

  Donovan felt the thread, and followed along. “And we should be able to find Ken Kellen and detain him—”

  Eleri interrupted. “You think we can find him? He’s way too weasely.”

  “That’s a word?” Donovan heard himself say it before he pulled back onto track. “We can’t find him, but Walter sure can. So, yes, we can bring him in.”

  “But will it stop the attacks?” Eleri asked the pertinent question between bites of chili. She seemed at ease to anyone casually observing her, but Donovan understood. Westerfield had lit a fuse, and no one knew how long it was.

  Donovan shrugged. That was the problem. “We don’t have enough intel to know who’s our keystone. And we sure as hell don’t know if we pull that keystone if everything will crumble or if someone else will slide right into place and keep the gears running.”

  “They won’t keep the gears running.” She shook her head. “They’ll ramp up the speed. It’s like standing over a bomb. Do you pull the blue wire or the red? Which one will stop it and which one will make it blow up faster?”

  There were no good answers and they both knew it. “So the next question is,” he said it while he thought about how much he’d really like another cider, but this was probably the last one for a while. Until the case was solved. While it had been fast before, it was in hyperdrive now. “How do we get the information we need? And what exactly do we need?”

  That seemed to turn Eleri’s gaze inward. “Get the check. We’re getting out of here. In fact, we’re getting out out.”

  He didn’t know what that meant, but he knew she was onto something. Since he’d triggered it, he pulled out his wallet and paid the tab while she started talking on the phone.

  By the time he made it outside, she was already waiting in the passenger’s seat. Not her usual spot. Eleri liked to be behind the wheel. So that meant she was more in control from the other side talking on her phone. As he headed toward the house, which she’d mouthed to him, he got the gist. They were moving.

  Job one: don’t be a
sitting target. They’d hauled Rollins in, and they’d had Kellen followed and at least Rollins, if not also Aziza, had made them. They needed to get the hell out of that house. While she talked to Marina about very rapidly locating a new place for them, with secure internet—very secure—he pointed at the steering wheel. “Get a new car, too.”

  “Shit, yeah—No, sorry, not you.” She turned her attention back to the other agent on the phone and explained about the car.

  It took an hour and a half. Too long. But necessary.

  They cleared out of the little house, whatever the payment was, it wasn’t worth quibbling over. Let Westerfield and his secretaries handle that. Eleri packed faster than he did, a fact that never ceased to amaze him as he was pretty damn quick.

  While he finished up, grabbing all the toiletries—his and hers—from the bathroom, she cleared the food stock from the kitchen. It would have been domestic. A couple packing after vacation. Except they weren’t a couple, they weren’t on vacation, and the only thing domestic was the location of the possible terrorism. What they were was a team. Even in this.

  Ever efficient, Vasquez met them at the car rental return in their new rental car, a smallish SUV from a different company. It blended into the L.A. landscape perfectly. “Here’s the keys. Wanna drive?”

  “Nope.”

  Vasquez blinked, almost as used to having Eleri behind the wheel as he was. “I’ll drive then.”

  She headed straight back to the Bureau office building. Inside, on the top floor were four suites for exactly these purposes. They would have FBI internet, supposedly unhackable, though Donovan was as clear as everyone else that an ‘unhackable’ net was about as real as a unicorn. But it was the best way to be as secure as was possible.

  He couldn’t have said just how much it hurt his chest to be living inside the Bureau offices now. Suddenly the tiny house seemed open and airy in comparison to bullet-proof windows and thick walls. According to Marina, all the units were empty and they could even choose separate ones if they wanted.

  Eleri said no, then looked to Donovan, who agreed. Then she gestured for him to pick one. Donovan pointed left, thinking it aimed their windows away from the main street.

  They needed separate bedrooms, but Westerfield had put them together to be a real team, not just two agents working a case. If they were going to succeed on this, they needed both their brains at full tilt and Marina’s to boot.

  “Come on in.” Eleri walked in the door of the unit he chose, heading straight back into the bedroom on the left as though she’d known it was there.

  Donovan was emerging from his own room—he’d only set the bag on the bed and moved the second bag of toiletries to the bathroom counter—when Eleri came out from her room with a puffy, manila envelope in her hands. “Look what was waiting for me.”

  Vasquez looked up from the box she was unpacking into the fridge and the few cabinets that existed over a subsistence level kitchenette. “What?”

  Her tone conveyed the complete confusion she felt. After all, Donovan had just picked out this suite, right?

  He had, but he’d seen that envelope before. He’d seen the loopy scrawl and now knew that “Makinde” meant Eleri, that it was a pet name her Grandmere used. He also knew that it held meaning for them, but not for the population at large.

  “My Grandmere sent them.” She opened the end of the packet as though finding something waiting for her in her bedroom of a randomly selected safe house didn’t surprise her. After everything else Donovan had seen Eleri do, it didn’t surprise him either. In fact, he was beginning to wonder if her skills were genetic in origin rather than some random luck.

  “What are they?” Marina Vasquez seemed to think that if Eleri was handling them, she must investigate.

  “It’s a grisgris. My Grandmere sent them for you and Donovan.”

  He almost smiled, “Did she leave a note?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  She pulled them out. His was on a black leather cord and the pouch had a wolf drawn in loose ink.

  Marina’s had two ribbons, one exactly matched the color of her blouse, the other the color of her pants. “Wow. It’s perfect. How could she have known?”

  Eleri didn’t answer that question. Instead she said, “Grandmere believes. And Grandmere clearly thinks you two are in grave danger.”

  28

  Donovan looked at the weird little pouch and wondered how Eleri was going to explain the wolf on his. How had her Grandmere known that? What had Eleri told the woman?

  He was giving her a sideways look, asking just that, but Eleri was paying no attention to him. She was fielding the oohing and aahhhhing from Vasquez over getting a baggie to wear because it matched her outfit so closely.

  “How could your grandmother have known? What did you call her? Grand-mar?”

  Eleri answered the easier question. “Grand-mere. It’s the French, or in our case, Acadian.”

  That was an excellent topic change, and as Donovan watched, Marina Vasquez started coming to the same conclusions he had a few days ago. Only he couldn’t be smug about being first. He’d known Eleri for several months before he figured it out. But then he’d had no one telling him her origins either.

  “You’re Acadian?” It was a question, but filled with both gravity and surprise.

  “Partly. Mostly African American and old Massachusetts founding family.” She looked to Donovan, only just then eying the wolf on his grisgris. “Put it on. Grandmere wants you to wear it. And you don’t mess with my Grandmere.” She grinned at him as though that said everything.

  Unfortunately, her comment pulled Vasquez right back around to the topic he didn’t want to discuss.

  “So why the wolf?”

  Eleri caught his expression and casually waved it away. “It’s like his spirit animal or something.”

  Eleri steered the group where she wanted them, just as both Vasquez and Donovan were settling the odd little voodoo talismans around their necks. She’d even pulled hers out—loud and proud now that she wasn’t the only one. “Our talk with Westerfield gave us a direction: We’re looking for multiple strike points for a simultaneous attack.”

  “Not more individual murders?” Vasquez looked at her.

  This time Donovan jumped in. “It’s not ruled out. But if we assume we have time to figure it out, we won’t. We have to work this as though the attack will go down in a manner of days. Because if it does and we miss, we’re all screwed.”

  He didn’t just mean out of a job, either.

  “But what’s the tipping point?” She looked from one to the other of them. And Donovan honestly couldn’t answer that.

  Their conversation with Westerfield changed where they were headed, but unless their boss was in the cell himself, that decision of theirs wouldn’t change anything the groups were doing. Was there any indication lately of a change of plan?

  Eleri looked at him. “I think Cooper Rollins is the tipping point.”

  Vasquez frowned, but Donovan got it. “They’ve targeted enough people around him that if the link comes up in the investigation, he may turn on them. It could be used as leverage to get him to roll.”

  “How long has he been in the cell?” Vasquez asked. “Because the Sullivan death was months ago. But I guess he was discharged before that. Did he come right back to California? I mean, was he even here for that death?”

  Donovan looked at her, not comprehending, before he realized she was working from a Cooper-Rollins-as-the-killer template. At least for one or two of the murders. That theory made sense, if you hadn’t seen what Eleri had, if you hadn’t heard her name each of the killers. She’d seen the Gardiner murder, the Sullivan one, and the Ratz case. They had the Indian man associated with the Dawson case, but the fact was, there was nothing tying him to that exact murder, and Rollins sure could have come in after him. In fact, Rollins conceivably could have perpetrated each of the crimes.

  Except Eleri had s
een otherwise.

  Dammit.

  He was starting to see why NightShade stuck with their own and why they only called in special teams when necessary. Why Westerfield had said they could use Vasquez, but they should just use her. Instead, they’d adopted her and Westerfield hadn’t stopped them.

  Was he letting them flounder? Letting them learn and grow? Donovan wondered.

  But this was no cut-your-teeth-on-it case. This was getting bigger and bigger, which was leading Donovan down a darker path. What if Westerfield expected them to fail? What if he didn’t even so much expect it, but was making contingency plans in case they did? Eames and Heath had been handling it. Would they take the bulk of the blame? Would their boss turn on them and question them as to why they hadn’t called in the Terrorism Task Force? Would he lie?

  Donovan felt Eleri looking at him. What should they do about Marina? He could see it in her eyes.

  He didn’t know. But he did try to find a way to ask the junior agent to leave so they could figure it out. “Tell you what, why don’t you let us get settled in and then we can convene and do some real digging. But think on that multiple point attack idea. Where would the points be? Who might carry them out? That kind of thing.”

  Unable to tell if she thought that was a great idea or if she realized she was being shooed out and simply handled it with grace, Donovan watched as Marina accepted the suggestion and gathered the few things she’d brought. As she headed out the door, she looked around the place, “Is there anything else you need? Food? Computers? Paper?”

  He shrugged. No clue. Eleri at least gave the place a good scan before saying, “I think we’re set, but we’ll let you know if we think of anything.” Then she jumped onto her own words. “You don’t have to get things for us.”

  Vasquez only smiled, and the two women seemed to communicate the level of ‘okayness’ between them. He saw it happening, but he couldn’t read it other than that it was ‘okay.’ This case, the Vasquez-Eames connection, was giving him some disturbing insight.