The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five (Book 2)

by A. J. Scudiere

  He could smell how people felt sometimes. He should have a much better than average ability to read and react to people, instead he lagged far behind. He was a second-grader to their advanced level understanding.

  As Vasquez disappeared and closed the door behind her, he turned to Eleri. “Did she understand that she was getting shooed out? I couldn’t tell.”

  Eleri almost laughed at him. “She could tell, and she honestly didn’t mind. She seems to understand that a good portion of this case is above her paygrade. I think she’s just having a good time getting to do something important. She’s happy to be out of her cube.”

  He eyed his senior partner. “And you know all this because you had a discussion with her about it?”

  This time, she really did laugh. “No, that’s body language. That’s me bringing her coffee as a gesture of consolation when I can’t give her more information.”

  “Or you’re psychic.” He went to his fallback position. Maybe he wasn’t so far behind, she was simply way ahead.

  “I’m not psychic.” She raised one elegant eyebrow at him.

  “I’m not a werewolf,” he responded.

  All he received in exchange was the other eyebrow climbing to match the first. Yeah, well, that one stayed at the impasse. “So what do we do now?”

  “What do you think of Westerfield?”

  Not what he was expecting, but Donovan answered her honestly. The way he figured it, Westerfield was at one level and he and Eleri were a unit at least one—if not more—levels down. “I’m not positive he’s trying to set us up. But I think it’s becoming pretty inarguable that we are, in fact, positioned to take the fall should it all collapse.”

  “So it can’t collapse,” she said. As though that solved everything.

  “Are you seeing the future?”

  “If only.” She made an odd sound in the back of her throat, but Donovan couldn’t interpret that either. Instead he moved a little closer, her scent faint but there. She was nervous. Tense, low grade vibrations seemed to emanate from her and her smell was just a bit sharp. She wasn’t as at ease as she appeared. “I’m just saying, if we fail, we don’t just fail ourselves. This is a big enough burden that getting thrown under a bus may feel really good—almost deserved.”

  Another angle he hadn’t considered. “So let’s sit down and get started. That way, if it all goes to hell, we can at least say we gave it everything we had.”

  Donovan had to wonder when he’d given everything he had. If he ever had before.

  She grabbed a box of crackers and popped the top on a coke, asking him if he wanted one. Somehow the girl who grew up with cooks and maids never seemed to have a problem serving others. For a split second, he wondered about the mother she complained about and where that humble ability had come from.

  From inside his head, he was listening to the noise of his own crackers being chewed, and from outside, he heard Eleri munching through hers. They thumbed through the papers, the pictures, the names and tried to come up with whatever they could.

  But Fracture Five was good.

  Too good.

  He and Eleri had pieces. So many pieces, so many links, and no way to put them together to form any kind of concrete answers. Ken Kellen went from one cell to the other. Cooper Rollins was at least in one cell and tied to all four murder victims. They had Aziza and Alya, who were in on student visas and whom Ken Kellen and Cooper Rollins had first met in Fallujah.

  They had the cell in Calabasas, who now had guns and sniper rifles. Another tipping point, though not one that pointed to mass terrorist attacks but another kind of singular assassination. Unless . . .

  “Do you think they’re planning to blow people up? Or snipe people?”

  Eleri’s head snapped up at the words. “You mean because they blew people up in situations when other killers would have used hand-to-hand methods? So they might be doing this somewhat backward. They might then do a mass attack that’s not a bomb per se?”

  He nodded at her, his head moving and his brain on one track while his mouth tried to explain what the rest of him was doing. “I think what we’re missing is the ‘what are they going for?’ question.”

  “So we assumed they’re aiming for mass casualty, but what if instead, it’s straight up terror?” Her eyes didn’t settle on him, or on anything in particular, instead they roamed, an outward mirror of her inward thoughts. “Give me the paper?”

  He handed her a legal pad Vasquez had left behind as though knowing they would need it. Maybe she was psychic too. He brushed that off, knowing Eleri’s list even before she started it. “Options: mass casualty. That could be bomb, biological, poison, etc. Shit. Too many ways to do that. . . . Option 2: Terror, and there are options within that, too.”

  He frowned until she explained.

  Writing furiously, she didn’t look up at him but seemed to read him just as clearly as if she’d looked. “Short term terror. The clock tower, Paris.”

  “Paris lasted a while,” he pointed out.

  “It’s still short term. Ongoing, until it plays out. There’s instantaneous, too. Where the act is singular—not like Paris, more like Oklahoma or the Boston Marathon.”

  “So what’s long term?” He asked.

  “The Unabomber. Anthrax in the mail. Multiple point acts with no one claiming them. No way to find the perpetrator, or perpetrators, and a nation waiting to see who and where will be next.”

  “Charleston? Columbine? Where do those fit?”

  She shrugged as though they weren’t talking about terrorism on home soil. As though she were giving tennis tips. Only she didn’t play tennis. She rode fancy horses and she fought terrorist plots. “Those walk the line between mass shootings and short term terrorism. The difference is sometimes subtle, sometimes in the intention. I’m not entirely up on Columbine, but if I remember correctly that wasn’t about fear but about actively killing people. Charleston was about removing a certain kind of person and starting a war. Not quite the same thing.”

  For the first time it occurred to him that Eleri felt some of this much more deeply than he thought. She’d begun her long journey to this table with her own terror. He’d only been asked to the table recently, and he’d agreed because he was bored with his job at the ME office.

  Well, he wasn’t bored now, was he?

  “What do you think is the case here?” He asked.

  “That’s the problem. I think they’re perfectly situated for any of the three. If they are placing bombs, they have independent groups ready to move in unison even if they don’t know it. Thwart one and the other two get through—”

  “If there are two others.”

  “There are.” She looked up at him finally, her list paused for the moment.

  “No, what if there are more groups? Four? Or five? And we just haven’t found them yet.”

  For some reason, it seemed she hadn’t thought of that. She paled just a little under the fine mocha of her skin. “So we could stop everything we have, everything we see, and still come up short.”

  Yup. That was the big picture problem: they didn’t yet have a big picture. “Let’s start figuring out how to do these,” he offered, wanting to be working rather than soaking in the likelihood of failure. “We might at least get rid of some as implausible. Do we call Marina back? Three heads are better than one.”

  Eleri looked at him. “Yeah, but first how do we tell her what we know? She needs to be playing with a full deck and she’s not.”

  “Let’s just tell her.” He shrugged and only as he said it did he catch Eleri’s horror.

  The sheer shock was another wake-up for him and he was getting damn tired of having them. What it must have taken for her to trust him, when she looked so utterly disgusted and even betrayed at the very mention of telling a woman she obviously liked and respected.

  “I didn’t mean ‘tell her’ tell her. I just meant give her the information.”

  “But how do we say we got it?” Now she was
frowning and it felt disturbingly good to be the one explaining for once, for making a solid positive contribution.

  “You said yourself that she understands part of this is above her pay grade and she’s just happy to help. So tell her that we can’t tell her. We give her the intel, but not how we got it.” It made perfect sense to him.

  Nodding slowly, Eleri seemed to absorb that. “In fact, we could develop some kind of code, just something to say, that lets her know she won’t know where or how we got it, but that she should work with it.” She was warming way up to the idea. “That way we can easily get rid of her at any point when we’re out if we need to. Makes our job easier.”

  She was looking up at him now, and Donovan nodded back. “Exactly. We just tell her we have a series of inside informants, and we know that Cooper didn’t kill Sullivan, etc.”

  “I love it. . . .and honestly, she probably will, too. It’s kinder than acting as though we just need her to leave for a minute.”

  Donovan actually smiled. In the middle of trying to sort a terrorist plot, he grinned and he wondered if that would always strike him as weird. “She’s a big girl. She’ll like it. Call her back.”

  Eleri had just stuck a cracker in her mouth and she motioned at him to do the honors. So Donovan rang up the woman stuck in the tiny cube office downstairs and invited her back up. He figured she’d probably just gotten into something important, but she didn’t complain. He was about to hang up when he added, “We have snacks, but feel free to bring your favorites.”

  Sure enough, Marina Vasquez showed up seven minutes later with all her papers, her phone, her computer bag, and four bags of vending machine chips along with three cans of some cherry drink they must stock in the break room. Donovan almost laughed as she stuck two in the fridge and lined up the chips along the counter. She popped the tab on the drink and yanked the first bag open. “So what’s new?”

  They explained the ‘non-identifiable informant’ to her and left it at that. Then they dropped all the information they’d been holding back and watched as she scrambled to re-organize it all.

  “So each killing was carried out separately? Like we thought, but worse. Because it wasn’t Cooper Rollins. Is he even involved, really?”

  “Doesn’t he have to be?” Eleri countered, but Donovan knew that really was a question and she would take ‘no’ for an answer.

  “I’m not sure any more.” Vasquez pondered it. “Honestly, looking back it doesn’t make a lot of sense. He may be responsible for the murders—they are all connected back to him—but the cells were here before him. He didn’t form them. He joined later.”

  Donovan took that in. An excellent point. The signs had all pointed to Rollins, but he might be no more than a side challenge. “It order to do what we now know happened, Rollins would have had to have his hand in all the cells—or at least all three that we know of—since right after he got home.”

  Eleri picked up his thread. “Otherwise, how would he have convinced other people to kill for him? And, as far as we know, he’s only just now getting into the cell. They aren’t even letting him into everything from what we can see.”

  Donovan took a deep breath. “So he’s joining them, but he’s a scapegoat, too?”

  Marina was tapping her finger on the tabletop. A chip remained in her other hand on the way to her mouth, having stopped its motion when Eleri asked her question. “So we really have two separate problems. The cells can’t be dedicated to bringing Cooper Rollins in for a string of murders he didn’t commit. It’s too many people with too much organization for that. The murders are one thing and the terrorist activity is another.”

  Donovan was glad they’d brought her in. She had a sharp mind and a keen sense of people. For a moment he almost thought they could get out of this intact.

  Then she asked another question, “So what made the two things intersect? Why are the cells here? And why are they killing people associated with Cooper Rollins? And what if they don’t actually all connect to Cooper Rollins?”

  29

  Cooper Rollins jerked his right arm up to stop the attack, but wasn’t fast enough.

  He hadn’t seen it coming.

  “Give me the damn phone, asshole.” Kellen squeezed Cooper’s wrist in an attempt to make him drop the disposable cell. Cooper tried to hold out, willed his bones and neurons to withstand. The beauty of the move was that it wasn’t about pain, it was about physiology, about neural signaling. Though you might withstand the pain, your hand would still open, and his did.

  He heard the plastic clatter to the ground and he aimed his free fist for Ken Kellen’s midsection, hoping to stop the obvious next step. But Kellen stepped on the phone even as Cooper’s fist connected with the solid muscle he’d been expecting.

  His right hand was useless, Kellen still held it tight, the bones crushing together under his grip. Kellen also used the hold to pull at Cooper, but the problem was, they’d trained to fight under the same guys. Been given the same techniques—moves that were never meant to be used against each other. Cooper knew Kellen was going to use the wrist to his advantage, and he already had his weight over his front foot, throwing himself forward as the other man pulled.

  Though Kellen let go of his wrist, Cooper made the split second decision to twist, grabbing the other man’s light jacket and managing enough of a fist full to pull him down, too. They hit the pavement with Cooper blowing hard just before he hit and half a second later hearing Kellen do the same thing, too. Both men gave up their breath before it could be knocked out of them, allowing for a faster re-set, no phase-period, just like they’d been taught.

  Because he’d hit the ground first, Cooper had a momentary advantage—finally!—and he used it to turn and aim while Kellen was still busy landing. Curling his fingers, he took advantage of Kellen’s exposed neck and aimed for the spot just under his jaw. Like Kellen’s move to his wrist, a shot here couldn’t be countered once contacted. And this one could knock a man out. Use the enemy’s body against him, he’d been taught. He just hadn’t quite gotten the lesson on how to fight another soldier. How to fight the one who was supposed to have his back. How to hit the guy he’d once have died for.

  They also hadn’t taught him that when he got here, he’d mean it.

  Cooper meant that hit in a way he’d never meant anything he’d done to any other enemy. Maybe it was PTSD. Maybe it was actually a tiny war here on an empty side street not far from the square, so maybe he was wasn’t over-reacting this time.

  As he rolled for the hit, his knuckles connected. But since he was going for the close side of Kellen’s neck, the exposed side, he couldn’t get the good cross swing he wanted and the hit hurt—he could see that—but it didn’t take his enemy out.

  Kellen let out a bark somewhere between a yelp of pain and a growl of anger. Somehow he jumped up from flat on the ground, but not to his feet. On his knees now, Kellen came at Cooper, putting him back on the defensive, and for the first time, he raised his arms to protect his head even as he scrambled to get out.

  He’d banked on that last shot.

  And it hadn’t paid off the way he wanted it to.

  Deflecting a few hits as the other man tried to straddle him and keep him down, Cooper jabbed both his elbows forward at the same time he brought up his knees. It protected him and bumped the other man back just a bit. Just enough to make a move. Cooper was taking aim on a new target and finally hearing that Kellen was talking to him.

  Talking wasn’t the right word. He was forcing out words as he swung repeatedly. Still keeping his arms up, Cooper tried desperately to listen.

  “Get out . . . Mine . . . Phone.”

  He couldn’t put it together.

  Though he wanted to listen, he had to fight back. If he didn’t, he’d get his ass royally kicked, in public, by a man he hated more than anything. Kellen was part of what had broken him. The main part of the mission turned rotten in Fallujah, the PTSD, the reason Cooper couldn’t live with his wife
and young son. He gathered his hatred.

  Taking a breath without looking like it, he prepped for a hit, only to have Kellen yelp and go flying off him just as he was ready to strike.

  In the rapid aftermath of his surprise, he saw a shoe swing by, finishing its arc. It must have connected with Kellen’s side, kicking him off the way one might do to a dog.

  “—and my foot is metal, asshole.” He heard the words before his brain placed them. “So don’t think I won’t do that again. It didn’t hurt me at all.”

  Walter.

  Cooper could see her standing over a downed Kellen now, as he looked up from his spot on the pavement to Kellen’s spot close by. He grabbed his side, but didn’t fight back. Only stared at the woman.

  She wasn’t done. “I have a metal hand, too. And you probably have some deep-seated psychological aversion to hitting a woman. I will use that against you. I am the fucking Terminator. Now get out of my sight.”

  Kellen rose to his knees, then his feet, unable to contain the fact that his ribs clearly hurt him. No wonder, bone could do some damage, but at least bone against bone was fair. Walter was right, she was the fucking Terminator, and Kellen’s ribs hadn’t stood a chance. The medic in Cooper looked for signs of Kellen’s having punctured his lungs, but didn’t see any. He wasn’t glad.

  He rolled easily to his own feet, his own side having not been kicked in, and faced Kellen.

  “Don’t come back.” Kellen said.

  Cooper just stared.

  “Fracture Five is mine. I made it. I’ll see it through.” His stare was glazed, maybe with pain, maybe with hatred, maybe with something else. Cooper couldn’t tell. But he shook his head anyway.

  If the others let him back in, he was in. He’d worked this hard to join, he wasn’t backing out now.

  “What do you mean?” Eleri asked, confusion everywhere in her system. She felt it, that hum right before they figured something out. She also felt the confusion that often happened at that point too. Where nothing fit and it looked like nothing ever would. The hum was the only clue they were headed in the right direction. She clarified, “What do you mean ‘what if it doesn’t all lead back to Cooper Rollins’? It does.”