The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five (Book 2)

by A. J. Scudiere

  “Yes,” the other woman was speaking faster, connections forming that Eleri and Donovan didn’t see yet.

  Looking to him, Eleri found Donovan shrugging back at her with an I-don’t-get-it-either expression.

  “It does all lead back to Cooper Rollins, but what if that’s not the point?” Marina paused, and when neither responded she fleshed out her answer more. “What if it happens to point to Cooper Rollins because he’s connected to all of them, but the connection to him isn’t the reason they were targeted?”

  Eleri was starting to put it together now and as Marina kept talking, it made more and more sense.

  “We’ve been following the Rollins thread because it’s the easiest to pull. But it’s not him killing people, right?” She looked to both of them, to confirm what intel they could share, if not the origins of it.

  Eleri nodded quickly at her. “So it’s not Rollins that’s the common thread, but there’s a common thread between the four dead people and Rollins that’s something entirely different.”

  “Exactly!” Marina smiled.

  Donovan hopped in then, when Eleri’s brain was trying to sort all the things they knew that tied Rollins to the dead people and what might be that thread—there were really a good handful of options—when Donovan turned her thoughts.

  “What if he’s a target?”

  “What?” she asked. Rollins had been a suspect for so long, joining Fracture Five, hooking up with Alya and Aziza and the group. It didn’t compute for a moment. “He’s in it up to his neck. Are you saying he just happened to join a group that’s actually targeting him?”

  Despite the clouds parting a bit when Marina had thrown the other option out there, Eleri was now confused again. How could Donovan think that?

  “No, he didn’t just happen to join. He’s Special Forces trained. He’s moved out from his home, seen the people he knows from now and long ago die in mysterious bombing deaths, and that’s a man who goes on a hunt.” Donovan had one hand resting on the tabletop while the other sorted through the pictures laid out on the table. He pointed one by one at the pictures they had of the targeted victims. “Sullivan, someone he may have known personally. Ratz, a mentor he definitely did. Dawson, a woman he probably never met, but he communicated with her about munitions orders, right?”

  He looked up at Marina, who nodded, pulling a few pages of her own. She pushed printed off e-copies of forms that were highly redacted but bore Rollins’ signature. Then she pushed a few others over.

  Eleri looked at them and recognized Ken Kellen’s scrawled name along with a few others she didn’t recognize. “These are claim forms for munitions that Dawson sent to them in Fallujah. Is that odd?”

  “A bit.” Marina shrugged, “Special Ops guys spend a lot of time waiting around. They’re trained to keep track of their supplies, guns, food, everything. It keeps them alive. Regular infantry would never sign for these things. They have officers who handle that. But the teams do everything themselves.”

  Eleri was putting more pieces together. “So someone wasn’t just sending the guns to Fallujah, they were sending them specifically to special ops?”

  Marina nodded. “Had to be. These signatures are other guys in their unit.” She pointed to the mostly black ink pages. “Look, Dawson sent them all.”

  Eleri looked it over and Marina was right. Vivian Dawson was shipping large amounts of arms to the special ops guys in one unit. “Is this an abnormal amount to send to this one unit?”

  She didn’t expect Vasquez to have the answer to that, but she did.

  “Yes, it’s unusual. I think the real question on that is, was Dawson doing it? Or was she following orders from someone else?”

  Eleri asked again, “Can we get that information?”

  “I’ve requisitioned it, but don’t have it yet. They’re balking.” She offered a shrug.

  “Do you ever sleep?” Eleri asked her. Honestly, she didn’t sleep much herself, but Marina was making them look like slackers.

  “Not lately,” she admitted.

  “You need to. But this is awesome.” She pointed back to the pictures. “Victim number three, Dr. Walton Gardiner, who was seeing at least Cooper Rollins as a patient.”

  Donovan joined back in, this time having scrambled through for the file they’d found on Rollins in Gardiner’s office. “I finally found a moment to go through this while you were at your parents’ party.”

  Though he hadn’t said it with any rancor, didn’t seem to mean it as anything other than a fact, Eleri winced. Donovan didn’t notice.

  “Rollins told Dr. Gardiner some of the things he saw. Gardiner’s notes are not redacted. You should read this, El.” He held the plain file folder out toward her. “But it’s not an easy read.”

  She took the file, looking at him. “Should I read it right now?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at her a moment longer than necessary, and it seemed he was conveying that she might pick something up. “It’s some seriously strong stuff. Rollins goes into detail about some of the things he saw. And he indulges in fantasies about revenge at the doctor’s urging. He’s a trained killer, they aren’t pretty. But I flagged some stuff that seems to be from Fallujah.”

  She looked down at the torn orange post-it notes sticking out haphazardly from the edges of the thick file. Before she could make a decision, Donovan spoke again.

  “I put the two files together. That’s why there’s a piece of red cardstock in the middle. It’s what I could find.” He pointed as she thumbed through to find it. “What’s before was filed as Rollins, what’s after was under the fake name.”

  “Gotcha.” She looked back and forth between the other two. “So maybe we don’t need to find the tipping point so much as we need to find the ignition point. Maybe that will lead us to the purpose here.”

  Donovan nodded cleanly, but his words were muddy. “I guess. We don’t seem to have anything else to go on. I think we need to dive into what happened on that last mission in Fallujah.”

  Marina spoke up again, drawing Eleri’s attention her way. “We need to do that, but I’m guessing that was a blow-up too, and not really the start point of all of this. We need to go back further.”

  Eleri agreed. Going back was the only way to predict the future. Unless someone wanted to just walk in and hand them a packet with intel. Or a phone with pictures. “We don’t even know who sent that damn phone still.”

  “Rollins? Kellen?” Donovan posited.

  “Walter Reed?” Marina asked.

  “Not Walter.” Eleri commented. “She’s working PI for us. I can’t imagine she sent us the phone and didn’t say anything.”

  “That makes sense.” Marina agreed. Then she sighed. “So, Rollins, Kellen, or any of the other players who want to talk to us anonymously. Yeah, that’s no big deal. None at all.” Then she looked up. “Can we safely rule out the people in the pictures on the phone? I.e. if they sent a picture containing themselves, they would have to have at least one accomplice. Someone else who wanted to communicate with the FBI. That seems like too much. Don’t you think?”

  Then she yawned. Eleri wasn’t surprised.

  “That’s where we have to start. Do you want to do that? Scrub the pictures and rule out anyone in them. See who’s left as a suspect?” She looked at Marina closely. “After your nap, of course.”

  “Yes, to all of it.” Marina started eating the chips again. She slugged the last of her soda, having only made it through the one, then she slammed the can back on the table as though doing shots. Eleri had to laugh.

  “Just go. You’ve done so much.” She smiled genuinely then. “Come back when you’re ready. You’ve been a lifesaver.”

  When Marina went out the door, Donovan looked to her. “What do we do?”

  “I think I have to read this. At least the flagged parts. See if we can put anything together from his past.”

  Donovan grabbed her arm. “Have you ever picked anything up from something like thi
s? It was bad enough that he lived it. You shouldn’t have to too.”

  “I haven’t before.” But she seemed to be getting better at it. In all her years, ever since Emmaline had disappeared that day, she would never have said she had a talent. She’d dreamed things, and they’d been accurate. Still, she’d always believed that was just her brain putting the pieces together with her subconscious. The only difference she had from her fellow profilers was that she remembered her dreams. And they were clear enough that she’d acted on them.

  But now, it was much stronger than that.

  She had to admit she’d always seen Emmaline. She watched Emmaline grow up, somewhere far from home. She’d fully believed it was a dream, until the day she felt Emmaline die. Then it had been too late and she hadn’t acted.

  It wasn’t her fault her sister had been kidnapped. It was her fault her sister stayed kidnapped and had died at the hands of her captors ten years later.

  Eleri had never failed to act again. Even when it cost her. Even when the ‘hunch’ was a slim thread she pulled at. Now, she was having waking visions. Clear movies playing in her head as though she was in the garage with Ratz. In the office watching as Dr. Gardiner was stabbed. Then she’d been Mrs. Sullivan.

  There was no telling what she’d get from Cooper Rollins’ chart.

  But she had to read it.

  30

  Eleri’s dreams were rough. Probably six different times she’d woken up during the night, her chest heaving from rapid breathing. Her heart pounding at dreamed-of terrors. Her brain scrambled from the disturbing dreams.

  Unfortunately, they were useless.

  The dreams were exhausting. Along with the lack of sleep, she wasn’t getting any rest when she did sleep. She was inundated with warped tales right out of Cooper Rollins’ already warped imagination as per the files from Dr. Gardiner.

  In her dreams, she fought insurgents riding a variety of animals. In the rainforest. She saw rebels holding guns stamped “U.S.A.” shooting dogs and kittens as they sat astride rhinos and giraffes. Then she sat at a low dinner table, eating the most wonderful Indian food, even as she wondered why they would eat that in Pakistan? One of the diners, Ken Kellen, with his red hair and his American accent, ate pasta. He used a fork and spoon to twirl the ribbons in a classic Italian style. He spoke Italian, gestured like an Italian, and pushed aside the family’s pet sloth as it tried to nudge its way to the table for scraps.

  When she asked why Ken had pasta and red sauce, they all turned on her. She would sneak out, duck between trees, hearing gunshots in the distance as the family closed in. Hunting her for some slip in etiquette.

  When she tripped over a tree root and hit the dirt, she jerked herself awake, where she lay gasping softly at the ceiling once again.

  She rolled her eyes at the moonlight. Or maybe it was just city light pollution coming in around the cracks of the curtains. There were blackout shades—after all, Agents might need to catch their sleep when they could—but she hadn’t pulled them.

  For a moment she thought she should. That if she got up and got the room good and dark, she’d feel more at home. Then again, if this was what she was dreaming in the light, what would she dream in the pitch black?

  Instead, she stared at the ceiling. Wishing something in the file had connected. Wishing that if she was going to suffer she would at least earn something for it. If she were dealing with this crap, then she’d like it to mean something. But these were ordinary bad dreams. And she was tired.

  So she didn’t close the blackout curtains, she just straightened the sheets and pulled up the blanket for weight if not warmth, then she rolled over and closed her eyes. She took slow deep breaths until she drifted off again.

  She didn’t know how long it took before she woke up, sitting bolt upright in the strange bed, the light still coming in around the curtains even though her clock read sometime after three a.m. Her breath was labored again, long and slow and deep, and she was almost in tears.

  The dreams kept coming, each one different from the one before, but always the same theme. For a slow, sleep-fogged moment, she wondered if she ‘got it’—if she figured out what the dreams were trying to tell her—could she get some real damn sleep?

  Well, she wasn’t getting any rest by going back to sleep, and she threw off the covers thinking something to eat might wake her up. Get some fuel for staying up, since sleeping wasn’t an option.

  Padding into the kitchen area, she poured herself a bowl of disturbingly expensive cereal. The cost of the upscale granola, combined with L.A. prices, had given her sticker shock, and she vowed to enjoy every bite. But she didn’t.

  She chewed while musing. Then, even before she finished eating, it occurred to her that she was eating, and in each dream she was eating. And in each dream Ken Kellen had been eating food of a different nationality. Grabbing a pad of paper and a pen, she returned to her spot, trying to eat with one hand while writing with the other.

  In the dreams they all ate the same food. Even Cooper Rollins. But never Ken Kellen.

  Did it mean that each person was doing what he believed in—except for Kellen? Or were they all doing the same thing, except Kellen?

  The danger always came when Eleri pointed out that Kellen wasn’t eating what the rest of them did. Only then did the dream turn threatening.

  “Is that a reason list for us to bring Kellen in for questioning?”

  Eleri startled, only barely saving herself from choking on the last bite of her cereal. She managed to chew a bit, shaking her head at either Donovan’s ability to sneak up, or her own ability to get lost in thought enough that she didn’t realize a six-foot man was walking up behind her.

  “No.” She swallowed. “I think it’s saying that we don’t bring him in.”

  He leaned over her shoulder, looking at the words she’d scratched onto the legal pad and he frowned. “One of your dreams?”

  “Not one of those. Just ordinary dreams.” She shrugged.

  “You don’t really have ordinary dreams, do you?” He stood up, scratching at his chest through the t-shirt he must have slept in. She wondered why men did that or if women simply couldn’t do it, and that’s why it was such a ‘man’ thing to do. Then she realized she was really incredibly sleep deprived if she was contemplating the gender bias of scratching.

  “I do have ordinary dreams.” She brought herself around to the conversation, even as she peeked out the window at the timeless, odd gray light that came around the curtains. “I see one person morph into another. I dream of peas for odd reasons. Some of the insurgents were riding zoo animals in the rainforest in one.”

  “That sounds like way more fun than what we have going on for real. Did you grab a hippo and charge one of them?” He pulled out the seat opposite her. Grinning when he sat, Donovan quickly changed his expression. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “No and no.” She answered, realizing that it didn’t matter which came first. “I mean I must have, because I kept having these wild dreams. But I didn’t get any real rest.”

  “You look it.” He turned his head one way, then another, and she decided to take it as a medical assessment. As long as he didn’t say she looked like one of his former patients, she’d be okay. Eleri was always one to accept the truth of things. She probably looked like utter crap and he was being nice.

  Turning the conversation back to what she’d scribbled, she told him, “In the dreams, the common thread was we were all eating dinner each time. And Ken Kellen was always eating something different.”

  “So he’s doing something different than everyone else? But you don’t want to bring him in?” Donovan gave her a slight frown, not understanding.

  “No. Each time I pointed it out, my life was suddenly in danger.”

  She was shaking her head, still trying to make sense of it, when he asked, “From me, too?”

  “No.” She thought back. “You and Marina were always there. And you were never running with me, but it wasn
’t you I was running from. It was them.” She put her fingers up to do air quotes right as she stifled a yawn. “It makes me afraid that if we bring him in, it will all go to shit.”

  Donovan nodded at her, just as the light began to change.

  Holy shit, it was morning already.

  Then she sighed. “Or it just means that’s what I’m afraid will happen.”

  Donovan had managed another hour of sleep after Eleri had wandered back off. It had seemed inappropriate to open her door and check in. She was a grown woman after all, and not his girlfriend. He learned about normal by reading books. So how would he even know if he was doing it right?

  Instead, he listened at the door. When he didn’t hear anything, he assumed she was doing better than she had been. He wasn’t going to wake her. Not on purpose.

  By accident might happen, though.

  He’d fielded a call from Vasquez, and she’d come in through the front door of the suite, coffees in hand, along with all her other necessary crap. She looked as bad as Eleri had, only she wasn’t going back to sleep. Donovan at least knew better than to say that to her. He just kept that to himself and thanked her for the coffee.

  He held it under his nose while he chatted, the aroma drifting through his sinuses and making him want to sigh and shift his face a little to get more. He did it sometimes when he was at home. He’d never done more than a nose flare in front of Eleri. She’d seen the beginning product and the end, but never anything in between. At least not that he knew. He wouldn’t freak Vasquez out by morphing in front of her, and not over a cup of coffee. “What do you have?”

  “So much. So very much.” She smiled through the smudges under her eyes, against the gauntness of her skin. It had all set in since he and Eleri had arrived with their NightShade case and their “can’t tell you” intel. But the woman seemed happy, and Eleri assured him that she was.