The NightShade Forensic Files: Echo and Ember (Book 4)

by A. J. Scudiere

  She turned.

  Five pieces. Wadded up. Equally spaced around her.

  In a five-pointed star.

  DONOVAN LOOKED at Eleri a little sideways during breakfast. The mess in her room concerned him, though he knew she was prone to odd dreams. Still, she’d been acting strangely this morning, even for Eleri. “Was there something you didn’t say about the children you saw at the Hiller house yesterday?”

  She shook her head. Dana had asked the same thing almost as soon as they got in the car yesterday. Eleri gave Donovan the same response she’d given Dana. He’d hoped she’d have something to add now that everyone else was gone. Clearly, she didn’t.

  “No. I just saw a bunch of kids in the house. It was obvious Leona Hiller ran an unlicensed daycare there. The way her husband bristled at the mere idea was a pretty sure giveaway that it was one. But that’s all I saw. I have no clue what it means or if it means anything at all, other than that I was seeing Leona Hiller’s life.”

  “It sucked that the house had been rebuilt.” He commented around toast and eggs. Eleri had voted for a high-end breakfast joint and was eating some kind of banana bread French toast and cantaloupe with honeydew slices arranged like a flower on a pretty little plate. Unable to stomach a quiche filled with a bacon he still couldn’t pronounce, he’d gone for a classic.

  “It sucked for you. For us.” Eleri commented back. “Honestly, my impression was that James Hiller was finally getting his life back together. I’m not surprised that he rebuilt the house differently.” She paused a moment then added pensively, “Did you notice that his new girlfriend, Lisa, looks a lot like Leona?”

  “She even has an L name.” Donovan agreed. Yes, he’d noticed. He’d also noticed there were no pictures of Leona Hiller around the living room. A few of her with the kids—two of them—but none with James and none of just her. “They’ve replaced her pretty well.”

  Eleri shrugged. “They may have had to. How do you come home one day and find your house burned from the inside out and your wife dead? Then you find out it wasn’t natural, that someone came in and burned her? Most people don’t carry that well. Especially since the cops and now the FBI come back around every few months and make you dig it back up.”

  James Hiller had clearly been treated as a suspect for a while—which made sense. He had a good job, an at-home wife who wasn’t a community pillar or anything, so no one knew or could say just how much the couple might have actually loved each other or how happy the marriage was. His good job had given them both solid, quality life insurance policies that paid out higher in the event of murder or death by random crime. It hadn’t looked good for him.

  His saving grace had been his bank statements, which had been steady-Eddie for years. He didn’t even get bonuses at work, and he balanced each checkbook by hand to the penny. Then there was the concern that while no community members could vouch for the quality of the marriage, no one could speak against it either. Leona Hiller had been relatively quiet, but her few good friends said she loved “Jimmy” as she called him. His coworkers said James never had a bad word to say about his wife. She was polite and kind at work functions, and James gave a death glare and fired anyone who made misogynistic comments, faster if they were about his relationship or his wife in particular. No one could pin anything on James Hiller.

  Donovan slid the last of his toast across the plate, cleaning the eggs with it before he ate it, a move that would have gotten him kicked out of Eleri’s home. “Do you agree with Dana and Christina that he’s as he appears?”

  Eleri nodded, her mouth full, her plate still half covered with yet-to-be-eaten food. She checked the time and rolled her eyes.

  Donovan almost grinned. “Well, you were the one who slept in. Not my fault this time.”

  They cleared out and drove back to find Christina and Dana waiting in the parking lot of the hotel, Wade just coming out the sliding glass doors looking down at his phone rather than where he was walking. Luckily, there was no traffic.

  Donovan parked and he and Eleri practically fell out of their SUV, anxious to not appear late. He looked at Dana oddly. “Are we waiting for something?”

  “Yes. Minivan.” She looked to Eleri. “No agent should have to sit in the middle of the backseat. I’m sorry about yesterday. I . . . apparently, some days I can’t count.”

  “I get the way back?” Eleri asked, using an odd term Donovan didn’t think he’d ever heard before.

  “Is that a problem?” Dana crossed her arms, clearly not liking having her nice deed questioned.

  “Nope. Beats the hell out of the middle.” She grinned.

  Just then a minivan pulled into the lot, followed by a compact car bearing a rental logo. Inside three minutes, Dana had signed everything and pocketed the keys.

  Donovan frowned. “We aren’t going anywhere?”

  Dana shook her head and started back inside, leading the rest of them like ducks. “Back into the conference room. I think I found something.”

  8

  Eleri was already emotionally done with the day by the time they’d settled into the conference room. Now they’d been cloistered in here for hours. They used a different conference room this time, to avoid “loss,” as Dana called it. Though that didn’t seem to be anyone’s primary concern now.

  Eleri watched as Dana put her face forward into her hands and breathed deeply. Dana was the only one who did it, but they all felt it. Between the lack of sleep and the panic attack Eleri had picked up from whomever had been in the SUV before her, Eleri was pushing herself just to maintain focus.

  Wade had been looking at scenes, calculating burn temperatures. He kept saying “really damn high” which matched to some of the molars of the victims popping off. But it was inconsistent. There were other victims that remained untouched by the fire. Their intact teeth indicated their bodies stayed a reasonable temperature despite the extreme fire all around them. Back teeth exploded in the two-thousand-plus degree range. So that was something they knew. Or Eleri told herself it was.

  Donovan was still trying to piece together the Riser fire—where the arsonist seemed to have chased down Burt Riser with a flamethrower. He’d tapped Wade to figure out where to stand and how to aim to make the patterns shown on the floor. They’d tried to determine the height of the attacker. They hadn’t been able to make it work. Eleri had jumped in a few times, her physics skills nowhere near Wade’s, but she’d tried.

  “Wouldn’t standing there make the accelerant trail veer to one side? I mean the flame-thrower would be aimed that way, not straight ahead.” She pointed.

  “Sure, but then he’s standing in the flames he started a few minutes before.” Donovan countered as Wade scratched numbers on paper. He would write frantically then spend just as much time erasing or scratching it out. Eleri gave up.

  Pines was working her way through the medical examiner’s reports—looking at them with a Bureau agent’s eye rather than a medical/biological one. And Dana was examining method of death.

  Eleri was tasked with victimology.

  Leona Hiller was a stay-at-home-mom with two small children. She ran a daycare. Eleri ignored everything that had happened to her as she died—that was Dana’s problem.

  Marcy Davis, another probable victim, was a schoolteacher. That might be a link; both women worked with children. Marcy Davis had taught second grade—children older than what Leona Hiller worked with but still young. Eleri wanted to latch onto that. They lived about sixty miles apart. But with Leona Hiller not running a licensed center and with the house having burned down, there were no records to be able to cross-reference anything.

  Any link between them would be great, except that Burt Riser was a geneticist—about as far from a childcare worker as one could get. He lived in a different city. He lived in a different tax bracket, for God’s sakes. The man was wealthy as all get-out. Nice house. Gated division. Eleri felt a thought snake through her brain, but she couldn’t grab it.

  Riser
worked in a privately funded lab. As far as Eleri could tell from the notes in his case, he didn’t interact with much of anyone outside of work. If it wasn’t a mouse or a lab assistant, he didn’t even look at it. What could he have done to trigger this attack?

  Her brain struggled with that. Maybe his case was the place to begin. He didn’t fit the profile she was working up. Nodding to herself, Eleri decided this was the start point. Leona Hiller was a victim. Eleri could feel it. Burt Riser was clearly a victim. The third? It was only a maybe. Eleri concentrated on what they knew. Maybe someone was mad about a specific genetic development or lack thereof. But how would that get the target on him?

  Eleri searched his papers but couldn’t find anything. Burt Riser had few friends. Apparently, he had a girlfriend for a short while, but no one the feds questioned knew her. The other workers and scientists at the lab said Riser was friendly when he was paying attention, but mostly he had his thoughts on his work. At home, he didn’t have a dog or cat or even a goldfish. So how would someone target him?

  Her head hurt. She had nothing.

  Dana had nothing. Christina kept making pained faces.

  Wade and Donovan kept saying “no that doesn’t work” and erasing things.

  Dana lifted her face from her hands. “We need a break.”

  Eleri refrained from using what was possibly her favorite phrase and saying, “No shit, Sherlock.” She just nodded.

  “It’s early stages,” Dana told them. “Something will come together.”

  They were agents, they didn’t need to be told that. Eleri bristled for a moment, then thought, maybe it didn’t hurt to hear it. As frustrated as she was, maybe she did need the reminder.

  “Lunch,” Dana declared, “but first, does anyone have anything to report?”

  They all shook their heads then stared at each other as though it was someone else’s responsibility to find the elusive connection.

  Eleri shook her head, too, and maybe it shook something loose. “Oh! I was wondering if there’s footage of Riser’s neighborhood. Of people who came and went that night. The neighbors all have alibis. Solid ones.”

  “Call that in before lunch.” Dana instructed her and Eleri nodded, pulling up the number for the local police on Burt Riser’s case seeing if they had the footage or could direct her how to get it.

  In the background, she heard them discussing the other files, and whether they should travel to any of those scenes this afternoon. Eleri wished she could vote no, but she couldn’t.

  By the time she hung up, the local PD had promised to have an assistant email her the footage from the entry gate at Riser’s neighborhood around the time of his death. They informed her that they had the footage because they’d checked it, but even their specialists had found nothing. The man on the phone gave her a “more power to you” that didn’t hold much weight, but she thanked him and turned to the others.

  “Food. Please.”

  Dana nodded. Eleri wondered if she could also ask for a nap. Sleeping on her floor and wasting her precious rest on that little house that seemed to mean nothing had done her no good the night before. She hadn’t even mentioned the clothing to Donovan. She wasn’t sure he’d recognized it for being more than just a mess. Besides, what would she say?

  She didn’t say anything now, either. Dana kept them all in a group, walked them through a vote on where to eat like they were on a high school field trip and then chauffeured them to the restaurant. At least she picked up the tab.

  Eleri had learned a few things on the ride out. One—the family that had the minivan before them had small children in car seats. Four of them! And two—she’d picked up some awful thing that she couldn’t define, but it was terrible. Blood everywhere. Dead parents or children or something. And for a flash of a moment, she’d been standing in the middle of it.

  On the way back, she sat in the back of the minivan without incident.

  Also, she had to admit that she felt better after eating a meal under a moratorium of “no work talk.” Even Christina opened up a little. Though one of the few times she spoke, she stopped herself from telling a story because it was work related. Eleri began to wonder if she did anything else.

  Finally fed and back in the conference room, they sorted the files they’d chosen of other possible cases.

  Donovan pulled out one case he thought had potential—the others had the job of seconding the idea or arguing it down. It wound up as a mid-level possibility for a visit. The second file got put aside; it would take a full day or a plane flight to get to the location—which honestly also made it less likely it was actually related to these. This killer seemed to keep his work clustered in this corner of the US.

  The third file was one Eleri put out, but Dana shook her head. “Too old. I don’t think there will be anything there still to see. We got lucky with Riser’s house.”

  That was true, though the FBI’s version of “luck” meant that Riser was rich and had no direct heirs. His greedy relatives were still arguing his estate in court, which left the house, and thus the crime scene, still intact for them to visit. In many cases, especially with fire, people tore down and rebuilt or remodeled at the least, like James Hiller had. With the death of a loved one, sometimes people just sold the land and took the money and left the bad memories behind. That meant no scene, no witnesses, no remaining evidence. Eleri didn’t fight for it.

  They were on file number four when Dana’s phone rang. She stepped away, though she answered formally, putting Eleri, Donovan, and Christina on alert. Only Wade remained oblivious.

  When Dana hung up she faced them. “Do you want the good-slash-bad news?”

  They all nodded. Anything was better than the conference room with its pile of files and no leads.

  “We have a new case.”

  “Linked?” Wade finally looked up from the case he’d been studying.

  “Fire in a circle around the victim. Sudden death from no obvious cause. House is still hot—as in the fire department is putting out the last of the sparks and nothing has been touched except for that.” Her eyes lit up and Eleri felt her own feelings spark. Something to do. A real lead. She had to remind herself that someone had died to give it her that clue and her job was to stop it from happening again. Another death was both a lead and a failure.

  “Where?”

  “Louisiana.”

  DONOVAN WATCHED the woman huddled at the edge of the scene. This was the part he hadn’t had to do as a medical examiner. He couldn’t say it was part of the job he liked: the crying wife, stunned, shocked, and shaking, was something he’d been happy not to deal with in his old life. Now, he had to look at her as a suspect.

  There was nothing about her that said she had any hand in this.

  She was yelling at the police. “I don’t know!” then again, “I don’t know!” and “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Leroy. Leroy.”

  She pulled the blanket tighter around her despite the warm, heavy weather. Just outside Alexandria, which was just over an hour south of Shreveport, the air clung like wet felt and Donovan could feel the strain on his lungs just to breathe normally.

  LeighAnn and Leroy Arvad had not lived a glamorous life. The house was a modest doublewide trailer—or it had been before it was burned. LeighAnn was still in a uniform that looked like it was ninety-eight percent polyester and two percent bacon grease and syrup. Leroy Arvad had not been killed for the inheritance.

  The team packed their things with a speed known only to Bureau agents and wanted criminals. They’d hopped on a small private plane, the fastest way to get here when time was of the essence. Finding herself in another minivan, this time Eleri sat in the back with the luggage even though Wade had volunteered to take the spot. They’d come straight to the house to find Mrs. Arvad still watching the mess hours after it had been found and firefighters not letting her inside. They were still standing watch and dousing the occasional spark as the afternoon lengthened into a very bad evening.

  Donov
an breathed deep, taking the smell of burning synthetics into his nasal cavity and letting it sit. He let his senses pull out small particles and waited while his brain matched them to things he’d smelled before.

  Wade spoke first. “Smells like the last guy.”

  It did, that hint of hydrogen as it burst hung in the air around the house. It was faint, but present. Donovan nodded, thinking how nice it was to have another nose around. Someone else to confirm. It wasn’t that Eleri didn’t believe him; she did, she supported him and followed what he said with no question. It was that when he questioned himself there was no backup. Wade was backup.

  He did smell hydrogen. And that was odd.

  Donovan turned to tell Eleri, only to find she’d wandered closer to the house even though the smoke was still wafting up in tendrils from the rubble. The trees still dripped, the humid weather doing nothing to dry out the thousands of gallons of water the firefighters had doused the place with.

  Perhaps this was a good time to mend fences. Or to build bridges, or whatever the hell else he was supposed to do. Donovan had no clue how to interact with people—it was why he’d chosen examining the dead as his profession in the first place. Not for the first time, he wondered where he would be right now if Agent Derek Westerfield had not strode into his office almost two years ago and suggested Donovan Heath, MD become an FBI agent.

  Donovan had laughed at the man. He’d laughed as hard and long as he could in front of a stranger. At least he had until agent Westerfield described Donovan’s ability in detail to him, stopping him dead cold. No one knew that about him. No. One.

  Now so many people did that Donovan figured he might as well wear it on a shirt. So it didn’t matter that he turned to Dana and told her what he smelled. She would believe him too.

  “It’s hydrogen—that buzz. Wade and I both smell it.”

  “Does that mean it’s the same guy?” Dana looked at him, no question about what he sensed or how he got the information.