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

by A. J. Scudiere

  “If you had to call it now,” Dana pushed, “what would you say?”

  “It’s Mina.” Eleri set the box on the table surface, only then realizing she was standing at one end while the others clustered far away. The table was made for more than they had.

  Eleri left her things farther away than she would like and headed to the other side of the table. There was a counter along the side of the room. It sported a sink and cabinets and even a small fridge. The FBI expected their agents to be holed up here for a while. She opened the fridge to find sodas and in the cabinet, she spotted snack size chips. She grabbed one of each and was popping the bag and the top on the soda when she realized they were looking at her oddly. “What?”

  “Donovan and Wade ran into you out beyond the parking lot, looking for the woman.” It was Christina who said it. Both the words and her voluntary participation felt odd to Eleri.

  “No. I wasn’t there. I’ve been in the lab.” She shook her head. They must have seen someone else and made a mistake. She popped a chip. Chewing, she caught their stares.

  “We spoke to you, Eleri.” Wade said as Donovan nodded. “You said we should split up to find her.”

  “No. I wasn’t there.” She didn’t get it. “How could you speak to me when I haven’t left the building?”

  Donovan turned to Dana and said, “She wasn’t there.”

  Eleri narrowed her eyes at them. It was a question?

  “Eleri, it wasn’t a mistake. We saw you, you spoke to us.” Donovan pushed the issue.

  Wade chimed in. “Although you were less . . . educated sounding than you usually are.”

  “Also, the agents outside Bethany Kellogg’s room are on video opening her door.” Dana added much to Eleri’s surprise. “They lean down, laugh, and take turns punching in the code.”

  “What?” Eleri asked, maybe the lack of food or surprise over Mina Aroya’s bones was making her brain not function.

  Dana nodded. “When questioned—separately—they said they were playing video games. Though they have no idea why they were doing that. They know they weren’t supposed to do anything other than stand guard, but they both played video games.”

  “Except they were unlocking the room.” She was getting it now. “Who else is on the video?”

  “She is.” Dana’s tone was ominous. “She’s slim, has amber color hair, and shows up on film if not memory.”

  Dana pushed a printed picture across the table at Eleri and she was picking it up when Christina spoke. She’d seen the woman before but couldn’t place her.

  “I think she’s like me.” The words were soft, breathy, almost apologetic. “I’ve never met anyone like me before.”

  Dana’s voice cut through again, throwing information at her faster than she could quite process it. “The infant at the house—”

  “I have it.” Eleri mentioned that she was now in possession of those remains as well.

  Dana nodded. “They got enough DNA from the bones to run it.”

  Eleri nodded. Those bones had been buried, not burned. That made sense.

  Before Eleri could say so, Dana spoke. “It links to Mina Aroya by a one-half match.”

  Eleri knew that math and she latched onto it as something that made sense in this mess. “That means parent, child, or sibling. Child is the only one that makes sense.”

  Dana nodded. “And it also matches one-quarter to Dr. Bethany Kellogg.”

  “Grandparent, grandchild, niece or nephew.” Eleri filled in. “Niece or nephew.” She confirmed as her brain clicked into place.

  Again, Dana nodded. “The infant was Mina and Benjamin’s child. Barring odd circumstances.”

  “Odder than what we’re already seeing?” Eleri snorted the question in a most un-professional manner.

  Donovan shrugged. “I talked to you out beyond the parking lot, Eleri. I know what I saw and I know what I remember.”

  She nodded. He’d been duped, but his next words shocked her.

  “It means that every witness on this case is unreliable. It means everything we have from witnesses is complete trash.”

  “Holy shit.” She thought about all the people in Florida who’d seen nothing. Eleri turned to Christina, “Could you override all the people at Gennida Orlov’s apartment building?”

  The other agent nodded softly. “It wouldn’t be my simplest task, but ‘I wasn’t here’ is actually relatively easy. Replacing it with specifics is hard.”

  Eleri’s brain was only half listening. She was thinking about Leighann Arvad and her truck driver husband. Had she seen anything? Eleri thought about everyone at Gennida Orlov’s apartment. Leona Hiller’s husband and kids. The man at the gate at Burt Riser’s house and all the neighbors.

  Eleri’s head snapped up. “I know where I saw her before.”

  38

  Donovan stared at Eleri trying to figure out what might have been different when he’d seen her out beyond the parking lot.

  Had it been her shirt? No. That had been the same to the best of his memory. He could have told a witness at least the color and that she wasn’t wearing a suit jacket. He could have picked that shirt out of a line-up to say it was what she was wearing today. That wasn’t it.

  Was it her face? Had something been off there? He shook his head as he thought it through. It had been Eleri. He would have asked if she’d looked a little off. Despite his friendship with Wade, and the fact that he was now working with more partners, there were only two people in the whole world he trusted on sight: Eleri and Lucy. Lucy wasn’t here.

  Though he admitted he had no reason not to trust the Eleri he saw, or to think it might not be his friend, he had trusted her implicitly.

  Eleri was looking at him oddly, and she should be, he’d been studying her face. Looking for clues. Clues he hadn’t found.

  “I saw her before.” Eleri pointed to the picture.

  “That’s not a good shot.” Dana said. Though the woman’s face was captured head on—the FBI didn’t dick around with their security cameras—it was still aimed downward. Even though no one had reacted, she’d averted her head a little.

  Donovan looked at the picture that captured her profile. Maybe she hadn’t seen the extra cameras and didn’t know to avoid them. No one questioned the woman covering her face.

  It took him a moment to figure it out. No one had seen her. No one had noticed that she was averting her face. Only the video had caught it.

  “I saw her in profile,” Eleri was saying. “One of the cars on the way into Burt Riser’s house the night he was killed. She was in the back seat.”

  Eleri pushed the picture back toward the middle of the table and went on eating her chips as though she hadn’t been hijacked and her partner played. Wade scrambled to get to the picture, even though he’d looked at it before. He’d said he didn’t recognize her.

  “Oh my god,” Wade said now as he held the picture in two hands. “She could have been at Dr. Kellogg’s nursing home.”

  “What?” Dana was asking. No wonder, they’d all looked at it and said it could be Mina Aroya—hard to tell from the profile taken when she was bent over, chatting with the agents at Dr. Bethany Kellogg’s door. “There were no cameras in the room.”

  “Right,” Wade agreed, blinking as his memory came clear, “but there was a group of four girls at the front desk, who went down the correct hallway where we lose camera coverage. She’s could be of the four girls.”

  Christina was nodding. “We dismissed it because we were looking for Mina specifically. How would adult Mina have made it seem like she was just one of the girls as she walked in? How would she have gotten in so tight with a cluster of teen girls?”

  Wade was following right along. “Because one—she is a teen girl and does fit in and two—she overrode them to make them think she’s their friend just like any other.” He turned to Christina. “Can you do that? Make the whole group think you belong?”

  She sighed and Donovan knew what she was thinking a
bout before she said it. He just wondered if she’d told Wade the same story. “I did it all through high school. Changing someone’s mind about something is on the easier scale. For example, you’re my friend, you’re my boyfriend, you don’t like that other girl you actually do like.”

  Donovan fought the urge to wince. Surely, she was describing what she’d done. That sucked.

  “That’s her.” Wade finally relinquished the photo back to the center of the table.

  Dana leaned forward, looking at each of them in turn. When she got to Donovan, he felt it like a physical weight. Only when she had everyone’s undivided attention, she spoke. “We have to crack this. She’s dangerous. She might be done—which could mean she’s in the wind—but we won’t know. We have to find her.”

  Heads nodded around the table. Not that this was news; this had been their job from the moment they opened the file and were assigned the first murders. But now there were no teams to call in for backup on a killer who could make you think you were talking to your best friend. She had been horribly evasive and maybe they had a lead now that they knew what she was up to, but had they found it all? Or was there another piece in store for them?

  Dana took a deep breath. “Is she Mina and Peter Aroya’s daughter?”

  Wade sighed and pointed to the picture. “She looks a damn lot like Mina Aroya. But that’s not enough to conclude that she’s the daughter.”

  There wasn’t an immediate answer.

  Donovan took it upon himself to start the conversation they needed to have. After all, they’d been chasing a dead woman for a while now. What if they were wrong again? “That’s the best guess. We need DNA to confirm her relationship to Mina and Peter. Where do we get that?”

  They discussed getting fingerprints, both for analysis and for DNA, but she hadn’t touched anything in the Bureau branch. Not that they found on the video.

  Eleri spoke up, bringing in some of the science he should have thought of. “Bethany Kellogg thought the daughter might be her brother’s. So, when we get this DNA, we need to test it against both Mina and Peter Aroya, but also against Dr. Benjamin Kellogg.”

  Donovan looked to Dana for the next bit. “What do we have from the warrant for his place? Is there anything that ties him to the girl?”

  Dana surprised them all by saying, “We have a ton of stuff from his place. We have file cabinets full of notes from his father. I read through them a little. I’ll say this, I used to be a breast cancer researcher, before NightShade. I understand the science he used, it’s old now. But what he did with it? I had to quit reading. I was going to vomit.”

  She looked to Eleri and Donovan. “This is the case you two worked before this?”

  Eleri nodded solemnly and Donovan found he didn’t have to answer.

  Dana sniffed in through her nose as though her stomach might still turn just thinking about it. “I’m having a hard time being upset at any of the Aroyas for killing any of the Kelloggs. Benjamin junior knew what his father had done. Bethany might not have, but the son definitely knew.”

  “Do you think those experiments are why the daughter is . . . The way she is?” Christina looked around. “Not just angry, but her skills?”

  Holy shit. Donovan didn’t say it out loud, or he wasn’t sure if he did. But yes, it had to be. “Her mother was experimented on by the Russian government and her father by ours—”

  “—if she’s Peter’s child. Dr. Benjamin Kellogg seems to think she might be his,” Eleri speculated. “But that would actually make her less special.”

  “Oh, I think she’s special enough.” Wade murmured. Still everyone heard him.

  “So,” Donovan started playing out scenarios. With Peter and Mina Aroya both dead, there was probably no one left to say what had gone down at the Aroya house. “The infant under the house was Mina Aroya’s and Benjamin Kellogg’s, right?”

  There were nods from Eleri and Dana, who both easily remembered the math on the DNA match. Christina and Wade didn’t answer.

  He asked another question, “And it would be younger than this daughter out walking around? Faith Grace or whatever it was.”

  Eleri nodded again.

  “Which means,” Donovan continued, “That Mina Aroya did have a relationship of some kind with Dr. Benjamin junior. Did her husband know? Is that how he wound up dead by Dr. Benjamin Kellogg’s hands?”

  “You think he found out and they fought and he died?” Dana asked him.

  “I think it’s possible.” Donovan shrugged. “The problem is that we had a narrative we were working from. That Benjamin Kellogg was keeping tabs on Peter Aroya and wound up killing him, thus sending Mina on a rampage of revenge. But that didn’t entirely work with the mother and it sure doesn’t work now. If Mina was having an affair with him, then why would she kill him?”

  Eleri looked away. “Maybe it wasn’t an affair. Bethany Kellogg was our source on that one. And she seems to have—had—an idealized view of her father, too. One that doesn’t hold up to facts. Maybe this story doesn’t either.”

  “You think he raped her?” Dana asked.

  It was only a shrug that answered at first. “Or coerced her. Bethany seemed to think Mina thought he could cure her. Maybe he told Mina that he could. Maybe he made her . . . sell herself in exchange.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Christina replied.

  “But it happens,” Dana added.

  Donovan picked up Eleri’s thread. “If the daughter had any inkling of this, and if she saw him kill her father, then most of this story gets a rework. Those skills she has? And being a child with a child’s view? This starts to make more sense.”

  “The grandmother?” Dana asked about Gennida Orlov. “If Grace Faith Aroya is our killer, then Orlov is her grandmother.”

  “Maybe she blames her for the mother’s problems in the first place.” He shrugged. It fit better than Mina killing the woman who’d saved her. “Maybe she’s a horrid old Russian grandmother who never makes cookies.”

  He’d meant it as a joke but it fell flat. The woman was dead, after all.

  “Burt Riser?” Dana asked.

  Donovan threw another dart at it. “Mother’s boyfriend? We don’t even know.” He’d lost it. He’d tried and this didn’t fit any better, but the narrative was important. He hadn’t thought so as an M.E. He hadn’t thought so when he started Quantico. Then he’d learned. When you were hunting, the narrative gave you aim. A direction to follow. They needed that now more than anything.

  “Hey.” Wade threw the one word out to the table. While Donovan was hoping for a rescue of his idea, Wade took it another direction. “We can see her on the videos. She can fool us, but she can’t fool the cameras.”

  Right. Donovan had been thinking about that thread for a while. He’d been pulling at it but it hadn’t unraveled until Wade spoke up. “We need body cams.”

  “Yes.” Dana latched onto the one actionable idea they’d had. “I’ll get those for us right away.” She paused, “And get cameras and a feed on Bonnie Kellogg’s family, too.”

  “Also,” Wade added, “I was wondering what you all know about hypnosis. Can we hypnotize the witnesses to figure out what they actually saw? Like a video. Is it really in there? Did you ever do that, Christina?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No, it never occurred to me that someone might be able to pull that information up. Huh.”

  “We should start with me. Then Wade if he wants.” Donovan looked to the other man. Before they wasted time on the people in Florida, or on Leighann Arvad, they might as well see if the idea had promise. He thought about that for a minute. Then he turned back to Christina. “Does this mean that she studied Eleri? To know what she looks like, to override us and think we saw my partner?”

  He wasn’t prepared for how relieved he was when she said “No.”

  “I don’t think so. I can make you see your grandmother. I don’t have to know the person, I just have to know what they are to you.”

 
“So if I don’t have a grandmother, you’ll be in trouble?”

  Christina nodded. “Exactly, but if I do know that you have a grandmother, I can make you see her. Now I get in trouble if she’s in a wheelchair and I make her run or something like that. The more I know the better, but I don’t have to know the person. Just like I can make you think I’m your best friend, just as me, I can almost as easily make you think I’m your best friend, whomever that really is. But if that’s a guy and I walk into the ladies’ room, there’s a problem. See?”

  He did. And he felt much better that this teenage bitch wasn’t stalking his partner. Probably.

  “There’s something else,” Christina said with an air of resignation.

  But she didn’t get to say what it was as the entire perimeter of the room burst into flame.

  39

  Eleri jerked backward as the flames rushed up around her. With force of will and years of training, she stood calmly and kept her breathing shallow. It wouldn’t help to breathe in smoke.

  With that thought, she crouched low, looking around for the fire extinguisher. She wasn’t certain it could put out a fire that she could clearly see was supernatural in origin, but her brain was racing. She had two alternate thoughts for the red canister. One was to aim the spray at the Aroya girl, if she could find her. Startling her might stop her. And two was to bean her on the head with the heavy extinguisher. She didn’t want to hurt a child but for fuck’s sakes, the kid was trying to burn everyone.

  Unfortunately, Eleri’s plans didn’t matter. The fire extinguisher hung within easy reach on the wall of the room. So it was engulfed in the flames that surrounded them. Now she was worried about it heating too much and exploding.

  She searched the room, watching as Dana looked up where the flames were spreading across the ceiling. Christina was motioning frantically to everyone and Donovan and Wade were crouching and making hand gestures to each other.

  They circled just behind Dana, pushing her a little out of their way to avoid the flames. As Eleri watched their motions she realized they were heading toward the door, even though it, too, was behind a blazing wall of yellow and blue.