by Rachel Grant
She snickered, then pulled back, meeting his gaze. “I should get to work.”
He ran his knuckles over her chin. “You going to be okay? Examining the bones?”
She nodded. “This feels right.” She let out a deep breath. “I think a lot about bones that are entrusted to me. It’s sacred to handle human remains, no matter what the circumstance.” She waved her hand over the table. “We didn’t meet in life…and the person they once were would never have wanted or expected to end up in my care in death. But regardless, here we are. And these bones… Someone tried to destroy them, but they didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so protective of bones, so connected, as I do to these now. We will find out what happened to them. We will tell the world who they are. They will be counted. Justice will be late, and it won’t be easy, but there will be justice.”
She spoke fiercely, the fear and anxiety gone from her eyes. Competent, confident Hazel was in control. “You are so damn amazing,” he said softly. Reverently.
She shook her head. “I’m not special, but I love that you think I am.”
“You are special, Hazel. And not just because you’re good at your job. You’re special because you give more than lip service to empathy. You go to hostile, foreign nations and hold them accountable for the atrocities they commit. You care about all the victims. Even the inconvenient ones that yank you from your much-needed break. I’ve always been impressed with your job, but I never understood the emotional toll it took on you. I know you aren’t ‘fixed.’ There will be more panic attacks and nightmares in the future. But you won’t face them alone. I will be right by your side, if you’ll let me.”
“There’s nothing I want more. But I’m afraid it will wear you out, because one thing I’ve figured out today, in the midst of all this crazy, is how important my job is to me. I don’t want to give it up. I can’t give it up. So I need to find a way to cope so I won’t have to. This could be a very long haul.”
“I don’t care if it takes the rest of our lives. I’m not a basket full of rainbows and puppies either. I’m terrified of letting my sister down. My nieces down. I feel helpless if I can’t muscle my way through a problem, and let’s face it, few problems require muscle.”
“Oh, Sean, you are the best man I know, and I can honestly say I know some pretty great ones. But in all the years I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you actually use muscle to defuse a situation. You use logic and calm and your crazy-good people skills to talk people down when tensions rise, like when you were protecting Ivy during Patrick’s trial and that guy cornered her in a restaurant and started screaming she was a traitor. You were amazing, the way you spoke to him and kept him calm until the police arrived. And I bet you’re amazing with your nieces too. I can’t wait to see what Uncle Sean is like.”
He smiled, his chest feeling warm at Hazel’s words. “He’s pretty goofy.”
“I bet he’s super hot.”
He laughed, cupped her face, and kissed her deeply. They both needed this break. In a way, it was just as grounding as describing buttons or sex in the forest. After a long, enjoyable moment, he raised his head and said, “I love you.” It surprised him, how easy the words were to say. He’d never been able to do it before. But then, he’d never felt for anyone like he did for Hazel.
She kissed his neck and whispered, “I love you. I’m still a little amazed this is happening. Us, I mean.”
“Oh, honey, it’s happening. I’m just kicking myself for waiting so long.” He released her. “But now I need to let you work. Like before, I’ll be planted in the corner watching you.”
“I wish you could read a book or something. This is going to be pretty boring.”
“Even though we should be safe locked in here, I can’t allow getting distracted by a book. Don’t worry about me. I’m good.” He nipped her earlobe. “And watching you is no hardship.” He stepped back and took his seat in the corner.
This part of the job—vigilant watching, in a relatively safe space—could get tedious, but not today. He had a beautiful woman to watch and a major puzzle to solve.
After clipping the microphone from the digital recorder to her lapel, Hazel slipped on a pair of magnifying goggles over her glasses and plucked a bone from the first tray. As before, she described the bone, noting marks and breaks that were pre- or postmortem. It took her thirty minutes to go through the first tray of seven bones.
A knock on the door and Sean checked the monitor for the door camera, seeing Ivy and Matt. Ivy held up a coffee carafe and two mugs. Sean jumped from his seat to admit them.
“Bless you,” Hazel said upon seeing the coffee mugs.
Ivy poured her sister coffee and sat at a stool across the table from Hazel’s workstation. “I wanted to ask what the idea was that you had when we were all in the conference room. You said it was something to consider when you were in the lab.”
“I was thinking about the human testing that was done in Alaska. Westover was severely limited in his test subjects. It was a small town in remote Alaska. Not exactly a large population to draw from.”
Ivy cocked her head. “Unlike, say, Virginia. Where Raptor had another lab.”
“Yeah. Exactly.” She waved an arm toward the bones filling the trays. “I only did a preliminary examination last week, but what I saw was…somewhat uniform. It’s hard to determine race, but several are likely Black. The thing that I find interesting is all except one skull are male. And all are in the twenty-five-to-thirty-five age range. Even a similar height based on the long bones.”
Sean slid from his seat and moved to the table, wanting to see both sisters’ faces as they discussed Hazel’s theory. Matt had the same interested look.
“You think these men could have been test subjects?” Ivy asked.
Hazel shrugged. “It’s possible. Where might you find twenty-six men, all of similar size and age?”
“A privately owned jail?” Sean said, his belly churning at the idea.
“But Beck and Small never got their venture. The private jail wasn’t built,” Ivy said.
“No, but that could have been the plan,” Hazel said. “When that fell through, maybe they got their prisoners from somewhere else. Like, from the local sheriff.”
“We need to look up how long Taylor has been sheriff,” Matt said.
“And look for news stories of missing prisoners in the same time period,” Ivy added.
Hazel took a sip of her coffee. “While you do that, I’ll examine every micron of the bones and look for whatever the hell it is they’re afraid I’d see.”
“You’re certain there’s something to find?” Matt asked.
“No. But being chased down and shot at, combined with the annex blowing up, makes me think they’re worried I could find something.”
“We’ll leave you to it, then,” Ivy said. “Isabel’s looking for news accounts of fires. We’ll start digging into Taylor and missing persons.”
“Thanks, sis. And thanks for the coffee.”
“No problem. The kitchen is working on breakfast. Someone will deliver a tray when it’s ready.”
Sean locked the door behind them, then settled at the table with his coffee to watch Hazel. “You think these guys were experimented on, like Chase and Vincent Dawson?”
It was likely Vincent Dawson, Isabel’s brother, was the first test subject at the Alaska compound. Sean knew Isabel had moved to Tamarack to prove her brother had been murdered. In the end, she did prove it, but Vin’s death had been part of the cover-up insisted upon by the CIA, to prevent other countries from attempting to replicate Westover’s work.
“My gut says yes. It’s unusual to find bones like this in the US. If this were Rwanda or Bosnia, I’d assume from gender and age they were soldiers. But then there would be bullet holes. And clothing.”
“The flow of water sifting the bones couldn’t have removed clothing fibers?”
“It would remove some—even a lot, certainly. But the clothes would still be th
ere, in the silt bed, just not on the bones. Cloth preserves really well in water. These men were stripped before they were burned.”
Sean studied the remains laid out on the table. Who knew what they’d been through before they were stripped and burned?
He thought of the torture Vin had suffered. Sean had met him once, when he’d been sent to Alaska to fill in for a weeklong training two months before the soldier died. Vin had been one of those charismatic people you couldn’t help but like. Quick with a joke, friendly. A natural teacher.
Westover had tested his infrasound weapon on Vin and later applied what he’d learned from torturing Vin to brainwash Chase.
Had these men undergone the same thing?
Hazel pulled her goggles back over her glasses and returned to work, recording the details of a skull, staring into the empty eye sockets. She turned the skull and described the sutures and bumps and cracks. She frowned, looking at a spot just below where the right ear would be, if the skull were covered in flesh.
She examined the spot and then removed the goggles and placed the skull beneath the microscope, all the while speaking into the microphone, describing a deep groove in the bone that he gathered wasn’t natural.
“At magnification, the eight millimeter groove is consistent with a scalpel blade. Cut is one point five millimeters wide in the center, tapering at the ends to point seven five millimeters. Groove is four millimeters deep at the apex.”
She placed the skull back on its tray and slid from the stool to reach for another skull on a tray just out of her reach. Sean would hand it to her, but she’d explained the first day that for chain of evidence and the integrity of the police investigation, only she could touch the bones.
She examined the second skull, only checking the spot behind the ear. She pulled the magnification goggles over her eyes and flicked on the light bar at the top. She returned that skull and then grabbed another. This time, she cursed upon looking at the spot behind the ear.
Sean wanted to ask her what she saw, but he didn’t want to break her concentration. She went from one skull to the next. Finally, on the ninth one, she said, “Gotcha, you son of a bitch!”
“What is it?”
“Several of the skulls have a cut in the mastoid process of the temporal bone. And the ones that don’t have the cut, the mastoid process is missing—and one of those is broken along the same cut line. But this one”—she held up the skull with the right side facing him—“has a small fragment of plastic embedded in the groove. The bone healed around the plastic, holding onto a piece when the implant was removed.”
33
Hazel called everyone down to the lab. She turned on the projector that attached to a magnifying camera and showed her findings on the large screen. It might be a creepy biohazard lab, but it did have excellent camera equipment.
On the screen, she pointed to the small piece of what she believed to be plastic. It held a hint of red. The plastic had probably absorbed some rust from the lake bed, discoloring the item.
She then used the camera to show the scalpel cut grooves in each of the skulls. Many of the cuts showed signs of healing, indicating the subject was alive when the cut had been made.
“So you think someone performed surgery, implanting something behind the right ear?” Alec asked.
“I do. My guess is it’s a chip of some sort, but we’ll need more than a tiny fragment to be certain.”
Isabel touched behind her ear. Her eyes held a haunted look. “What would that do?”
“There could be any number of things, but given the consistent placement of the groove, it could relate to hearing, with wires that stimulated the cochlea or auditory nerve. A transmitter of some sort.”
Isabel frowned. “Or a translator,” she said softly.
“What do you mean?” Alec asked.
“Not a language translator, a sound wave translator. Or…an infrasound translator.” She continued to rub the spot behind her ear. “I don’t remember much from…my experience in Alaska, but there was one conversation they let me remember. It had to do with the timing of being zapped, or maybe it was the frequency. It’s all a little fuzzy. But the thing I do remember is they wore masks, and I was told it was because the mask translated their speech into a sound wave I could hear and understand when they were zapping me. It could be bullshit, the masks could have been worn just to be disorienting and scary, but…I don’t think so. They were pretty specific and changed their voices even when I wasn’t being subjected to infrasound waves.”
“So it’s possible Westover was working with masks,” Keith said. “While in Virginia, they were perfecting the technology to deliver infrasound without the need for a big, bulky mask.”
“With a transmitter, they could dial in on a victim,” Alec said. “Focus the sound wave right on them so no one else would feel the effects. Hell, they could use an implant to trigger nausea and vertigo. And they wouldn’t need to wear masks to deliver orders in public.”
“Manchurian candidate,” Matt said softly.
“Chase,” Isabel said.
Hazel stared at the skull before her. “We need to look for a scar behind Chase’s ear.”
As one, they stood and headed to the door. Sean locked the room behind them. No one had the patience for the elevator, and they ran up the three flights of stairs to the medical clinic, where Chase Johnston was asleep and still handcuffed to a bed.
The medic examined Chase at Alec’s request, while everyone else waited outside the room. After a moment, Alec stepped to the door, his face blank. “Hazel?” He nodded toward the hospital bed, and she stepped into the room.
“Take a look,” Alec said. “We need your opinion.”
She paused to look at the man on the bed. Chase was pale, his skin slack with slumber. The monitor showed a strong heartbeat. She wasn’t a medical doctor, but she’d taken classes after earning her PhD to have a better understanding of how the skeletal system worked with the other systems of the body in life.
She grabbed a pair of latex gloves from the box on the counter and slipped them on before approaching the bed. Before touching him, she turned to the medic. He nodded his permission, and she turned Chase’s head slightly to get a better view of the area behind his right ear. The scar, if it was there, would be just above the hairline. She ran her fingers over Chase’s short hair and felt the hard ridge of a scar, even through the latex.
She let out a soft gasp and reached for the magnifying goggles in the holder mounted to the wall along with the sphygmomanometer and stethoscope. She flipped on the high-powered light above the lenses and examined the spot behind his ear up close. She could see the space between individual hairs and the puckered skin of a suture scar.
She stood and flipped off the light. “The FBI will want to shave the spot and take photos. But yeah. He’s been cut there. Same place. The length of the cut is what I would expect on the skin’s surface, longer than the groove in the bone.”
“Westover didn’t do that to him,” Alec said. “He was thoroughly examined, X-rayed, MRIed, you name it, after what happened in Alaska. When he was medically cleared to work for Raptor again, we were given his records. If he’d had a chip in his head, we’d have known. He’d have known.”
“It appears someone picked up the testing where Westover left off, after Chase started working for Raptor again.”
34
Hazel spent the next hour on the phone with the Virginia medical examiner and then with a forensic specialist in the FBI. The medical examiner agreed to sign a release, acknowledging that Hazel informed her that the remains collected from Anderson Lake would be released to FBI forensic analysts. This was officially an FBI investigation.
Paperwork went back and forth via computer, and at last the proper signatures gave Hazel permission to hand the bones over to the FBI. They agreed to send a team to the compound, to be accompanied by the Deputy Special Agent in Charge who was in charge of the investigation into both explosions. She would bring
a doctor with her who would examine Chase and arrange for him to be admitted into a DC hospital under guard—for his protection, not because he was a prisoner. Once safe in the hospital, medical professionals would begin the difficult task of determining how to remove the implant.
Of course, first they had to determine if it was there, but Hazel had no doubt about what they’d find.
But who was behind it?
The FBI would be getting search warrants for Small’s—and Raptor’s—property along the reservoir. Raptor had a few buildings—storage, mostly—that had been scoured along with the rest of Raptor’s holdings. Small had the vacation home that overlooked the reservoir.
Hazel rubbed her temples. She was exhausted. She still needed to eat breakfast. And shower. But everyone was gathered in the main conference room, and she wanted to know what the others had learned in the hours she’d been dealing with legalities.
She was alone in Keith’s office, with Sean outside, guarding the door. She stood and stretched, joints popping and cracking. She met Sean in the hall.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I think so. Tired. Hungry. Angry.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He took her hand. “There’s food in the main conference room. And Ivy has some news to share.”
A buffet had been set up along the interior wall of the conference room. Hazel had missed breakfast, and the chafing dishes were filled with chicken, fish, rice, beans, vegetable soup, and green salad. She was so hungry, she loaded her plate with everything and filled a large bowl with soup.
When she took her first spoonful of soup, she let out a happy sigh and remembered Dr. Parks’s warning not to load up on caffeine and forget to eat when she was working. She hadn’t meant to do that today. It had simply felt too urgent to speak with the ME and FBI. She wouldn’t have been able to eat before making those calls.
