They made it from the first room safely and were just gathering themselves when two more agents popped up. Despite the fact that they cleared this room before, and they knew it, bad guys must've come in while they'd been in the other room.
"Shit," Walter yelled.
GJ echoed the sentiment and ducked, propping herself up behind a metal desk for cover. With short, sharp hand signals, she showed Walter exactly the path to take and laid cover fire. Though it felt like an hour, it was probably less than twenty seconds before they managed to maneuver themselves outside of that room as well. They paused, stopping on either side of the door, breathing heavily, weapons clutched tight to their chests. GJ looked at her with an expression that surely mirrored her own. What do we do now?
When a hand fell on Walter's shoulders, her first reaction was to turn and shoot at it. Luckily, she had slightly better reflexes than that, because it was their initial instructor, the one who'd opened the door and led them into this hellhole, who was clamping on her shoulder and letting the two of them know that the drill was over.
The other agents, armed to the teeth, came out of the back room and smiled at the two women. As her breathing and heart rate slowed, Walter looked around at all of them. She and GJ were the only students here. Everyone else had just tried to lay waste to them.
"Hells bells, that was a shit show," she said.
"Well," one of the senior agents said, looking between the two of them, "you're still alive. That's a passing score on this exercise. In fact, it's the only passing score."
Holy shit, Walter thought, but didn't say. This time biting down on her tongue and glancing at GJ as she saw her friend try not to smirk. The next morning when she showed up for breakfast, Hank and three other trainees had disappeared.
9
It was several more weeks before they were given a solid break again. In the meantime, they'd had more hostage negotiation classes, and GJ had managed to kill fewer people and get more of them to surrender. No one had a perfect record, but hers was getting pretty good. Needless to say, she still hated it. While she worked, she always knew that it was a fake situation with terrorists and hostages played by her instructor agents. Despite the fact that every scenario was based on a real encounter, she couldn’t actually kill anyone. But that meant that, if she were ever in a real situation, it was going to be an entirely different ball game, and one she was not looking forward to.
The next week, when she’d almost decided she'd learned everything she could about firearms, they dragged out something new. She could jump and shoot, roll, hide behind things, and cover her partner, even if it wasn't Walter. The one time Brian had been assigned as her partner, she’d kept that fucker alive, even though he didn’t deserve it. She could make split-second decisions about who she should shoot and who she shouldn't. It would've given her no small amount of pleasure to let Brian die in the exercise and then shrug later and say, "Well, it couldn't be helped." But no, she’d saved his sorry ass. Then he'd turned around and claimed he’d saved hers.
When that was all said and done, they turned their attention to making bombs, throwing grenades, avoiding IEDs. They had to practice with several different types of gases. They entered a specially built house wearing their full complement of tactical gear, including gas masks, heavy vests, and more. They had to walk into the “Gas House,” which was entirely dark and had already been bombed with OC gas or CS gas, both of which burned like a motherfucker if you didn't have your mask on. GJ knew this because that had been their first gas training: stand there and take it.
When they'd started, Quantico had been exciting. It had been new. It had been challenging. Now, it was just exhausting. It was hard to believe she once thought the people they were learning about during the first weeks were the dregs of humanity. Those people practically seemed like regular family members after the stuff they’d gone through this past week. No wonder agents were often cold and hard.
She did not want to profile another serial killer. She did not want to hear about how he tortured animals as a kid. In fact, she decided to buy a pet bunny when she got home, just to make up for all the ones that had been gutted by psychopaths building their way up to a good murder.
As class went on, the tally on how many pet bunnies she was going to have to buy rose. However, by the time their next break—four full days on a long weekend—rolled around, she had managed to squash the idea of saving all the rabbits in the world. She also realized she needed to see her own parents again.
After flying to her grandfather's house for the first break, she was now approaching far too long an absence without her Mom and Dad knowing where she was. It was tempting to let the omission stand a while longer, since her parents thought they knew where she was—but if she didn’t correct that soon, it would roll from omission directly into lie and she didn’t want that. Still, the way her parents always tolerated her and let her grandfather indulge her, led her to believe that it was entirely possible she could probably hold a job with the feds for two or three years before she mentioned that she was an FBI agent. However, if she did that, it would be a shit storm of epic proportions when it did hit the fan. Since she was already exhausted, GJ decided she might as well deal with it now.
Even so, she was not planning to spend the entire four days at her parents’ house. She wouldn’t go to her grandfather’s house either; she’d had enough of him, too. Perhaps the way to not get in trouble with what she’d found in the basement lab was simply to not go to the basement. It almost shocked her that it was an idea she’d simply never considered before. Had she told Walter her problems, her roomie would have stated the option as a matter of fact a long time ago. Maybe she should have told Walter…
Though GJ would never have expected it, Walter had shocked them all by becoming an expert in serial killer and serial offender profiles. Whatever it was about Walter, she just understood these guys. GJ wasn't sure if that was comforting or scary as fuck. Maybe it was because Walter didn't have GJ's sensibilities. These people didn't really scare the former Marine. Walter had no doubt about her ability to get away from anyone who might try to attack her or take her down. GJ, on the other hand, still had plenty of concerns in that department. Walter also managed to completely disengage herself from the perpetrator and the series of victims, while GJ never fully could. Maybe it was an advantage of having been an armed fighter in the past: the ability to look at human life in simple terms of commodities and losses, the same as she might if her groceries were stolen. Ironically, Walter was the one who'd worked with live people. GJ was the one who'd worked with the dead.
"If you look at it like a puzzle, and you know these certain kinds of pieces go certain places," Walter had said, "it makes sense. We know they tend to drive white or silver cars. We know they tend to have certain types of histories. We know Child Protective Services was often called on them when they were children. Those are records we can look up and put together. We know what a disorganized killer does versus an organized killer." Walter had gone on and on while GJ sat there stunned, feeling like she was being “mansplained” to, or Waltersplained to. Wasn't she supposed to be the star student?
"I understand," she replied. In fact, she'd studied some of this stuff before she’d ever set foot in Quantico. The knowledge helped with determining how a body had been positioned, or how deep it was buried, things like that. Forensic anthropologists and human forensic scientists like herself understood a good deal about these things.
"It's just, Walter, I can't look at that person and not think that's a living human being. Now I'm dealing with them before they're dead," she'd explained. “If we screw up, more of them wind up dead. That’s a heavy burden.”
But Walter had remained very much disengaged and said, "There's nothing we can do about that. We just catch them as fast as we can."
Damn, GJ wished she had that ability. Walter would probably get reassigned to the serial killers division and GJ would go on to—oh God, please not!—hostage negotiation
s.
So for the break, she'd headed back to her own apartment, figuring she would spend the first two days there, probably the only way she was going to get any relaxation. Once again, she slept a long night. Sadly, this time she dreamed she was assigned—of course—to a hostage negotiation team. In the dream—a nightmare, really—they sent her from one fraught situation to another with zero sleep and an epic number of failures. She woke up feeling no more rested than she normally did after a night drill.
This time, she did all the things she had eschewed her last break. She went out with friends. She partied. They saw a movie. Oh my God, sweet blessed relief, a movie. She drank a bit too much at a party that trailed into the wee hours of the night and she slept in late again. That was going to kill her sleep cycle when she got back. But before that, she was going to kill herself by going and telling her parents.
She arrived at her family home late the following night. After a brief round of hugs and zero confessions, she slept straight through the night again. Her silence didn't last five minutes into breakfast. She’d thought of fifteen different ways to casually work the idea into conversation. She was looking for a topic where they were already proud of her. Maybe something they were already asking questions about, like her academic advancements at the new university where she was supposedly working. She had it all laid out. If they did A, she did B. If they did C, she had D, and so on.
Instead, they said, "Tell us what you've been up to, GJ," and she blurted it out.
"Mom, Dad, I've been at Quantico!"
"Oh, are you teaching forensic science there?"
GJ had not expected her mother to ask that, although now that she thought about it, it was a perfectly fair question. She didn't have a PhD, but she did have the background and a pedigree to certainly be capable of teaching at these universities and training grounds.
"No, Mom. I'm a student. I'm actually a NAT—a new agent trainee."
"Oh, what are you training to be an agent of?" her mother asked between serene bites of pancakes and bacon.
GJ rolled her eyes. Good lord, had her parents never heard of the Federal Bureau of Investigation? "The FBI, Mom." Then she smacked her fork down. Man, she had escalated that shit all on her own. Way to go, GJ.
In the end, she mucked things up so badly with her parents that by the time she was headed back to Quantico, she found she was actually looking forward to it. However, that sentiment changed relatively rapidly upon arriving at her dorm. While she started the first day back with a renewed sense of purpose and an I’ll-show-them attitude, it didn’t last long. After a handful more weeks of training and far more midnight drills than she'd been counting on, and she was more than ready for their third break.
The next time, she planned to hop a plane for Peoria, and beeline straight to her grandfather's. She wanted to believe she could go and just relax, hang out in her apartment in the south wing, not go in to the basement, just be fed wonderful food, and be nice to her grandfather. She was all set to do exactly that, but she got a call the day before she left from her grandfather.
"GJ, honey," he said through the line, "I hate to tell you this."
"What?" she'd asked, her voice probably low and weary over the phone. She'd yet to tell him that she had joined the FBI. Given the way he was speaking and the way he hadn't asked, he had not yet had that conversation with her mother. GJ was wondering how that was going to go down, too. This weekend wasn't looking any better than the last one she’d had off. "What's going on, Grandpa?"
"I got called away, again. They offered me an amazing chance to lecture over at the Sorbonne."
"The Sorbonne? What are they doing with forensics?"
"They've opened up a whole set of classes to visiting professionals," he explained. In the end, if he wanted any part of it—and he did—he needed to be on a plane the day after she arrived. She would get to see him and give him a hug for about fifteen minutes in the morning. He would not be awake in the evening when she got there because he needed to get a good rest. All these things she understood. They were a part of her grandfather's regular life. It was GJ who was out of whack.
She dragged herself through the few remaining days before the break, managing to scrape out some passing grades and not have to retake anything. Then, she’d flown and driven another exhausted, dreary journey to her grandfather's house. She went into her apartment and slept face-down on the pillow, exactly as she’d predicted she would. Over breakfast the next morning, she spoke briefly with her grandfather and learned what more he'd found out about his assignment.
As soon as he left, she scraped her plate, put it in the sink, and headed down to his basement laboratory. There, something new awaited her—a new body was in the walk-in cooler.
10
While Walter had seen Donovan for the second break as well, when their third break rolled around, she had nowhere to go. Donovan had been pulled by Agent Westerfield as a backup resource on another case and wouldn’t be home. Walter wanted to go to Los Angeles, but she wanted to go to see her old friends. The problem was, she couldn't call her friends back home.
Almost two years earlier, she'd been homeless, living in a caged-in city block in the downtown area. The block was chained to protect it while it waited for a building to be erected. Instead of keeping them out, the fence had offered safety to those who congregated behind it. Though the high-rise had never been built, and the block remained much the same, and she lived in Los Angeles most of the time, she didn't visit the downtown block much anymore. This break, though, she found she very much wanted to go back. She'd lived in a tent there, with other veterans protecting their space, eating when they needed to and could, and generally taking care of each other through some serious postwar mental and physical illnesses.
The problem was, she couldn't call ahead. She couldn't check to see if her old friends were going to be around or even if the people that she’d known were still living there. She would just have to go by the old block and find out. Unfortunately, Los Angeles was too far from Quantico to make the trip for a weekend. There was no way she could catch a flight to LAX, then catch a ride downtown, check the place out, find a hotel room. No, she did not have the energy for it, so it was just going to have to wait.
While Donovan had offered her the use of his place for the weekend, even though he wasn't going to be there, she'd refused. There was no point in driving that far simply to save the fees on a hotel room. That idea amused her. How far she'd come. The first time she met Donovan, she'd been eating fried chicken, sitting on a crate turned upside down, outside of the tent that she lived in. Now she decided she'd pay for the hotel rather than driving the extra couple of hours. But fortunes changed and she knew that.
Taste changed with it too. She didn't go far from Quantico, just far enough to be away and then, when she found the first cheap motel, she stopped. She checked in and promptly went back to the desk and checked out. She'd slept on dirt cleaner than that bed. She stepped up her game, finding a nice hotel with clean, white sheets, full pressure in the shower, and basically pampered herself. It was a very un-Walter-like thing to do. But these days, what was she doing that wasn’t un-Walter-like?
She was sitting on her bed wrapped in the hotel bathrobe reading a romance novel—of all things—when GJ called.
"Walter."
GJ didn't sound frantic but there was something in her tone that made Walter set down the book, adjust the towel on her head, and pay close attention. "What is it?”
“Where are you? Are you at Agent Heath's?"
Walter always referred to him as Donovan. GJ had never quite gotten around to referring to Eleri and Donovan as anything other than “Agent” and their last name. This was possibly because, when they’d first met, GJ had wound up handcuffed to the safe in Eleri’s hotel room. Walter still wondered how long it would be before she would live that down.
"Walter," GJ continued, "can you get here?" And she rattled off an address that was three states over.
&
nbsp; Jesus, Walter thought. She'd come this way so she could avoid all that driving and, in fact, she'd gone west from Quantico. Now GJ was sending an address that was north and even farther west. Lovely. But since she hadn’t been doing anything important—not even just hanging out with her boyfriend—Walter had a hard time just saying, no, she couldn’t make it.
"What's going on?" She fully expected GJ to be having some kind of minor crisis that truly didn't warrant getting Walter out of her bed and bathrobe. However, she should have given her partner more credit than that. Though she often thought of GJ as a girl—her bubbly exuberance and diminutive size lending to that idea—if she’d learned anything at Quantico, it was just how wrong that perception was. GJ was an avid student, an intelligent woman, and a scientist. She brought all that to her studies, even the physical ones she didn’t excel at, even the ones she downright hated. Honestly, she'd pulled Walter along as much as Walter had expected to pull GJ along.
GJ hadn’t answered and the dead silence was concerning. Walter asked again, "What's going on?"
It only took a few moments for GJ to explain the situation at her grandfather’s house. Walter hadn't realized, or maybe she hadn't paid enough attention before, or maybe she simply didn't have GJ's steel trap of a memory, but GJ's grandfather was apparently a renowned forensic anthropologist and archeologist. He went on digs all over the world. Walter remembered some of this from Donovan talking about the bones that GJ's grandfather had found. So while she'd known the grandfather had been looking into Donovan’s “kind” before this, she really hadn't put all the pieces together.
It turned out that GJ's grandfather was currently lecturing at the Sorbonne. That was very different from the professor hobbyist she’d thought him to be.
Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel Page 6