Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  “Are we in relative agreement that the burn was intended to hide the damage to the body?”

  Though no one agreed verbally, everyone nodded their heads.

  "Over here." Donovan pointed to the x-ray for the other forearm. "This could be one too. It's just too hard to tell from x-ray alone."

  Once again, they nodded in agreement and then turned to the x-rays of the legs and feet. But as the rest of them moved to the screen about three feet down the row, GJ stayed put. She could not stop looking at the image of the forearm. It wasn't right. She looked at the lower legs. She looked at the skull and reexamined the area that had been bashed in, and then she turned back to the group at large.

  "Wait, I thought you said Agent de Gottardi was like Donovan. Like every other skeleton in this room. Right? One of those changing wolf things. What’s the word?" Why hadn't she thought of it before? She looked Agent Heath directly in the eye and said, "Werewolf. You're a werewolf."

  Heath gritted his teeth, saying, "There's no such thing as werewolves." And for a moment, GJ thought she saw Eleri almost smirk through her sadness. But that wasn't what she wanted to talk about.

  "Fine, a changing-wolf-man-thing then. Is he like you?" she demanded, pointing at the body, though that wasn’t really the right idea. "Is he?"

  After looking to Westerfield to check if he could reveal his friend's secret, Agent Heath said, “Yes.”

  But by then, he’d given it away. GJ didn't need the confirmation. What it did give her was answers. She looked at each of them briefly, wondering that they hadn’t caught it. "Then this isn't Wade."

  14

  Walter watched as Donovan and Eleri both suddenly turned pale at GJ's words. Then, in the next moment, their expressions changed completely.

  Speaking at the same time, Donovan almost yelled, "Then who the hell did he hunt?"

  And Eleri yelped out, "This isn't Wade?"

  Leave it to GJ to manage to confuse and startle an entire roomful of FBI agents in less than thirty seconds. If it wasn't so shocking, so scary, Walter would've laughed.

  GJ was still looking at the x-rays and hadn’t seen the expressions she’d inspired. She was pointing out various issues, things Walter didn't really follow, even after her forensics class at Quantico.

  "So if you look here, at the epiphysial plate," GJ said, pointing at the end of one of the long bones…and after that she lost Walter.

  She talked about fusion points. She talked about the maxilla. Then she said, "I mean, I can't be positive without completely defleshing the body, but I really do not think this has the anomalies associated with this group. It doesn't have any of the signs of the anomalies. I mean, if we could deflesh it and actually see all the bones and the tendon and ligament attachment points, that would be conclusive. But according to the x-rays, this isn’t one of Donovan's kind."

  It was disturbing how easily GJ used the term deflesh. For all the things Walter had seen, and all the things she had done, even all the surgeries she had undergone, that word gave her the willies.

  Though Walter always believed GJ wanted to impress the senior agents around her, now, when the time came, she seemed to be completely ignoring them. Such a nerd, so lost in her own little world, that when something exciting happened, even her own goals were pushed aside in favor of the discovery. It was probably why she'd stolen the bones from the Bureau branch office in the first place.

  That was almost a year ago now, Walter thought, although it did make her wonder what would happen in the future, when the next discovery came along. Would GJ forget all about the oath she'd taken at Quantico and think only of the discovery in front of her? Walter couldn’t fathom a guess right now.

  It was the second time Donovan questioned her that GJ turned around and paid attention.

  "Is your grandfather hunting us? And if he is, why is this person not one of us?”

  "I don't know," GJ replied. "I was a kid when I saw it. He's my grandfather. I do remember him coming home with carcasses of wolves or big dogs. And he said he hunted them. I remember I didn't like it. I mean, who hunts puppies?"

  Walter cringed as she saw the expression that passed across Donovan's face at that term. GJ, however, completely missed it. She'd turned back to the x-rays and was still examining them, even though she was answering Donovan's question.

  "But that's what it was. I mean, I don't see any dog bones around here.” She absently swept her hand to the large lab space behind her. “So he certainly didn't keep them and put them in the pot."

  Suddenly, she stopped dead. Then Walter caught on as well.

  "So maybe he does have the dog bones here," Walter mused, inadvertently mimicking GJ’s term.

  It was Donovan and Eleri who looked at her, strangely. Interestingly enough, she had a moment of feeling smart, right in the middle of all these brainiacs.

  "He did keep the bones." Walter said it again, as she looked from face to face.

  "He kept them?"

  "He put them in the kettle, I guess," she said, now trying to use GJ's terms. It did not roll easily off her tongue. "And when he put them in the drawers and the boxes, because they're like you, they look just like all the other bones in here."

  GJ looked up for a moment. "Do they transform back into people after they're dead?"

  Donovan rolled his eyes. "No. Just like a fractured arm doesn't unbreak after you're dead." He said it through gritted teeth.

  GJ, once again, seemed oblivious. "Oh, that makes sense." And she turned back to the x-rays again. Then she muttered to herself what a dumb question it had been. “They were brought here as dogs. So clearly, they didn’t transform back. Sorry.”

  She pointed out a few more points on the x-rays, again supporting her theory that this was not someone who had Donovan's anomaly, and therefore, could not be Agent de Gottardi.

  Then she turned around, her eyes questioning. "What do we do?"

  It was Walter who spoke up. After all, she'd just been through Quantico training. She knew exactly what they were supposed to do. "We need to identify the body. We can rule out Agent de Gottardi right away if we've got any kind of records on him."

  She looked to Agent Westerfield, who nodded his head. "Yes. We have records on all our agents."

  It seemed just a matter of course, but at the same time, it also seemed relatively morbid. Walter didn't say that, though.

  She looked to the others in the room. Donovan, the medical examiner. Eleri, with a forensic science degree. GJ with another forensics degree. And herself, a Marine. She was out of place in the middle of all this brainpower.

  Yet here she was, the one talking. She was afraid if she didn't talk, Westerfield would get an idea, or Donovan would. And they would close this place down. She had to argue in favor of keeping it open. It was GJ's grandfather's lab, after all.

  "What do we need to collect from the body in order to identify it?" She was looking at each of them, keeping their attention on her and her idea. Let them explain it to her, whether she needed the answer or not. If she had them engaged, she could steer them. The only question was, would they catch on that she was using techniques straight out of class?

  "Well, normally, I would just take the body to the morgue," Donovan said. "Why are we not doing that?"

  Well, shit. That gambit lasted all of five seconds. Probably because her boyfriend didn’t manipulate well. He was a little shy on his social skills, never having mixed well with others as a kid.

  "We have to leave it here," Walter argued. She hated this. She hated making a point against Donovan. "If we take it, then her grandfather knows we were here. Which means he knows that she was down here. And right now, he doesn't seem to."

  "I don't care if he knows,” GJ sighed out the harsh words. “We need to bring him in. He's hunting humans."

  That was the first time Walter saw GJ fully realize the impact of what she'd said.

  GJ spoke up into the small space that opened.

  "I don't know that he was hunting them p
er se. He said he hunted, and he brought them back, and they were dead. Some of the bones are far too old to have been hunted. Not by him. Maybe he's stealing them from sites, or from where he finds them."

  "I think he's hunting at least some of them," Donovan said, and Walter noticed he said "them," not "us," still not putting himself in the same class, even though his revulsion made it clear that, at least on some level, he did. He didn’t have evidence to support his claim either, unless he knew something she didn’t.

  "We have to leave the body here," Walter said again. "We don't know that her grandfather is hunting your kind. We don’t know exactly what he’s into. And if we take the body—if we take or leave anything—we tip our hand. Then we'll never know. We have to leave it here and we have to find the rest out on our own."

  She turned to GJ, thinking about what the woman had said to her while they were working so hard in the early weeks of Quantico. You’ve got to play to your strengths.

  Well, Walter was a Marine and an investigator. "We need to put a tracker on his car, so that when he comes back from the Sorbonne, if I remember correctly... Anyway, when he comes back, we'll know where he goes."

  She looked to Westerfield for confirmation. The man nodded his head, seemingly looking at his new agents more closely now. She could feel him assessing them.

  "Next, we gather all the information we can from this body without damaging it in any way or leaving any evidence that we were here."

  "What do we need?"

  Though it was GJ who spoke, Walter looked to Eleri, hoping to put Donovan and Eleri a little more at ease, or at least distract them with a task to do.

  Eleri immediately answered, "I'd run dental records. We've got the skeletal x-rays. We’ll need to get a full dental set. Then we'll print and take them all with us. We need to erase them from the computer system, too."

  GJ sucked in a breath. "I hadn't thought of that."

  "Anything we leave behind will tell him we were here. If he comes down and finds a full set of x-rays on his newest skeleton up on his computer, he'll know."

  Though Donovan was still angry, and though his need to stop the person who was hunting his kind had not been assuaged, the group immediately set to the task of getting dental x-rays.

  The x-rays of the teeth and gums were only good if they had a record to match them against. They had to already have an idea who the deceased person might be. Then they had to have that person’s x-rays to match or rule them out. They would immediately rule out de Gottardi, but after that, right now? All bets were off.

  As far as Walter knew, there was no clue who this guy was, unless Westerfield was holding out on them.

  When they finished gathering dental x-rays, as well as taking digital photographs of the hands and the feet, they collected a few last pieces of evidence. This included some skin-scrapings that Eleri said would not be noticed missing from the body, especially given that GJ’s grandfather had a tendency to boil the bodies down. Walter again tried to hide her shudder.

  Then, with everything in hand, Westerfield handed all the evidence they had collected to Eleri and Donovan.

  He said, "You two are in charge of this. You'll be responsible for making the identification from this information as soon as we get a tip as to who this body might be. In the meantime,” he turned to face Walter and GJ, “you two get out of here. We have to find Agent de Gottardi. He's been missing for eight days. And this definitely isn't him."

  15

  GJ found herself back at Quantico on Monday and utterly stunned to be there. She'd watched as agents Eames and Heath gathered evidence from her grandfather's basement lab and left in search of Agent de Gottardi. She'd helped Walter and Agent Westerfield pack her grandfather's lab up. They did their best to put everything back exactly as it was supposed to be in hopes that the man would never notice they had been there. They scrubbed the computers, exactly as Eleri Eames had suggested.

  But then, GJ had expected to do something. She’d expected to be tasked with helping to identify the body. Or she’d thought she'd help hunt for Agent de Gottardi. Instead, Agent Westerfield sent them back to Quantico, back to school. Told them to do nothing. She’d gotten no texts from her grandfather, though he was just as likely to call as anything else—an artifact of his generation. Still, that only meant that he hadn't decided to let her know if he knew anything. It was entirely possible one of the staff had alerted him of her activity and he was coming home even as she sat there in her class, trying desperately to pay attention.

  SAC Westerfield seemed to think that she and Walter would just be able to come back here and focus on their lessons. GJ could've told him that that wasn't going to fly.

  She'd paid little to no attention during class on Monday. And Monday afternoon, during their drills, she'd been flat out murdered by one of their bad guys. It was the first time she'd been shot and killed during a simulation with absolutely no idea that it was happening.

  Sure, she'd tried and failed to dodge bullets before and had wound up "dead." But this time, the shot had come out of nowhere. She had no clue she was dead until she felt the hit. So, on Tuesday afternoon, she was repeating the exercise. To make matters worse, her partner in failure was none other than Brian. Normal Brian was an asshole. Brian doing repetitive makeup work was an even bigger ass, and a threat to her life, at least in the scenario.

  Forty-five minutes later, GJ had survived the scenario, although only barely. Brian had not.

  "You bitch," he accused her. "You threw me under the bus so that you could get out. We're supposed to be partners."

  GJ stood there, stunned. He'd literally tried to use her as a human shield in several situations. He’d ducked behind her, holding her arms to keep her in front of him, letting her take any oncoming bullets. Inside the exercises, there were cameras everywhere. She thought about saying this, but bit her tongue. Surely, the instructors could see what he’d done. No one needed a defense from her.

  Unable to resist opening her mouth, at least a little, she replied in a calm tone, "Yeah, that's not how it happened."

  "You're trying to get me flunked out," he snarled this time, spitting the words at her.

  GJ, still tense from the exercise, on top of her tension from the weekend she’d just endured, didn't have it in her to hold back anymore. This time, she laughed, "Brian, you don't need my help with that. You're doing a fine job of failing all on your own."

  And it sounded like she was right. The instructor hooked a thumb over her shoulder. "Parks, you're out. Pack it up."

  She wasn't sure if that meant Brian should pack up his things from the exercise, or pack up his dorm room, but she was pretty sure that Brian had failed three times in a row—this time being number three. Full failure—one that wasn’t made up, like today—led to removal from the NAT class. GJ was pretty sure she’d just watched Brian Park kill the last chance he had at becoming an FBI agent. Couldn’t happen to a better asshole. Still.

  No wonder he was so mad. No wonder he wanted her to take the blame for it, but really, there was nothing she could do about it. Trainees either survived the exercise or they didn't, and Brian was wearing the mark of a dead man. He stalked off, throwing his weapon onto the ground as he left. That was not FBI protocol, she thought as she watched him go, her own breathing still heavy from the exertion of the exercise and the confrontation.

  She wanted to yell after him, "Why don't you go meet up with Hank, and the two of you can cry in your beer together?" or "Try not to become a mass murderer!" but neither seemed appropriate.

  She was still standing in front of three instructors. The lone NAT still at the exercise, the last one to pass. The lead trainer barked at her. "Janson, back to the dorm. I don't know what's got you these past two days, but you need to have a better day tomorrow."

  "Yes, ma'am," she replied and turned, setting down all the equipment from the exercise into the proper containers. She stripped her gear next and walked back to the dorm. It was an effort just to keep her bac
k straight, just to hold her head high enough not to be considered moping. She'd had enough of this.

  It was a long walk and she made it alone. Brian had stomped off somewhere a while ago, and she wasn't going the same direction as him, thank goodness. Hank had left long before.

  Everyone else had passed the exercise yesterday. Walter had whizzed through with flying colors, and GJ envied the other woman's ability to compartmentalize what she'd seen over the weekend to let it go and focus on the task at hand. It was certainly a skill GJ would like to pick up. Then again, Walter wasn't compartmentalizing her own family. She wasn't compartmentalizing her trust fund, her grandfather's respect, her parent's web of social ties coming down if anything she’d done came to light.

  GJ made it all the way through to Friday night. Not having heard anything from her grandfather, and finally beginning to let go of some of the worry that plagued her, she managed to bring her scores up and stay in line with class for the rest of the week. Though she wasn’t as good as she’d been before, she was at least getting close.

  When the knock came on their door at two a.m., she and Walter quickly rolled into their routine. Walter groaned her usual, "Jesus, another midnight drill," to kick them off and they got ready at lightning speed.

  Everything was within easy reach. GJ stepped quickly into her own clothes. Tying her shoes and buckling her belt to get her own uniform completed, she stood to find Walter with her prosthetic leg almost entirely situated. GJ picked up the arm—as had become their regular routine for getting out the door as fast as possible—and helped Walter get the metal and plastic limb in place. They were always last and she knew they'd be last again. This usually got them yelled at, and usually got her yelled at specifically, because Walter had a clear excuse for being last. GJ's only excuse was Walter.

  The two hopped out into the hall in their khakis and blue NAT polo shirts, to discover they were the only ones there. They'd even managed to line up in their usual spots out of pure rote habit almost before realizing that the only person who stood waiting for them was SAC Derek Westerfield. He looked at them and spoke in his usual gruff tone. “Grab your things, you're coming with me.”