Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  Burt just gave her a nasty look. "Yes, it's true. Silver bullets will kill us. So will wooden bullets and ice bullets, and just bullets in general. They kill us just like they do anybody else. This idea that it has to be silver is some mythological bullshit. The only consolation is that it costs them time and money making their stupid bullets to kill us. But homemade or not, it went through me like a son-of-a-bitch. Just like any other regular bullet would have."

  GJ nodded. “That makes sense.” She felt a little bit chastised, but had to go on with the interview. It was only after she agreed with him that Burt sighed and looked away.

  "We let Randall come out with us. Wade's in love with the guy and Randall wanted to know more about how all this worked. So we let him tag along. We figured if he's going to be family, he should know. I mean, some of us change and some of us don't. Lots of times, we just don't know who will or won’t until later—puberty, adulthood sometimes. So, we're all kind of in this together.” He sighed deeply, though whether it was irritation or sadness, GJ couldn’t quite tell. “We just thought Randall would be another addition to the group. At first, he was just out in the woods with us having a grand old time. And when those guys showed up and they started shooting at us, fuck, I got shot and I ran. I should have stayed and helped Randall."

  19

  Walter watched as the two large wolf-dogs emerged from the back room. GJ stood, stunned, beside her. As Walter cataloged her partner's O-shaped mouth and wide eyes, she realized for the first time that GJ's understanding had not been complete. Previously, her idea of what Donovan and Wade and the family members could do had been purely clinical. She'd seen the bones. She'd calculated how they fit and moved. She'd been told the sum of those parts, and it made logical sense to her, given what she understood of human physiology and the physiology of the specimens in her grandfather's lab. But now, watching two adult men walk into a room and two large wolves walk out—well, Walter saw that GJ hadn't truly been prepared.

  Walter assessed the two. The easiest way to tell them apart was fur color. The hair on the grown men's heads matched the hair on their arms and matched the hair on their wolves. So the older, white one was Will Little, Wade's grandfather. The younger, more brown-red-colored wolf was Art de Gottardi, Wade's cousin and Burt's brother.

  Interestingly enough, Wade was the odd man out in his family, not because he was a wolf, and not because he was gay, but because he was a physicist. As far as Walter could tell, most everyone in the family stayed in the area. She wanted to call the place “de Gottardi-ville,” but her humor would likely not be appreciated. Besides, though they owned a lot of land, the de Gottardi/Little clan wasn’t big enough to be a “ville”—just a family compound, nestled in the Ozarks, just south of the state line dividing Arkansas and Missouri.

  Wade had not stayed and tended the farm, tended the relatives, or had kids. He'd left. He'd gone to the city, gotten degrees in things that weren't directly useful to the family. The man spoke in terms of quarks and spins rather than what it would take to grow a fruit tree or remove a silver bullet and stitch the wound up neatly.

  Though Wade's decisions had taken him away, and though Walter couldn't tell if he had been tight in his family’s embrace in the meantime, his loss now seemed to have ricocheted through all of them. Whether it was necessarily because it was Wade's boyfriend who was killed or because it was suddenly clear they were being hunted, all had rallied around him. That meant when Wade de Gottardi told his relatives that two FBI agents were coming to investigate, they happily opened their doors and began talking. That was something Walter had not expected.

  She could only compare this extended family to her own insular communities. Having once been homeless and having also been a Marine, she understood those groups were tight-knit. They'd seen things and experienced things that others hadn't, thus tended not to talk freely. And they certainly didn’t generally open their doors to outsiders. She was impressed that whatever Wade told these people had worked.

  Now, she and GJ followed the two men—in their nonverbal wolf forms—out the back door. They were going tracking. Walter wished for a moment that Wade was here. He'd tracked Randall originally and could lead them directly back to the spot. Still, she understood from her investigation classes how important it was to get independent confirmations when possible, and they were trying to get that now. However, she also understood from her courses at Quantico it was equally important for family members not be involved in their own investigations, and for anyone with a known bias recuse themselves. To say those issues applied here would still be an understatement of epic proportions. Even GJ was completely involved with the other side of this case. In fact, Walter was apparently the least biased investigator. Ultimately, she’d been taught the idea was to present the case before a court of law. However, Walter could hardly imagine this case ever coming up on a docket or how she might lie on the stand if anyone asked her about werewolves.

  Inside of five minutes, it became very clear that the wolves had a much faster natural pace than either Walter or GJ. Though Walter was fit and strong, the prosthetic leg did slow her down, and GJ…well, she was GJ. Walter turned to look at her and see if her smaller partner was keeping up. GJ stayed silent, offering a thumbs up, but not appearing to be out of breath. Good.

  Quantico had made them both fitter than they had been, though Walter wouldn’t have believed it. She’d been certain she was already as fit as possible and that nothing would make GJ any faster or stronger. She’d been wrong on both counts. Apparently, before this new training, she'd been working out only one set of muscles. Quantico taught her she was the proud owner of five or ten or five hundred different sets of muscles. She was sure GJ could enlighten her on the physiology if they ever got a chance.

  They'd set up a series of signals ahead of time, given the wolves’ lack of English skills. Nods, head shakes side to side, one bark or two barks, were now their only mode of communication. The men were dependent on GJ and Walter to understand what each sound or motion meant.

  Walter hadn't been ready for this. She and Donovan had never gone running together, though she had seen him walk in and out of the house as a wolf. They hadn’t communicated then, other than for her to wave and say, "Hi," and she expected nothing in return until he changed back. Here, a lack of communication was not an option. It was necessary, and wolves did not speak. Now, a series of grunts, followed by ground-sniffing, alerted her. Then both of the wolves took off in the same direction—an obvious signal they'd found something.

  Walter called after them, "Stop. Will! Art! Is it Randall?" She needed confirmation that they were following the trail they specifically needed. Both men stopped, turned, and looked at her, their long faces and sharp eyes glowing as the light around them dimmed. Both heads nodded up and down once before they turned and took off. All she saw was the disappearing wolves in front of her. Walter took off after them.

  GJ’s body was ready to fall into bed and go to sleep, but her brain was nowhere near that happening. Her schedule wasn’t helping either. She was in her fourth set of clothes since leaving the night before. Even her outfits had suffered a hectic twenty-four hours. Today alone—actually, late last night—she’d started off wearing her Quantico uniform. She’d then changed into her own personal clothing for the flight and she pulled out a business suit she had stashed away upon arrival in the Ozarks. Eventually, she’d found herself in hiking boots and gear. That outfit had gotten muddy on the knees as she collected soil samples from the spot where they believed Randall had disappeared.

  Art and Will, in their wolf forms had encouraged her to inspect that particular position. Their dramatically changed shapes still astonished her, but she had to simply push her shock and curiosity out of the way to do the job.

  Though the two men—wolves—had seemed insistent that this was the exact place where Randall had disappeared, it was GJ who’d insisted on collecting the soil. Later, in the dim light of the evening, sitting in the kitchen of Wil
l Little's home, she could hold up the glass vial she had stuffed the dirt and muck into and see the coloration. It did not appear the body had been burned here. So that must have happened after he was taken away—probably after they discovered he wasn’t what they’d thought.

  GJ inspected her little sample. She had plenty of experience collecting soil, and she could practically see blood in this one. It was “fresh” as compared to weeks- or years-old blood. That usually couldn’t be seen. There’d been no scent of decay when she sniffed at the ground nor when she opened the vial and put her nose close. There were none of the fluids a body might leak had it been left out to rot. So while she couldn’t say the men had found Randall’s site for certain, she could say it was not the site of an old body. In fact, it matched what she understood so far and further indicated Randall's head wound must have bled more than she’d initially assessed.

  She had a thought she didn't like thinking. Though this was merely one case like so many others, she didn’t like this one. She’d been at this a long time. Eleri was right: GJ had been raised on this stuff, even working some cases with her grandfather when she’d been far too young to sign confidentiality clauses or understand the losses the families suffered. She’d been his apprentice back then, soaking in knowledge on cases and digs. Even so, she’d never worked one so close to home.

  "Wow. You're acting as if you don't need a microscope to see what's in there." Walter entered the room and slid wearily into the seat next to her.

  "I almost can," GJ replied. “I can tell you this has blood in it. And because of the way it dug up, it was not fresh, but not old, either. It was beginning the clotting process."

  "I didn't need to know that," Walter winced, and GJ laughed, pleasantly pleased to discover that Walter, the Terminator, the super soldier, was a little bit squeamish over blood.

  "Compare notes?" Walter asked, and GJ simply nodded, setting the vial directly into her bag so it couldn't be forgotten. She had, of course, labeled it very carefully on the scene, much to the chagrin of Will and Art. They’d stood staring, vaguely bored, while she carefully dated, collected coordinates, and put more information on the small vial than most people carried on their driver's licenses.

  "So," Walter asked, "did you get any information on the people who were out hunting?"

  "Yeah," GJ answered, scratching at her knee. Only as she stuck her hand onto the wet fabric did she remember that she’d been kneeling in the dirt. She looked over at Walter's notes, finding that they agreed. There had been an older black man. Another man had been termed "middle-aged" by several interviewees—a white male. And lastly, the third hunter was a younger woman that people were fairly confident was of Asian descent.

  "None of these is my grandfather," GJ said, both secretly pleased and yet also concerned, because ruling him out dramatically ruined their chances of easily figuring out who these people were. Until now, she’d believed it might have been her grandfather who’d killed Wade’s boyfriend, and she was glad that he had not been the one to pull the trigger. Still, it was possible he was in this up to his eyeballs.

  Will Little came up then and took the seat next to Walter, looking back and forth between the two women, still dirty from their run. He, of course, had taken the time to shower. This was his home, not theirs. Now that he was here, they couldn’t keep their conversation private, a problem when you sat at someone else's dinner table discussing your case.

  "I'm so glad," he offered up in a dry tone, "that the group of people hunting us is so diverse. If there was ever a time you wanted a cohesive group of racists, now would be it."

  Were they racist? GJ wondered to herself. Perhaps they were species-ist. Although from the bone samples she’d studied in her grandfather’s lab, she certainly hadn’t found anything that demonstrated speciation.

  "GJ." Walter’s hand waved through her field of vision. Yup, she'd wandered off there for a minute.

  "I'm sorry, what?"

  "Will has something to tell us."

  Apparently, Will had been talking while GJ contemplated species divergence and what kind of evolutionary pressures might have occurred to bring about men like Will Little. Instead, she should be listening to him. She could ponder the universe later.

  "This woman—I think we may have seen her before. Did you talk to anybody else about this?" Again, Will looked back and forth between the two newly minted agents. It occurred to GJ for the first time that the de Gottardi-Little crew didn’t know they were getting rookies.

  "No. We did ask if people knew them, and everybody said no," GJ answered him. "Although, I have to admit, I thought there were a few odd ticks with answers. Why would that be? Why wouldn't they just say: I think I've seen her around before? And where do you think you saw her?"

  She was pulling out her notepad, anxious to get these thoughts added to her notes as Walter reached for her phone to begin recording the conversation. Will Little was talking again, giving out valuable information rather than just shooting the breeze with the women who’d invaded his home.

  "We tend not to say anything because we're constantly getting discriminated against. So we don't want to speak out against someone that we're not confident of, but I think I may have seen her at the grocery in town. You might want to go ask there. They'll know if this is somebody new, or if we're all being idiots and thinking that several different people are all the same woman."

  That was a valid point, GJ thought. There were numerous studies that showed people often had difficulty distinguishing faces in races outside of their own. It didn’t seem to matter what race you came from, but what you were exposed to. The problem was that different races used different distinguishing characteristics. So, it was entirely possible that this woman's Asian background might have caused all the white boys of the de Gottardi/Little family to not recognize that the woman in the store had been hunting them in the woods. Also, no one claimed to have gotten a solid look at any of the three assailants. Burt hadn’t even been sure she was a woman. Not surprising. It was hard to commit a face to memory while running from bullets.

  Being in a backwoods town in the Ozarks was another problem, from GJ’s standpoint. There wasn't a lot of diversity here anyway, so who could say the grocer wouldn't make the same mistake? She didn't push it, though. Just nodded at Will Little, as she and Walter agreed they'd get on it.

  "We're staying at the motel on Pinn Street," GJ volunteered, though she’d yet to check in, so “staying” a strong word for her relationship to the motel so far. "Is it the only one in town?"

  Will nodded at her as Burt came into the room, deciding he, too, was going to join the conversation. He didn't move quite as easily as Will did, his side still stitched up, his right hand occasionally moving as though to cover the wound and hold the blood in, even though he'd been thoroughly taken care of.

  "The closest place you can stay besides the motel is to go three towns over, way past Bull Shoals. So if somebody came here, that's where they would stay."

  Will hit the nail on the head to what she was thinking. They had a lot of places to ask, and a lot of ground to cover before they would likely figure out who their three mysterious visitors to this little patch of family land in the Ozarks were.

  20

  Walter's stomach growled. The Egg McMuffin she had for breakfast was managing to both not sit well and not keep her from being hungry again. The sandwich was, sadly, the highest-end food she’d had access to that morning.

  Bull Shoals was such a tiny town that it couldn’t support much in the way of business, something Walter totally understood. The café would have taken too much time today, but if she was still here tomorrow, she was going to make the café happen, then hit up the grocery store. She would graciously forget motel rules about not having food in the room. Too bad.

  Out here in the woods, she kicked up the dirt looking for clues and information in the same places she and GJ had come the night before. Once the two of them had rolled out of bed, they’d made a plan for th
e day. However, a good chunk of the morning was already gone, as they’d agreed to sleep in. They’d needed it after the twenty-five hour marathon they’d run since being pulled from their beds in Quantico with only three hours of sleep.

  Walter had suggested she come back and check out this area. She’d been hopeful she might find more information in the daylight, and GJ, of course, said yes. In part, her partner only agreed because the evidence had already been trampled so many times. GJ had gotten her samples last night. It was fair game now for Walter to search out what she wanted.

  One thing Walter still hoped to find—despite both Art and Will being unable to find any the night before—was spent casings. GJ might look for clues of blood and bone, but Walter looked for clues of cordite and firepower. Walter looked for evidence of arms.

  Now, in the daylight, she was trying to figure out which location Randall had been killed from, where someone else might have stood to get a crushing hit to his head. Walter shone a flashlight in an attempt to illuminate any remaining footprints. She needed the extra light to get past the gray color of the day and the gloom that hung overhead, but as GJ had said, the site was so trampled, the signs were difficult to distinguish.

  From what GJ and Eleri had deduced, and what she'd surmised herself, Randall had taken a blow to the upper right side of his skull, probably from behind. If she was the one doing it, that's how she would have made it happen.

  That thought led her to conclude he’d likely been running away. Though the body was burned, she could easily guess that he would have marks on his hands and forearms from stumbling forward. Which then meant the blade—and the evidence of self-defense that Donovan had thought might cause the markings on his arms—might also have been an issue from him falling onto rocks when he was hit from behind.