“I can come back safe.”
She was staring right at him. Pale green eyes boring into his head, trying to read the hieroglyphs of his thoughts. He wouldn’t let her, but she tried. Finally, she sat back. “Good, because if you don’t, my ass is fried.”
“Your ass will be fine.” He said it in all sincerity before he realized he just commented on his senior agent’s ass. A younger, female agent’s ass.
Her head snapped back so fast he thought she was having a seizure. The gulping for air didn’t help, and he almost whacked her on the back before he realized she was laughing. Hard.
The rich throaty sound caught him off guard.
It shouldn’t have. But it was so at odds with the clothing that screamed of money and taste. The posture that spoke of classes for deportment overlaid with hours of logged firearms and defense training. The long swimmer’s muscles, the feminine disposition, the straightforward speech, even her unusual facial features that he couldn’t quite put a finger on. Eleri Eames was a mass of contradictions.
Donovan would have been beet red if not for his darker coloring. He tried to drop the thought from his mind, too, but the best he could come up with was that at least she wasn’t offended.
Focusing on planning, Eleri continued to gulp for air as she laid out the day.
She slept the night before with Jane Doe’s box in her room. Even he didn’t invite the dead into his bedroom, but Eames seemed undisturbed by it. “We need to get her to a field office and into the hands of a real forensic anthropologist or pathologist. And we need a drone from a field office. Let’s go get you a rental car.” She started shutting things off, talking while she made her work almost literally disappear into the plain but beautiful gray bag she carried. “Then you sleep today, because you’re going out on recon at night.”
He only nodded because that’s all she gave him room for as she kept going. “I’ll take the current car and head out to whichever field office has what we need. Hopefully a drone I can work, or an agent to work it, or . . . well, we’ll see. So I’ll trade Jane and Jane’s artifacts for whatever I can get and I’ll come back here to meet with you.”
Slinging her bag over her shoulder, signaling that this little meeting was done, she looked him in the eye again. “You don’t go out until you and I have met and we know we have a working GPS system.”
They were in the car before he thought of his question. “Are you going to stay up and monitor me?”
“Maybe.” It was the best answer she would give. “I may catnap and pray things don’t go horribly wrong for you while I’m out.”
He didn’t believe that for a hot second, so he asked questions about the GPS while they drove. A short while later they headed off in opposite directions. Donovan needed a mesh backpack, a dog collar, duct tape, and rope. He bought more than he intended, checking out in two batches—what he could expense and what he couldn’t figure out how to explain. Then he headed back to the hotel, drew the shades and forced himself to sleep.
LATER THAT NIGHT, he sat in the rental car inhaling the air.
Eames had run tests on the GPS, syncing it to her system, making sure she could find him within a ten-foot radius. So he sat in the dark in his car, smelling that he was in the right place and stuffing his supplies into the pack.
He couldn’t start here—it was too open. Anyone could see.
Turning the lights off, he stepped out, pocketed the keys and slung the pack over his shoulder. At first, his world was a nebulous mass of darkness held back only by the sliver of moon overhead. With several blinks, his eyes adjusted and the terrain turned colorless but clear.
It was one of his mutations. The human eye had two kinds of neurons—rods for black and white vision and cones for color. He had more rods in his eyes than a human should—far more. His color vision was passable at best, but in all but total darkness, he was a predator, seeing clearly over long distances and easily picking out prey. Now he just had to follow the scent to find out what was going on in the City of God.
Donovan walked an easy mile into the dense growth. Here he could smell the earth, the oil-and-burn combination that was the same as Jane Doe’s shirt. Here he would make base camp.
Stringing the rope up into the tree, he hooked up the pack, his things all tucked neatly inside. The GPS had been his biggest concern. He couldn’t leave it; Eleri would come looking for him if it stayed stationary. But he had no pockets. When he mentioned this she frowned and shrugged at him as though everyone had pockets. Not Donovan, not tonight. He’d been itching for a good run, but he wondered how it would feel with the GPS device duct taped to the collar he now clicked around his neck.
He felt ridiculous, though it should at least work.
Peeling all his clothing, he folded it neatly, sliding it into the pack, piece by piece. When it was all in there, he used the rope to tie it off the ground. He didn’t need anything sniffing at it or chewing it while he was gone. That would be a hard one to explain come morning—he knew from experience.
Just an hour ago, Eames had wished him luck, told him to go track.
Donovan rolled his shoulders into place and cracked his spine, slightly altering the arch. He felt his breath open up and his feet hit the ground. Muscles stretching, unused for too long, he loped off at a steady pace. He could smell the oil-and-burn on the wind and he turned toward the scent.
He was tracking.
8
Eleri rubbed at her eyes. Donovan may have napped all day, but she’d driven miles upon miles, handled political negotiations, and worked her way through a good-old-boy network.
Mentally, she conceded that the good-old-boy network wasn’t as “good,” “old” or even “boy” as she wanted to believe. It was simply red tape and limited resources, but when other agents called her “honey” or “darlin” it was really easy to blame it on an inside club. Eleri had never been anybody’s darlin’.
When she asked for a drone, she’d hoped for a small team—an agent or two—to run the flight. She imagined men in suits, wilting in the hot Texas sun as they launched the drone. They would roll up their sleeves, work the system, and record everything.
Instead, she was given a box. Her drone came in pieces to be assembled. “Easy Peasy” the agent had told her.
Eleri didn’t think she’d ever heard an agent use quite that terminology before. She also hadn’t used a drone before—she’d seen them, but never worked one herself. Maybe all the sweet words were just a response to her strawberry blonde hair, freckles, and facial features that contained no sharp edges, making her look young and sweet.
She didn’t open the box. She had a tracker to track and she had to stay awake.
When Donovan left in his compact rental, Eleri headed the other way. Trusting in the computer to show her where he was when she returned, she went straight to Grounds for Thought, a little coffee shop she’d noticed earlier. Relatively frou-frou and located in the heart of a nearly permanent heat wave, she knew they had to serve cold drinks with massive quantities of caffeine. She left with a full tray. A frozen caramel latte thingy to start. A coffee and a tea and a massive cup of ice waited to be fed into her mini-fridge for the wee hours. Or for the next morning when she had to haul her sorry ass out of bed again. Eleri believed in being prepared.
When she returned to the hotel and her perch on the bed, she took her first huge sip of the frozen latte and stopped dead. Damn, that was good. Then she booted her system and prayed her partner hadn’t gone out of range or lost signal or any of the other things that could have gone wrong. Things she could never imagine reporting to a superior and having to say, “I was getting coffee, sir.”
Luckily the red dot pulled right up. Donovan was within a mile of where he said he smelled the T-shirt scent. Good for him.
Sipping at the coffee—a perfect blend of sugar, caffeine and cold—Eleri kept only half her attention on the dot and the other half on some truly terrible television. She briefly considered catnapping, but Donovan could start moving
at any time and she wanted to keep a weather eye on the tracker, see where he went, what the pattern was.
The way he talked he must think he was some kind of Indian warrior? Who knew? It hadn’t seemed arrogant, simply confident. That, combined with her own memories of being held back by agents who didn’t see that her skills were different from theirs, led her to put her faith in him. She sipped again and hoped it wasn’t misplaced.
As she watched, the red dot started to move.
It was disturbingly fascinating, and she stared at it, her brain zoning out. In slow motion, the dot tracked Donovan’s position. Stats updated moment by moment on a panel to the right. Coordinates—which she could read from her Academy training—held rudimentary information. The map itself told more about the terrain, the flora, the things she was interested in. Her partner moved in odd lines, the map constantly shifting under his path.
The constant updates now kept her glued to the screen, at odds with the slow motion movement that nearly put her to sleep more than once. Still, she could see where he was and tell where he was headed.
As her head snapped upward and out of near sleep and her body jerked, Eleri made the decision that the drone was not going out bright and early tomorrow. No, there would be sleep. Tired agents were bad agents. Tired agents didn’t make good first impressions on their inaugural cases with their new elite division. Yes, sleep was definitely on the docket. She just had to fend it off until Donovan got back.
The low rubbery sound inside her head each time she blinked and the slight burning sensation around her eyelids let her know that was much easier said than done. The coffee cup left a wet ring on the bedside table and she wiped at it, thinking a big sip might perk her up. She then gathered the whole setup and moved to the desk. Waking up, curled on her bed, with the red dot that was her partner nowhere to be found was a potential nightmare. She was better off in the chair. If she woke with an impression of her keyboard on her face, well, that would only be what she deserved.
The TV turned then to an infomercial but Eleri left it on behind her, hoping the perky voices would keep her awake. Academy training had involved exhaustion and long periods without sleep. Agents often ran for more than a day or even two with no breaks, but the negotiations and the heat had sapped her today. She was warm, it was dark outside, and she had the deep, saturating need to curl up and give in to sleep.
Eleri fought it.
Donovan had balked at the GPS, brushing aside her comment about just sticking it in his pocket. She laughed about it now, thinking, you try getting women’s clothes with pockets. Still, what did she know? Only that in the end he thought he figured out how to do it and she was happy. He needed to keep it with him. She had to know if he stopped moving and she had to be able to find to him. So she needed to stay awake. Just in case.
The numbers scrolled down the right side. He was keeping up a pace of eight miles per hour. She quickly did the math coming up with an impressive seven-and-a-half-minute mile.
She could do that—for a short while, but only a very short while. Then again, she was a swimmer. Her running days had been almost entirely at the Academy. She passed the time trials only seconds before the failure mark and even then only managed that pace by imagining homicidal maniacs chasing her. In water, she was fast, outswimming most of the men. But running? That was clearly Donovan’s forte. His pace was solid and superbly impressive given the terrain. She would never be able to maintain that rate or even keep up in the woods that separated the road from the open spaces.
There were open areas between the towns, places farther from the water sources where the trees didn’t grow as tall. As the red dot approached the edge of the forest, she was left wondering what he would do when he hit the flatter field. Donovan was a tall man, how would he stay low enough to not be seen?
Four minutes later she watched in awe as the dot went straight from the forest into the field without stopping at all. There was no change in movement—as though he were just striding through the tall grass, plain as day.
She frowned and sipped at her coffee, only to be affronted by a gulp of air and a hissing noise. Great, her coffee was gone and her partner—extraordinary tracker and self-proclaimed man of stealth—was just strolling through an open field near a compound that housed a leader who likely killed three people before he turned sixteen.
She waited for the dot to stop dead and wondered if she’d hear the bullet crack from all the way out here. But the dot didn’t stop its forward progress. In fact, the mileage increased by half a mile per hour. Did the man think he was better off going faster in the open space rather than skirting it? What the hell kind of stealth was that?
Debating whether to trust him or buzz him and bring him back in occupied her next thirty minutes. By the time she didn’t decide, he was safely across the open area and into another patch of dense forest where his pace slowed just a little back to the earlier rate. The man had been holding an eight-minute mile for two hours now.
Her head buzzing, Eleri tried to calculate it. Marathoners held that pace, for several hours even, but they did it on flat ground—not in forests with protruding roots and thick underbrush. The winding path may have been Donovan following a trail that was already established, but even that wouldn’t explain the speed he held. And he’d gotten faster in the field. While it lacked the underbrush, it was full of tall grass and that couldn’t be easy to run through. Aware that she wasn’t a runner and wasn’t up on the finer points of wilderness jogging, Eleri still couldn’t make logical sense of it.
Forty minutes later, the pace of the red dot changed drastically.
She had just pulled the tea from her little fridge, using standing and stretching and even the short distance walked to keep awake. She made a production out of pouring the tea over a cup she filled with the ice she’d brought and giving it a good shake. A caffeine-heavy mix of black tea and some fruit flavoring, it hit her senses with a bloom, bringing her awake and recharging her a bit. So when she sat down to look at the screen again it had catalogued a few changes in the numbers.
Donovan looked like he’d come to a block. He veered almost a full ninety degrees to his left—west—and his speed dropped. She wondered if he’d worn out. But that wasn’t her concern. If he was upright, if he was moving, she was going to let him do what he claimed he could do.
An hour later he’d made most of a circle.
DONOVAN SNIFFED the air but didn’t detect anything. When he arrived, he knew he had the right place. This small cluster of homes must be the City of God. Whatever it was, it was where the dead girl had come from: the T-shirt smell belonged to this place.
Now though, he couldn’t smell much of anything. It was as though the air had been cleaned. Still he stalked the edge of the compound, mentally recording every bit of information he could. All in all there were twenty-two buildings, most looking like homes, although about five appeared to be more for common use or storage and several of these were farther away. Some had security measures around them: razor wire in the grass, nearly invisible over the fescue that grew up through it. Fences made of spikes driven into the ground at intervals too small for a person to squeeze through.
A number of small generators were scattered around the compound, chugging softly in the dark. Since they didn’t seem connected to anything, Donovan figured there was an underground wire network. This in turn would indicate a sophisticated system that wasn’t quite as primitive as it looked.
The houses and buildings were parked under large trees, all but obscuring them from overhead view. They were painted camouflage colors, so satellite pictures could show the house but you might still never see it. A few buildings—those more out in the open—were earthen in one way or another. One was half-buried into the rich soil, only two sides of the building exposed, so that from several angles it looked to simply be a hill. Another two buildings were painted in the same camo shades but sported grass rooftops. These sod tops were benefits for heating and cooling as well as ma
king sure they weren’t found. Eleri and her drone would have fun tomorrow.
In the dead of night, the little hidden village seemed peaceful, but closer inspection made it clear all was not as it seemed. Concerned with the lack of smell, Donovan sped up his pace. The GPS not only knew where he was at any given moment, it would trace his path. If he could get all the way around, he would clearly show the boundaries of the compound when Eleri pulled it up.
Armed guards—about five of them—traipsed through the City. They walked a path only they saw, checking the outer edges of the homes before criss-crossing their way back through the center of the compound. Though they all carried guns, they left them at their sides. Donovan watched them as he skirted the edges. Relatively lax in their watch, they didn’t see him, so their patterns should be relatively normal.
He tracked the perimeter without coming too close and as he was deciding to finish the job or leave the area, the wind changed. It must have cleared his sinuses because fresh smells slowly came back to him.
Frowning, he thought he detected blood, so he followed it. As a faint scent, it didn’t mean much. It might mean someone cut himself working recently. It might not even be human. In a place like this, the scent of blood should be everywhere. Unless they were the only gun-toting vegetarian cult in Texas.
The wind shifted again, bringing a fresh wash of the blood scent. This time he knew it was human. It wasn’t a huge quantity, but it was fresh and overlaid with fear—deep, bone-chilling, anyone-could-smell-it fear.
Searching for the source, Donovan sniffed around in a circle. He had just caught the scent when he heard the sounds to his right. A quiet cacophony came from another part of the compound. Something was wrong but not quite wrong enough to wake everyone.
Donovan was watching the mess intently, when one of the guards suddenly spotted him.
Dead on, gun already raised, the guard stared him in the eyes.
The NightShade Forensic Files: Under Dark Skies (Book 1) Page 7