“Donovan!” She stared at him but hollered as though Donovan would come out and help her.
Well, he couldn’t.
Shit.
“Donovan?” This one wasn’t as strong, but that made sense since Eleri was clearly no longer expecting her partner to come help. Her hand was reaching for the Glock she held at her side.
Holy shit. She wouldn’t shoot him, would she?
Of course she would. If he attacked, moved in an aggressive manner, she’d lay him low. He wasn’t inside the gate though. And thinking through his options left him a very short list.
He could stand up, change in front of her and freak her the hell out. Then he could tell her she hallucinated it. He just had to hope that she would stay passed out long enough for him to get some pants on.
Or he could leave. Trot off, wait her out. Eventually—hopefully soon—she’d realize he wasn’t home and go do . . .something.
Last option, stare her down. But her gun had slowly cleared the holster and her hand wasn’t shaking.
Option two, it was then.
Lowering his head in the universal sign of submission, Donovan backed away from Eleri. She surprised him by stepping forward, only one step to each of his two, so he was gaining distance and she was allowing it. But he was surprised that she was moving toward him. Or he was surprised until she moved like lightning, striking, slamming his gate shut, and making him sigh with utter exasperation when he heard her latch it.
Great. Now he was locked out of his own yard.
Thankfully, he’d installed the latch at the very top of the gate, with the intention that he could reach over and unlatch it from the outside. The one time they had a yard onto woodlands when he was kid, that was how his father had done it. Of course, they’d latched the yard and gone into the woods, hiding and stringing up their clothes. His new method was much easier, lion urine and all. Unless, of course, someone came into your yard and latched your gate.
At least none of the trails came by his house, something else he’d checked before buying the place. It was no good to have random people coming by and seeing what you could do. There was a reason his kind was still considered myth after all these centuries. The few who had come out had been badly treated, and Donovan had no reason to suspect his welcome would be any different today.
He lingered on the other side of his fence, listening for her to leave. But she didn’t. Instead he listened as she called him. Left him a message, exasperated that his car was there and his gate was open but he was nowhere to be found. She also told him that she saw a wolf coming into his yard and maybe he shouldn’t leave the gate open, then ended with, “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you since six a.m.”
He could almost hear her ire as she hung up on his voicemail.
Surely she would leave now.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she stopped, listened, and called him again. This time she waited through his message and only said “Test” before signing off. Then she stayed very still.
Why did he have to join the FBI?
She heard his phone beep inside the house. So she knew his car was there, his gate was open, wild animals were trying to get into the yard, and he was gone without his phone. It all made perfect sense to him, but it wouldn’t to her. So of course she was banging on his back door, hollering out for him.
When that didn’t work, she worked her way around the house. He could hear her checking the window latches, the doorknobs. He locked them. He lived in the country where most people didn’t, but he’d seen enough strange deaths and enough people killed by someone just walking right in, that he locked his doors and windows. Always.
Despite her attempts, Eleri didn’t find a way in. She only found no running water—clearly he wasn’t in the shower where he couldn’t hear her. No loud TV or music—he wouldn’t come running to the door not having heard anything. And it didn’t help that when she circled back to his car she would see that he hadn’t moved it since he got home.
He knew she was looking in windows. He just knew it. He was also pretty certain that his time was limited before she popped out a pane of glass and broke her way in. He was at plan D.
So he backed into the woods, far enough away that she wouldn’t see anything and he sat on the ground. It was the easiest way out. One leg at a time, he popped joints, pulled muscles into their new locations. Rolled his shoulders back into the places they were expected. As he put himself back into proper form he watched as the hair virtually disappeared.
The rest of it, he’d figured out. It was really just minor variations in skeletal structure—most mammals had the same basic skeleton and similar musculature—along with a specific set of double-jointedness. All of that made perfect sense. It was logical, clear. Weird, sure. But nothing amazing. The hair still got him though, and he ran his finger over the scar on the side of his thigh. In medical school, he’d headed into the lab, taken a needle full of Xylocaine and a scalpel and took a biopsy of his own skin. He’d stitched it up and tried to make the hair work. But he never could. He dissected it. Found the hair shafts unusually long compared to his dermatology texts, mostly buried. And the best he could figure was that it operated like piloerection—hair moving to stand on end in the cold—in normal humans.
None of the rest of the myth was true. It was, in fact, baldly ridiculous. And the truth was that he was now walking through the woods, bare-ass naked. He wanted to close his eyes and sigh. He wanted this to not be happening. He debated using her first name or her last.
“Eleri!” If he was going to ask her to throw his pants over the fence, a first name basis seemed inevitable.
ELERI WAS KNEELING beside his car, growing increasingly alarmed when she heard Donovan call her name. Relief deluged her, entirely out of proportion to the situation. But in her world, missing partners were not acceptable. Missing people triggered severe emotional reactions. And his car hadn’t been moved in several days. Since she’d spoken to him at five p.m. yesterday she knew he was alive then, and healthy, but that was nearly twenty hours ago.
“Donovan!” she called back to where she’d heard the sound—the other side of the tall fence. She looked up at the top of it and gauged it to be eight feet tall. Shit. The wolf. “There’s a wolf on that side.”
She was already running for the back gate, ready to reach up as high as she could to flip the latch and let him in. “It walked in toward the gate, toward me. It might be rabid—”
“Don’t open the gate!”
Was the wolf over there with him? “Do you want my gun?”
She didn’t open the gate; she didn’t panic. She was trained for harsh, strange situations, and she was trained to listen to what her fellow agents said and react as a team, not as a lone, panicking person assuming whatever they thought was best for the situation should be done. It had been one of the hardest parts of training—to hold fire when another agent said so, to not bust down a door when your team was in peril on the other side. But she’d learned. And now she paused, waiting for further instructions from the person who could see the situation on his side of the fence.
His voice was remarkably calm. “No wolf.” There was something sardonic in the tone, but she still called back.
“Keep an eye out. He was right here.” Some of the tension that had snapped back into her at his sharp command began draining again. “What do you need?”
His request surprised her. She’d expected maybe a rope or help climbing over, she really didn’t know. But not what he said.
“There’s a key to the back door here.” His hand appeared over the top of the fence, holding the key. No ring, no identifying marks, he must have carried it with him. But when he dropped it to her at her word, she found it cold to the touch. “Go into the mudroom and bring me the jeans there? Throw them over the fence.”
Her mouth opened. Thank God she’d already caught the key, because if he’d dropped it right now it would have fallen right past her. “You’re out there running
around in your underwear and you won’t walk into your own yard?”
No, that made sense: she was kind of his boss. Not really the boss, but his ranking officer so to speak. Turning to walk away, she almost missed his next words.
“Nope. No underwear.”
Holy shit. “You’re running in the woods in the altogether?” Her brain did not process that and her mouth opened, letting out the first thought that came to her. “What about ticks!?”
He laughed, deep and rusty, and though she’d heard it before, she got the feeling that it wasn’t a common sound. “Ticks and mosquitoes don’t like me.”
“Well, I wish I had that problem.” She muttered under her breath. Then again, even if they didn’t, no one was going to find her running naked through the woods. “Give me a damn minute.” She was fetching pants for her new partner. Stranger shit had happened, but not that often.
The key slid easily into the lock and luckily a pair of jeans, neatly folded, lay right in the doorway. Swooping them up as she leaned over, Eleri turned in one motion and marched back to the fence. She was not opening it. “I’m throwing them over now. Watch out for that wolf.” Then she muttered, “Hope he doesn’t eat anything important to you.”
He laughed again, this time a chuckle as his hand came over the top of the fence, lifting the latch and letting himself in. “I’m very familiar with the wildlife here. It’s why I moved here.”
“So you can run around naked on national park land?”
She was surprised when he looked up over her head and thought about it, then simply said, “Yes.” After a pause, he added, “It’s a bit of an old family tradition.”
“Well, you make sure your family is wearing pants before I meet them.”
Unable to help herself, she added, “You know, wild animals approaching humans or clearly human areas is a sign they aren’t mentally stable. Possibly even rabid. And you’re out there with that thing, with . . . everything available for bites.” She waved her hand up and down at him, realizing she’d dug herself a hole with the direction her sentence was heading. “Anyway.”
He turned then to close the gate and latch it. In only his jeans, his bare feet melted into the grass and he seemed completely at home. “I usually walk in the gate, in the back door, and right into the shower. Key?”
The change of topic startled her from her examination. But she handed the key to him, not paying attention as he put it back in some secret spot at the top of the fence. “Donovan.”
“What?” He was turning to face her, but she put her hand out, turning him, keeping his back toward her.
“Your scapulae, they’re both larger and narrower than normal.” She was almost reaching out to touch them, forgetting he was a person and not a specimen. He looked normal—right—at first glance. Anyone else wouldn’t know it, but she was trained in forensics and biology. She knew the human skeleton, how it worked together, how it gave evidence to the life lived, how it decomposed. And she was seeing so many tiny aberrations in him. Eleri couldn’t stop looking.
The curvature of his spine was shy on the lower portion of the usual S. It was within human range but definitely at the end of the spectrum. His neck muscles were relatively thick, his jaw longer than average—that was clearer now from this angle—his hips narrow for a man of his height, but he had a taller hip girdle than normal.
She was still frowning, examining, when he turned around. No longer laughing or even smiling, his ink-dark eyes looked at her sternly. “Are you done?”
“I’m sorry, I—” There was nothing she could really say. Something about his eyes was bothering her now, too, though she couldn’t place why. But more than that, he was angry and she’d caused it. “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you here, Eames?”
No more “Eleri” then. Sure it was “Eleri, throw me my pants,” but one comment about your scapulae and it was Eames again. Her brain sharpened. She’d been distracted, but she was here prowling around his house, pissing off her naked-in-the-woods partner for a reason.
“There’s another City of God escapee. She calls herself Charity. And she’s asking for Jonah.”
15
For a moment, Eleri just stood at the one-way glass and peered through at the girl sitting huddled on the chair. She was shivering beneath a blanket despite the raging heat of the day and the moderate interior of the Brady City Police Department.
The municipal building was a squat thing, the bricks multisized and at one time quite the trend. The single story, flat-topped design made the building look as though the heat had pushed it down, stunting its growth. The girl inside looked like she was getting pushed down, too.
The police officer handling her case was a sweet, slightly pudgy woman with abnormally bright red hair. Eleri liked her within moments of arriving. Detective Cassa Brinks wouldn’t let them see Charity any closer than the window into the holding room, her fierce protection of the girl evident in every move. She did let them see that the department had already provided drawing paper, a stuffed animal, the blanket, ice water, juice, and a meal—most of which Charity hadn’t touched.
Cassa shook her head. “She won’t eat and I keep hoping she’ll just fall asleep. She’s clearly exhausted.”
Eleri positioned herself strongly despite being the shortest one there. She wasn’t taking over the investigation, but she was firm that she needed information. Hoping to keep everything friendly, she asked, “Do you have time to talk to us about what you know?”
“Of course.” The woman led them down a short hallway and into a room designed more for conferences than for holding people. It took a minute for Eleri to place that this building held more than just Police Services and this was a joint-use room.
“I’m sure you’ll want a copy of the file we already have started, Agent Eames, Heath.” The red hair bobbed as she nodded at each of them briskly.
“Please, call me Eleri. This is Donovan.” It was the least she could do, since the other woman had told them to use her first name before she even shook their hands. “And yes, anything you can share is helpful.”
Cassa carried the file along with her, but Eleri could see it was woefully thin. The detective said they fingerprinted the girl and kept a scan of the prints on file. When Donovan raised his eyebrows at the standard fingerprint card—old-school, paper-and-ink style—the officer explained. “Our chief will scan the cards, but says ink is still the best capture system.”
While some of the light-scan programs were finally getting better, for use in a situation like this, the Brady Department had it right. “Is the original card headed to the AFIS team?”
Cassa nodded. They’d given it to someone who would run it through the national database and hand check the ink against possible matches the computer spit out. “Since she’s a minor, we gave it priority.”
Given their location, they had pulled someone away from a serious backlog to match the prints. That person was likely three counties away which meant someone was driving it over there. A lot of the specialists swore by the old ink-and-card system, said they could be far more confident of a match with a real print. The timing sucked, but it often did, and a child huddled under a blanket at a police station with only a first name to go by deserved the time to get it right.
Cassa offered them drinks, and Eleri’s original intent was to give a blanket “no, thank you” but Donovan beat her to it. “We’re fine.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Cassa poured several cups from a standing water cooler. “You should drink even if you don’t want any. This heat will dehydrate you faster than it feels like it will.” With that, she handed them the water they had already refused.
Not able to not drink it now, and knowing Cassa was right, Eleri wondered if they’d passed the required small talk and could get down to business. Pulling out one of the wheeled, padded chairs, she made herself at home and leaned forward. “Can we ask how you found her?”
“Of course, but I have to ask to see your badges fi
rst.” She acted as though it was a shame she had to do so, but Eleri appreciated the check. She pulled her holder from her purse as Donovan was pushing his across the table. They had different models, hers with the actual gold badge on the outside, ID and commission on the inside. His was all interior, though both were black leather. Eleri wanted a red case, or something less drone-like, then she learned that people don’t respect an FBI agent with any sense of style.
As they sat there, Cassa Brinks inspected the badges and radioed the front desk. In just a moment the office girl came forward, snapped pictures, and returned to call in to the Dallas field office to check on them. Again, Brinks looked chagrined at the procedure. “Protocol.”
Offering a smile, Eleri only said, “I appreciate it. It’s the way things should always be done. Don’t apologize.”
A return smile was the only segue before the woman launched head first into the story. “I input her to the system. I was out with an officer in a black and white, when this truck driver pulled up and stopped us. Said the girl had flagged him down outside Mills.”
Donovan held up a hand then, a cross between a classroom question and an interruption, “Where is Mills?”
With deliberate movements and a tug at her pants, Cassa stood and moved to the cabinets at the side of the room. Unlocking one with a key she produced from seemingly nowhere, she pulled out a tablet and turned it on. In a moment she had an interactive map up and was showing Donovan all the small towns between. “He says he picked her up about here.” She pointed. “And that she said she wanted to go to Austin, but he was headed this way. She decided having a ride was more important than going the right direction.”
Brinks then opened the manila file and showed some of the slim pickings inside. Pictures of Charity’s face, arms, legs. All bruised. Eleri’s heart squeezed even though it shouldn’t. Getting beaten was bad enough, but treated like meat to get photographed by the police—officers she may not trust, strangers definitely—that was often just as bad. Eleri wanted to check the wounds. While they were fresh, one could glean all kinds of information, but it could be as invasive as the original round of photos, and the girl didn’t know Eleri from Adam. Instead, she asked the question she could. “Did she say where she got these?”
The NightShade Forensic Files: Under Dark Skies (Book 1) Page 12