Bozeman turned on charm Donovan wouldn’t have guessed he had. “Us agents have been talking and we’ve decided it’s best and safest to keep you here with Jonah.”
The girl’s excitement pulsed through the air and Donovan could almost feel the wave hit him.
“He’s here?” Her voice went breathy, her heart floating up into her eyes.
Telling her no would be like kicking a puppy, but Agent Bozeman simply reached for her hand, as though she were a small child and not a girl on the brink of womanhood. “Yes.” Leading her inside, he left Donovan and Eleri trailing. “And he doesn’t know you’re coming. It’s a surprise.”
Again, Charity became more excited and tagged behind Bozeman until Jonah came into view. He was sitting at the main table, this time working in watercolors and obviously in the zone.
“Jonah?” Her voice was tentative, but the kid’s reaction was not.
Despite the crutches at his side, he stood sharply, clearly recognizing her voice. Hobbling to her, he engulfed her in an embrace the likes of which Donovan had never seen before and certainly had never experienced.
He wondered if the pinching in his chest was jealousy.
DONOVAN RODE back to Hamilton under a wide dark sky. Eleri didn’t let him drive this time, so he laid back the passenger seat, and simply agreed with what she said the infrequent times that she spoke. He let his mind wander and contemplated what he’d seen, what Charity had spoken of.
He considered himself an introvert and figured that explained his lack of social skills and his subsequent lack of desire to develop any. But Eleri and this whole FBI job were opening holes in his theories about how his life should be.
Deep in his own thoughts and tangled in the conundrums coming to light, he was surprised when Eleri turned the car into a chain restaurant for a late dinner. Then again, maybe he’d agreed to this at some point. Oh well, he wasn’t against another burger.
He found himself seated at a dark wooden booth across from his partner, who was looking at him expectantly. He had to ask, “What? What did I miss?”
“I suspect the entire last two hours.”
Nodding sagely, he added, “Did you say anything important?”
“Nah.” She shook her head, and when the waiter appeared a half moment later, she offered her entire order and then looked at Donovan expectantly.
He pointed to the most appetizing picture and said “A Coke, too, please.” Then wondered what he had ordered. It looked like chicken. At least chicken wouldn’t hurt him any, not after the baconed and sauced double burger he’d had at lunch when Charity had attempted to out-eat him.
“Are you paying attention now?”
Nodding yet again, he focused. It was the only appropriate thing to do.
“So if Cassa knew Ruth a while ago—” She was cut off when her phone rang. “Well, speak of the devil. . . Cassa?”
A fleeting, furtive movement of her eyes indicated she was checking to see who could hear and Donovan did the same. By the time his gaze landed back on the table, Eleri was putting the phone on speaker and placing it in the middle of the space. “Cassa, you’ve got Donovan on the line, too.”
“Oh, hi Donovan.” There was only a slight pause then, “I remembered where I knew Ruth. We attended several years of college together. I was straight out of high school and she was an older student but our writing classes always seemed to overlap. She was in a theology program while I was in CJ.”
At the initials, Donovan frowned at Eleri, who mouthed back to him “Criminal Justice.”
Cassa continued on, unaware of their brief exchange. “Part of the problem was that she wasn’t Ruth then. She was Robin. Robin Jennings.”
“You remember her last name?” Eleri smiled and Donovan could hear the return smile in the other woman’s voice.
“See? No one credits me with the smarts I’ve got. I have a great memory. Get a pen.” And she proceeded to give them the dates she’d overlapped with Robin Jennings at the college. She gave the name of the school, the location, two professors they shared, and even the name of a dean who had been in position when they attended and was still there. “I hope that helps you out.”
“I’m sure it will.”
Eleri hung up with a smile as their drinks arrived along with chips and salsa that Donovan didn’t expect. Grabbing a chip, Eleri grinned at him. “You really should pay more attention. You said you liked it really spicy, right?” She scooped a disturbing amount of salsa into her mouth and nearly moaned at the taste.
No. He didn’t like anything spicy. Not too much anyway. His sense of smell and taste was too sharp to handle it. He was stuck watching while she ate several more bites before taking pity on him. “It’s mild, Donovan.” She sighed and scooted the bowl closer to him. “I know you don’t like spicy foods.”
Yeah, he should pay closer attention. It was bad form and she was his boss. He almost apologized but instead dug into the chips, suddenly ravenous again after the long day.
The food arrived and they ate in silence for about five minutes before Eleri looked up at him. There was something feral in her gaze, and he was bothered before she spoke, but not as bothered as he was after she asked her question.
“So Jonah saw a wolf, a pure-black wolf, that delivered pointy sticks to him at the roadside. Sure, he was crazy and out of it, but his delusion is quite clear in his head. You said you saw the wolf, too; what color was it?”
No, he definitely did not like where this was going. But he shrugged, tried to play it off. “I don’t really remember, I was frantic. There was a puma.”
“But really, what color was the wolf?”
He shrugged again even as he remembered not to do anything three times. That bit of information from the Academy stuck with him; it was from the “how to spot a liar” class. “I don’t know. Dark? Wolf colored?”
“See, the thing is, I then saw a wolf at your back gate. A wolf you didn’t seem very worried about at all.”
Shit. He had a brain fart. He forgot for just a moment in his attempt to cover the issues with Jonah, that she had seen the wolf, too.
“The wolf I saw was black. All black. Just like Jonah said.” She picked up another chip and began playing with the salsa more than she seemed to be getting ready to actually eat it. “So I got online—”
Immediately, he interrupted, wondering if his redirection would work at all. “Oh yes, the Internet, source of all things reliable.”
It didn’t.
“I trust the Internet on this. There are no black wolves in this area. So I asked Jonah to draw me what he saw.”
Donovan swore to himself. This was not good.
Eleri continued, “There aren’t any black wolves that look like what I saw—which is identical to what Jonah drew for me. In fact, there aren’t any in all of North America . . . or anywhere.”
17
Eleri slept hard that night. It was their last night in Hamilton, and if she had her way it would be her last night ever in a room with antlers. Despite the fact that her father was a hunter and despite the fact that she ate meat herself and had no problem with it, she did not cotton to dead things as decor. Even the furniture looked like trees that had been slaughtered and taxidermied.
Although she was pretty certain the antlers were resin and not real, it was still too much to take and she was shocked she slept so hard with the remains of the dead around her.
While she slept hard, she did not sleep well.
In the beginning she was back in the hospital. The nurses handed her medication after medication and told her she was “healed.” In the dream she wondered if she had actually healed at all or if the cuts had simply scarred over—there was a difference, she knew.
Eleri made mistakes in her last assignment. She dug too deep, letting the profile get its claws into her. During that chase, she hadn’t slept for fear of missing something—a clue, a sign, a thread to pull. When she was being honest with herself, she admitted that she didn’t sleep for f
ear of what she might see.
In her dreams she saw the man they chased. She saw him with the women he stole. And she was helpless to stop. She could describe his job, his lifestyle, that he lived with his mother—how typical—but no one believed. There was no stake in dreams.
So it didn’t matter that she learned how he got them into his car. That he was small, unassuming, but trained. The bruises on their necks were not marks of strangulation but of systematic and repetitive pressure designed to make them pass out, to make them malleable. He needed only the strength to lift them, to move them, not to fight them. Some of these women should have been able to take him.
Then there was one missing woman who confirmed all of Eleri’s suspicions.
Eleri’s profile assessment was so dead-on that she was brought in for questioning herself.
It wasn’t unheard of for legal agents, officers, lawmen to go rogue. When they did, they knew just how to do it.
Eleri should have remained calm. She should never have put the details in her report in the first place. But she wanted this guy, wanted him bad. While hard, angry agents spent three days interrogating her, he had abducted another woman. Just like she said.
She screamed, she railed, she did everything wrong.
So now she slept below the fake antlers and dreamed of her months in the hospital. She got the guy. She was absolved in the end. But at how high a price?
Agent Westerfield brought her and Heath in on this. He put her in charge—something she’d never expected to be. Westerfield knew her history, knew what she’d done, but called her back into the field anyway. Now here she was again: the more they worked the more she saw the beaten kids, the more she thought of the dead Ruth and the bones from the girl on the side of the road.
Then the dream changed again.
The familiar field formed around her, block by block, surreal in the setting, dusk dropping even as the pieces of landscape clicked into place. The wind accosted her and Eleri turned as though she could ascertain its source, and when she came full circle Emmaline stood in the distance.
At Lakewood, Eleri had told her doctors about Emmaline, the dreams, all of it.
Another mistake.
She tried not to think of that now. Avoided the memories of holding Jane Doe’s bones and first determining that it wasn’t her sister. Only when Eleri had been positive of that fact, could she begin her assessment. She pushed all those thoughts aside as her sister walked toward her in the dreamscape.
Emmaline wore the same white linen dress as last time, only she wasn’t alone. Eleri knew she couldn’t move. So she waited, watching her sister and peering at the dogs that walked calmly alongside.
The wind came again, whipping Eleri’s hair in front of her face, making it a constant struggle to see. But time passed easily and before she knew it, her sister stood in front of her. It became clear the dogs at her side were dreams though Emmaline herself was real. Despite the solidity of her sister, Eleri found herself frowning.
Not dogs. Wolves.
One of them black as ink. Black fur, all over, black eyes. While she stared, both wolves sat, drawing her attention to the other one. This one was brown all over. Slightly smaller than the black one, its eyes were hazel. Eleri’s head snapped back when she saw this. It was all too odd; something was off with their faces. When she gave up trying to place it—what did she know about wolves anyway?—she looked at her sister again.
Emmaline simply reached out and took Eleri’s hand between both of her own. Eleri stared. She drank in as much as she could of Emmaline’s face. It was so infrequent that she got to see her sister. She stood still, letting her hand be held until she woke up.
Light bled in around the corners of the heavy curtains. Horses walked myriad ways on the thick print as though they, too, were trying to escape the room, Eleri thought. The alarm clock told her she’d woken just five minutes before the beeping noise would start and she’d best get up. She had to pack, had to leave this place, get away from the antlers and the praying cowboy and the horses trapped on the curtains.
With the efficiency borne of too much practice, she put her bag together. Rolling certain pants for space, folding tops, tucking shoes into corners of her suitcase. She dressed and packed in sync, the second dream of Emmaline within a week disturbing her more than she wished to admit.
The two wolves with her sister weren’t that hard to figure out. At least part of it could be easily sorted: Donovan had neatly evaded all her questions. And she had—eventually—let him. Clearly, he did not wish to tell her what was up with that damned black wolf. Just as clearly, something was up with it.
The previous night, before she packed up her computer, she nearly fell asleep on the keyboard, she’d been so busy looking up black wolves. Had she been limited to only her own memory she might have dismissed it, but she also had Jonah’s sketch. In the sketch the wolf was positively glossy, black from tail to tip, but it was the face that got her. Though all-black wolves did exist—a mutation normal to the breed, like redheads—none of them looked like the wolf she saw in South Carolina. Which was somehow exactly like the wolf Jonah saw in Texas.
The wolf she saw didn’t really look like any wolf on any continent.
The coloring could match to some wolves. The eyes could match to some. Jonah had drawn the mouth open and the teeth were wrong—not as pointy in the front as the images on the Web. These were flatter, more Mongoloid. Shovel-shaped. Like she’d learned in forensics. The brow was higher, the face not as long.
When she looked at the drawing, when she searched her memory, she immediately thought wolf. But as she looked online, she realized that every piece of it was off in some way. Eventually, she gave up and crawled into bed, but the dreams had chased her.
She didn’t call Donovan to see if he was up, just expected that he would be. She wasn’t mad, exactly. There were things she would evade, too. Still this one was biting at her. Eleri sighed to herself, knowing if the situations were reversed she would want him to back off; she let it go. For now.
She found him standing in the hall, bags packed, waiting on her.
They didn’t speak as they walked down the hallway, looking like the Feds they were. They each had a rolling bag, hers in red, stacked with another bag. They each had a shoulder bag for electronics—again, hers in red. Their not speaking wasn’t out of anger. The air didn’t hold that vibe, it was simply too early in the morning. It was simply that they had once again packed everything into small suitcases and rolled out of one place only to know they would roll into another later.
Eleri wanted to go to Brady, but there were already enough small towns around here getting familiar with the Feds coming by and staying for a few days. As Cassa Brinks said, the locals were all related and they all talked—all except the City of God people.
Donovan stood back as Eleri handed in their room keys. She was slipping the paperwork into the folder she kept in the front pocket of her suitcase when she saw Donovan tipping his head toward the breakfast buffet.
“Buffet” was a very loose interpretation here. Warming dishes appeared to hold two meats in one dish and the other had thin, stacked servings of eggs. Eleri shook her head; she couldn’t handle perfect pancakes of eggs that folded into quarters.
They were on their way to Dallas. There was an FBI building there—so they wouldn’t stick out so badly and so they would have access to the things they needed and maybe get some work done. They would check satellite images of the area they found, do heat readings. See if they could match the number of kids to the numbers Jonah and Charity talked about. Check some forensic evidence from both kids.
The Fisks were being flown in today. Not shockingly at all, Charity’s fingerprints had been a perfect match. Agent Bozeman reported that as soon as he informed the two escapees of this, they started singing like canaries. Telling more about how Charity had been “acquired.” Unfortunately, it appeared there had been drugs involved—not willingly on Charity/Ashlyn’s part—but i
t changed the dynamic. It meant the Fisks could not be completely reunited with their daughter until they had been re-questioned, now that there was more information about how the kidnapping happened. Eleri, desperate to be in the room for that, hoped there would be clues to find Jennifer Cohn.
Her chest tightened at the thought and she could almost see the words in her FBI file—“no children.” So why was she put on this case? She was starting to get attached to the idea of finding Jennifer.
It meant she had six hours to beat Charity’s parents to Dallas. They had a three-and-a-half hour drive and she wanted a real breakfast. Thinking they’d find something on the way, they watched the town of Hamilton rapidly fade at the edges, leaving them on small, back woods highways with no food in sight. They suffered the occasional random traffic light or even stop sign as they crossed another road and Eleri became willing to downgrade her expectations and eat somewhere that had “and bait” at the end of the name.
About an hour later, her stomach growled loudly as they spotted a large truck stop named only “Larry and Sue’s” and Eleri gave up. Some of these dives had great food. It was a crapshoot, she knew, but one she was now willing to take.
The waitress, Amy, was wearing a perfect polyester reproduction of the old Mel’s Diner uniform. Though the place was too crowded to get away from everyone, Eleri accepted a table at the back and took the primary seat, able to look out the large front windows. While trucks parked or fueled up, truckers walked by toward the convenience store behind her. She trusted Donovan to keep an eye out in that direction while they spoke in low tones, taking notes about what questions to ask of the Fisks, maybe Charity and Jonah, too.
Hoping the sheer volume of patrons was an indicator of quality and not desperation, Eleri ordered a large breakfast. She was able to pick from three kinds of fried potatoes, but the only fruit or vegetable she could find was a frozen blueberry in the pancake mix. She went for it. Donovan, of course, outdid her.
While they waited for drinks, she tried not to look at Donovan oddly. His evasion of the questions she had already asked, as well as the stockpile of questions she hadn’t yet gotten too, didn’t add up. Though she struggled with it, she aimed a different direction. “So we got word last night about Jonah’s fingerprints.”
The NightShade Forensic Files: Under Dark Skies (Book 1) Page 14