The NightShade Forensic Files: Under Dark Skies (Book 1)

by A. J. Scudiere

  “Did he match?” Donovan’s head snapped up and he stared right at her. Something about his eyes bothered her, but she pushed past that thought, too.

  “No. They’ve exhausted every database they can think of. As a male, his numbers are lower to check against, and while there are too many missing kids who aren’t uploaded due to backlog or whatever, he should be in the system. Given everything we know, he couldn’t have been taken that long ago. So AFIS is calling it as a ‘no match’.”

  Donovan nodded sagely, already refilling his coffee from the thermal pitcher left in the middle of their table. It was some of the best coffee Eleri had been served in a long time, but the mugs were small enough that Donovan looked to be serving himself shot after shot rather than getting to actually drink any of it.

  She went back into her conclusions. “So I started thinking. Jonah said some of the women got pregnant, babies appeared. We believe that not all of the kids at City of God were stolen. So I thought about the players we know and who might have been there fourteen years ago. Then I tried to looking through the pictures he gave us.” Pulling out a straight-on photograph of Jonah, she laid it on the table. Then she put Jonah’s own drawing of Baxter next to it. Next to that, she laid out the picture Mark and Lilly Baxter had given them, taken when Joseph was sixteen.

  “Holy shit!” Donovan blurted it, then stilled, his eyes comically darting one way then another.

  Eleri was more subtle in her perusal of the area but she didn’t see anyone reacting to his swearing. “Exactly.”

  Already shaking his head, her partner returned to his normal self and started fixing another tiny mug of coffee. “But there’s no way we’ll get Baxter’s blood to check for paternity.”

  His eyes opened with comprehension even as Eleri spoke. “But Mark and Lilly Baxter will gladly test to see if he’s their grandchild.”

  “And Jonah wouldn’t go into foster care.”

  “If he’s a match.”

  Donovan was smiling widely at the new development. “I would say that’s a very small ‘if’. Those pictures are quite compelling.”

  She agreed, but Eleri couldn’t stop staring at his teeth. A uniform shade of white with a hint of blue, they were perfect rectangles in the front. A bit shovel-shaped, indicating he had some kind of Asian background. From the color of his hair and eyes, she was thinking India, but the forensic recognition of the teeth grabbed her.

  Not too big in the front, his bottom teeth were smaller. All were nearly perfectly spaced and she noticed for the first time tiny gaps between each. More disturbing, his canines were long, both top and bottom.

  She could see with perfect clarity, the teeth on the wolf of her dreams last night because they were smiling at her right now. Well, they had been smiling at her, but now he was frowning and the wolf-teeth had been covered by his pinched mouth. “Eleri?”

  She couldn’t answer him. Her brain was working too fast to produce actual vocalizations in English words. The teeth. The eyes. They were the same. The hair color, also the same—and she looked now up and down his arms, seeing that he was a little more hairy than the average guy, but clearly not enough that she had even noticed it before. The hair on his arms was, in fact, as black as the hair on his head.

  Still frowning at her, he leaned back a bit, breaking eye contact and stopping her perusal. Clearly, he was uncomfortable, but she still couldn’t explain.

  Staring out the wide front windows at nothing, she kept adding pieces. He ran in the nude. She met the wolf at his back gate just moments before Donovan appeared—naked. He refused to take the cell phone when she tracked him, and the night he found Jonah she’d sworn she saw him shove a dog collar in his pocket. The blood and dirt that night had been under his clothes—consistent with running in the nude and getting dressed after.

  And he’d run thirty-two miles an hour.

  She’d double-checked both the system and the GPS and they had no errors at any other time. She hand calculated the distance and divided by time. She got thirty-two miles per hour, too.

  But it couldn’t be.

  If she thought that, then she was buying into an old myth.

  Maybe she was more ready to buy in than even she thought. Eleri knew monsters were real. And myths often had origins in truth. Could Donovan really be what she was thinking?

  The truck she was staring at blindly pulled out, leaving her gazing into open space. As she blinked, trying to put the jumble in her head together in a way that didn’t leave her where it was leaving her, Eleri ignored Donovan repeating her name.

  As she watched, a new truck pulled into the space.

  A truck with an orange cab and blue flames painted across the front.

  18

  Donovan saw that Eleri was looking at him oddly, and he suddenly realized that in two and a half weeks with her he managed to reveal a secret he had successfully kept his entire life. He would have to tell her something. Maybe not the whole thing, but she wasn’t one to let it go. He already knew that.

  Her eyes bored into him, even though she wasn’t looking at him so much as looking through him. She might as well be speaking, her thoughts were so clear. She recognized his teeth, she was looking at his eyes, she’d already alluded to the fact that she and Jonah had seen the same wolf—the wolf that didn’t exist in nature, or at least in recorded nature.

  Donovan knew all these things. No one had studied him more than he had.

  His father had been content with just being, embracing himself and his son as magical beings. But there was no magic to it, and Donovan had always been a child of science. Absently his finger went to the scar on his right leg. He believed in the science, even if it didn’t always believe in him.

  He swallowed, getting ready to say—to confess—something, when Eleri’s whole body snapped rigid.

  Suddenly very worried for her, he followed her line of sight. Turning around, he saw nothing. Just trucks coming and going. Fueling up. Parking. Leaving. Exactly the same as it was when the two of them came in. However, Eleri’s shift made it clear something had changed.

  He leaned toward her, though even that didn’t pull her attention from the plate windows in the front of the store. “Eleri, what is it?”

  “The truck. The driver.” Her eyes never wavered.

  “Which one?” He was nearly whispering, probably because she was.

  “Orange truck, blue flames. Round driver, white hair, saggy jowls.” Her words were clipped as though recalling them, rather than describing what was in front of her, but Donovan easily spotted the man she spoke of.

  “Why him?”

  “We need to question him.” She still didn’t peel her eyes away. The trucker was going to run off if he caught Eleri staring; she was positively trance-like, so Donovan touched her hand hoping to break her out of it.

  It worked. Maybe a little too well.

  Eleri jumped sky high. Something about the movement made it look as though her soul had been dropped back into her body with a jarring motion. Donovan ignored all of it. “Don’t stare at him. If we need to question him, we will, but staring won’t help us.”

  She knew that and she nodded, but still wasn’t entirely her normal self. Scrambling for a pen and a napkin, she jotted down what he realized was the license plate number from the truck. “Keep your eyes on him.” She hissed and got up to go to the ladies room, pen and napkin still firmly in hand.

  About as subtle as the Mac truck she was stalking, she made a wide berth by the front window before disappearing down the hallway. Donovan had to stop watching for a moment when their server came back, her arms laden with enough plates to indicate that about five people were having breakfast.

  He only smiled and said thank you, then swung his eyes around again, immediately catching the man at the counter and almost as quickly spotting Eleri coming back out of the ladies’ room. She barely spent enough time in there to wash her hands, let alone anything else. He just hoped no one but him noticed.

  Actu
ally, she was pretty furtive. He figured it was only because he knew exactly what she was doing—was trained to do the same thing—that he saw it. He was relatively convinced that she memorized the truck’s registration from the print on the door as she went by and probably spent her time in the ladies’ room writing it down. She would re-check on her way back.

  Sure enough, her eyes darted to her right, scanning the truck and Donovan almost smiled. The older man didn’t seem fazed at all, and as Donovan watched he was led to a long table and given a seat with other truckers coming and going solo.

  Good, he would be here for a while.

  When Eleri made it back to the table, she was still tense but hiding it much better. He grabbed her wrist, nearly pulling her into the booth as he spoke. “Why do we need to interview him? Am I missing something?”

  She still didn’t answer. Not for a moment. “Let me just say that I think he’s a key witness and we need to ask him a few questions.” She wasn’t looking Donovan in the eye, instead surreptitiously scanning the area, keeping watch on the truck driver.

  Why that one? Donovan couldn’t distinguish anything about this guy that set him apart. Eleri had snapped when the man got out of the truck, or maybe when he pulled in. Donovan didn’t know; his back was to the front window.

  No longer paying attention to their food, the two of them ate, alternately keeping an eye on the older gentleman. His food arrived, the waitress winking at him and pouring his coffee—as she did with many of the men and the few women at the long table. So far, there was nothing special about him except Eleri’s reaction.

  For a moment, Donovan stopped and savored the food. As horrible as it was health-wise, taste-wise it was disturbingly good. Several times he found himself too busy enjoying the meal and not keeping his eye on the man at the long table. Eleri was suffering from a decided lack of vegetation, but Donovan’s system had always been fine on large quantities of meat and starches. He wondered more than once if that was because of his alternate physiology. But there was no way he was doing a GI biopsy on himself. The scar on his leg was as far as he was willing to take it, and he was willing to admit that might have been too far.

  They finished their meals—hers picked over, his cleaned down to the white Corian—and waited. As the man started to stand, so did Eleri, but Donovan held her back and watched. As he expected, the white-haired man made his lopsided way to the men’s room hallway and Donovan nodded to Eleri.

  They paid their check at the front counter and headed out. First, Donovan moved their car to block the truck then Eleri posted herself near the cab door.

  When he came out, he saw them and ambled forward, his eyes focusing more as Eleri came into view. Donovan hoped maybe she didn’t look as much like a Fed as he previously thought. The resulting frown on the man’s face, the way he turned to Donovan as his shoulders sagged, told a different story.

  She hadn’t even flashed her badge.

  ELERI WATCHED as the snowy-haired man changed in front of her. He went from proud, if old, to saddened in a single blink. He nodded as though accepting his fate, then went so far as to ask if she had a car.

  “Yes, my partner is parked behind your truck.” She had to make this more formal. “My name is Agent Eleri Eames with the FBI. My partner there—” she motioned toward the car, “is Agent Donovan Heath. We’re hoping you can help us out.”

  The old man looked at her suspiciously from the sides of his eyes, as though he didn’t trust her suddenly. But he got into the back seat when she offered him the door and before jogging around and climbing in behind Donovan, allowing him to chauffeur.

  Suddenly, she was at a loss. The old man was agreeable to helping them, but they were in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t even know what to ask him really. How would she say “Did you give a ride to this woman? And did you know she’s dead?”

  Then again, maybe that was exactly how she had to do it.

  Watching the man for weapons or sudden moves—though she suspected the latter would be hard for him—Eleri checked her phone and then leaned forward, asking Donovan to take them to the Brownwood Police Station as their planned route to Dallas had them heading right through the small town where they’d started. The station would let them use a conference room.

  The silence in the car suggested the old man was resigned to his fate. Whether this was because he knew something of value or because he simply hated authorities, she couldn’t tell. The quiet pushed at them, the only sound the road under the wheels, then the gathering traffic—if it could be called that—as they passed the city limits of Brownwood.

  Though they had stayed here several days, they had only been in the PD once to introduce themselves. Instead of achieving their feeble attempt at making nice, they had announced their presence and probably sparked a good handful of rumors, hurting their job here more than they helped. Too late to re-think that one now. Eleri wished they had met Cassa Brinks first.

  When Donovan pulled the car up to the bright brick building, no one recognized them, and they had to go through the ritual of flashing their badges again and explaining that they simply wanted a conference room to speak to the gentleman with them. The trucker stiffened at the offer of an interrogation room but was obviously relieved when Eleri declined. His name was Bernard Collier, but beyond that, Eleri had shut him down, preferring to wait until the recording device was on.

  Her heart jittered. What if she was wrong?

  The orange cab with the blue flames had simply been part of a dream. Then there it was at the truck stop. And this was the man she saw in the dream helping Ruth into the cab. So on some level something was correct, but what? It was too big a question to dive right into. It was too big a coincidence to leave alone.

  Several raised eyebrows and phone calls later, they were seated at a nicely appointed conference table and even offered beverages. She suppressed a sigh at the trappings of hospitality that prolonged their start time.

  At her glance, her clear desire to get started, Collier began to look even more concerned than he had before. Eleri had no idea what to make of him. So she went through the motions, asking his permission to record the meeting. He granted it.

  She set up the recorder, noting all the details ad nauseam before asking him to state his name and occupation.

  “Bernard Worley Collier. Independent driver for Diesel One Truck Lines.” He went on to describe his route today, passing Mills and coming through Brownwood on his way to Sweetwater.

  They asked about his usual routes, and he told them he hit El Paso regularly, coming from the east as well as the west. The company gave him several stops there. He operated out of Austin, often running a different route through Dallas or a third option through Amarillo.

  He was nodding as she asked him about Brownwood, Hamilton and Zephyr. How often did he pass there? With each answer, he became more nervous. Sweat began to bead on his forehead, Collier successfully ignoring it until one drop ran down the side of his face.

  Eleri was mid question as he reached up to wipe it away and something about the action broke him.

  Interrupting her, he blurted out, “This is about that dead girl isn’t it? The one I buried in that field?”

  19

  Donovan had not expected to be out sniffing in a field today. He hadn’t expected to smell another death.

  He used to perform autopsies on dead bodies all day long. Sometimes they arrived fresh from the hospital or a home case. Sometimes they were pulled from the side of the road or an alleyway, fished out of a river. He knew death and all its smells. And he could smell the girl under the ground.

  Collier hadn’t done a good job of burying her. It seemed he’d gotten her just deep enough to give the scavengers a challenge. One look at the man’s arthritic hands and it was clear even this shallow depth had been hard for him.

  It indicated some level of care for this girl.

  Another smell hit him, bluebonnets.

  Though they had passed a field on the way, the
re were no bluebonnets here. Donovan smelled them anyway.

  Donovan’s mind raced. Did Collier kill this girl? Was he a serial killer? The middle of nowhere Texas, small towns that people rarely leave but teenagers run from, a trucker with a route past the area: it was the perfect setup, even if Collier didn’t seem like the kind of guy to do that. However, in Donovan’s mind, that would make him the perfect killer. Who would suspect the round, slow-moving Bernard?

  In the interview, when Collier finally spoke, it wasn’t to say what Donovan expected.

  “I saw this woman on the side of the road about three years ago.” He pointed at Jonah’s picture of Ruth. Eleri had added more Jonah originals to her collection as Agent Bozeman kept her up to speed on things. Still, there had been no more clarity on Jennifer Cohn.

  Collier had spoken quietly the whole time. “She said she needed a ride, and so I took her into Hamilton, I think. That was it. I dropped her off. She said her name was Ruth and that she would find a ride home.” His chest heaved with the effort of a deep sigh. Then he looked them in the eyes. “I know she made it home, because I found her in about the same place about six months later and gave her a ride toward Dallas that time. After that, I told her my schedule. All in all, I think I drove Ruth about five times. Four times away from where I found her on Farm Road 16, and once she flagged me down outside Zephyr and I took her back.”

  Donovan tried to stay calm despite the revelation. “Where exactly did you drop her off?”

  It might give them insight into what was going on.

  Collier agreed to show them the exact location if they would drive him out there. Donovan had a clear picture in his head of an old newspaper headline reading: FBI Agents Slain by Notorious Serial Killer After Driving Him to Kill Site. But Eleri agreed to it, and he knew the protocol—they would call it in, make sure someone was tracking them, check in regularly. Basically, be harder to kill.