Openly, Donovan stood down. Taking his eyes off the other predator in the room, he turned to Eleri. “He’s like me. I smelled him from down the hall.”
That the man was ex-NightShade made the new unit seem shady, for lack of a better term.
The conversation turned to a three-way as Wade finally looked to Eleri. “You know about him? You know what he is? What he can do?”
“I just figured it out. But yes, I think so.” She was still looking at her old friend with new eyes. Wary eyes. “And you’re the same . . .”
The words trailed off, as though she was concerned, invested, not ready to face the possibility.
Resigned, Wade nodded. There was something in the way the two looked at each other, something about shared history. The words were out of Donovan’s mouth before he thought about it. “Are you sure he’s not an ex?”
ELERI FELT the tension snap and break. Her head flew back and she saw and heard Wade guffaw about the same time peals of laughter emerged from her own throat.
Poor Donovan was looking back and forth between the two of them, confused as hell, probably convinced they’d lost it. To his credit, it had been one hell of a confusing day, but she couldn’t get herself together to tell him.
Wade managed. He’d probably dealt with this plenty. “I’m gay.” The words came out in between laughs that threatened to choke him. But he pulled himself together before she did.
Donovan still looked confused. “So it’s just Eleri, then? This is just what she does? Makes you tell her all your shit?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“I’m standing right here.” She’d had to hold her breath to get the words out. She thought being indignant would help, but it didn’t make a difference. They kept talking about her.
“So how come she didn’t figure out what you are?”
Wade countered with, “How did you screw up so badly that she figured you out? You’ve known her, what, all of three weeks?”
“You know that?” Donovan was now completely ignoring her and having a great conversation with his new wolf buddy. Great.
Inserting herself into the conversation, because she sure wasn’t going to get asked to join, she said, “Yes, he knows. We’re friends. We stay in touch. He knew when I got pulled back into the Bureau.”
Donovan nodded at her response, but spoke to Wade. “I went on a run. I did some recon and I took a GPS. She tracked me at thirty-two.”
He had the decency to look sheepish about it, but it didn’t stop her from adding, “Also, this kid saw him, and the kid’s an artist—an extraordinary artist—so when I saw him, I had a print to use to look up the wolf and cross-reference the species to the area. Turns out, there is no species like him.”
Wade started nodding as though all the pieces made sense. “Actually, there is.”
“What?” She felt out of the loop and running slow on everything since she woke up this morning.
In response, Wade only pointed at himself before again turning to speak to Donovan. “You didn’t stand a chance against her. I knew she was keenly observant before I even met her, and I was never her partner, never had to change near her.” He grinned. “You got screwed by the artist, but honestly, it was a just matter of time before she figured you out.”
Fine, if they were playing two-in-one-out, she could do that, too. Turning to her partner, she relayed the earlier surprise Wade had delivered. “He knows about Westerfield and NightShade. He probably understands far more about it than we do.”
Wade stuck his hands in his pockets, his universal gesture of waiting the situation out. She, on the other hand, was waiting for him to offer up some grand observation about the speed of the sound of her voice, the way the sun’s rays reflected, something that would change the way she saw the world. Something that would make all the pieces gel.
Instead, he suggested lunch.
Despite Donovan’s smirk, Eleri suggested Chinese and Wade drove them to his favorite hole-in-the-wall nearby.
After they ordered and rubbed their chopsticks together and were served their soup, Wade started talking. Since they were seated near the back, most of the conversation around them was in Mandarin. Eleri didn’t speak the language but she could identify it, so she felt relatively safe there.
“NightShade exists because there are certain jobs that fall outside the jurisdiction of the FBI. In the simplest terms, you operate more like the CIA, but since the CIA technically can’t function inside the borders of the US, we have NightShade.”
He paused when plates arrived and the waitress hugged him, as he was clearly a regular. Eleri wasn’t surprised one iota.
“The badge gives you access and respectability. It also keeps people from knowing what you’re really doing.”
Using the large spoon to make friends with the moo goo gai pan steaming in front of her, Eleri leaned forward. “But what about the other agents we work with?” She looked to Donovan who shrugged; he didn’t know any more than she did. “Agent Bozeman? He’s not NightShade . . . I don’t think. I’m pretty sure he’s just a field agent in the Dallas branch.”
“Probably.” Wade was making short work of both the food and the conversation. “You’re under the umbrella of the Agency. No one questions the FBI coming in and taking jurisdiction. You have the full support of other agents who believe you’re standard Bureau, too, doing the same thing they’re doing.”
The chopsticks stopped partway to her mouth. “Like my fellow agents and I thought when we worked with you.”
The nod was likely the only concession she was going to get to that deception.
After that, the conversation stuttered and stopped for a while. The only sounds were those of straws in plastic cups, the faint fizz of fresh sodas that did not constitute the traditional Chinese fare the restaurant boasted. The food itself was incredible—Wade could always find the best places—and suddenly she was starving.
Every once in a while, she would find Wade watching her, as though he were looking for something he couldn’t find. But when she made eye contact, he would quickly offer a half-grin and turn away. It didn’t hide what he was doing, but Eleri had enough for one day and didn’t want to deal with anything else. So she didn’t ask.
In turn, Donovan watched Wade carefully, though she couldn’t tell if he was studying Wade because of what he’d discovered or if he was still thinking he had to protect her from her good friend. For her part, Eleri was trying not to process that she sat at a table eating excellent food in a strange city with two men who were probably the closest thing on earth to werewolves. Nope. Did not want to even attempt to wrap her brain around it. So eventually she spoke up, turning the conversation easily to mundane things as everyone seemed to agree these were the topics that were safer to talk about.
How did Wade like San Antonio? She asked.
Donovan followed up with, “Where do you run?”
Great. Werewolf conversation. She tried again. “Do you have a new boyfriend?”
“I was seeing one guy, but it turned out to be nothing special.”
“Is it hard finding a boyfriend?” Donovan brought the conversation around again.
Wade only laughed at him. “You date a lot?”
“No.” It was spoken with a wry grin. “The dating pool is pretty slim, and you can’t get too close to someone or they start figuring things out.” With his thumb he gestured at Eleri whose mouth fell open at the implication. But she was soundly ignored.
“Exactly. Now reduce your dating pool by ninety percent.”
“Damn.”
Leaning her face forward into her hands, Eleri started muttering “I hate you both. So much. So very much.”
When Donovan laughed at her, she glared back and at least he apologized. “Sorry, I never met anyone like me, not that I wasn’t related to.”
Done with her food, stuffed really, she pushed the plate away and decided if she couldn’t escape it, she should dive in head first. “Why do I feel there’s something
more to NightShade? There is, isn’t there? Even beyond the directive.”
Wade sighed first, then answered, but not the way she expected.
“You saw Westerfield this morning, right?”
When she nodded, he continued. “After lunch, go back and catch him before he leaves town.” He looked to Donovan, too, this time. “He can tell you a hell of a lot more than I can. But make sure you see him face to face, no phone. And when you do, ask him about the quarter.”
28
Donovan was frustrated. Three days with no real leads. Westerfield had flown out of San Antonio before they even finished their lunch with Wade. Hearing that news, the physicist told them to wait to ask their question until they could meet with their lead agent in person. Thus they were stuck waiting on that count.
There had been no new breaks in the case and Donovan itched under his skin with the need for a run.
When he lived by himself, going into the ME’s office on a semi-regular schedule, getting called during off-hours to work the occasional crime scene, he hadn’t experienced the overwhelming urge to put distance under his feet, not with this kind of drive. Maybe it was that he was living in odd boxes—one hotel room after another. Maybe it was akin to the psychological urge for something unavailable. At his own home he could always take off on a whim, but this life was confining for a creature like him.
His world had been thrown out of whack on so many levels, and he could see that Eleri’s had been, too. So it wasn’t surprising that each of them had retreated to their own corners, trying to put new information into an old schema of the world. His didn’t fit. Eleri’s clearly didn’t either if the darkening circles under her eyes were any indicator.
Her humor had fled, replaced by soft monosyllables and deep silences. He didn’t think she was sad, just disturbed. Jumbled. Concerned.
Who could blame her? In case it wasn’t enough that her partner had turned out to be what he was, her best friend had been hiding the same secrets directly under her nose—and far more successfully—for years. She’d been asked to kill a suspect. Told that her government was no longer her boss, and lastly that she didn’t actually hold the job she trained for.
Donovan on the other hand was struggling with the fact that someone else was out there like him. He believed for so long that it was a defect unique to his family. He’d been told it went back many generations but had no evidence of that.
Had he finally stumbled across someone else like him because he was getting out and about and meeting many new people all at once? He’d been such a recluse that, had another creature like him passed nearby, it would have had to get in sniffing distance for him to know. There was a possibility it was just a numbers game.
But when he learned that Wade de Gottardi had also been actively recruited into the NightShade division, Donovan began to get suspicious that there was a lot less random chance in this meeting. Maybe NightShade needed a wolf in its ranks and he was simply the current candidate.
He wrestled with his Hippocratic oath. He was to do no harm, but he wasn’t a physician anymore, not really. Honestly, he’d been a speaker for the dead more than a healer. The only thing he’d healed had been court cases. If taking Baxter out made people safer then it was a hard decision to argue with.
Though the FBI didn’t advertise it, there were numerous cases when the Bureau knew who their man was long before they could do anything about it. Perhaps NightShade was the righting of that inability. But at what cost?
Donovan believed in innocent until proven guilty, but he’d never been behind the entire idea of standards of evidence collection. He knew something of it before his Academy training, given his background, but the FBI had drilled the methods into him. The agents at the training cited more than one case to the students where an agent had to make the decision to save a victim—sometimes a child—from a monster or leave them there until the appropriate warrants could be obtained. Usually they rescued the victim, but the evidence found in the rescue was often declared “fruit of the poison tree” and completely inadmissible in court because of the way it was obtained.
That evidence was no less valid in Donovan’s mind. A killer or child molester would go back on the streets, when there was solid and known proof against them, but the court rules couldn’t allow it. The next victim would have to be taken, have to be hurt, before proper evidence could be obtained. A perpetrator would have time to disappear, change methods. Maybe NightShade was the better way.
Donovan couldn’t say for certain. The only thing he did know was that he wasn’t going to solve his moral dilemma any time soon.
In three days, he’d eaten two meals with his partner. During breaks, he stared at the walls, then did it again when he was supposed to be sleeping and couldn’t. Donovan watched stupid television, in real time. He’d gotten so jaded with his recorder at home that here he picked up the remote when the commercials came on and was surprised again each time that the they didn’t simply bleep away.
He and Eleri had meetings that amounted to nothing. They couldn’t find any other evidence. Then yesterday, Eleri reported that Westerfield called her, wanting to know what progress they had made and she was forced to say “nearly none.” After that announcement, they both stared morosely at the wall in one of the conference rooms at the San Antonio branch for a while more.
His restlessness was hitting epic proportions, so he finally gave up and knocked on the door that joined the two junior suites without even knowing if Eleri was on the other side. It was time for action.
When the knocking yielded nothing, he knocked again, then a third time simply because he had nothing better to do. So he was shocked when he finally heard footsteps and Eleri pulled open the door, frowning up at him.
She had a soda dripping in her hand. “I just went down to the vending machine. Were you knocking long?”
“No.” He lied. “I have an idea.”
She waved him into the room and sat back into one of the two chairs that went with the desk pushed up against the wall. As she gestured him into the other, he noticed the yoga pants and tank top. She must have been thinking about working out, or maybe just not working at all. “Tell me.”
“We need Baxter’s finger prints and we need to see his fist. I say I go in.”
Until he said it out loud, Donovan hadn’t realized just how invested he was.
“How will you do it? Just walk in? Announce you want to join? You’ll never just walk out . . .”
The way her voice trailed off told him she’d figured out what he intended.
“We need a smaller GPS, attached normally to a collar. I need to look like an escaped pet.” He couldn’t believe he was saying that. To him, the wolf was a sacred being—protected, hidden from humans, seen only if necessary. He was risking himself. But he thought of the two dead girls, of Ruth, whose body was yet to be found. He thought of Jonah and Charity, and his new thirst for Baxter made him believe that he could expose the wolf but still keep the secret.
A sharp click and fizz preceded Eleri sipping at the soda, clearly thinking about what he proposed, and she started asking the relevant questions. “What are you trying to collect?”
“Fingerprints and enough DNA to match him as Jonah’s biological father if we can. Though I wouldn’t think that would be top priority.” His fingers twined and untwined unconsciously.
She nodded. “I’d like the DNA too, but not at huge risk. And once we get Baxter we can get it another way. All we need that to do is show the elder Baxters they have a grandchild and keep Jonah out of the foster system.” Her gaze shot off again in a new direction. “We should also get confirmation on the fist. If you could see it clearly, that would help.”
If only Baxter would oblige and make a fist without hitting him.
“So, how do you get his fingerprint? It’s not like you can pick up a glass he touched, drop it in a bag, and walk away.”
It was his worst idea ever, but he was willing because he knew what was on the o
ther end. “Dog tag. I’m thinking he finds a dog wandering around, checks the tag. We get his fingerprint. Maybe I can inadvertently scratch him a little, get some DNA to bring back.”
She was shaking her head before he finished. “It’s great, but there are so many ways it can go wrong. Right off the bat, if I were looking at a dog’s tag, I wouldn’t touch the flat surface, I’d want to read that part. Plus, you’re hardly a dog. You’re a wolf. I did not for one second think that a dog had wandered into your backyard.”
Impressed with how well she had accepted what he was, and even developed an ease of talking about it, Donovan pressed his case. “As for the wolf, well people keep wild animals as pets all the time. I’m sure I can get close and make contact just by acting friendly.”
“Have you ever done it before?”
“No.” He hated to admit it.
Her cheeky grin told him he wasn’t going to like what she had to say. “Wanna do a dry run? We can get a collar and a leash and I can take you for a walk. Let people pet you?”
He thought he might retch. That was so far from the sacred right of the wolf. There was no way . . . . “I’ll make it work. The collar will identify me as belonging to someone, I’ll be friendly. The tag just needs something to make him give us enough of a print for an ID. We have a full set from his juvenile record.”
Her laugh was self-deprecating. “Yeah, it needs a ‘press here’ sign!” Raising her soda can in a toast, she grinned at him.
He was with her. It had too many loopholes, too many places to go wrong. “They make tags that light up with a button. Maybe we can get one of those.”
She was actively frowning at him now, and it wasn’t because of the suggestion, he was pretty certain it was a helpful one. Sure enough, her next words cleared things up.
“You sure know an awful lot about dog tags. You’re really sketchy about the idea of even wearing a collar—” she held her hand up to stop his interruption— “I can see it when you even mention it, your shoulders get tense. But you know a lot about them.”
The NightShade Forensic Files: Under Dark Skies (Book 1) Page 22