He was right. She had no doubt that the Curie PD would check everything. The police officers in town had passed Marshall Bennett's IQ test, just like everyone else. It didn't make them better human beings, but it probably did make them smarter, better-than-average detectives. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out that a genius cop would be onto them immediately.
Hell, Eleri was surprised they hadn’t been called out already. Or maybe the CPD had already figured it all out and knew they were Bureau agents but were staying out of the way. What came out of her mouth was, “Well crap. Now we have to act normal."
"Okay, let's set a timer. We've got five minutes." She turned back to the body.
Donovan was peeling one glove and reaching for his phone. Then he stopped. "No, we don't even have that. We've already been inside for a while. We have to call the police now.”
"Oh, dammit!" Eleri swore harder, thinking Donovan was right once again. If their entry got cross referenced to the time of the 9-1-1 call, then they would likely get caught. Normal people might not believe that level of accuracy, but more than one criminal had been caught for mismatching times, even by just a few minutes.
“Okay." She peeled her glove, pulled out her own phone, and dialed dispatch.
The voice on the phone answered, "9-1-1. What's your emergency?" And she almost laughed. There were only about four or five dispatchers in Curie, but Marshall Bennett insisted the city run its own station. Apparently, because of whatever the mayor had experienced in life, he did not trust the surrounding counties' resources—not their sheriffs, not their police, and not even their dispatch.
"Hi, um, I'm at Jivika Das's house, and, uh—" Eleri purposefully inserted in the stutters and pitch changes. "She's dead. She's—I think she's dead."
The voice from dispatch calmly talked her through feeling for a pulse and Eleri went with it. She could have just stood there and said yes, there was no pulse, but the safer bet was to follow along. Any smart PD would find discrepancies between Eleri’s prints and every point the dispatcher had told her to touch the body.
Peeling the glove quietly, so hopefully the snap of latex did not appear on the recording from the call center later, she put her fingers aside the neck—incorrectly—and then she moved them. Just an as untrained person would.
She babbled her way through the whole charade, regretting the time lost from checking the scene. "Yes, I don't, I don't feel anything. Can somebody come and help? I mean, she's staring at the ceiling. I think. . . She's pale. She's gray. I think, I think she's dead."
"Ma'am. We'll have someone out right away."
"Okay, okay. Thank you. Thank you," Eleri said, and hung up the phone, even as the woman was asking her to stay on the line. Eleri and Donovan had a very limited window of time now to check out the room and the house before the police got here. They could not afford to stay on the phone or get caught rummaging through Jivika’s home.
"Office!" Eleri announced, and the two of them bolted to the other room, looking first to be sure the curtains were closed and that no one would see them. Though they had done this before, this might be their last chance. This time they also didn’t have Jivika looking over their shoulders. Eleri pulled things out of the drawer and handed them to Donovan to hold, and then punched at the drawer bottom.
She got lucky. Jivika had the same trap bottom to the drawer that Marat Rychenkov did. That made it even more likely that the two were working together. Then …
"Holy fuck! Donovan," Eleri muttered as she pulled out a notebook. "Look." She held it up. It was the exact same kind of composition book they'd found at the Rychenkov-Schmitt home, the kind Marat had used to record his drone research.
Eleri quickly cracked it open and scanned. "Son of a bitch." It was written in the same code as Marat’s notebooks.
Tucking the books under her arm and quickly hustling everything from Donovan’s hands back into the drawer, she issued the edict, "Find more!"
They continued searching the office frantically but were slowed by the need to carefully put everything back in its place. They kept gloves on their hands, making sure that they didn't leave fingerprints in here, so that no one could trace them to this room. They hadn't even touched the doorknob on the way in.
Donovan found one more notebook tucked into the lining in the back of a suitcase that had been shoved into the closet for apparent storage. But then he looked up and said, “Sirens.”
Though she couldn’t hear them yet herself, Eleri looked to Donovan frantically. “Now what?”
He looked back at her. "We have to hide these. We can't take them with us. It's not like I can stick them down the back of my pants."
"Okay. Where do we put them?”
"Kitchen," he offered. "Up high. If they find them, they'll know it's weird. But they probably won’t. Not for a while. Even if they do, at least our fingerprints aren't on them."
Eleri nodded her agreement and they headed down the stairs. Donovan opened a series of cabinets before settling on one. He gently shoved the notebooks into the middle of a stack of old warranties and manuals in the small cabinet above the microwave.
"Good. The sirens are closer, El," he warned her, though Eleri didn't quite hear them until his voice ended. "Back up to the bedroom."
They were running up the stairs as she peeled her own gloves and told him, "Give me yours." She wadded them into a tiny flat pack and stuffed them into the zippered section of her purse, underneath the tampons and other feminine supplies she carried there. Hopefully, anyone who searched her purse would not dig that deeply.
If there was a problem, all she and Donovan would have to do is pull their badges. Her badge currently lay at the bottom of her purse, underneath her wallet. But still, she didn’t want to tip off the cops that she and Donovan were anything other than what their cover appeared, if they could avoid it.
They’d just bolted through the house twice as the front door was coming open. The police hollered out to them, "Hello, police, police."
Eleri looked at Donovan frantically. "Move," she ordered softly, and he seemed to catch on. They'd been running through the house. Had they just been sitting by the body as she had suggested on the call, they wouldn't be breathing heavily at all. Though they’d both practiced lowering their heart rates and breathing at Quantico, it was still better to have an explanation than to need one.
She paced the room and worked up a few tears in her eyes. Donovan stood on the other side, leaned on the bed, putting his fingerprints directly onto the knob of the posts. He leaned over, staring oddly at the body. Eleri thought it was strange, but she didn’t have time to question it.
As the police came in, Donovan suddenly leaned the other way, bending over as though he were going to retch. Eleri almost laughed. Morbid humor was common for people in her profession. She was standing near the body of a woman she'd known, one she was supposed to protect, but she was fighting back the need to laugh at Donovan acting as though he was going to hack up his breakfast.
She hoped the officers saw the press of her lips as distress, and to be fair, more than once she'd come across people standing over a dead body, laughing hysterically. A break from the normal expected emotions was not uncommon. Any trigger in an extreme situation could make expression of emotion go haywire. So she hoped that if she sucked a deep breath and aimed for a tragic expression, the officers would read it as something correct and normal for the scene in front of them.
"Oh, thank God you're here." She rushed toward them and pulled herself up in a harsh stop, almost skidding as she came close to the body. She had to carefully step around, and she pressed her butt against the dresser, even though she had to pick her feet up and over Jivika's hand—the one that lay near the dresser, the one Eleri suspected had been tied with a rope to the foot of the heavy unit.
She almost threw herself into one of the officer’s arms. "Thank God you're here. I'm—I'm going to go in the hall if that's okay.”
The officer she’d nearly assaulted
nodded at her and looked then toward Jivika’s body as another tended to Donovan.
"Sir?" The man put a kind hand on Donovan's back and led him, too, into the hallway before motioning them both downstairs.
Upstairs, several officers examined the room, and Eleri tried to figure out how to explain to Marshall Bennett that they needed to be sure the strange pillow dirt was tested. She hadn't even gotten to drag her finger through the odd stuff. Was it sticky? Dusty?
She endured the officer’s questioning and explained how they had come in through the door, called out Jivika's name and gotten worried when they hadn't heard her respond. She explained that they'd gone to the store to pick up a few things and then by the pharmacy and so on.
Donovan continued his act of wanting to yak up his guts—despite being a doctor, he’d not seen a friend dead before, he said. But that allowed her to lay down an initial storyline, so he could match it later. One of the officers was bringing him a glass of water and telling him to take slow sips. She motioned Donovan onto the ground and told him to put his head between his knees.
It was brilliant on Donovan’s part, Eleri thought. They weren't getting separated, and they were going to get to keep their stories straight.
She continued with her worried re-telling of what hadn’t happened. "But she didn't call out, and I wanted to meet her for lunch. I mean, I called her this morning." That would match with the voicemail when they checked Jivika's phone, and she was grateful that she hadn't said anything else. "So when she didn't reply, I just, you know, we were here already, and I got worried."
She pointed as though to the pharmacy four blocks away and maintained her cover, but every moment she spent with the police, every moment she waited while they interviewed Donovan, only ratcheted her nerves up.
She had to get to Marshall Bennett.
49
Eleri was on the phone with Marshall Bennett within minutes of them arriving home. It had taken an hour and a half for the police to look through the house, decide that Eleri and Donovan were not at fault, interview them, and eventually let them leave.
Of course, Eleri had ultimately been interviewed twice by two different officers, as had Donovan. It made sense, but the whole thing with the one officer being nice to “sick” Donovan the first time had allowed them to coordinate their stories quite cleanly.
Of course, the cops should have separated her and Donovan right away. Then again, it was pretty clear from the way the two of them were treated, despite being found in the home standing over the dead body, that they were not considered suspects.
The officers would know right away that this was either by the same killer or someone trying to create a copycat scenario. However, these killings would be hard to copycat without knowing exactly what the killer had done.
Eleri was frustrated as hell. Hell, even she couldn't copycat this murder because she still had no idea what the killer had actually done to kill them.
The drugs found in their systems would not have killed them. Even if the buttery smelling toxin were an alternate form of GHB, as they suspected, it would have left some kind of chemical evidence if it had caused the heart to stop. It couldn’t have caused oxygen deprivation, which appeared to be the actual cause of death. There were no fibers or bruising in or around the mouth, which should have happened if the murderer had put a pillow or bag over his victims’ faces. Hell, their hair wasn’t even messed up—and even if a victim didn’t struggle, a smothering almost always messed up the hair.
Eleri felt like she was trying to figure out which glass of wine she could clearly not choose—a la The Princess Bride. And she was aggravated as hell. She’d splayed out on the couch and looking at the ceiling as though it might have answers. It didn’t.
When Marshall Bennett answered the phone, she tried to use her polite voice. "Mr. Bennett, we need your help. We need it quickly."
"I hear there's been another murder," he said, by way of opening the conversation.
Of course, Eleri's way of opening it had been no better. "Yes, sir. We just stumbled across the body of Jivika Das."
There was a pause, and Eleri understood he needed to process. He was likely trying to frame some acceptable way of asking how they had let this happen. Jumping into the space calmly, she tried to act as though this were a normal conversation when they were discussing a third dead citizen.
"We told her to leave town last night. We offered her an FBI safe house, but shy of arresting her, there wasn’t much we could do. If we’d forced her to go, it would have not only blown everyone's cover but it would have been against her very clearly stated wishes.”
"She didn't want to leave?" Bennett asked softly, still processing.
"No. We suggested it the first time we spoke to her, but she didn’t want to. At the time, we didn’t believe she was in danger. It was just an offer. But last night, we suggested it very, very strongly. She refused, despite all our efforts."
Eleri still felt guilty. That one thing—Jivika's stubborn refusal to leave, regardless of all the options they'd thrown at her—was the only thing letting Eleri breathe through this day. She'd been able to focus on the body while she was standing over it, but now she had no physical work to occupy her time.
She desperately needed to get her hands on those notebooks. She needed to get to the body, but the body needed to get to the CDC in Lincoln, first. There was little chance of that happening right away. "Sir, I wish she would have left."
"Me too," he said. They sat in the small silence for a moment, acknowledging the sadness of the call, because Bennett, despite the large stack of names he did not remember allowing into town, seemed to truly love every citizen. In a moment, he spoke again. "How can I help? And how do we stop losing people?"
"I have an idea, and I need your help." Eleri truly hoped that Das was the last, and she thought perhaps they were onto something. "When we were in the Das home, and we found the body, we managed to enact a very quick search. We found two notebooks. Black and white composition books."
She was more grateful than ever now for the cover story that he was a friend of her uncle’s and was helping her out. It was the only thing that would make these phone calls seem normal if anyone looked at the records.
"The composition notebooks were in different places. However, Donovan and I placed them in the kitchen, in the cabinet above the microwave."
He didn't ask for further description, and Eleri hoped he had everything he needed. He had to transfer the information to Kate seamlessly.
"I don't believe Donovan and I can go back into the house. The house is a crime scene now and the Curie PD are all over it. I'm hoping that Kate can get in there somehow and get to those manuals to us." She paused for a minute. Her brain was always turning, and she thought of an idea. "Does Das have a relative we can reach out to? Can you and Kate claim that this relative requested the manuals, and that other papers are included in that stack? Maybe a living will or such. The sooner we get our hands on those notebooks, the sooner we'll be able to figure out what's really going on, and hopefully stop the next person from being killed."
Bennett agreed. He would take Kate and go out to the Das house right away, and they would attempt to get the notebooks surreptitiously out of the way without the officers knowing. “I’ll bet Kate will think of something.”
Eleri put in her next request. "Can you have Kate deliver them to us? I don't think Donovan and I should be seen out and about this afternoon. So it would help if she could bring them to us, to the house. Maybe she can bring a food basket or something, put the notebooks in the bottom?"
"Something to make you feel better about the loss of your friend,” he murmured. “A way to welcome you to town with something other than a murder."
She heard the underlying frustration and sadness in his voice, and she felt it herself. NightShade cases often dealt with the paranormal, the unexplained. This set of murders, though perfectly earthly, was quickly falling into the second category.
Sh
e hung up the phone and turned to Donovan who asked, "Now what?"
"I don't know. We've got to get our hands on those notebooks. We've got to figure out why these people have been killed, and how it might lead us to the next person on the list."
Donovan nodded as though he agreed, at least somewhat. But his next questions chilled her. "And if we can't?"
50
Donovan sat at the kitchen table, munching on a stick of organic, Slim Jim-like processed meat. Several discarded wrappers already lay in an arc around him. Eleri had raised an eyebrow at them, but Donovan didn't care.
Eleri had taken a wheel of brie from the basket that Kate had brought and was putting it on some crispy Parmesan crackers. As usual, Eleri appeared sophisticated and Donovan much less so, but then again, they'd each been a product of their upbringing.
Despite her job and willingness to get dirty, she still occasionally gave off glimpses of someone who'd been raised with extreme wealth. It showed in the way she knew the names of all the cheese knives and the cheeses, the way she was spreading them on the crackers and then lining them up to be eaten daintily. Donovan had only barely recognized that the spreaders were, in fact, cheese knives, and it was only something he’d learned as an adult.
The expense of the gift basket had seemed extravagant but maintaining their cover story was important. Kate had laughed as she showed up at the door, saying how difficult it had been to find a basket big enough to unpack and repack with the notebooks securely hidden inside. Sure enough, when they'd removed all the sausages, the logs of cheese, the rolls of crackers, and jars of dips, two black-and-white composition notebooks had sat underneath.
"Did they find anything else?" Eleri asked Bennett’s assistant, ignoring the food, another thing that Donovan found was a trait of the wealthy.
Even as an adult, he always tracked where the food was located, having gone too many times without as a child. He’d learned as an adult that he didn't have to eat it all right now, but he’d never been able to kill the reaction every time he scented it. He placed it, cataloged how much there was, and thought about how long it might last.
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