She would not let her partner find her dead and feel guilty.
Fuck that shit. This time when she screamed and pulled, the couch moved farther, and Marshawn came closer just as she rocked enough to the left to get the cinder block to begin its slow roll off her chest. It landed on her arm, knocking into her brachial artery and sending a twinge out her arm to her wrist as it hit nerve bundles on the sensitive inside skin.
She could feel the tingle in her fingers, but it would not stop her. She lifted her shoulder and shrugged out from under the heavy weight, as she sucked in air, finally expanding her lungs to full capacity. The oxygen hit her like a high, but she couldn’t let Marshawn get the upper hand. The move had left her position awkward and she yanked on the rope, tugging against the couches again at the cost of her wrists.
If she needed to bring the furniture with her to stand to her full height, she would. Marshawn was towering over her now, though he still appeared nervous and she could see he’d begun to sweat. He clearly had no intention of letting her merely push the cinder block away and live.
He picked it up to put it back on her chest, and Eleri took deep breaths as though she had been drowning and broke the surface. She sucked in air, feeling it rush through her starved system. Could she lift the couches? Could she break the sturdy feet that supported them and get loose? She didn't know. Could she break the rope? Did she have any kind of force? But now she had oxygen and she screamed again as Marshawn lifted the cinder block to place it back on her chest.
He stumbled backward with the force of her yell, his eyes growing wider as it became clear that he did not know what he was dealing with.
Donovan had told her that her eyes had gone black when she’d screamed out in battle once. Now, she could feel it, she knew they had, so she stared at him, and used the only thing she had left.
In the lowest voice she could muster, with as much magic as she could put behind it, she said, "Marshawn James, if you kill me, you will have not only the full weight of the Federal Bureau of Investigations upon your head, you will have me. If you doubted that I could come back to haunt you, know this: if you kill me, I'll be stronger than I ever was."
60
Donovan was on Wade’s tail as he screeched to a halt in front of the house. Seeing Wade bust through the front door had raised his heart rate even higher.
Eleri's blank text message had been a warning. He could feel it now. Drawing his weapon, he followed Wade through the door his fellow agent had left standing open. He swept rooms and followed Wade into the living area, where he could hear Eleri struggling, even if he couldn’t see her.
Only as he came close, could he see his partner was tied out on the floor, her wrists bleeding, her ankles still roped. She'd managed to get one hand free. He saw the cinder block lying on the floor ten feet away, dust scattered around it as though it had been dropped there.
A fire of anger flared in her eyes as she looked up at him. "It's Marshawn," she ground out the name even as her left hand reached over toward her right and began working at the rope. Wade holstered his weapon and crouched down, popping open the handy Swiss Army knife he always carried with him. Pushing her hand away, he began to saw at the bindings.
Donovan nodded. Leaning down, he tried loosening the ropes on her ankles. "How long ago did he leave?"
He wanted to ask how she'd done it—how had she gotten out of certain death?—but he also didn't necessarily want to know. It was clear that whatever had happened, Marshawn had used his standard technique. In Eleri’s case, the pillow that had been used to soften the weight of the cinderblock and stop evidentiary bruising had been discarded to the side. Normally, it would rest on the victim's chest, weighed down with the cinder block. No heart damage. No lung damage. No liquid in the lungs. No signs of cause of death much at all … except an unexplained oxygen deprivation.
It wasn't a quick way to kill someone, but it wasn't too slow, either. One only need not be breathing for a handful of minutes in order to die. Strangulation took longer than most people thought, but the difference between strangulation and this open-air suffocation Marshawn had masterminded would not be all that significant. Given a few minutes, he could sit, watch his victim die, and even wait out the clock with a little time to spare before removing his devices and making sure he left the scene with little to no evidence.
As he lifted his head and sniffed the room, Donovan could smell the tinge of Eleri’s anger like an acrid smoke. Just under that, Marshawn James' fear hung in the air, and he recognized it as the same scent he'd found in Jivika Das’s home.
Wade moved to where Donovan hovered near Eleri’s tied ankles and brushed him out of the way. Wade began sawing on one of the ropes around her ankle, and Donovan—not having gotten very far loosening what apparently were expert knots—checked her wrist for any cuts that might be more dangerous than they initially appeared. He then headed into the kitchen for paper towels and water.
She was going to look like she had attempted suicide, but he wasn't going to leave her cuts exposed—not when they still had a killer to hunt down.
"I don't know where he went." She said it almost as though she’d heard his thoughts.
"How did you get out?" Wade asked the question that Donovan had been holding back on.
"I got angry," she whispered. "I managed to get a little loose and I scared him. Once I had enough movement, I rolled a little and the cinder block tipped far enough to drop off. He picked it up to put it back on top of me, and when he stepped back, startled, he dropped it, and he left."
Donovan held the wet towels over her wrists and watched as she gingerly pressed them against her cuts. He hadn’t found any cuts that were life-threatening, but they would sting. Grandmere was not here to make them hurt less this time …
He laid out two more pieces for her ankles in case the rope had managed to damage her through her socks. He hoped not. Then he darted upstairs for the first-aid kit that he had haphazardly put together first in New Orleans but built a little more sturdily to carry with them now. Before he was even back downstairs with his kit in hand, Eleri was up. She had her holster on and was tugging her jacket over it.
Wade, already dressed to bolt, was hauling her along to the car. Motioning to Donovan, Wade shoved the two of them and the medical kit into the backseat. As he dove into the driver's seat, it became apparent they had no real idea where to go. But Wade turned the engine, and said, "Let me try."
As they headed out of the neighborhood on a quest for Marshawn’s car or the man himself, Donovan bandaged Eleri's wrists one at a time.
"It's been almost twenty minutes since he ran out. I think," she said. "We're probably too late," but she called Marshall Bennett and told him to have the Curie PD lock down every road exiting the city. She gave him Marshawn James' name and had him put the full PD on alert. She couldn't call the Curie police directly without needing too long to explain who she was, letting her badge number get verified, and so on, Donovan knew.
It would be faster to go after Marshawn themselves and have Marshall Bennett take care of the PD.
First, they checked his home. Eleri and Donovan headed up and over the grass mound that housed the James family and around back, in case he tried to bolt as Wade pounded on the door. Donovan would be able to hear the man clearly, even if he was on the backside of the house and the other side of a dirt- and plant-covered building. “FBI. Open up!”
When no sounds came from inside the house, not feet running, not an animal, nothing, Wade tried the doorknob. “Got it!” he yelled, and Donovan tried the knob on the back door. It didn’t give.
Rather than leaving the back unattended, they waited for Wade to get through the place and open the door for them. He greeted them with an, “It’s clear.”
Though Marshawn wasn’t there, the unlocked front door was suspicious when coupled with a locked back door.
“He locked up after we came to pack the girls up tonight,” Eleri informed them. Despite the relatively casual co
nversation, the three of them were stalking the place with their weapons out and their eyes alert.
“His room’s a mess. Looks like he grabbed things and bolted. Smells like it was very recent,” Wade called out.
Eleri pointed to the sink and Donovan frowned as he looked at the dish drainer. Small, pointed vials sat upside down, scrubbed out and clean. There was just enough water to indicate that they’d been washed a while ago but not too recently, not on his pass through here after having failed to kill Eleri.
“That’s the stuff,” she told him and then turned to check out the girls’ bedrooms.
Donovan remembered enough from undergrad and a few rotations in med school. The pieces in the drying rack were exactly what a chemist would need for a small batch of GHB-like drugs. He couldn’t have cooked up more than a single dose, given the size of the vials, indicating he’d made it each time he’d “needed” it.
There was no doubt in Donovan’s mind that the chem set would yield nothing chemically to prove what he’d been doing. Marshawn was a very smart man. Though he’d left out a burner and a stand with a clamp over it, he was a chemist. The fact that he had chemistry lab materials on his kitchen counter would mean nothing in a court of law.
But Donovan didn’t need more. He would have sniffed the air for a trace of the drug, but it was odorless. He hadn’t even smelled it on Eleri.
Once they’d declared the James home lacking in any further evidence or clues as to where Marshawn might have gone, they headed across town to an office space that Wade had found Marshawn was renting. There, they found a variety of mops featuring sponges from his patented material. There was nothing odd about the mops, except the way they were lined up in front of a standing cabinet.
Bashing the cabinet lock, they swung the doors wide and found the shelves revealed a set of drones Marshawn was keeping for his own. Though they didn't have much time, Wade insisted they turn them on.
Flicking the switch on a controller kept with the set, the three of them watched as each drone lit up. A tiny light graced the top of each robot and it blinked at a consistent rate. However, each rate of blinking was different.
"Look," Donovan said, recognizing the sinoatrial node set up in the blink pattern. "He already started programming them with Marat's ideas. Watch." And as they stared, one by one, the slowest blinks turned to a steady red light, until at last, only the lead drone blinked at a rapid rate.
Donovan watched, amazed. For a moment, he wondered what to do. Then he reached out, grabbed the lead drone, and flipped it upside down. It took a moment to find a switch and turn it off. Within a heartbeat, the others all began blinking again—likely, Donovan thought, because they’d lost their lead signal. They should reconfigure, he supposed as he waited. But he didn’t wait long at all. In seconds, one by one, the blinking again steadied to constant red lights, the slowest steadying first until once again a new hive leader remained.
Donovan looked at Wade and Eleri, her bandaged wrists peeking out from under the cuffs of her sleeves.
"It's worth millions," she said.
"Possibly billions," Wade offered.
As they turned off the drones, Donovan called Bennett to check up. Curie PD had found nothing so far. They had nowhere to check, until at last, Wade looked up and said, "His kids are in protective custody, right? Does he know where they are?"
Eleri and Donovan glanced at each other, and Donovan was glad to be able to shake his head, “No. I know the location of the safe house, but even Eleri doesn't."
"Okay, so he can't get to his kids. We’ve checked his home and his office. Where else might he go?"
The three of them looked to each other. And said the name simultaneously.
“LeDonRic.”
61
Donovan hit the button to raise the garage door at the Frank Lloyd Wright house. It was close to two a.m. when they arrived. He’d been awake for almost twenty-four straight hours and working without a break the whole time. He also wasn't certain that the garage door was not going to wake their neighbors and alert their street in Pythagoras Point that he and Eleri were not the random new Curie recruits that they seemed.
Not that their cover mattered much anymore. He and Eleri and Wade had blown that big time tonight. They had surrounded Marshawn James' home in the Shire neighborhood like the FBI agents they were. There was no way to sneak around a home built out of a mound of dirt, grass, and flowers. They'd gone into the business district on one of the back roads and invaded his office. Though no one lived there, Donovan could not be sure other business owners were not in their shops late at night. If anyone had seen them, their business would be obvious. If anyone recognized them, then the days of being Eleri Miller and Donovan Naman were over.
Now, they were prepping to raid the place next door to their own "home." The only consolation was that they wouldn't have to screech the car to a halt on the street this time and then run up to surround the house.
So Donovan pulled into the garage and almost casually pushed the button to lower the door. The three of them headed into the house through the garage, weapons drawn again, sweeping their own home downstairs and upstairs for the second time that night.
They had to. There was always the possibility that Marshawn had returned to the scene of the crime and made an effort to clean up or remove evidence.
"Clear!" Eleri called out from the bedroom upstairs.
"Clear!" Wade's voice, too, carried down the stairs from the offices to Donovan, who had the job of sweeping the wide-open lower floor by himself. Then, once they’d made sure they hadn’t just walked past their fugitive in their own home, they gathered at the back door. Turning the knob, Donovan led them out into the fenced yard, once again clearing the space. Though this time, instead of yelling it out, they used hand signals and stayed in sight of each other.
Still at the front of the small pack, Donovan headed to the side gate, his back dually covered by his partners. They couldn’t just go out their own front door. They were already going to be conspicuous, and he was trying to limit their exposure as much as he could.
Opening the gate, he led them across the wall the fence made as it connected the two back yards. Donovan motioned for Wade and Eleri to aim for the back door. He would head to the front.
He snuck along the siding, attempting to stay in the shadows even after stepping up on the porch and into the yellow glow of the insect-reduction light that LeDonRic had hung. Unlike the ones Donovan had tried at his real home in South Carolina, this one apparently worked.
Of course it did, he thought. Curie.
When he heard the whistle from the back yard letting him know that Wade and Eleri were in position, ready to apprehend Marshawn if he bolted out the back, Donovan stepped into the middle space of the door.
He knocked loudly—once, twice, three times in rapid succession. It would not do to have any inhabitants get the idea that this might be a friendly visit. In a moment, he heard footsteps inside coming down the stairs in two sets. He knew Wade, in the back yard, could hear them, too. Were the two sets LeDonRic and Marshawn?
He didn’t think so, as only one sounded heavy enough to be Marshawn. Hopefully, that would be LeDonRic. Still, Donovan stayed ready for anything.
The older James brother was supposed to live here alone. But that didn’t mean he stayed alone most nights. Was it Maggie?
Donovan knocked again. Though the knock masked the footsteps, it helped lend the air of urgency he wanted. When the door opened, it was Maggie, confirming Donovan’s more promising thought. Luckily, LeDonRic stood right behind her. Between them, her tiny, pink pig pushed her way through the people’s legs.
Donovan couldn't help but glance down as the pig looked up and offered a small squeal at him. Atinlay seemed to know what he was, even if it couldn't communicate that to its humans. The pig was stinking cute, and he smiled at it.
It was then that LeDonRic noticed the weapon at Donovan's side and put his hands up.
"Whoa! I don'
t know what’s going on …" LeDonRic made the words clear as he began walking slowly backward into the house. Maggie just stood and frowned.
Reaching into his back pocket made both Maggie and LeDonRic jerk back sharply, probably sure this was a home invasion or worse. But Donovan quickly pulled out his FBI wallet. Flipping it open, he showed it clearly to both of them. With that same hand, he held his finger up to his mouth asking them to stay silent.
Two sets of eyes became wide and round, startled at the badge.
Well, he thought, at least they hadn't figured him out yet. No, that was just the teenagers.
Motioning them to move back once more, Donavan took a step into the entryway and closed the door behind him. They'd already made quite enough of a scene for any neighbors who might be watching.
He looked back and forth between the two of them. "You can put your hands down. Eleri and I are agents with the FBI." He would have said “Agent Eames,” except that name would mean nothing to them. They knew her as Eleri Miller. And if they'd read his badge, they would know he was not Dr. Donovan Naman, but Dr. Donovan Heath, Special Agent. They likely would not notice or understand the small diamonds at the end of the lines that bracketed both the top and bottom of the Bureau ID. To anyone who knew … it meant he was with NightShade.
Though he could still smell shock and fear on both of them, it faded slightly, and he had a moment to think. If you hadn't done anything wrong, what did you have to be afraid of? But he realized this was Curie, Nebraska and there had been murders. And, to be fair, not everyone trusted the authority of the law. No matter what he said or did, that distrust had been well-earned—not by him, but by others who represented various badges. So it was up to him to put these two at ease and determine whether they could be trusted, too.
The Camelot Gambit Page 33