"We're looking for Marshawn," he told them. This time, wide round eyes turned to a frown. Their surprise seemed genuine. They seemed to have no idea why the FBI would turn on up on LeDonRic's doorstep or why they would be looking for Marshawn.
He motioned the two of them toward the back door. "Agents Eames and de Gottardi are at your back door. I need one of you to let them in. Knock twice before you open the door," he added, even as LeDonRic turned his back and walked away.
It was a good sign, Donovan thought, that LeDonRic trusted him enough to leave Maggie here alone with him, at least for a moment.
Though the layout on this house was similar to the one he and Eleri had been living in, the staircase went up from the left instead of the right and the kitchen was in a separate place. It still had an open design downstairs with the bedrooms and extra bathrooms upstairs—or at least Donovan assumed that. He'd not checked the layout of this house, as LeDonRic had not popped up on any of their flagging systems.
But now, he looked up the stairs, as though he might see something from down here. He had to wonder if Marshawn might be up there hiding. LeDonRic and Maggie might be covering for the man's brother. It was also possible that Marshawn was hiding out in the house and they didn't know.
Eleri and Wade came in the back door, presumably having searched the back yard. There was every possibility now that Marshawn might attempt an escape out a second floor window and run off. But it was a chance they would have to take. There were only three of them, not a full S.W.A.T. team.
As Donovan scanned the back yard for a fleeing brother, Eleri and Wade both pulled out their badges quickly, and this time Donovan watched as LeDonRic and Maggie much more carefully inspected them. It was Maggie who spoke up first. "You're here investigating the murders?"
It was a reasonable question, and Eleri answered her, "Yes. That's why we've been here all along."
"Is Marshawn okay?" she asked.
Donovan realized the two still had not grasped the situation. "Is he here?" Donovan asked bluntly. Both shook their heads.
"He has a key to this house," Eleri commented. "Did you know that?"
LeDonRic nodded absently. "Of course. I gave it to him."
But the two still looked confused as they were asked to sit and stay on the couch while the three agents ran a full search of the house. Donovan once again took the downstairs, only this time, he had two persons of interest to watch. If FBI agent training had taught him anything, it was that anyone could pop up with a gun in hand at any time, so he kept a sharp eye on the two of them.
Though they didn’t speak, communication seemed to pass between them while he checked inside closets and opened the garage door. When Eleri and Wade returned, it was Eleri who sat in the recliner the two had left open, Atinlay curling at her feet as though Eleri were welcome and the two wolves could please just not bother her.
“You asked if Marshawn is okay,” Eleri started, her hands clasped between her knees. She could not have looked more like an agent had she been wearing a dark windbreaker with bold white letters across it. “Physically, we have no reason to believe he’s harmed. But we are searching for him. As of ten p.m. tonight, he’s wanted for the murders of Marat Rychenkov, Johanna Schmitt, and Jivika Das.”
Donovan noticed she left out her own attempted murder.
“That can’t be right. Marshawn wouldn’t hurt a fly,” his brother protested. But Donovan had been ready for that. Marshawn was one of those happy people who smiled at everyone. Even if he admitted to the murders publicly, some people still wouldn’t believe it. Even in Curie, where evidence reigned supreme.
He and Wade stood back and waited out the silence with Eleri.
It only took a moment before it paid off.
Maggie turned to her boyfriend with tears in her eyes and said, "Don, you have to tell them."
62
Eleri felt her heart beating faster as the SUV bounced along the dirt road. She was sweating beneath her helmet and her Kevlar vest. Her hand reached to her hip, automatically checking her weapon, then to her other hip, double-checking her backup ammo.
Donovan sat beside her, outfitted much the same as she was. They were in black, head to toe, except for the glaring “FBI” emblazoned in reflective lettering on the fronts and backs of their jackets. Their SUV was packed full, and three more large vehicles followed directly behind them. She and Donovan took the back seat in the front car. They were in the lead as the agents on this case. Wade sat in the front passenger seat, and an assigned agent drove them forward.
An entire team had been assembled for this raid. They were almost three hours outside of Curie as they approached the tiny family cabin that LeDonRic and Maggie had pointed them toward.
It had taken a while for the couple to accept the fact that Marshawn was, in fact, the killer everyone had been afraid of. Originally, they’d just told the trio about the things LeDonRic’s brother had been doing that might make the agents mistakenly think he might be their suspect. Eleri had to straighten them out and let the man know that she’d spoken to his brother and he’d confessed, before escaping.
Luckily, when they put it in the proper light, Marshawn's behavior over recent weeks had begun to make sense to the two. When she’d asked whether they’d seen him with composition books like the ones they’d found, they didn’t say yes. But the answer wasn’t “no” either. It hadn’t been Marshawn they’d seen with the book, but Madisyn, though neither knew where that book was now.
As they bounced through a turn onto a gravel road, the ride got rougher and therefore slower. Eleri’s thoughts took the same turn. Marshawn had their FBI-issued laptops and the notebooks. He’d grabbed the bag as he ran out.
She hated the way her heart sank at the thought. She’d let him get away with almost all their evidence. At least she hadn’t let him get away with one more murder.
Maggie and LeDonRic hadn’t been done, though. They’d mentioned that his brother had asked both of them, separately, to invest in a new project. As LeDonRic seemed to look at it now, in this new light, his brother's “top secret project” had not so much been a new idea he would be investing in, but money sorely needed to get him out of massive and dangerous debt.
LeDonRic had sat on the couch with his elbows propped on his knees, his head in his hands. “I refused. I didn't want to make an investment. I've been working hard to save for retirement. If I'd known it was about his life, about saving him, of course I would have given it to him.”
Eleri had shaken her head at him. “I don't know how much you have, but chances are it wouldn't have been enough to save your brother. Please don't feel guilty about this.” Truly, she hadn't known that, but she'd said it anyway.
She'd then asked LeDonRic who the guardian of his brother's children was, and LeDonRic had looked up, startled once again, eyes wide.
“Me. I'm their guardian.”
It was something that would have to be worked out, since Marshawn hadn’t passed away but would hopefully be in FBI custody shortly. But once the two had mentioned the family cabin, Eleri hadn't stayed put to dwell on any of it. They had their information. The house had been searched and Marshawn was not there. Neither Maggie nor LeDonRic had seen him that night, and there was no evidence that he'd been in the home.
Wade and Donovan both agreed they'd not smelled him there, or not recently, anyway. And the timing, it turned out, had been even more important than they knew. The one place LeDonRic and Maggie had believed Marshawn might go was this family cabin, and being so far away, it had taken the coordination of a satellite image and local FBI director in Omaha to gather up this team and get them ready.
The sun was coming up behind them as they headed up the uneven road, and she wondered if there was any way Marshawn could miss the caravan barreling toward him.
Though there were corn fields on all sides of them, the land was excruciatingly flat. The dust cloud raised on the gravel roads could not be missed.
Under her breath, Eleri mu
rmured the prayer she’d learned from Grandmere years ago. “Bon Dieu, keep me safe. Bind me from trouble. Aida-Weddo, protect me from this forest I walk.”
Donovan surely heard her words, but he didn't say anything.
Eleri wondered what Marshawn might say when he saw her. He'd seen just a little of what she was learning she could do when she fought him off at the house. Whatever he'd seen had scared him enough to make him run, to stop trying to murder her, though he could have picked up the cinder block and put it back on her chest.
He would have been starting her suffocation from scratch, as she'd gotten several deep breaths and restored her oxygen, but it could have been done. Still, he’d run, leaving her there, stuck and frustrated, still tied, long after Marshawn left and before Wade and Donovan arrived.
She was snapped from her angry memories as Wade handed her back a tablet. The satellite images showed the small house ahead to have one warm body inside. She prayed it was Marshawn. Otherwise, they were going to startle the hell out of some unlucky camper.
The cabin sat on an acre of open land in the middle of corn fields. The corn on three or four sides would be their cover going in. Again, Eleri thought their cover only worked if no one in the home managed to notice that a dust cloud the size of Omaha hovered just beyond the edge of the fields and that the corn rustled in all directions around the house. For a moment she longed for forests or city buildings, anything that would provide adequate cover, but it wasn't going to happen.
The SUVs stopped and the agents began pouring out. With two more vehicles coming at the cabin from the other direction, they hoped to encircle the house as much as possible. The lead tactical agent opened a line and let Eleri and Donovan have the floor. As the senior agent, Eleri knew this one was on her.
She spoke to the group at large. “Here's what we're looking at. Satellite images tell us there's a single body inside the home, but we don't know if there are more. Most recent images show the body as moving, so we expect one fully functional adult. Though the suspect has murdered at least three known victims, the murder method is slow and precise. I've yet to see him with a gun or firearm of any kind. He justified his murders, suggesting that he was owed, and that the lives he took were those of elderly people, so he'd not stolen too much from them.”
This information was important, she knew, because it meant the FBI was much more likely to try to take Marshawn alive.
“Is there anything else we need to know?” an agent from the other side of the property asked.
She and Donovan looked to each other. There was plenty they could tell about this case, but she only added one thing: “The suspect is highly, highly intelligent and an excellent manipulator.”
Everyone nodded at her, having gotten the message: Don't fall for anything.
On a signal from the operating team leader, not Eleri—as this wasn't her specialty—they fanned out. She'd done her job, and she was no longer the lead. This was now a tactical raid, much like a local SWAT team would do. They rustled through the corn as quietly as they could until each signaled he or she was in place.
She and Donovan were close, centered to the front door. They were mostly here for vocal support, to talk to and negotiate with Marshawn as voices he knew.
She and Donovan were the first ones to step out toward the home, emerging at the edge of the corn field. Two humans dressed in black, head to toe, except for their white FBI letters. Hands up, they moved slowly forward, automatic weapons in their grip, barrels toward the ground. The idea was to make it clear they were not aiming at him but that they were more than capable of taking him out.
Holding up her bullhorn, Eleri spoke clearly, “Marshawn James, you're surrounded by the FBI. Please come out peacefully with your hands in the air.”
When there was no response, she looked to Donovan, who sniffed at the air. With a tilt of his head, he held up a thermal imager in one hand, showing her the heat signature from inside the small building. This close, this information was much more precise, even showing an outline of the person inside.
Whoever it was, the build looked like Marshawn, and he appeared to be cooking. It looked for a moment as though he paused and then he went back to work. Eleri shrugged. He was making sandwiches and was either deaf or ignoring them.
She yelled her words out again, only this time she heard back. “No, I will not leave this cabin.”
“We have your girls!” she countered.
“Good, Madisyn only did it because I made her. Tell Don to keep them safe.”
She didn't like hearing those words. It sounded as though he was confessing, and that actually wasn’t a good thing. Not only that, he was confessing for his older daughter, too.
Frowning, she took two steps forward. In her peripheral vision, she watched as the other agents followed her lead, now emerging almost as a unit from the corn fields. Like a cinch, the circle slowly tightened around the cabin.
Eleri lifted the bullhorn to her mouth to speak again, barely catching the sputtering noise that was their only warning.
The world went white.
And she was thrown backward fast enough for the world to go dark.
63
Donovan had come around slowly. It took a moment to realize he was lying on the ground, looking up at morning sky. Overhead, cornstalks reached up toward the blue above him.
His ears rang. More sensitive than most, they’d suffer the blast damage even more than normal human ears would. The first thought through his head was the last words from the team leader: "Is there anything else we need to know about the suspect?"
No, they’d said.
We screwed that up.
Though he and Eleri had told the team that Marshawn James was highly intelligent, they had not anticipated him correctly. They had expected him to manipulate the scene, but not like this. And they had neglected to mention that he was also a brilliant chemist.
Marshawn had not been making something to eat. He'd been planning an exit—a dramatic one—and Donovan and Eleri had not caught it.
Donovan looked first slowly to his left and then to his right and saw no one. At his feet, he saw rows of corn, some upright, some not. He'd been standing in the open space around the house. At least, that was the last thing he remembered.
From the way the stalks were bent, it appeared that he had been blown upward, over the tops of the plants, and dropped here. He'd left a trail of bent corn in his wake, almost like Superman crashing to Earth.
But where was Eleri? Where were the other agents? The thoughts tumbled in his head like rocks. He should worry more about the team, but he was worried about Eleri, and about Wade, who'd come in from the other side of the small house.
"El? El!" he hollered out, though it sounded like his head was inside a bowl, and he was screaming only inside his own skull.
The ringing continued, and as he tried to sit up, he felt his stomach roll. That was unlike him. He must have taken a very hard hit. Glancing down toward his feet again, he saw a black plume of smoke reaching toward the sky. He must have awakened quickly. He couldn't have been out long, or the smoke would have spread.
Donovan was grateful for his thoughts solidifying as they did. Even if a slice of his life had been completely removed, and he didn't know how long it had been, he was at least able to back-calculate it.
"El!" he yelled again. But this time, he didn’t lie there and wait. Instead, he rolled over, scrambling to his hands and knees, leaving his back to the scene—a thing he shouldn't do, but wasn't quite able to not do. In front of him, the corn he had not disturbed stood up straight and blurred, despite only being several feet away.
As he tried to focus, he found he couldn't. He wanted to shake his head but was afraid that would make him actually vomit rather than just feel like he would. The dirt beneath his hands was not the soft, brown loam of a nicely turned garden, but covered in stalks, husks, and other sharp objects from the field. Slowly, he rocked back on his knees.
"El," he yelled it
again. "Eleri!" This time, it seemed as if some of the sound he made escaped the fish bowl around his head. He couldn't hear. The ringing was too intense. He could hardly see. Though he could make out objects, he could not focus on them. But this time, the sound didn’t feel as though it immediately bounced back to him.
And he could smell. So he stopped, worked to quell the turning in his stomach, and took a deep inhale. He smelled smoke. He smelled old, drying corn. He smelled chemicals from the burning home behind him. He smelled fuel from the trucks they had driven in. He smelled people, and at last, he found her. He would not be able to find Wade—at least not immediately, as Wade had been much further away.
He could only pray that his friend was safe. Crawling on his hands and knees, because he was unable to stand fully upright, Donovan made his way, pushing at the cornstalks and sliding between them, one slow, forward movement at a time.
"Eleri," he called out, and at last, as he got close, he was able to hear a moan in response.
That was her voice. He knew it! At least she was still alive. He continued calling out and listening for her groans in response, a sharply painful game of Marco Polo.
When at last he came upon her, he grabbed her face in one hand. Though she batted at him half-heartedly, he turned her toward him and used his other finger as a reference point for her to track as a test. He checked her pupils, making sure they were equal and reactive. This blow could definitely have caused serious mental damage, and for a moment, he wondered how his own eyes were functioning.
"Check me," he rasped out and waited while Eleri slowly sat up. She seemed to have taken the hit a little harder than him, though as he looked around—and found his focus was returning slightly—he could see the cornstalks around her appeared to have the same pattern from where he had landed, as though she too had been picked up and thrown to Earth at a high speed. He was looking at the pattern when Eleri, in turn, grabbed his face and aimed him toward her, waving her own finger slowly in front of him.
The Camelot Gambit Page 34