Flashbyte (Byte Series - Ellie Conway Book 4)

by Cat Connor

  “Shouldn’t you be doing that?”

  He smiled. “He’s in good hands.”

  “Why does he need surgery?”

  “To remove some large pieces of glass embedded in his skull and to reconstruct his shoulder. That was some blast.”

  Thank God he landed on his shoulder and not his head.

  “Will Noel be okay?”

  “I think so – he’s going to be off work for a few weeks.”

  It was time to ask for a damage report on me.

  “And I’m here because ...?”

  “You don’t know?” He frowned. “What’s your name?”

  Had I felt more like me, I would’ve had some fun with that, despite his worried expression. Just this once I let him get away without my smart mouth getting involved.

  “I am Supervisory Special Agent Gabrielle Conway, Ellie.”

  “Yes, you are.” He seemed relieved, and I couldn’t blame him. Recent events being what they were.

  “So?”

  “Some pieces of glass were removed from your back and you had a large gash in the back of your head.”

  I didn’t remember anything hitting me.

  “Go figure,” I replied.

  “They tell me the last thing you said was my name.”

  “Don’t go reading anything into that,” I replied. “You’re a doctor. I wasn’t feeling great.”

  He smiled. “Whatever you say, Conway.”

  A song started. The volume built and built until I was sure Kurt could hear it too. ‘Palisades.’ I really had to stop the crazy association between Kurt and Kevin Costner. One thing was true. Kurt couldn’t scale my palisades, and he couldn’t take down my walls. Not unless I let him and I wasn’t about to do that. No sir, I was not.

  He was taking my blood pressure with a small frown creasing his brow. I could still hear the song and had to fight to stop from singing along.

  “You lost a lot of blood,” Kurt said, taking the cuff off my arm.

  That accounted for me asking for him then; nothing silly about that.

  “Concussion?”

  “Doesn’t appear to be.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “But with your track record I’m erring on the side of caution.”

  Smart man. Especially with the live concert in my head, but I wasn’t about to tell him about that.

  “We still in West Virginia?”

  “No. You missed the excitement of the medevac.”

  “Medevac,” I repeated.

  That had a strong military sound to it.

  “So where are we?”

  “NNMC.”

  “Navy hospital … we are in Maryland?”

  “We are. In Bethesda.”

  “I’m not navy.”

  “No, but Noel is. We had one helicopter and a choice to make. He’s sicker than you, it was an easy call.”

  “Is my dad here?”

  “And Carla,” he replied. “They’d like to see you.”

  “We have a crime scene …”

  “I know.” He looked away for a minute and studied the monitors that beeped in the background. “I’ll give you a half hour before I start unplugging you. Then we’ll talk about the crime scene.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Can I sit up?”

  Kurt stood up and passed me the control for the bed. “Go for it.”

  He moved the pillows and rearranged them so I was comfortable then opened the door.

  I went to scratch my head and felt something rough under my fingertips above my right ear. I followed the roughness around the back of my head. It seemed huge. I traced the edges and realized it was a bandage and it circled my head.

  “Kurt? This is a big bandage.”

  “Yes.”

  And the vainest of all thoughts jumped from my mouth in utter horror. “Do I still have hair?”

  He grinned. “You have hair. Minus a three by one inch area from above your right ear and around the back of your head. It’s okay. I was careful.”

  “Great.”

  “I was careful; your hair will cover the section I had to shave. I went underneath. But maybe don’t tie your hair back for a few weeks.”

  “Thank you.”

  It seemed stupid that my biggest concern was a shaved head. Noel was in surgery. It could’ve been so much worse.

  “Mom!” Carla squawked rushing through the door and bounding toward me. She pulled up short and approached with sudden caution. “Can I hug you?”

  I held my arms out. “Of course.” I couldn’t understand why she didn’t throw herself at me like she usually did. Maybe I looked really terrible. With my arms wrapped around my daughter I looked at Kurt, hoping my eyes conveyed my question.

  He shook his head a little. I saw my dad out of the corner of my eye. He waved.

  “Carla, sit with me,” I said, encouraging her to let me go.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. I moved over. So far so good.

  “Okay, kid?” Dad asked leaning in to kiss my cheek.

  “I’m okay.”

  After an hour of convincing my family I was okay and that it was Noel everyone should be worried about, Kurt unplugged the equipment attached to me. The beeping and the tubes vanished. Dad and Carla disappeared.

  It was time to get back to work and visit the crime scene. My team was waiting.

  Thirty-Two

  I Get A Rush

  “A blood bath.” I let air escape my lungs in a slow, controlled exhale.

  “Literally,” Sam replied, leaning next to me against the cold wall. Beads of moisture clung to his upper lip. The air was cool and he was sweating.

  “It’s just gross,” I replied.

  “The hearts bobbing on top in the tub were an interesting touch,” Sam muttered wiping a hand over his face.

  “If by ‘interesting’ you mean fuc’n creepy, then yes, they were.”

  We waited outside, our breath visible with every exhale. Lee was next door interviewing the neighbor who called the police. Kurt was inside the house with the medical examiner.

  Five adults lived in the house, all were missing. We had a lot of missing people all of a sudden or, more accurately, we suspected there were a lot of missing people, related to our case.

  “Are these related to our boxes of ass?” Sam asked.

  “I have a feeling they are.” My mind wandered to the tattoos I’d seen. “Sam, we ever hear back from biometrics?”

  “We did, but the three tattoos that they did match belonged to live people who weren’t missing half their ass.”

  That’s the thing, tattoos aren’t always as unique as you’d think.

  “That’s good for them, not so good for us.”

  “They’ll keep the photographs in the data base until someone comes up with an ID. Photos are being added all the time, we might get lucky.”

  I saw Lee hustling across the frozen driveway. He waved. The medical examiner and Kurt called out to us from the front doorstep. We all huddled for the sharing of information.

  The ME went first, “Five adult human hearts. The blood is also human.”

  “That’s not good,” I said. “I hoped they were pigs’ hearts or something.” Even so I had a feeling they belonged to the missing occupants. I looked at Kurt hoping he had some answers.

  “Not a lot, Conway, but we’ll run DNA and try for a match from our previous body parts. And one interesting thing: All five worked for the USPS.”

  “Postal workers,” I echoed. Boxes of ass in the mail and now dead postal workers. My eyes flicked to Lee. “Bingo! There’s the link.”

  His brow furrowed. “Link. Only you could look so pleased over mailed boxes and postal workers. If that’s the link then I don’t get it.”

  A song drifted into my ears on the breeze. Elvis doing it again with ‘Return to Sender.’ I knew it was the link.

  “Elvis is never wrong.”

  “Ellie, one day he just might be,” Lee replied.

  “Not today.”

  “You need to
give me more.”

  “What? Elvis isn’t enough?”

  “Chicky babe, he’s more than enough for me,” Sam said with a wide grin.

  I laughed. For me too.

  “For whatever reason, postal workers are the target of a killer, and certain people are receiving their body pieces via supposed mail …” I said. “Why?”

  Kurt had a contribution, “What do the recipients have in common?”

  “The packages actually turned up,” I said, unimpressed and somewhat sarcastically.

  “And you say it like that because you have had bad experiences with missing mail?” he asked.

  I smiled. “You know I have. Shit, if a fed can’t get her mail then who the hell can?”

  Sam and Lee high-fived Kurt as he said, “Try that then.”

  While they were busy patting each other on the back for their brilliance, I was thinking about how anyone outside my circle would know I was pissed at the mail service. My phone buzzed. I checked it quickly.

  A twitter update: joanneJ @EllieConwaySA this isn’t a mail service this is torture #wheresmymail

  The penny dropped followed by a roll of quarters. Holy shitballs.

  “Twitter. The killer is using Twitter,” I announced and typed a private reply on my phone to @joanneJ saying she needed to check my profile and call the phone number immediately.

  “The killer is doing what?” Kurt asked.

  “Using Twitter, the killer is following hash tags. Someone just tweeted me using the hash tag #wheresmymail, but we’ve used more than just one hash tag to talk about our mail issues.”

  “And it’s possible to follow them?”

  “Yeah, you click on the hash tag and it brings up a list of all references to it. Or use Tweet Chat, which enables you to follow hash tags.”

  My phone rang. I looked at the screen and saw it was the office. “Yep.”

  “We have a call for you from a Joanne J.”

  “Start a trace and put her through.”

  Two seconds later a confused woman spoke, “Hello?”

  “Joanne, it’s Special Agent Conway here, from Twitter. We have a little problem with the hash tags we’ve been using.”

  “Have I done something wrong?”

  “Absolutely not. I’m going to ask for your address and you should know we’re tracing this call; it’s for your protection.”

  “Can I verify who you are?”

  “Of course,” I replied, hoping my brain would kick in and come up with some smartassed way to do this via cell phone. “When I hang up I want you to call the number back and ask for Caine Grafton, Special Agent in Charge. He will verify who I am. I’m going to snap a picture of myself holding my credentials right now and send it to you. You can ask Caine for a photo of the credentials on file.”

  “I never would’ve thought of that,” she replied.

  “Hanging up now.”

  Me neither, until just then.

  I took a photo with my camera, holding my ID by my face. Seconds later the picture was sent to Joanne’s cell phone.

  Caine called me within moments.

  “I’ve spoken to Joanne from Twitter. There are two agents on their way to her home.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No good can come of social networking,” Caine growled.

  “I’m pretty sure you said the same thing about electricity.”

  He harrumphed. I hung up.

  The ME had excused himself.

  “Okay, so we have five hearts,” I said. “Where are the bodies?”

  “Moving five bodies is not easy,” Kurt added.

  “We’re looking for a truck of some kind,” I said. “Sam, Lee, go door-to-door and ask neighbors about vehicles in the street over the last few days.”

  “On it, Chicky Babe,” Sam said. He and Lee took opposite sides of the street and started knocking on doors.

  Kurt and I looked at each other. “You think the other bodies will all be USPS workers too?” I asked.

  “It’s possible.”

  I groaned as I said, “Time to get the USPIS involved.”

  “We know anyone over there?” Kurt asked.

  I shrugged. “If we did, I would’ve been asking for an investigation into my missing mail.”

  “Chances are someone has noticed missing employees and the USPIS is already involved. They investigate violent crimes against employees of the Postal Service.”

  I heard another groan and realized it was from me. “Are we going to have a jurisdictional tug of war over this?”

  “I hope not,” Kurt replied.

  “Me too. The last thing I want is a lecture on how the special agents of the USPIS are the oldest law enforcement agency within the US, and how they’ve been using ‘Special Agent’ since eighteen-oh-one.”

  It was tricky keeping the condescension from my voice. Some agencies are just not fun to work with, or rather, some agents. I shouldn’t lump all the USPIS agents in the same bag. Not their fault I once came across a rather boring, lacking-in-humor special agent with the Postal Service.

  “Aren’t you a mine of information?” Kurt said. I was impressed with the way he kept the sarcasm to a minimum.

  “Be prepared.”

  “Didn’t know you were a scout,” he said.

  “And I didn’t know you were such a smartass. Life’s a learning curve.” I smiled. Things were moving and reshuffling within my internal filing system. “Moving right along. We need to find the bodies. I need a computer. I’m going to the office.”

  I waved to Sam and Lee as I drove out of the street. Kurt was riding shotgun. I reached forward and flicked on the radio. The Clash’s ‘Bank Robber’ filled the car. Bizarre. The song caused more reshuffling.

  I don’t think I spoke during the drive. I parked in my space and headed for the stairs, running two at a time up to my floor, with Kurt hot on my heels. I held the fire door for him, letting it go as he reached his hand out to take the weight. Sandra called out as I passed her; I waved as I hurried into my office. On the desk was the pile of files from earlier in the week. I flipped through them. The bank robbery case file was missing. I turned on my computer. Not a problem, I had an electronic version. As the computer powered up I remembered where the file was. With legal: I’d closed the case. Legal were building their case against Madeline and Howard White. I scrolled the information on my screen while Kurt planted himself in a chair in front of me.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “An answer,” I replied. I stopped scrolling. It wasn’t there. So I pulled out my notebook and went back over the notes from earlier in the week. I found the information I needed. I had written the name of the bank employee who had gone home sick the day of the robbery. Having not needed to run her through our system in the initial investigation because it wasn’t anything to do with her, I now needed to run her name.

  “Who are you looking for?” Kurt asked.

  “Marjorie Smith.”

  “Why?”

  I chewed my lip as her driver’s license popped up on the screen. I jotted down her address and phone number. I did a fast search for any other information. Six months ago her sister committed suicide. The sister, Luella Smith, was a postal worker and there was a report from the United States Postal Service regarding her suicide; she drowned.

  “Road trip,” I said jumping up from my desk.

  “Why this woman?” Kurt said, following me.

  “I don’t know. All I know is The Clash song came on the radio and I need to talk to Marjorie.”

  He strode along beside me. I could feel his mind working and trying to catch up with my thinking.

  “I’m not following,” he said holding the stairwell door open for me.

  I talked as we descended into the underground parking, “When I was investigating the string of bank robberies I heard that Clash song, ‘Bank Robber,’ in my head; also Marjorie Smith’s name came up. She has worked for the bank for twenty-one years. She had nothing to do with the ban
k robberies.”

  “None the wiser here!”

  “Her sister killed herself six months ago – she was a postal worker.”

  We reached my car. Kurt held his hand out for the keys. I threw them to him; it was easier to let him drive than argue. Considering what I’d just told him about knowing there was a connection because a song played.

  “Where to?”

  I read out the address of the bank. “Let’s try her at work first.”

  She wasn’t at work so we headed over to her home. Kurt did a drive-by. There was a car in the driveway. We parked down the street and walked back.

  I knocked on the door.

  Muffled footsteps sounded then stopped.

  I knocked again.

  The footsteps grew louder.

  The door opened revealing a tallish woman in her early forties. She looked fit, calm, and was well dressed in tidy jeans and a smart shirt.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  I pulled my badge.

  “I’m Supervisory Special Agent Conway; this is Supervisory Special Agent Henderson.”

  “Is this about the bank robbery?”

  “No,” I replied. “Can we come in?”

  She stood aside letting us pass then directed us to the living room. There was nothing to indicate anything amiss in the house or with her. That bothered me. Could it be that my missing memory incident and sudden death had messed up my psycho-prophetic talent?

  Mac’s voice overrode my doubts, “Trust your gut.”

  Upon the mantelpiece I saw a picture of two women. One I recognized as Marjorie; the other looked like her. Same height, same coloring, same eyes. Their mouths were a little different. Her sister’s mouth was quite hard looking. Straight, not a happy mouth.

  “Is that your sister?” I said, pointing to the picture.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Have a seat.” She indicated the sofa.

  Kurt and I sat down. Marjorie sat opposite us.

  “I’d like to ask you about your sister.” My eyes never left her face as I watched for anything that resembled nerves.

  “Why?”

  “Because we think her death may be tied into other postal worker deaths.”

  Her mouth flicked up in one corner. I almost missed it as it was so quick.

  “My sister drowned. I don’t see how that could relate to any other deaths.”