The NightShade Forensic Files: Echo and Ember (Book 4)

by A. J. Scudiere

  Apparently, that wasn’t really what the two men had in mind. Donovan nudged her toward the folded pile of clothing.

  Eleri looked at him. “Yeah, it’s your clothes.”

  He made a noise at her, then did it again before she understood.

  “Wait, I’m your pack mule?”

  He nodded as she muttered, “Screw you,” but she picked up the clothes and folded them all into Wade’s plaid shirt, tying them into one massive hobo bundle. “Am I just carrying this along behind you in case you need them?”

  Donovan nodded again and trotted off, leaving her to figure out if she had any higher purpose in this jaunt. And she’d been afraid Christina had nothing of value to do.

  Even that idea was put to bed not a few minutes later when they cleared the front yard, the two wolves sniffing their way around.

  “My God, those are big dogs!” The male voice brought Eleri’s head up sharply, though both the wolves managed to ignore him completely. They’d probably smelled the man from a distance and must have deemed him harmless long ago.

  She was opening her mouth to answer when Christina beat her to it. “We use bloodhounds in a lot of our cases. Helps find leads in fresh situations like this.”

  Bloodhounds? These were clearly wolves.

  Well, hell, Christina was manning the perimeter, and she’d just used her skills to override that guy. He’d remember a bloodhound. She was much more useful than Eleri, it seemed.

  Christina spoke again. “Sir, I’ve asked you several times to leave. I know you’re an officer, and I know you’re off duty. But it’s just a good time to leave, isn’t it?”

  “You know what?” He asked her as Eleri watched. “I think my wife and kids are probably waiting on me. I’ll head out.”

  “You have a nice evening, sir.” Christina smiled at him and watched as he walked away.

  Eleri had paid attention throughout the exchange, then turned to catch up with the men. They’d sniffed the perimeter and were at the edge of the ruts that made up the driveway when they put their heads together and started making whining noises. She wished to hell she understood them.

  Dana was looking for a gas can or hydrogen tank or something, hoping that if they knew what the flamethrower used, they could track purchases, or find a person capable of using it. “Is it from a gas can?”

  They both turned their heads up and looked. Both heads said “no.”

  “Part of the flamethrower?”

  Again, no.

  Eleri was dead on her feet. Another long day, the sun was going down. She hadn’t gotten any good impressions from the house and was fighting the overwhelming feeling of uselessness. The expression on Dana’s face when she’d come up with nothing of value was wearing on her soul. Eleri had had enough of disappointing people when her parents decried her joining the FBI. Her mother still refused to acknowledge her work. Eleri got her appreciation from her bosses. She knew it, but it was still a sharp pain to see that look on Dana’s face. Now, here she was, ferrying clothing for the guys and about three hairs short on her temper. Any moment now she was going to crack and ask them, “What is it, Lassie? Is it Timmy? Stuck in the well?”

  She bit her tongue and followed them around the property. She high-stepped over the rusted engine parts she’d seen in her thoughts. The ones LeighAnn hated. Eleri felt some sympathy for the woman, clearly they were useless and he wasn’t doing anything with them except keeping them. Hulls of lawnmowers hid nearby. These had been left so long the plant life had grown up around them. There was no swing set for the children LeighAnn desperately wanted and Eleri couldn’t help the apt comparison to her own mother and father, who easily got pregnant each time they tried. Who had money to raise the girls with the occasional nanny, summer camps, horses, lessons, and more. Yet her own family had suffered, too. A terrible loss that LeighAnn would never have to deal with given her inability to conceive in the first place.

  Eleri’s maudlin thoughts had left her standing, staring into the weeds while the men wandered off. She could no longer hear their wuffing noises as they moved with their heads down, pushing through the tall grass, and catching whatever scents they could. For a moment, she stared at nothing, but this time she paid attention, training her ears even though they were no match for the wolves.

  Just when she was ready to give up and holler for them, she heard the noise. Not that it did her any good.

  “Eleri!” Donovan’s human voice called out from the stand of trees at the back edge of the property. “Bring the clothes.”

  “Yes, sir.” She grumbled. She may not be lead agent on this case, but she was his senior agent. She mocked his voice, “Bring me my clothes, Eleri.” Then responded in her own voice, “No, you can run around naked.”

  Though it was all under her breath, the sing-songy tone carried well enough to the men with beyond-human hearing. She could hear Wade laughing. Then she heard Donovan, the breathiness of his voice indicating that he and Wade had both heard her loud and clear.

  “Okay, we’ll come out naked if that’s what you want . . .”

  She saw flashes of nude male skin through the slim tree trunks. While she oh-so-desperately wanted to see them change from human to wolf form or back, watching her partner walk out of the woods in the altogether was on her to-do list at about “never.”

  “Fine!” she yelled. “Take your stupid clothes and get dressed.” She tossed the pile—poorly—in their general direction before turning and walking a little bit away. Her back turned, she waited, arms crossed over her chest.

  It took only a few minutes of muttering, hers and theirs, before they emerged, fully dressed if a little askew.

  “We’re dressed. You can turn around.”

  “Dressed doesn’t make you any better looking.” She retorted, though she didn’t know why. The day had gotten to her. Yesterday, too. She wasn’t in charge. They had a dead body and some sick fuck out there, tormenting people with some kind of hydrogen flamethrower, and she had nothing other than the fact that the dead man liked to collect old lawnmower parts and let them rust in the yard. She turned around though her attitude didn’t improve. “Tell me you found where the dude stashed his gas can.”

  “There is no gas can.” Wade repeated.

  “Compressed flammable hydrogen tank?” She tried again. She was a biologist and a chemist with a specialty in human toxicology, but Wade’s physics always seemed to be two steps ahead of her ability to grasp it. She could only get there when he dragged her along.

  “No hydrogen tank.” Donovan grinned, and before she could ask why, he glanced at Wade and back at her. “There is however, another person. Female. The hydrogen burn smell was clinging to her. So she was there for the fire, but she was alive and walked through the woods.”

  Eleri felt her chest compress. “She escaped?”

  11

  Donovan wanted a shower. Bad. He loved running in the woods. He loved running in new places. But he didn’t like putting his clothes on in the woods. He didn’t like putting clothes on over his freshly altered and un-showered form.

  He missed his home.

  He missed his backyard with the high fence and the safety of knowing that even getting a drone into his backyard would be difficult at best. He had a high fence and a covered porch. He would slip the latch at the back gate and run free into hundreds of thousands of acres of protected South Carolina forest.

  Here, the grass was neither wild nor tame, just some weird overgrowth in between. The house smelled . . . not good. Donovan had asked Wade and apparently it was a wolf thing not to distinguish “bad” smells. Very few things made him turn his nose away, but there had been some mold in the house before it burned. Old food. It wasn’t the fact that it was a trailer; he’d been in pristine ones. It was probably that the undertone of lack of care took him back to his childhood—that smell demarcated the time after his mother had died.

  Eleri wasn’t holding up either. The days had run her ragged and Donovan had learned over the p
ast several cases what that did to her.

  “Is she okay?” Wade asked him, reaching back and adjusting something around his belt. That happened when you got dressed in the woods, and Wade had never been a black-suit type of fed in the first place.

  Donovan didn’t know what to answer. Yes, Eleri was okay because she was always okay. She’d been ten when her sister was taken from twenty feet away. And she was coming to grips with getting asked to use her skills on command, where in the past she’d always worked as though she just had lucky hunches.

  But she wasn’t really okay. She needed to be able to dive forward, to do something. She was nearly incapable of sitting back and letting someone else steer. Also, she had the added weight of her grandmere’s note that Emmaline would be found soon. Eleri and Donovan were the only two who knew, so he wasn’t ready to tell Wade about the note. That was for Eleri to decide. Her sister, Emmaline, had been alive for years after she’d been kidnapped, but had died at seventeen. Despite all Eleri’s claims of only having hunches, she knew in her heart these facts about her sister. Emmaline had now been dead for over a decade, and still her parents met with the feds every year, reviewed the case for new leads, acted as though their daughter—now grown if she was alive—might come home one day. Eleri knew the truth.

  It hit Donovan right then, that he was quite possible the only person she’d ever told. So he didn’t answer Wade’s question of “Is she okay?” directly. He just said, “I’ve got her.”

  Wade let that answer stand as Eleri returned with Dana and Christina in tow. It was Christina’s presence that bothered him. He turned to her, “Who’s manning the perimeter?”

  “One of the officers who came back.” She shrugged.

  “You trust them?” Donovan asked.

  “Of course. He’s doing what I told him to.” There was a tone in her voice that made it clear she’d overridden him to make him follow along, and a nonchalance that told Donovan it wasn’t hard for her to do it. He didn’t like the way his stomach turned.

  Though he tried to hide his dislike of that, Dana caught it. She looked at Eleri who was also appeared a little disturbed by Christina’s “methods.”

  “She’s doing what I told her to do. If you have an issue with that, you take it up with me.” She’d gone mother hen on them and all Donovan could do was nod. But Dana wasn’t done. “When I met Christina, she could make you think you were holding a baby dragon in your hand. Now she can make you think you’re on a different planet. Like everything else, it’s a skill. And you can have your issues with it, but we have to trust her integrity. She can get suspects to talk faster than anyone else, she can talk a jumper off a ledge every time, and she can neutralize a hostage situation faster than any negotiator.”

  Donovan felt his gut twitch at Dana’s casual use of the word “neutralize.” Did Christina just make the perpetrators turn and shoot each other, effectively ending the hostage crisis? He didn’t know.

  Dana caught his questioning look.

  “You want to be upset, be upset. You don’t like it, fine. But I’m standing over the body of a man who died on our watch. You want to question LeighAnn the usual way, then the next person who dies is on your head.”

  Well, fuck a duck, when she put it that way.

  “Besides,” her voice was softer now, “you can trust it. If she pushes you too long or changes too much, you’ll start to notice the cracks. She can’t override you if you’re watching out for it.”

  That didn’t quite match Christina’s own story about having the whole school vote her prom queen or her quarterback boyfriend dating her for years, but Donovan held his tongue while his brain ran with the idea that Dana was taking up Christina’s defense and maybe she didn’t even know what her partner was truly capable of . . .

  “So, tell me about this woman? Eleri said someone escaped?” Dana deftly changed the subject, and while it didn’t alleviate his fears, his stomach did right itself.

  “She went through the back woods here to get off the property.” Donovan pointed into the trees at what could be called a “trail” only in the most generous of terms.

  “She went quickly—hence the idea that she was escaping.” Wade added as Dana frowned.

  “Dumb question, but how can you tell she was moving quickly?”

  Donovan watched as Eleri quirked a brow at Dana’s question. Eleri knew the answer because she’d sat him down and asked it all before. Partly as a need-to-know about his skills and partly because she was just disturbingly curious about it as a scientist. She didn’t answer the question though. Her phone must have pinged because she pulled it out of her pocket. The happy/disappointed look that crossed her face could only mean it was Avery on the other end of the line.

  Springtime meant hockey playoffs and Avery Darling’s team—the North Dakota Executioners—had made the post season. Just barely. Donovan expected to be watching Eleri watch the game that evening. If they could get past the case in front of them. Her face said she didn’t expect it.

  He turned his full attention back to his new boss. “The trail is more spread out. The smell gets thicker when a person pauses in one place. All that can be bothered by wind and time, but this one is relatively fresh and light. Also, being in the woods helps stop the winds from spreading it, but lets animals get at it and more smells interfere.” He’d been rambling, so he shut up. Then he added, “She had the hydrogen smell on her. She was in there with the fire.”

  “Something’s off, though,” Wade added, “but my brain’s not putting it together.

  Dana didn’t seem to care. “Tell me when you put it together.” Turning abruptly, she started issuing orders. “We are heading out. Getting to a hotel. You two are showering.” She eyed Wade and Donovan, then herself. “Hell, all of us are showering and reconvening about twenty minutes after we check in. I think I hear our CSI people pulling up. Then we’ll go interview LeighAnn Arvad.”

  No one argued. Donovan, for one, was looking forward to that shower. What he found out thirty minutes later was that there were no hotels in any reasonable distance of this place. And that the motel they ended up at was only able to get them a chain of rooms at the far corner after cleaning a room that had been abandoned and not yet taken care of. Christina volunteered to take that room. Neither he nor Wade, with their extra sensitive noses, volunteered to take that burden off her shoulders. So it was that they spent twice as long waiting for the rooms they’d been promised as they got to actually get ready. Dinner didn’t happen. Not then.

  Donovan sighed and asked Wade if he’d ever put his finger on what was wrong with the scent trail in the woods. Neither of them had figured it out yet, but something was off.

  ELERI’S STOMACH WAS REBELLING, even though she stood in a simple pose with her arms crossed. Even though she was watching the interview with LeighAnn Arvad and not even participating in it. Something about Christina’s override made her gut churn. She didn’t know if it was something leftover from when Christina had done it to her, or if it was just about being in the room with it.

  Maybe it was something a bit off in perception versus physiology—the way a person could get sick from wearing glasses that tilted the room. Or maybe her body was picking up on the override in some way and her stomach reacted. That was possible, Donovan had said he had it, too. Or maybe it was just the idea that what she was participating in was so vile and invasive that her stomach twisted. It was like having to watch someone get abused and doing nothing. She didn’t have it in her to not jump in. But she was holding back now.

  She was also extremely hungry.

  She was agitated.

  LeighAnn Arvad was not. Eleri told herself that the serene state Christina created in the woman was good for her, calming her blood pressure and all the physiological alterations that came with shock and sudden grief. At least, that’s what she kept repeating in her head like a mantra.

  LeighAnn Arvad, on the other hand, was telling everything. She told how they couldn’t conceive. How so
metimes Leroy drank too much but she loved him anyway because he’s “a good man!”

  It sounded like someone had been telling her he wasn’t.

  He was a long haul trucker and she was a waitress at a local stop called the Waffle Pit. She recommended it. Eleri thought she’d do her best to avoid any food source with “Pit” in the title. But the longer the interview went on, the hungrier she got and the more she started considering it.

  Dana leaned in, talking to Eleri in a low voice, despite the fact that they were beyond the two-way glass. There was no way LeighAnn could hear them. “Is she telling the truth?”

  Eleri almost balked. She wasn’t a human lie detector. Then again, Donovan kept telling her she was more than she’d thought. She was better at these things than she gave herself credit for. She changed the topic. “When do we get time off?”

  “Two days, three from now? I don’t know. Why?”

  “My grandmother is just over an hour from here.”

  Dana took a look at her. Must have seen the wear on her and for once Eleri didn’t bother to hide it. “We have a good team. We’ll get you the time. Do you need to take Donovan?”

  Well, shit. Eleri wasn’t prepared for Dana to be perceptive and nice about it. “They’ve communicated before, but never met. It would be great if he could go.”

  “I’ll see what I can swing. I mean there’s five of us. And I’m hoping we aren’t neck deep in the shit yet.” Dana sighed.

  Eleri held out what she had. “I’m pretty good at telling when people are lying. I don’t think she is. You can also put Donovan or Wade in there. They can smell it.”

  Dana raised an eyebrow, then sent Wade in to literally sniff out the situation, before telling Eleri and Donovan to get the hell out. That was it. Just in a heartbeat, she had leave time to go see her Grandmere. And she found she needed it.

  It took an hour to get a rental car, and the only place to eat while they waited was . . . The Waffle Pit. But driving to her Grandmere’s house, Donovan reading and researching on his tablet in the passenger seat, already made her feel lighter.