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

by A. J. Scudiere

  He looked further.

  One grandmotherly person was Eleri Llewelyn Hale.

  He couldn’t shake the nagging feeling. Pulling his phone from his pocket, Donovan began typing in the names. It was only a moment before he was looking over his shoulder.

  Llewelyn was the family name of probably the most prominent family in American Witchcraft.

  Seriously? Eleri was running around acting like her hunches were luck yet she had this family lineage. He blinked. Grandmere had said Nathalie—Eleri’s mother—had run from her heritage in New Orleans and had run “right into it” with Thomas Hale.

  But it was all here on the internet. Had Eleri never checked? Did she not know?

  “Donovan!” Eleri’s voice rang out, bouncing off the old lathe and plaster walls.

  “Yes?” He tried to sound normal.

  “I’m heading to Charlottesville to run a few errands and then pick up Avery. Do you need anything?”

  He needed so many things, but he said, “No, I’m good.”

  He’d talk to her when she got back. Damnit, she’d have Avery with her. That wouldn’t do. Donovan turned to the next painting and put “Thomas Hale” into his phone.

  The Hale family was a first family of Massachusetts—Eleri had mentioned that before. Donovan’s heart rate slowed. “Llewelyn” had to be some odd coincidence, right?

  “Rebecca Eames” loaded on his screen. His heart kicked. There was a famous Rebecca Eames—convicted but not put to death in the Salem witch trials.

  Massachusetts. Paintings from 1643. He turned and looked down the hallway as though the ghosts would come for him. He looked at the next painting, unsigned. Undated. John and Sarah Hale.

  John Hale, minister of a church in Beverly, Massachusetts. Donovan pinpointed it on the map. Near Salem. Sarah Hale, accused of witchcraft late in the Salem trials.

  Holy shit.

  Eleri had to know.

  Or did it just not register because she never looked? He’d never questioned his grandparents until much later. He’d never thought his father was different until it had been pushed in his face. Was it possible Eleri didn’t know?

  Now, he itched to run.

  The combination of not knowing enough about the case with now maybe knowing too much about his partner begged him to change. He needed the fresh air. He needed the scents of grass and dirt. He needed to get out of this house of witches.

  He’d made it as far as his room. He grabbed his small pack, stuffing extra supplies in it and mostly leaving it empty so he could put his clothing in, tie it in a tree, and disappear as the wolf for a while.

  He was stepping out the back door and onto the wide patio when his phone rang. He cursed it. For as much as the house resembled Monticello, they must have their own damned cell tower. His lack of ability to escape signal was the most modern thing about the place.

  No name popped up and he didn’t recognize the number or even the area code. He shoved in back in his pocket.

  He was crossing from marble tile to the neat green of the too-tended gardens when it rang again. He looked. Same number. No idea. He put it back in his pocket.

  He was in the tall grass, almost to the woods when it rang a third time. He’d have to answer just to tell the person they had the wrong number. “Hello?”

  “Agent Donovan Heath?”

  He frowned. Not a wrong number. “Yes.” He offered nothing more than the word. The voice . . .?

  “This is GJ Janson. I’m not sure if you remember me, but I have some information for you.”

  21

  “You should have called Agent Eames.” Donovan told GJ when he got over his shock. “She’s the senior partner. I’ll give you her number.”

  He stood in the grass at the edge of the trees, wondering how far he could go before the signal would break and he could just slough off the call.

  “I know, but you’re the one I was studying.” She said it matter- of-factly.

  Shit. Had she figured something out about him? He didn’t speak, just waited.

  “Actually, I have two pieces of information for you. One is just for you.” Again, her voice was earnest, but professional.

  Shit. Then he looked at the phone. “I thought I had your number. Why doesn’t this number log in my phone?”

  “I’m on a burner phone.”

  There were no mirrors nearby but he knew his eyebrows were near the top of his head. “For God’s sakes, why?”

  “Because I don’t know what people know about the case we worked.”

  To say “the case we worked” was strong terminology for the woman who’d been detained by federal agents through a reasonable portion of it.

  “Also,” she started in again, “Given the information about you, I thought you might not want your colleagues listening in.”

  Shit and double shit. His colleagues already knew enough, but he wasn’t going to hand her that. “Go on.”

  “First,” Her voice changed then, becoming breathier, as though she were excited. “I was right about my grandfather. He and his assistant, Shray Menon,” She took a moment and spelled it out for him, “Write that down. They have been following people with your bone anomalies for about thirty-plus years now. I went through some records he doesn’t let me into—” her voice turned wry and Donovan could tell she’d been breaking into her grandfather’s secret stashes somehow. “—and the original bones he found, like yours, were over a thousand years old.”

  Donovan’s heart stopped.

  Of course, his people were old. The stupid legends of moonlight and howling and ravaging villages were old. But silver bullets required guns, and that limited him to about seven hundred years on that legend. Over a thousand years old? He took a second to force himself to breathe.

  As much as the age of the find was interesting, more concerning was the fact that Dr. Murray Marks had been cataloging his species for a handful of decades. “Does your grandfather know anything about what the . . . mutation does?”

  Mutation. What a terrible word. It was a small set of dominant genes that lined up through generations. One of them was sex linked, he thought. Did GJ know this? Did her grandfather?

  “No, but it’s consistent. Once we account for the general stature difference and obvious lack of dental care and proper diet, the bones are identical to yours and the others my grandfather has.” She paused a moment. “But I’ve been studying them as I get the chance—”

  “Does your grandfather know this?” he interrupted her, his heart pounding again.

  “No. He won’t talk to me about it. I’ve skirted the subject a few times, and he shuts me down. When I have solid evidence, I’ll present it to him so he can’t ignore me.”

  Donovan breathed out. So at least GJ didn’t know what he could do. Whether that was because her grandfather didn’t know or because he wasn’t sharing remained a mystery.

  “So,” she continued, “I was looking at the bones, and the things is, the attachment sites for the tendons and ligaments aren’t quite in the right place. I figure the live person would stand and move like a normal person, but also move other ways. Have you noticed anything like that?”

  Damn, the woman was forward.

  “No,” he lied.

  “I’m thinking you should be double-jointed, or something like that. A lot.” She seemed to ignore his “no” answer.

  “Nope,” he lied again. “I’m sure it was just an anomaly on that bone set. Clearly, something was off about it.”

  “No. Not an anomaly. I checked all the bones. Even the oldest set—the thousand-year-old one. It’s from the Haryana province in India—”

  “Haryana is a state.” He corrected automatically. His mother was from the country. He knew little other than what he could find online and the smells of her cooking that had always seemed like home. He shouldn’t have corrected GJ, but it had fallen out. He wasn’t on his A-game. Straightening up, he set his bag down into the grass and looked out at the blue sky, turning his focus so
lely to the voice on the line.

  “Okay—it was found in Haryana—but it has the same anomalies in the tendon and ligament attachment points. Yours must be like that, too.”

  “Not that I can tell.” He tried shutting her down again. “What else?”

  “That’s it. That’s what I have for now.” She sounded disappointed. Good. “Honestly, I was hoping you’d say you were double-jointed or something that I could point to as a diagnostic. All I have are the bones. I don’t know if it’s genetic, or a disease, or something developmental—like the mother ate or did something at some certain point of pregnancy. I was hoping you’d have ideas.”

  Oh, he did. But he wasn’t sharing them. “Is that it?”

  “On the bones. Regarding the hospitals in Michigan and Arizona, I have other information.”

  “Hospitals?” He barked the word out on a laugh. That was a far too kind interpretation of the buildings in their last case.

  “Okay, wrong word. So, I went and made myself a volunteer at the assisted living facility where Dr. Benjamin Kellogg is now being cared for. The thing is, Kellogg is a new last name for the family. He used to be Dr. Benjamin Schwartzgartner.”

  The name hit him like a truck. His A-game was long gone. Where was Eleri when he needed her? He blurted out, “You what?”

  “Look, my thesis is in shambles, my grandfather is hiding the find of the century from me and everyone else, I was detained by federal agents and only set free without charges because I was helpful. My father thinks I’m wasting my time getting a graduate degree. So I told him I needed a gap year to go find myself.” She rattled it off as though everyone had the money and family support to just wander off to a new state and volunteer at an old-folks home.

  “So you thought you’d play amateur sleuth on an FBI case?” She was too smart to be this mental. But he’d met people like that, all brains and no common sense.

  “Well, I’m getting somewhere. I cracked some of the code last time.” She sighed, signaling a stop in her forward momentum. He waited her out. “Is it wrong if I want to consider becoming an agent?”

  His head jutted forward in surprise, as though she were sitting in front of him. He was going to get whiplash from this call. “I have no idea what to tell you, other than Agent Eames would clearly be the better person to talk about on this one.”

  Feeling the early stages of a headache, he reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose, then rubbed at his temple. He would have rubbed both, but one hand had to hold the phone for this god-forsaken phone call.

  “Okay.” She conceded and he wondered if she was done.

  She wasn’t.

  “So, I’ve been talking with Dr. Kellogg. He’s not all there, but he says some things repeatedly. He says he has thirty-plus children. Ben Jr., Bethany, and Bonnie are all names he repeats and the nurses agree those are his three children. I’ve met Bonnie and Ben Jr. More on that in a minute.”

  Oh good, she was parsing out the info now. What in God’s name did she have?

  “But he also lists William, Valerie, Sarah, Peter, Amanda, Roy, Jason, Brett, Chloe and a handful others. The nurses say he’s making it up, but he says the same names over and over.” She sucked in a small breath. “And I get why they think he’s making it up. He sometimes says his kids are named Kilo and Echo and Zulu.”

  This time Donovan sucked in a breath. Shit. She was going to be the death of him. Those were names of the kids in the Atlas and Axis programs they’d discovered. They’d been listed on invoices under military lettering codes. “Are you seriously just sitting there and talking to this old man and sifting information out of him?”

  He hoped to the high heavens she wasn’t doing anything dangerous. Then again, he’d met her. She probably was. She was going to get herself killed. Then him and Eleri.

  “That’s it. I read to him at reading time; I read to a lot of the patients. Just him more than the others. And he talks. Okay,” her tone changed suddenly from defensive to excited. “I got him to talk about some of the kids. He even called them ‘graduates.’ They have to be Axis and Atlas graduates. Right?”

  “Probably,” Donovan conceded.

  “You should write this down.”

  “I can’t. Text it to me.” The headache bloomed across his whole head. His run was shot to hell, and he did not look forward to relaying this call to Eleri. Plus, how was he going to tell GJ that he wasn’t writing anything down because he was standing at the edge of the trees, wanting to go for a run in his alternate form, because, despite his lies, she was right? He wasn’t quite human.

  “Texting it doesn’t seem safe.”

  “You’re on a burner and I’m on an FBI phone. Text it when we finish.”

  “Okay,” she sighed, “you’re the boss.”

  It was the only reasonable thing she’d said. Now if she could just act like he and Eleri were the bosses, things would be a lot better.

  “Well, I met Ben Jr. He’s pretty nice. Get this, he’s a geneticist like his father. A human alternate splicing specialty geneticist.” She sniffed like she was thinking something distasteful. “I played dumb around him. Just a girl volunteering, you know. And I overheard him say he was keeping tabs on several of them.”

  “What?” That was it. He was going to have to call Eleri and shut down the two days she had with Avery and they were going to have to examine an old case. Part of him was glad. Their Senior Agent in Charge Westerfield had shut that case down quickly. Too quickly.

  “Yes, I’ve tried to look up some of them, but I’m having trouble. I have four names for you. That’s why I’m calling.”

  He couldn’t speak. She had street names of some of the graduates of a vicious government program. Then his brain clicked. “First names don’t go very far. They all sounded generic.”

  “I know, that’s why I have . . .” She paused, his sensitive ears picking up the sound of paper rustling, “Sarah Vanguard, Chloe Mercer, Peter Aroya, and Jase—”

  “What did you say?” Donovan demanded, his heart about to pound out of his chest. “What was that last name?”

  “You didn’t let me finish. Jason Krupp.” She sounded offended but holy shit.

  “No, the one before it.” Blood beat heavily in his ears, his heart working double time, his breathing picked up as though he had made his run after all.

  “Peter Aroya. Why?”

  22

  Eleri bounced into the room with a smile on her face and the lift of hope in her heart. Avery was in town. For barely forty-eight hours, but she threw the front door open wide, enjoying her boyfriend’s almost self-deprecating awe at the place. “It’s been in the family for generations. I didn’t decorate it.”

  “It’s huge.” He answered with a breath, his hand in hers.

  “That it is.” She smiled up at him as Donovan came into the hallway.

  The look on his face was enough to stop her cold. “What?”

  “Hi, Avery.” He held out his hand and she watched as her partner took a deep breath he managed to keep hidden.

  “Hey, Donovan.” Avery offered a firm, manly handshake in return and a half grin. The two men had never met before, but Eleri had told them so much about each other there was no real need for introductions. “Am I off base thinking that I’m walking through a historical building here?” He said it as though Donovan was a co-conspirator.

  “Nope. I’ve thought the same thing. You should check out the portraits of the ancestors down the hallway.” Donovan tilted his head with a wry grin.

  Eleri huffed. She’d never thought about it, but it was relatively abnormal to have all your old relatives hanging in full-sized oils down your antique-laden hall. “Sure, laugh it up. Everyone loves having their own wing.”

  “True.” Donovan managed a smile, but it didn’t cover that something was bothering him. He said as much in the next breath. “I’m really sorry, Avery. I have to borrow Eleri for some shop talk.”

  “Is it ‘classified’?” Avery grinned as thou
gh he was joking.

  “Actually, it is.” Donovan’s response brought Avery up a little short, and Eleri, too. Had the case already picked up again? Just when Avery got here? Fuck.

  “But if you want, head out the back door and hang a right. There’s an old horse barn and Wade’s building a flame thrower.” Donovan offered in exchange.

  “I’m sorry. He’s building a flame thrower? Are you serious?” Avery was blinking now.

  “Yeah.” Eleri finally joined what should have been her conversation from the start. “He’s serious. Wade’s a physicist and a bit of an engineer. He’s trying to reconstruct something from our case.”

  “A flame thrower?”

  “Yes,” She forced a grin. “And that’s all I can tell you. The rest is ‘classified,’ as they say.”

  “Well, then, at least I’ll be entertained.” He headed out the double doors toward the back. She could see him framed in the old white paint, through the leaded glass that remained from possibly the original builder. His suitcase remained in her car, no talk yet of unpacking or bringing it in, and Avery had already been dismissed.

  “What is it?” She could have been mad, but she trusted Donovan. He wasn’t underhanded, didn’t deal dirty, and he wasn’t trying to ruin her break. Something must be up.

  “Aside from the ancestors in the hallway?” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder and looked at her as though she should know something. Then he said, “You’ll never guess who just called me.”

  Eleri thought about it for a minute. He looked perturbed. That wouldn’t be Grandmere, plus she was more the type for a cryptic note. It wasn’t Westerfield, Eleri’s phone had stayed silent. She went for a long shot, trying to bring some levity to the situation. “GJ Janson?”

  “I hate you.” He said it without inflection and for a moment she reveled in her correctness.

  Then she realized what he’d revealed. “GJ called you? Whatever for?”

  “Because she found a thousand-year-old skeleton like me. And she stole records from her grandfather’s journals. He’s been studying my kind for thirty-plus years, apparently.” His sarcasm oozed. Donovan was not happy. “And she also just happened to find another anomaly in the ligament and tendon attachment points—it goes back to the ‘super old’ skeleton, so it’s ‘scientific’.” he used air quotes and what she assumed was his best approximation of a teenaged-girl-on-phone voice, though GJ Janson had never sounded like that. “She seems to think I’m probably double jointed or something like that.”