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

by A. J. Scudiere

He’d found something.

  He offered a short bark, pawed the ground hard enough to leave a mark and turned around. Donovan followed him as though he’d spoken pure English and Eleri raised her eyebrows behind their backs. Werewolves. Neither man would appreciate the thought. She trailed them, but nearly bumped into Donovan when Wade stopped. They hadn’t gone very far.

  Another short bark. Wade pointed with his paw again.

  She didn’t see anything. It seemed neither did Donovan. Wade pushed at the ground again, and this time she spotted a small hole near his paw, about a half inch in diameter. Snake hole? Some small rodent? A big bug?

  Satisfied, Wade walked a foot away. He pointed out another one. Then another one. They were odd. Perfectly round. Straight down. Eleri felt her brows pull in. She should recognize this.

  Wade walked further away, over toward where several of the holes had been dug. For a moment, Eleri peered down into one, then the other. It didn’t appear anything had been removed, but that might be hard to tell. Sometimes people buried cash in their back yard. She didn’t know.

  Another short bark came from Wade and she realized he was trying to get her to pay attention. “Sorry,” she apologized and come over to see he was pointing out more of the same holes.

  Then he went back to the spot he’d marked, sniffed the area again and began digging. Eleri looked to Donovan who shrugged and looked back at her. “He smells something.”

  Though he didn’t stop digging, a sharp retort of a bark came from Wade. Even Eleri could understand it. Yes. He smelled something.

  “Do you smell it?” Eleri asked Donovan even as she scooted to his side, taking advantage of the shade he offered as the sun got warmer. They still had to hike out of here.

  He looked down at her, his droll expression letting her know that he knew what she was doing. “Not with this nose.” He said it as though she should know that.

  They waited a moment, and when nothing happened except that Wade had made a shallow trench in the ground, Donovan offered to help. “There’s a shovel over there. I can help?”

  The noise he got in reply was clearly a “No.”

  Eleri stepped back and went to look at the holes in the ground again. As she searched, she found far more of them than just the ones Wade pointed out. They clustered around the dug up spaces and she felt pieces of her brain almost slide into place. “Donovan!”

  “What?”

  “The holes!” She grinned. “We use them to test the ground. He was using a pointed piece of metal bar to test the ground for softness.”

  Donovan nodded. “So, he was looking for something buried, either harder or softer than the natural dirt pack.”

  “Right.” Eleri crossed her arms and grinned. She looked around the yard at the holes. They were small. Kellogg had been looking for something he’d lost.

  A bark came from Wade as he stepped back, his paws filthy from digging. He looked up at them expectantly, so Eleri stepped forward.

  As she looked down, her heart sank. She didn’t like what he’d uncovered. It looked like a tangle of tiny roots and a smooth rock. “Shit.”

  She was pulling a pair of latex gloves from her back pocket before she even realized she was doing it. Wade stepped back as did Donovan, letting her get down on her hands and knees. She was going to be as dirty as Wade.

  It took her about fifteen minutes before she was satisfied—though that was probably the wrong word. Leaning back on her heels she looked around to find her partners.

  Wade sat, naked, his arms resting on his knees, clearly exhausted. “Put some clothes on.” She told him, but mostly she was berating herself for missing yet another change, so damn close!

  Donovan was already leaning over her, looking at what she’d uncovered.

  “Oh shit.” The words rolled out of his mouth.

  “Yeah.” She agreed. Wade had smelled it. No one had to be told.

  The tangle of tiny roots was hair. And when she pushed and rubbed the dirt out of the way, she’d revealed the round surface and eye sockets of a human skull.

  26

  Donovan stared up into the bright klieg lights and felt himself sway. This job had gotten infinitely worse today. His only consolation was that the decomposition of the body made it certain that the man had not died on their watch. This one wasn’t their fault.

  He’d been on the phone calling Dana and explaining the whole thing to her. He usually would have simply followed Eleri’s orders, which he already knew would have been as casual as “get us a team. ASAP.” Dana’s orders however, were more precise. They also included a conversation stating that she’d requested and been given all their paperwork from the Atlas case. To which she told him, “You got shafted on this one. Not even being able to tell the families you found their children. Not getting to really close the case.” Then she was regular Dana again, explaining to him how she wanted the scene contained.

  Donovan found all that very funny. There was no one out here to contain. Until they set up the lights, no one would have any idea they were even here. Still, he got into the kit they always carried and dutifully tried to roll out yellow tape around the entire perimeter of the house.

  Eleri asked him what the hell he was doing. Then he ran out of tape. So he’d limited it to running down the property line at the road side, and staking a wide space around the body.

  In a few hours, an FBI team arrived with a cadaver dog—who ironically kept finding him and Wade. The handler appeared embarrassed, saying, “I don’t know why she keeps doing that!”

  Donovan just smiled. At first, Wade laughed at him until the female dog had put her nose to the ground, sniffed a neat trail around the yard until she hit Wade’s foot, then dutifully sniffed right up his pants leg to his crotch. At which point she sat and alerted.

  Donovan had almost bitten into his tongue. The unintentional comic relief of the dog was the only thing making the long night bearable. Though the swarming bugs didn’t bite him, they were still obnoxious. He was pretty sure he’d inadvertently swallowed one. There was nothing to eat but water and energy bars and after the fifth he was convinced they were not giving him any energy. He was tempted to curl up under one of the nearby trees and sleep.

  Forcing himself the two slow steps necessary, he planted himself at Eleri’s side. “Why are we still here?”

  “Because we’re in charge.” Her voice was as dead-to-the-world flat as his was. She’d been down in the ditch digging up the bones while they waited for the team. She’d brushed at the dirt with a soft broom from a cheap dustpan set. It was her favorite—which he’d learned at one point when he suggested it was so dirty she just throw it away. He was surprised now that he hadn’t gotten her black-eyes-of-anger response for that.

  He figured they were lucky they hit the skull first. A little off and they might have missed the body. But they wouldn’t have. With Wade in wolf shape, his nasal cavity was wide open, he could sniff a decaying body as well as any cadaver dog. And he didn’t have to be trained to do it. They wouldn’t have missed. Wade might have even been able to tell head from feet when he smelled it and set them to digging in the most valuable place. Foot bones were a bitch to reassemble.

  Periodically, the team would call out something. They’d gotten the whole top layer of the body exposed. Two bright yellow strings lay on a perpendicular, staked and leveled, holding court above the body. They existed to orient the photos to north-south and east-west and then to measure down to determine the depth at which different body parts had been buried.

  “Come look.” One of the experts called over. Eleri popped to life, scrambling to get to the hole and look inside yet again. “What do you say?”

  “Same thing I said with the skull. The clothing also supports the conclusion this is a male,” Eleri told them, her eyes laser sharp now. “The shape of the skull is non-definitive, but the blonde hair would indicate at least some Caucasian ancestry or that he dyed it.”

  Eleri lowered herself to her knees and pulled
on yet another pair of gloves. This time there was more dirt pushed away in a slurry of mud made as the team kept washing the skeleton. The water helped to clear and clean the bones without damaging them, but the mud was a mess. She put one finger under the upper teeth where the lower jaw had been removed and stored already.

  “No shoveling,” she reported. “Shoveling” of the teeth indicated ancestry, but it didn’t do anything to identify this man as Peter Aroya.

  The tech nodded at her, then pointed again and again. “We have a few things. Here—” she pointed to his ribs. “There’s a neat hole in the shirt. Looks to have burn marks around it, but it’s too old for that to be evidence alone. So now that we’ve more dug out, I can tell you there’s a matching mark on his ribs.”

  “What?” This time Donovan—who’d been listening only half awake—throttled to full alert and peered down into the hole. He’d been expecting no marks. Whatever Mina Aroya was doing, it wasn’t leaving any evidence they could find. So why did this guy have a mark. “Knife?”

  A good stab to the ribs was an effective way to kill someone.

  “Knife?” Dana’s voice startled him. Though he could recall the sound of a car pulling up, he hadn’t really registered it. He hadn’t really registered any of it until now. Christina trailed behind her, quiet but present. They both looked fresh enough that if he’d had the energy, he would have shaken them for it.

  “Nope. Bullet.” Eleri said from where she hovered over the body. “And look.” She didn’t seem at all startled to see Dana and Christina here.

  Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. Though when he looked around, he realized that Wade had gone to sleep in the passenger seat of their empty car. He didn’t know if that made the man smart, lucky, or what. Donovan only knew he was jealous.

  His thoughts pulled back to the hole in the ground and dead body in the hole.

  “See the side here?” Eleri again pointed to where the techs had most of the skull unearthed. It sat on a pedestal of dirt, the rest carved away, giving it a creepy, floating look. “That’s another bullet hole. And back here—” she moved to the other side, almost to the back, but Donovan could see the damage through the empty eye socket. “That’s the damage of an exit wound. I’ll want to do a full report, but that’s a bullet to the brain.”

  “That’s a cause of death,” Dana mused confusedly. Her confusion seemed to make techs wonder. In the regular world, this was all normal. Bullet to the brain was a reasonable cause of death, and honestly, if you were going to bury a man in someone’s backyard, your having shot him in the head was a good reason to do so. But in the NightShade world, in the world where this woman was running around with a damn flamethrower killing people out of fear and nothing else? Then a bullet to the brain and a normal backyard burial were very confusing, indeed.

  Donovan was about to declare himself beat, but Dana made his morning worse. Or better.

  “We need to get out of here, team. They can finish this up.”

  Eleri started to protest and Donovan understood. It was her body. It was probably hard enough on her to not be doing the digging herself. But she didn’t get a chance to say anything, Dana gave out even more startling news.

  “We have Dr. Benjamin Kellogg Junior in custody.”

  ELERI WOKE to her phone ringing after just barely two and half hours of sleep. She was supposed to be afforded four. So she ignored it.

  Her phone rang again. Either someone was dead or someone was dumb. Her hand slapped out at the nightstand that was always right beside the bed in these hotels. She’d slept more nights away than in any of her own beds in . . . well, since her Senior Agent in Charge Westerfield had called her at the mental hospital over a year ago and told her she was getting out, that he had a case for her.

  The face of the phone was too bright to register in the near total darkness in the hotel room. The Bureau favored certain chains for lodging for their soundproofing and blackout curtains. Eleri thought about the fact that this was the first one they’d managed, since this killer seemed to favor victims in small towns. Eleri counted them lucky if there was an hourly motel nearby.

  As her eyes adjusted, the horrid noise came again. The ringtone she’d once thought was sweet was going to have to be changed lest she throw the phone across the room. The blurry letters came into focus as her brain did and she scrambled to work her thumb while at the same time coming fully awake.

  “Hey, baby. Good morning.” Avery’s voice came through the line, sweet despite his stupidity.

  “It is neither good nor morning. Why are you calling so late?” She stuttered and corrected herself. “So early?”

  “It’s seven a.m. on the west coast. Unless you’re in Hawaii, it’s morning.”

  “What?” She barely got the word out before she looked at the phone again and saw that he was right. “Shit.”

  “Sounds like I woke you. I’m sorry. I really thought you’d be up.”

  “No, it’s okay. Normal people would be awake.” She was sitting up now, but not fully alert. This was the life she’d agreed to. Hell, it was the life she’d chased down and handcuffed and read it its Miranda Rights.

  “Did you see the game last night?”

  “No.” Her heart turned. She’d promised to watch. If she could. Shockingly, she hadn’t been able to. “I’m sorry. Dead body.”

  It was all she could tell him and even that was probably too much.

  “You get that many live bodies in your line of work?” He chuckled.

  “Sure, but good point, we don’t call them ‘bodies.’” She changed the subject. “Did you win?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s fantastic!” She was truly excited for them. They were in the playoffs. A first for the relatively new team.

  This time it was him changing the subject. “You said normal people would be up by now. But you’re not normal, are you?”

  “What?” Maybe she wasn’t as awake as she felt like she was. Her brain turned it over until it made sense. “No. I’m an agent, we work all hours and nothing is overtime. I’m sleeping because I was on site until four a.m. uncovering a body. I don’t know how to be normal.”

  She was satisfied with her answer, but her senses were pinging her. There was something in his tone that was ominous.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?” This time she asked it with deep concern. She could feel herself starting to distance from the conversation. Was he done with her?

  He sighed, heavy and long and dejected. “I’m not as dumb as I look, Eleri.”

  “I never thought you were dumb. What’s going on, Avery?” Her blood was thinning, running cold. She was sitting stock still, waiting, tense, fully awake now, her eyes glazing as her focus turned inward, ready to curl up in defense. She told herself she did not need this now.

  But Avery had other ideas. “I heard your partner talking to you about your family. In the hallway, at Bell Point Farm. He said your ancestors were witches. Why would you hide that kind of heritage from me?”

  “Jesus, Avery. If you’re going to listen in, do a better job of it. I didn’t know.” She immediately regretted snapping at him. “I’m sorr—”

  “How could you not know?” He pushed over her apology.

  “Why should I? What did your grandparents do for a living?” Apology be damned. She’d had no idea. First Donovan, now Avery? “My parents told me the pictures were of great-grandparents. I don’t even have to look up their names—they stared down at me in the hallway every day when I would go to school.”

  “All you had to do was google it!” He countered.

  “Why would I? Have you googled your grandfather? Or for that matter, your five-times-great grandfather?” She huffed out a breath she hadn’t meant him to hear. There was nothing like a fight in the morning that shouldn’t have been morning. Not yet anyway. “I’ll bet I know more of my ancestors’ names than you know of yours!”

  There was a deep pause and she wond
ered if this was the end. She shouldn’t have told him she’d been up with a dead body. It was a breach of Bureau classified information.

  “You’re right.” He conceded. “I don’t know my great-great-grandparents’ names or jobs or much about them.”

  Good. The thought went through her head followed closely by the thought that she’d won, but at what cost?

  “Are you a witch?”

  “What?” She didn’t even get time to process it.

  “Eleri. You have to look these people up. Your partner is right. Your great ancestors were witches who were tried in Salem and disappeared before being hanged. Not just one. Several of them. And you have a grandmother—that’s not that far back, Eleri!—who’s a Llewelyn.”

  This time when the name came back at her, she understood. She’d looked it up when Donovan shoved the details in her face. It was disturbing how many tangled chains of American witchcraft coursed through her father’s side of the family. Grandmere had been right. Her mother had run from Grandmere’s roots right into just as big a mess. Only she didn’t know.

  “Eleri.” He said it as though he’d said it several times already. “You know what that makes you?”

  “It doesn’t make me anything.” She countered, tired again.

  “It does. You are literally the granddaughter of the witches they could not burn.” He said it with a conviction that shot through her. Something she had not considered before. She wasn’t a strange girl with strange hunches. She wasn’t a psychic. She was the product of her ancestry, a lightning bolt of heritage she could not escape.

  “Eleri,” he pushed again, “Are you a witch?”

  27

  Donovan was sitting at yet another conference table in yet another branch FBI office when Dana’s phone rang. The look on her face said it couldn’t be good. Her eyes closed and she glanced away, her hand coming up to shield her face as though if she couldn’t see the bad things they couldn’t see her. Donovan might have felt worse for her if she hadn’t been his boss and if she hadn’t been about to share the bad news with the rest of them.