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

by A. J. Scudiere

  Eleri nodded and they headed out front to meet Wade. It took another fifteen minutes to get a preliminary set of the day’s video of the people in the hospital.

  “I’m sorry.” The man behind the counter looked genuinely upset. “I can’t get further back than that without getting someone higher than me to unlock it. I think Marsha can’t either.” He referred to the woman who ran the facility. Since the place was part of a bigger conglomerate, Eleri didn’t find that odd.

  Wade nodded at him and passed over yet another business card—they’d been handing them out like Halloween candy. “Call me by this evening, let me know when to expect it.”

  The young man nodded.

  They headed out to the parking lot, having handed the scene back over to the local agents to process. This time, a big black SUV awaited them. Dana must have wanted to look more FBI-like. They did, once again, weapons not drawn but at the ready, hands loose at sides, in case Mina Aroya should present herself. She didn’t and they climbed into the SUV, closing the doors firmly.

  Eleri spoke first. “I think Donovan is right. The fire is definitely not made by a flamethrower.” She looked into the back seat. “I mean, Wade can’t duplicate it, and now? The fire has a perfect edge. I saw it. It happened all at once, the flames were everywhere. The person who can do it, can probably also move freely inside the fire without getting burned.”

  That just made Mina Aroya a hell of a lot more dangerous.

  30

  Eleri peeled her gloves for the umpteenth time that day. She was hungry and both physically and emotionally exhausted. Three different times she’d contemplated calling Avery and coming clean, just saying, “yes, I think I’m a witch” and explaining what she could. All three times her break had been interrupted. The case was too crazy to do anything personal, to have any time for anything other than hunting the killer. Eleri wondered how other agents had families.

  She’d done the autopsy on Peter Aroya’s remains. Donovan, a former medical examiner, had done only a little of the work, because Donovan was used to weighing organs and taking blood and tissue samples. This body had none of that. In his medical examiner days, it would have gone the same way—initial scan by him, then determination that it belonged in the hands of a forensic anthropologist or one of the new breed, like her. Not anthropology, but human forensics as the base. She had far more hard science under her belt than most forensic anthropologists, but she lacked the history component. Still, she preferred it her way. She’d been glad when Donovan had declared his part done and left her alone.

  Well, alone with a dead body and a full report to write by herself. The only important part had been the “by herself” part. The work had been a breeze, given that she could breathe more easily, doing one job she was familiar with, even though it was behind a cloth filter mask.

  Still, the work had been long. She’d written the report, filed it, printed it, and was walking down the hall with it now. It was nine p.m. and she’d had no dinner and couldn’t remember lunch. She’d had a handful of crackers and a candy bar, if she remembered right.

  She hit the conference room to the smells of hot cheese and baked dough and nothing had ever smelled so good.

  “Pizza?” she asked breathlessly as she walked through the doorway. It must have just been delivered, she could feel the heat and see her teammates just starting to serve themselves.

  Donovan nodded. “Didn’t you get my text?”

  She pulled her phone and, sure enough, she’d missed it.

  “I ordered what you like on it. We didn’t want to interrupt you.” He smiled and handed her a glass, an actual glass, with ice and what had to be coke.

  “You are a god among men.” She told him and grabbed a paper plate. Real glasses, paper plates, cheap napkins with the pizza logo pressed into them. She didn’t care.

  No one spoke for probably ten solid minutes. The only sounds were ice clinking, chewing, and stomachs settling. Donovan, then Wade, then Christina each got up for second servings. Eleri had gotten herself three pieces and an extra can of coke before she even sat down. She was not getting up again. As she contemplated the fact that her good diet had gone to hell in a take-out handbasket, she poured more coke over the ice. She did it every minute or so, topping off her drink, keeping it cold and fizzy. About the fifth time, Dana finally addressed the group.

  “I hate to be the one to say it, but we have to work this out.”

  “That’s okay,” Eleri conceded, “I feel five hundred percent more human after pizza. Thank you.”

  Dana smiled at her—a real smile—and Eleri offered one back. “So where do we start?” She asked it as though she was serious but lifted her third slice of pizza and went in for a bite. She wasn’t going to stop eating just because Dana wanted to talk. Thankfully, no one seemed to expect it and everyone was still chewing, drinking, and wiping their faces periodically.

  “We need motive. I can’t figure it out. We think—relatively confidently—that our killer is Mina Aroya.” Dana laced her fingers, resting her elbows on the table top. “But I can’t figure out why. Why would she kill her own mother?”

  “Because her mother let the Russian government experiment on her?” Donovan offered up.

  “Sure,” Christina countered, “but there’s far more evidence that the father sold her into that and the mother protested. Her story says the mother tried to run away with Mina and her father brought her back. Mina would have been early teens, maybe, at the time. She would remember her mother trying to protect her. And her mother was the one who ultimately got her out of the program and out of the country.”

  Eleri had wondered that, too. “There must be bad blood. We don’t have any kind of record of them visiting her, do we?”

  The analysts had done a preliminary check on finances on everyone the team was looking at. Then they went back and combed through years of back taxes, credit card expenditures, everything, to see if they could put anything together.

  Christina shook her head. “They didn’t visit her, but there’s every indication that she visited them. Every year. She had flights and debit card use in Wyoming, in both Casper and Rosedeer when the Aroyas lived there. No hotel charges either. So she was either staying with them or other friends who happened to be in the exact same cities as her daughter and son-in-law. Not seeing them doesn’t make sense. The money trail says she went to them. It looks like they weren’t estranged. Not fully.”

  “What about the other murders?” Dana asked. “Any theories on why she would murder a schoolteacher and a geneticist at another lab and an at-home mom?”

  “I got the geneticist, too.” Christina spoke up. Her pizza was getting cold. Eleri stayed quiet and kept eating. “I missed it on the first pass. The police report from his friends says Burt Riser was dating a new woman—Willa.”

  “So?” Wade asked it, but Eleri watched as it dawned. “She’s Wilemina. We think he was dating Mina? Then she killed him?”

  “When were they dating?” Donovan asked Christina.

  “Just before he died. The friends say he was wild about Willa and they were all waiting to meet her. One friend said he thought he remembered Burt saying his new woman was Russian.” Christina added.

  That was pretty damning. Eleri finally put down her slice and wondered if she’d get to pick it up again. “That fits with my best guess of decomposition on Peter Aroya. I need a forensic botanist to be sure, but the body had a few decent-sized tree roots going through the ribs and around the skull. I think it was there at least two years, maybe longer.”

  “So she offs her husband, takes up with Riser, and offs him, too?” Dana asks.

  Wade hopped. “Kellogg tortured her husband. That one’s relatively obvious. Until you add in that she offed her husband. Why would she both kill him and avenge him?” He took another drink of orange soda.

  “Right,” Dana replied, “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe it does.” Eleri took a deep breath. “I want Wade to check m
y work, but the bullet wound trajectories suggest Mina didn’t kill him. She’s too short.”

  “So . . .” Dana frowned. “Benjamin Kellogg?”

  Eleri nodded. “His height is consistent with the angle of bullet entry.” She didn’t like to draw conclusions from non-proof evidence.

  “Then why wouldn’t he know where the body was buried?” Wade asked the table at large.

  “It’s possible he killed Peter Aroya and left Mina to clean up the mess.” Donovan suggested.

  “Why would she do that? Why not report it?”

  Eleri fielded this one. “Did you see their records? They were practically hermits. They either hated people or they were hiding something. Aside from Peter going to work, and her just occasionally getting out of the house, they didn’t do anything. But more than that, calling the police would mean that she had to say she knew who did it. She would have to admit to some kind of relationship between Dr. Benjamin Kellogg Junior and her husband. If she outed Atlas, she’d probably be killed for it. She probably was afraid.”

  “So she went on a rampage using firepower she got at the hands of the Russian government?”

  Eleri shrugged, she really didn’t know. Those pieces didn’t all fit yet.

  Dana’s next words were world weary and didn’t even have to do with the case. “How did the two of them find each other? Both of them tortured by government experiments. They wind up married to each other. Jesus.”

  Eleri fielded this one, too. As far as she knew, she was the only one in the room with any psych background and any profiling experience. “People with like experiences find each other. There have been experiments on it. For example, if you put two sociopaths in a room of a hundred people they’ll find each other and be best buds within an average of five minutes.”

  “Seriously?” Wade asked, yet another slice of pizza hanging limp in his hands at his shock.

  “Yes. In fact, if you tell them they are the only sociopath in the room, they’ll find the other one faster.” Eleri shrugged. The science of it was disturbing, but understandable on a certain level. “People see something when they find a like soul. I’m honestly not surprised Mina and Peter Aroya found each other. They were probably the only ones they could each trust with the truth about their pasts.” The more she talked the sadder she got about what they’d lost. “So maybe Benji there shot her husband and she went on a murderous rampage.”

  “Maybe.” Dana sighed again. “Either way, we’ve got to bring her in.” She turned to Wade, “What was on the nursing home video?”

  “A whole lotta crap. That’s what.” This time he set down his pizza and picked up his notes. A smudge of red sauce got on the margin but he didn’t seem to care. “It’s a weekday, so even though school just let out locally, not too many visitors. Seven visits to the whole complex that day before the murder. Three separate women at least in their seventies. Any of them could be Mina, but each stayed in the lobby or the restaurant and didn’t go down the hallways. One older man, the same. Two younger, lone men and a single gaggle of teenage girls left of the lobby, but none of them work.”

  “Explain.” Donovan pushed.

  “The video is too rough for faces. It’s pretty much the crappiest thing I’ve seen. Honestly, if this place gets robbed, the video will only prove that they got robbed.” He shook his head. “Mina could have disguised herself as a man—but these guys are taller than she is. Also, each person coming in went face-to-face with the guy behind the counter, so while getting past the camera was easy, getting past him would be hard. He didn’t remember anyone he didn’t recognize coming in.”

  Wade took a breath and continued. “Both the men, alone and at separate times, went down the other hallway—away from Kellogg’s room. There are no cameras in the halls for privacy, but there are cameras at the outside entrances at the end of the hallways. So those men didn’t loop around and come back in the other way. And the girls were teenagers—again, nothing odd from the guy at the desk. They are clearly all chattering with each other like teenagers, and they do go down Kellogg’s hall, but I don’t buy any of them as the killer.”

  Eleri nodded. “It would mean that one of them killed Dr. Kellogg while the others watched, or snuck away and did it, then returned, hoping her friends would leave before the charred body was found. Plus, how would Mina come and make friends like that? Fit in with the teenagers so easily and pass the clerk without him recognizing her picture at all? No way. It’s has too many problems. She’s not on the camera.”

  “No one came in any of the end doors either.” Wade sighed. “Unless she went in three days ago and hid out, she didn’t come in the normal way.”

  Eleri felt all the energy drain out of her suddenly. The case had stalled. They had Benjamin Kellogg and his geneticist sister in custody. The schoolteacher and her family were at home but under FBI surveillance. Agents were combing the assisted living facility. Agents were combing the Aroyas’ home. Agents were still combing the other murder sites where necessary. But no one knew where Mina was.

  Eleri looked around the room. Everyone looked as tired as she did. She spoke to Dana. “I have to get some sleep.”

  “We all do. Let’s wrap it up.”

  Just as they stood, all their phones went off.

  Shit. Eleri looked down at the message, stunned.

  Dr. Benjamin Kellogg Junior was dead. Burned crisp in a ring of fire just like his father.

  31

  Donovan arrived at Benjamin Kellogg’s motel room as close to a panic as he’d ever been.

  Dana broke land speed records getting here and he didn’t even want to think about how Eleri had been thrown around in the back of the minivan. At one point a cop had popped his lights and run his siren and Dana simply flashed her badge out the window at him and kept driving.

  As they pulled up, Donovan watched her approach the officer who’d followed them. She held her badge out as she explained. Donovan pulled his wallet, flashing his own badge as he went by. They had to get in.

  Apparently the two agents arriving for shift reported that the agents they were to relieve were missing. The unguarded body was burned to a crisp in the middle of the room.

  Donovan and Eleri pushed inside first, shoulder to shoulder in the narrow doorway. Neither budged, somehow comfortable wedged in like they were. The room was empty except for the fresh smell of burned human flesh. A human—whether it was Benjamin Kellogg junior or not remained to be determined—was burned to a dark char in the middle of the cheap comforter.

  The Bureau often brought detainees to rooms like this. No one expected the FBI in a cheap motel. With only one door and one window, and often constructed of brick, they were usually good places to store witnesses.

  Two agents stood on either side of the open doorway in the dead dark of night, watching their six. Dana, done with the police, came up and nudged her way in to see between them. That meant looking over Eleri’s head and getting in front of Donovan.

  “Holy mother of God.” She breathed it out reverently.

  This was their second charred body in twenty-four hours. No one had been burned like this before. Donovan shook his head. Was Mina angrier? Upping her game? Or was she simply mad at these two men specifically? Donovan had no idea.

  He turned to Dana. “Can you touch him?”

  “If he’s cooled down,” she replied before muttering, “Not that that’s a problem I’ve ever had to deal with before.”

  Eleri moved to the background with Wade and Christina, their huddle illuminated by the sodium light at the back of the parking lot. Donovan didn’t blame Wade or Christina for not looking. It wasn’t for most people. He stepped back, as it was, no one should be setting foot on the carpet or in the scene. They didn’t want to contaminate what the techs might find. He looked at the agents standing by.

  “Did you enter the room?”

  They both nodded but only one spoke. His appearance screamed “FBI Agent” with his dark suit and neatly cut hair. But that’s
what Donovan had looked like the few times they’d sent him on detail before he was officially inducted into NightShade. It was how they were supposed to look. “We arrived, checked the body and the room to be sure no one was still inside—alive. Then we left and stood guard.”

  Standard protocol. Someone had to go into a scene. You couldn’t assess death just from looking through the doorway, even though sometimes you actually could. If the man on the bed had been alive, the kind thing to do would have been to shoot him. But, knowing what they were dealing with, Donovan was almost certain he’d been dead before Mina Orlov left the room.

  “They’re safe!” Christina announced.

  When Donovan looked at her, confused, she followed up with, “The two agents who were on first shift. They’re almost here.”

  She’d understated it as the first car pulled up just then and the woman climbed out, her badge glinting in the dark as she flashed it. “What’s going on?”

  Her eyes darted from one of the agents at the door to the other. “Who are you?”

  The man on the left glared at her. “Next shift. Protecting the dead victim you abandoned.”

  “No.” She shook her head, managing to look both frightened and stubborn at the same time. She, too, was in a suit and white shirt. Overkill for the heat of the day, but enough to make it clear she was a federal agent.

  Dana pulled her aside and put a hand on her shoulder. Donovan wondered if she could feel the woman’s emotions. He was pretty certain he was smelling them—the cold fear that spiked adrenaline, the confusion that started the churn of stress and cortisol, general sweat and anger that her charge was dead.

  “Please, tell me what happened.” Dana stayed soft, steering the agent away from seeing the scene.

  “We checked him into our custody at three-twenty-two p.m. My partner—he’s on his way—and I arrived early, at about three. We did a thorough sweep of the whole building even though we’ve used it before. We swept the room for bugs, both electronic and organic, braced the windows, checked our weapons. We followed protocol. Then we waited until the two agents who were bringing him dropped him off and we assumed custody until nine p.m.” She took a deep breath and Donovan waited along with Dana. “At about six-thirty our relief team showed up. Early. So we called the Bureau. It was perfect protocol. It was strange, but we called it in. I called it in. I checked badge numbers, looked at pictures, faces, my partner ran his finger along the ID card to see if it had been tampered with. The branch confirmed everything. They’d been sent to relieve us. They wanted us on shifts at twelves and sixes, so they were relieving our rotation then. I went in, introduced them to the charge and we left.”