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

by A. J. Scudiere

  She looked back and forth between them and kept talking. She had to know they were waiting her out. She had to know, but she kept rambling. She was very shaken up for an agent. Then again, she was accused of abandoning her post and letting her charge get brutally murdered. “I left in my own car and my partner in his. There he is.”

  She pointed to the car coming up, and Dana sent Donovan to intercept him.

  Fifteen minutes later, as he saw Eleri escorting the crime scene techs into the room and following them dressed in her own paper booties and hair cover, he returned to Dana. He’d stashed the partner in the car as had Dana with the woman. “It’s a match. Not entirely perfect, but excellent corroboration. He says she called in the badges. He checked them for tampering—there was none. He says he heard the voice on the other end of the call and that it sounded like the Bureau. The agents seemed like agents.”

  “Get this,” Dana raised an eyebrow at him. They stood apart from the action at the door to the room, and could talk a little more freely. “Christina?”

  Christina popped herself into the conversation then. “I called the local branch, their branch, and double-checked the story. She called in, but hung up as soon as the receptionist answered the phone. The Branch secretary called her back five minutes later and asked if everything was okay, as per protocol for hangups. She said everything was fine.”

  “Pull her phone.” The words tumbled out of his mouth, though Donovan knew they didn’t need to be said.

  “I’m all over it.” Dana walked to the car and asked point-blank for the agent’s phone. She handed it over easily along with the unlock code.

  Within about thirty seconds it was clear that she had called the local branch at about six-thirty. And hung up less than two seconds after connecting. A return call from the branch occurred five minutes later and lasted less than thirty seconds. Dana marched over to the car where she confronted the agent, who shook her head vehemently.

  “No, I didn’t hang up.” She was bewildered. “It was a long call. It should show that.” When she reached for the phone, Dana let her take it back. They’d already captured screen shots and plugged in a backup, so no one could tamper with the data.

  “Oh shit.” Her voice wavered. “It does look like I hung up. But I swear I didn’t.”

  Dana, Donovan, and Christina took the phone back and walked away.

  Dana sighed. “That agent is exactly who she says she is and has been assigned to the local branch here in Arizona since she graduated from Quantico. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars, she arrived home right on time—the GPS in the car will confirm it. I’ll bet she walked in the door and didn’t smell like smoke or charred flesh or anything.”

  “You think she didn’t do it.” Donovan said. She was the logical choice. Kill her ward, then lie about another agent.

  “She has already provided solid alibis for other dates—like when Mina’s mother was killed. She was in training in Quantico two years ago when Leona Hiller died. How would she have even made that happen? Leona Hiller died on a Tuesday. That training session never had a Tuesday off.” Dana was aggravated and frustrated at the number of dead leads.

  Christina spoke up, albeit quietly. “She said two agents came to the door to relieve them. Have her meet with the sketch artist to draw them. Have her partner do it, too. Unless they planned this out with serious detail, they won’t be able to fake it.”

  Dana was nodding. “And if they did see someone, we’ll have two eyewitnesses to confirm it.”

  “If one of the women looks like Mina Aroya, that will help, too.” Donovan added, getting on board with the plan.

  In just minutes, Dana had called two sketch artists to the scene. Wanting to keep the agents in her sight, she brought the sketch artists to them.

  Donovan helped Eleri catalog data once they were cleared to touch the body. Eleri even managed a preliminary ID. She’d met Benjamin Kellogg just the once, but she had his wallet and other pictures she could reference.

  She looked up as Donovan stood in the doorway pulling on his own paper cap and booties. “It’s him. I can’t write the report yet, but I’ll be shocked if it’s not.”

  “What do you have?”

  “Ring.” She pointed with her pencil to one curled hand. “Shape of skull. General height and weight. No dental records, but the office reported a few fillings that should be easy to find. Two color-matched composite and one silver in the back molar. All match. Plus, these look like his clothes. We just saw him wearing them. I say it’s a match. This is him.”

  Donovan looked around. “Where’s Wade?”

  “Out in the woods sniffing around, seeing if he can catch a scent.”

  Donovan frowned, hard. “Not as . . .”

  “Nope. We’ll have to leave, let one of you change, and bring you back to make that happen. And we should do it soon.” She looked up at him. “I’d rather not wait until the scene is cleared and the trail may be old, but it’s up to Dana.”

  The last part was stilted, as if she’d forgotten for a moment that she wasn’t the senior partner on this. Donovan nodded and got to work helping with official identification of the body and any clues left at the scene. Shockingly, there were none they didn’t have from every other scene.

  One of the techs informed them, “We have hair. It doesn’t belong to either agent nor the victim. As long as the room was vacuumed before use, this is a lead.” She headed back inside the van and back to work.

  Dana put Christina on making sure the room had been thoroughly cleaned per protocol before Kellogg was kept there. Then she began pulling records from the Aroya house, calling the team stationed there for information, checking for hair samples from the Arvads’ home, from Mina’s mother’s apartment.

  Then, an hour later, after Donovan’s stomach began growling, Wade reported back that he’d followed the smell around the outside of the building but not much farther. Though he’d checked the bulk of trees separating the hotel from the strip mall next door, he’d gotten nothing. However, he did get a hit at the restaurant across the street. He smelled the woman at the doorway, and he’d freaked out some customers asking if he could check their booth. He’d eventually flipped his badge to explain why he was crawling through it and making them get up out of their seats. The vinyl held the smell well.

  Then Christina made an announcement that made Donovan’s stomach flop.

  “The sketches are in, and they match.”

  32

  Eleri looked at the pencil drawings and felt her blood pressure rise. There were four total drawings, done in pairs by two separate sketch artists. Neither of the women were definitively Mina Aroya and neither weren’t.

  It was clear that the agent they were calling “A” and the one they called “B” matched with the two sketches. The A agent—the one who’d stood on the left—was blond. The other was brunette. There were minor differences in the eyes and such. The sets of drawings matched closely enough that it was clear the Agents who were supposed to be watching Kellogg weren’t lying about seeing these two.

  Eleri handed the sketches back to Dana. “Maybe they were paid to leave? That phone call doesn’t make sense. She hung up!”

  Dana shook her head. “I got nothing but the nasty smell of burned flesh in my nose and the squidgy feeling that I’m never going to wash it off my hand.”

  “Ew.” “Squidgy” was not a word Eleri had ever expected Dana to utter.

  The next words out of Dana’s mouth were a surprise, too. “We are heading out to eat.” She told an agent from the local branch and left him in charge of dealing with the crime scene. Mostly this meant telling the motel owner—who’d showed up on site in the middle of the night—that, no, they couldn’t just clean it up and get the room ready to rent out again. Eleri wondered if she could hand him a couple twenties and shut him up, but she wasn’t going to jeopardize the case.

  She wondered when Westerfield was going to issue a kill order on Mina Aroya. How many bodies did the woman h
ave to burn before he did? Then again, they had circumstantial evidence against her, nothing more.

  Dana was informing the agent she was leaving on site that, after they ate, they would come back with a dog. He nodded as though it were no big deal and within a few minutes they were back in the minivan like a big family and off for food.

  Of course, they didn’t eat at a restaurant like civilized people. Eleri sighed her frustration, though she knew it was the right thing to do. She wanted someone to bring her a coke and keep it full. She wanted to have a cloth napkin or even real pressed-alloy silverware instead of plastic. But she smelled a bit too much like burned body to be welcome in a restaurant. And they needed a place to let either Wade or Donovan change.

  At least if they ate carryout at the hotel, she could take a shower.

  Forty-five minutes later the sun was up, she was clean—though she could still smell death in her nose—and fed, and it improved her mood a lot even though her plastic fork had been nearly worthless and she hadn’t slept at all in well over twenty-four hours. She was running purely on fumes and food and was grateful that her boss seemed to notice that.

  Dana sent her with Donovan to be the “dog handler,” and tasked Eleri with gleaning information from Wade while Donovan changed. Then Donovan was thumping his tail at his door and they left with him walking down the hall directly at her side. He was far too big to keep people from being nervous, but the idea of putting him on a leash left Eleri with the belief that she wouldn’t have all her limbs intact if she did it.

  There were three cars for their group and Eleri had the keys for the SUV, which gave Donovan enough space to sit in the back. He pushed past her and climbed across the driver’s seat into the front.

  “Uh-uh.” She shook her head at him. “You can’t wear a seat belt. Back seat.”

  He stared at her, deadpan, and didn’t need words to tell her what he thought of that.

  How had they not had this argument before? She wondered. “If we have to stop suddenly and you go into the dash and break bones, I will not be responsible.” He still glared. She wasn’t having it. “Fine. You stay there. If you do break bones and can’t change back then I’m taking you to the nearest hospital for treatment and explaining everything that’s going on. If that doesn’t work, I’ll take you to the vet.”

  He growled low is his throat but hopped down and let her open the door to the back seat for him.

  Jesus. She climbed in and started the car, heading first to the strip mall. They passed the hotel and saw a crew loading Kellogg’s body into a waiting ambulance for transportation to the morgue. At the strip mall, they climbed out and walked the length of the sidewalk, going into the small convenience store where Donovan scented the woman.

  They caught the clerk just as he was opening up for the day. Eleri held up the sketches and asked the the man if he’d been on shift the evening before. He had been, it was his store, and no, the two women in the sketches had not come in. This answer came only after she explained there were four sketches but only two women—a concept he had problems with. She didn’t know if that was because he didn’t get it or because she couldn’t explain it well having not slept at all the night before.

  “No, no one like that came in here. Not two women. Not in suits.”

  After a few more minutes, Eleri had his name down in her notes, his contact number, and his store info. She also had that he’d been working the cash register off and on since noon, but swore he paid attention to everyone who came in because he had alcohol in the store and didn’t really trust his afternoon help. She asked for the security video. He shrugged and said the camera had been broken for years. Eleri fought a sigh.

  They hit the restaurant across the street and got other information.

  Donovan beelined for the same table Wade had described. He’d not told Donovan. The dual “hit” made her pretty confident Mina Aroya had sat there. But Donovan only put his paw on one seat and shook his head at the other.

  In a booth like that, it would mean only one person sitting in it. Eleri suddenly hated her life. She talked to the manager, who said the waitress who’d waited that table was already home. So Eleri tried her damnedest to conduct the interview over the phone. The waitress only recalled one woman alone around that time. She ate fries and soda and nothing else.

  Eleri asked a few more questions, then the woman said, “Is she wanted for something? Because my cash came up shy yesterday for the first time in years, honey.”

  Eleri wasn’t one much for being called “honey” but the information brought her up short. She asked a few more questions while Donovan sat dutifully at her side. He wasn’t allowed in the restaurant at all, and only her badge had made it happen. In the end, the waitress was missing the same money as the cost of a large plate of fries, a soda, and the tip the woman had left. It had struck her as odd that she would be shy exactly the ten dollars that had been left on the table. It was her only ten-dollar table on the shift.

  Thanking the woman, Eleri hung up the old cordless phone the manager had handed her, then went about handing out her card again. The sheer number of cards she’d handed out could fell a forest, she thought, but shoved it away. They had to catch Mina before anyone else died. Anyone they liked better than Benjamin Kellogg, that was.

  Her brain fried, she packed them back into the SUV, with Donovan no longer trying for a front seat. He must be as dead on his feet as she was. Back at the hotel, she debriefed to Dana, jealous that the others had gone to sleep, but respecting her new boss for waiting up for her.

  Donovan came around the corner just then. He’d walked the hotel hallway in jeans and a t-shirt but no shoes, but no one could muster up the energy to care. He’d gotten dressed—as it were—to come talk to them, then he was likely to strip and fall into bed face first. An act she planned to duplicate for herself.

  “No,” he interrupted her. “There was no smell on the other seat that matched anything at the motel or at the strip mall. She could have been there with someone else. But if she was, that person left.”

  Eleri had nothing to add; all she could muster was a shrug.

  Finally, she was sent off to her hotel room to sleep. There was nothing more to do. Before they made it out the door, Dana spoke up. “We have new information, but it will keep for a few hours.”

  DONOVAN STRETCHED. Sitting in a conference room chair now, his muscles felt used and not fully recovered from changing. In his morgue days, he couldn’t shift to sniff things. There were cameras on his work, on him. If he came in as the wolf, it would have been on film. Here he thought he’d have more options. And he did, but he wasn’t as in control of his shifting as he would have liked. Though he couldn’t get a good sense of smell on things at his old work, at least at home he shifted when he wanted. Now, he was a command cadaver dog and bloodhound. He was nose to the ground, working. He wanted to be running. If he ever caught up on sleep, that was.

  They’d gotten Bethany Kellogg into protective custody inside the Bureau building. She was now in the room just down the hall from the conference room he sat in. Every ten minutes someone got up and opened the door to be sure she was still in there and still safe, despite the fact that she had no bathroom, no windows, and nowhere to get out or in. She was not a happy camper.

  Bonnie and her family had been moved to a more secure location, too, though the agents were still holding out hope that she wasn’t a target because she hadn’t engaged in any of the research.

  Benjamin Kellogg’s wife and two young daughters were in tight custody as well, but again, the agents were holding out hope that they weren’t the target. Eleri had thought to send in a therapist. The kids had lost their grandfather and father in short range and unexpectedly. The mother knew both men had been killed. They had to be terrified. But he hadn’t thought of it. Only Eleri.

  It was his turn now to get up and open the door and check on Bethany Kellogg. He knocked, per protocol, swung the door open before there was an answer and was met by a
glare of epic proportions. He wanted to ask if anyone was hiding on the far side of the bed, but instead, he walked in and swept the room himself. No one was there. Her glare intensified, but she didn’t speak.

  That was why they were rotating that duty.

  He closed the door behind him and returned to the table with his fellow agents around it. It was covered in papers, tablets, laptops, and some box Dana had yet to open.

  Dana was walking around the table, maybe having had enough sitting and spewing out information as though she were a computer generating random numbers. “The hair from the last burn matches hair found at the Aroya house.”

  “That doesn’t mean much.” Eleri managed to say it before he did.

  “Well,” he countered, “It means something but it’s not like a DNA match.”

  “True,” she conceded and Dana started in again.

  “It also matches hair found at the Arvads’ home in Louisiana, and hair at Gennida Orlov’s apartment there, too.”

  Donovan felt his eyebrows go up. “Does it match anyone living in those places?” He pretty much already knew it shouldn’t. Long, caramel colored hair wouldn’t. He’d seen Leighann Arvad. Gennida Orlov had lived alone and had salt and pepper hair.