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

by A. J. Scudiere

  Dana shook her head. “Of course the residue on it changes. We think different shampoos and stuff. But it could be one person staying in hotels.” She shrugged. “The big kicker is what turned up at the Aroya house.”

  Dana turned and put her hands on the table on either side of the box. “This was found under the floor boards.”

  She pulled out a pocket knife and began cutting the tape. “It’s a baby book. Peter and Mina Aroya had a daughter.”

  33

  Eleri stared at the box, not sure if she was hallucinating.

  She’d slept less than four hours so it was possible. That was all the time Dana had allotted them. It was fair, except her body had disagreed with the concept of rest. She’d woken up in a damn pentagram again. This time: socks. White, balled-up sock pairs on the floor around her. Too perfectly spaced to be anything other than another symbol. So now she didn’t trust her eyes any more than she had when she’d woken up.

  The baby book was thick and heavy, the cover purchased and the pages added. Before she knew it, Eleri was on her feet, crowding Dana for a better look. Luckily, the senior agent didn’t seem to mind.

  Carefully, Dana unboxed it, pulling out three loose pages. They weren’t baby book pages but rather information the agents at the site had added. They showed the layout of the house and a mark where the book had been pulled from beneath the floor boards.

  “Did she die?” Eleri asked. When Dana shook her head, Eleri added, “Because there was no evidence of a child in that house. None. No pictures, no toys . . .”

  She looked to Donovan who spoke up in agreement. “You would think there would be something. A piece of clothing. A picture, even a framed ultrasound. People do that. El’s right. There was nothing.”

  Dana flipped through the pages quickly. “It goes right up to about age . . .” She checked inside the front cover, then back. “I can’t tell. There’s no birth date. No hospital pictures. No dates. Anyway, the girl looks about thirteen? Fourteen?”

  “So possibly not dead.” Eleri looked over Dana’s shoulder and checked the picture. The girl looked a lot like Mina Aroya. Just lighter hair, like her father.

  Dana found a good page and read out, “Grace Faith Aroya.”

  “That’s a little heavy for a woman who came from an atheist country . . .” Wade commented off-handedly.

  Christina turned to him. “Maybe she found God. She was here a long time. Lots of people here want to help you find God.”

  “Good point,” he conceded.

  Eleri picked out more loose pages from the bottom of the box. As she flipped through she became more appalled. “Under the floorboards” had been the wrong term. There was a trap door in the floor of the closet; the photos were clear. A staircase led downward into a room that resembled a storm shelter. Inside it were toys. Bean bags. A bookshelf with children’s books. A rack with clothing. Her stomach churned.

  “Looks like the storm shelter where they kept the records at Atlas.” Donovan said from where he’d been looking over her shoulder. She hadn’t even heard him come up behind her.

  “I was thinking the same thing.” Silently, she passed the photos to Dana, who’d been engrossed in the baby book.

  “They hid the daughter.” Dana marveled. “Completely hid her. Like Anne Frank in the attic. Only under the floor.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.” Eleri repeated her words of a moment ago.

  Dana looked at the photos for another full minute, carefully soaking in the images. Then she passed the book to Christina and Wade. “You do that when you’re hiding a person from someone or something. But what were they hiding the daughter from?”

  Eleri looked to Donovan only to find him looking back at her. She took a deep sigh. “Atlas.”

  “What?” Dana asked.

  “Atlas.” Eleri repeated, feeling like she was doing that a bit much. “Peter Aroya is one of the program ‘graduates.’” She said it though the word made her want to shudder. “Any child of his would be of particular interest to the project.”

  “You think Dr. Kellogg was following his ‘graduates’ around and waiting to see if they had kids?” It was clear Dana was trying to process all of it.

  “I’m confident of it.” Donovan spoke before she could.

  Eleri agreed. “I’d hide my kid from him, too.”

  “Shit.” Dana let it out like a low whistle. Her phone gave a subtle beep and she pointed at Christina. Her turn to check on Bethany Kellogg.

  They all stayed silent while Christina left the room briefly. Whatever was happening, whatever Mina was doing, they weren’t letting her get at anyone else.

  As the door closed, Dana turned to Donovan. “Could the daughter be the woman with Mina? Would they smell alike?”

  Wade sat up straighter at the table and Donovan leaned back, letting the other wolf field this one. “No. We’d be able to smell the family line probably, but they wouldn’t smell like the same person.”

  “So maybe Mina just uses her sometimes. Like when she needs an extra agent.” Dana mused out loud. “Maybe the daughter went in to buy the stuff at the convenience store.”

  Donovan shook his head. “She would have smelled different. And I smelled those two agents who stood guard the first time.” Eleri watched as Wade nodded in agreement. “I smelled one woman in the room.”

  “The daughter could be pretty tall by now.” Dana added.

  “Sure,” Donovan agreed. “But she’d smell different.”

  “Shit, I don’t know.” Dana leaned back, not down for the count, but out for a moment.

  Eleri looked around the room. “I think the big question is: If Mina’s out killing people, where is her daughter now?”

  ELERI FOUGHT the urge to sink to the floor, sit, and put her head in her hands. She’d been standing in this hotel room hall for three hours and she had three more to go. She was wearing a full suit, a wire in her ear, and the bored expression of a federal agent standing guard.

  The devil on her shoulder told her to sit down. She was going on fewer hours of sleep than meals in the day and, besides, there was another agent on the other side of the door. His name was unimportant, his stance was solid if a bit arrogant. He liked this. He liked being the badass in his black, tailored suit. He liked being ready to take down the room service clerk if he looked a little too sketchy.

  Eleri, on the other hand, had had enough of this shit.

  The problem was that the last set of agents hadn’t included a NightShade agent. It hadn’t included one of their team. Thus a pair of women, posing as agents had managed to jack that up and murder their charge. The two agents who’d gone home had been thoroughly interrogated. They’d been put through polygraphs. And despite the physical evidence against them, they were coming up clean.

  Plus, they’d been thrown together for the detail. That was common. One shady agent would have a hard time working through an unknown partner on an assignment like that. So, while they had met each other for the first time about fifteen minutes before their detail started, they told identical stories about what had happened. And in spite of hours of interrogation, guilt, and hunger, neither story had deviated. But there was no call into the branch to check badge numbers and names on the replacement agents. Just the one call that hung up, and the return call five minutes later. Analysis showed that call had been picked up while the female agent had been in her car. She hadn’t mentioned the replacement agents, because she thought she’d just talked to the center about them. And Dr. Benjamin Kellogg’s watch had been checked, despite extensive damage, one of the techs managed to re-align the hands. This put the fire that killed Kellogg stopping the watch less than fifteen minutes after both those agents were proven to have left the scene.

  Eleri felt her teeth grind.

  She couldn’t sink to the floor. The angel on her other shoulder told her a life was at stake. The devil reminded her that life belonged to Dr. Bethany Kellogg, who had proven to be no better of a person than her father or h
er brother. So Eleri reminded herself that other lives were at stake and if they could catch Mina Aroya, they might be able to save them. She thought of Dr. Bethany as bait and kept her knees straight.

  The rest of the team was back at the motel gleaning whatever clues they could. Not much was coming in after the preliminaries, Eleri knew this because she was getting updates on her watch. Mostly they were things like further analysis showed the hair had matched most of the locations. She found that to be interesting but certainly not damning. Hair was like blood type, circumstantial, but hardly proof.

  She fought a yawn as a couple went to into a room closer to the elevator than where she stood. By using a room farther down the hall, the Bureau managed to keep the surrounding rooms clear. No guests, no staff, just FBI agents.

  No word had come in from Bonnie Kellogg’s safe house either. Nothing other than that nothing was happening there. Maybe being a schoolteacher would save her.

  Bored out of her skull, and desperate to keep from falling asleep standing up, Eleri started patching the pieces together. The existence of a secret daughter changed the playing field.

  A hidden child would be homeschooled. The birth date of the daughter wasn’t listed, but later gaps in Mina’s own medical and work history seemed to reveal a year in which the child could have been born. It would make the daughter about fifteen if she were still alive. Eleri did the mental math and matched it up to Dana’s assessment from the pictures.

  Could Leona Hiller have maybe watched the daughter? Leona Hiller had died in a fire and, aside from living in Rosedeer, Wyoming during the same time Aroyas did, she had nothing in common with them. Her husband had not recognized either Peter or Mina Aroya’s pictures. There were no checks made to Leona Hiller from either of them. But if they were keeping their child from having records, they would pay cash. And Leona Hiller’s off-the-books daycare would have been perfect. Would Leona Hiller have had some kind of records? The house had burned, but someone needed to ask Mr. Hiller to search and search hard. That record could make the difference. He could get closure on his wife’s death.

  That scenario would have meant they hid the daughter at home, but maybe not out and about. That would be odd. Eleri still couldn’t put together why Mina Aroya would kill a woman who watched her child. Would the drugs from the childhood experiments have made her crazy?

  Eleri had been thinking that they were dealing with a calculating woman. What if they were dealing with one who was batshit insane?

  Her other thought was that if the three Drs. Kellogg were all in the same field, then maybe Bethany was the only one left alive who knew anything that had been going on with Mina and Peter Aroya.

  A jolt startled her as her wrist buzzed with a new message. Jesus, she might have been falling asleep. That shouldn’t have startled her. Tipping her wrist slowly up, she read the incoming message from Donovan.

  “On my way.”

  She checked the time and, holy shit, her brain had been wandering for the whole three hours. Nodding to her erstwhile partner, she said, “I’m going in for check. It’s almost time for me to change out.”

  He nodded back but said nothing.

  Eleri turned the knob and found Dr. Bethany Kellogg reading in a chair. Judging from the puffiness around her eyes, her reading hadn’t pulled her attention from the loss of her father and brother.

  “Just checking on you, ma’am.” Eleri stated it coldly, then swept the room, the closet, and the attached bath. All were clear. She was getting ready to walk out when she changed her mind. “Dr. Kellogg. I have a feeling you know far more about Peter and Mina Aroya than you’ve been willing to tell us. Your father is already dead—”

  “Because of your incompetency!” She started up out of the seat, but Eleri glared at her and the woman immediately sat back down.

  Her eyes hadn’t gone glassy black, she knew, she could feel that this was just general “Bad-Ass Bitch” mode and not the surge she’d felt the last few times Donovan had mentioned it. Pushing down her odd thought of “I really am a witch,” she tipped her head. “No. Our agents have been proven to have followed every protocol. We are on better alert now, but you need to be aware of just how knowledgeable and cunning your father and brother’s killer is. If you can help, you might save your own life.”

  The woman snorted, so Eleri bit back a “suit yourself” and left the room.

  When she walked out, the other agent was at guard, and Donovan was striding down the long hallway toward her. He looked sharp in a pressed suit and earpiece. He probably had the volume turned down to nothing.

  Holding her tongue, because it wasn’t the time nor the place nor the company, she didn’t tell him how tired she was or that he finally looked like a real agent. She simply nodded a thank-you and let him take her post.

  She was waiting on the elevator, too tired for the stairs and barely holding herself upright in the manner befitting federal protection, when she heard the scream.

  Her head snapped to the right, only to see Donovan and the other agent rush into the room. The door looked to be open before they turned, and her feet were pounding the hallway carpet before she consciously made the decision to move.

  Grabbing the edge of the doorway with one hand, she used it to swing into the space and see what was happening.

  Dr. Bethany Kellogg stood screaming in a ring of fire. The room blazed as the other agent put it out and Donovan moved with sharp precision around the empty spaces, checking for anyone there.

  Eleri started to enter the room when she felt someone bump her shoulder, but no one was there.

  34

  Donovan watched as his partner of less than one minute doused the room with white foam. Having checked every corner with his eyes, his gun, and his nose, he declared the space safe and went back to grab the screaming woman. She hadn’t quit yet.

  He didn’t care. Donovan simply took her by the arm and hauled her toward the front of the hotel room, into the hallway, as per the protocol they’d designed in case someone got in, in case there was fire, in case the woman survived the encounter.

  Eleri was there; he smelled her before he saw her standing in the door to the hallway. He told Bethany, “I’ve got you.”

  They walked directly across the open space and into the room straight across from the one still a little bit on fire. Eleri stood with her face toward the elevator bank and her back to Donovan and his still-screaming charge. Each time the woman quit, it seemed she was just taking a breath to let fly again.

  “I checked it.” Eleri added. She’d swept this room before coming back for him. Protocol. Teamwork. The other agent was in the other room and would stay there until the fire was out.

  It wasn’t the time to say so, but there was no one Donovan would rather have at his back than Eleri Eames.

  Later he would admit that he’d manhandled their charge, just a little. He would also admit he was sharp with her. But at the moment, he didn’t care. “Shut. Up.”

  She smacked her jaw shut hard enough for him to hear her teeth click.

  Eleri came in behind him, closing the door behind her just as hard. She’d looked tired before, but now she was wired. “You’d better start talking.”

  “Was that staged?” Searing anger oozed from every pore of Bethany Kellogg’s body, but Eleri didn’t react.

  “No.” She said. “It wasn’t. You just got a taste. We have no idea what you’re up against, but I think you do. Start talking.”

  The doctor glared at her.

  “Fine, but I can’t stop this. For all my skills, whatever that was got into a closed room guarded by two federal agents.” Eleri shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

  Maybe it hit the woman then, that she’d be going to her father and her brother’s funerals very shortly. She could be added to the mix if she didn’t change what was happening.

  Donovan reached in his pocket and pulled out his recorder. He carried it with him all the time, a habit borne of being an M.E.

  The woma
n shook her head. “No record.”

  “Record. Or no protection.” He didn’t think he had the actual clout to refuse her FBI agent guards at this point, or even NightShade investigation, but he tried it.

  She crumbled. “My Dad is a pioneer.”

  That was not the word he would use, but he fought the urge to vomit and held his tongue. For a moment, he waited for Eleri to leap on her in a rage at the reverence the woman held for the monster her father was. But out of the corner of his eye, he caught only a nod of “go on.” Eleri was playing poker like a champ.

  Dr. Bethany Kellogg continued. “He created genetic programs that would eventually save the human race. He ran trials at local universities in Arizona. Students signed up because he paid handsomely for their participation in his trials.”

  Donovan fought the wide-eyed blink at the complete and total falsehood of that statement. Was she lying to protect her father, or did she not know about Atlas?

  She looked between them, then continued. “They got some of the early forms of breakthrough gene therapies. A handful of students graduated his program, having stuck through the entire therapy regime.” She waved a hand. “Do you know how human trials go? They can opt out any time or just not show up for the next appointment.” She explained it as though they were agents with no idea what she was talking about. Donovan not only understood human trials, he understood that what her father had done had not met one whit of FDA guidelines. Nor moral ones. He pushed a blank look on his face and nodded.

  He watched as Eleri looked to the doorway, then turned to meet the other agent, keeping him in the hallway as a guard again. Was the thing going to come back? It had smelled like a woman, but Donovan had only started to recognize that scent when he heard the screaming. And there had been nothing there.

  Nervously, Bethany Kellogg told them how her father had stayed in touch with many of the subjects of his trials. When he’d retired, Benjamin, her brother, had taken over. That had been some time ago. She looked away at the floor, then back up at the two of them.