36
Donovan followed his nose down the hallway. He smelled her.
Wade tucked in close behind him, his own nose confirming Donovan’s unseen diagnosis of the situation.
Whoever she was—Mina, the daughter, or maybe someone they hadn’t considered yet—she was here. She’d been in the room with Bethany Kellogg, and she had moved down the hall past him, though he couldn’t recall her name or face. At the time, he’d thought she must be another agent, there were so many in the throng. Then his nose caught her scent and he followed that.
He saw her duck out the door at the end of the hallway, one of only three entrances into the building. The guard nodded at her with a smile as she left. Not invisible at all.
Donovan pushed through the agents all rushing the opposite way. They’d been breached. Their charge was dead, on FBI property. Only a few of them were hustling his direction. Not so few that her passage seemed odd by any stretch, but enough. It was part of the job. If all the agents went one way in the event of even a full-scale catastrophe, then it would be easy enough to create a diversion. It was still easy enough for someone to slip out.
Pushing past the guard with fewer pleasantries than the woman had exchanged, Donovan heard Wade stay behind.
“Did you know her?” Wade asked the guard and Donovan could only guess that Wade was pointing out the door. Donovan’s own eyes were scanning for movement, looking for people, and specifically for her.
The surrounding area was covered in small hills and low scrub. If she knew the area any better than he did, she could easily hide. Donovan had to admit he didn’t know the area at all. It hadn’t occurred to him to scope it out. Surely someone in the office—or even many of them—were very familiar with the surrounding area. There was a convenience store almost caddy corner. A busy street between. Another street if one went through some scrub and came out the other side. But Donovan had just exhausted his knowledge.
He didn’t have time to go back and ask; he just hoped Wade was on his A-game.
Trailing out the doorway, he put his hand on his weapon. He’d re-holstered it for the run down the busy hall. It wasn’t appropriate to wave it around here in the open. Cars went by on the street. People crossed the intersection to the convenience store. His eyes scanned for cars in the parking lot just pulling out. Women. People who looked out of place.
He didn’t see anything.
As long as she hadn’t gotten in a car and driven away, he could follow her trail. It was nowhere near as fast as spotting her and running after, but it would have to do.
“You got a bead on her?” The voice over his shoulder was Wade’s. A little out of breath, it was clear his partner had come up behind him.
Donovan shook his head.
“Then let’s get to work.” Wade told him, leaning into the Phoenix air and lifting his nose for a quick inhale. Donovan did the same. The low wind was perfect, enough to aim a smell toward them without scrambling it or ripping it apart.
Crouching low so he couldn’t be shot, Donovan occasionally lifted his head and checked over the tops of the cars. He wasn’t sure if he really believed she’d shoot him, but given what the woman had done to her last two victims, he’d almost prefer a gunshot wound. He’d truly prefer that she didn’t see him at all.
He caught her scent again at the side of the parking lot. Just as he was turning to ask Wade if he smelled it, too, he saw the other man nod softly. They walked in lock step several feet forward, then paused, sniffed, and kept going.
Her scent was here. It was fresh, but not current. She wasn’t close by. Or if she was, she was somehow masking her trail. Donovan didn’t think she’d never done it before—not that they were aware of. She didn’t even seem to realize she had the equivalent of dogs on her trail, so there was no reason to believe she was doing it now.
The two men inched forward, then moved faster as the trail got stronger. It took them out the end of the parking lot, as though the woman walked right between the parked cars and kept going. They followed.
Up and over a sandy dune held together by scrub brush, they traced the trail. It headed back into a section of streets that held small industrial buildings. Donovan fought the flashbacks the landscape brought on. The Atlas building had been set into land much like this. Farther away from society than this, but the plants were the same, the small rolls in the land were the same—strip away the diesel and the smell was the same. He kept walking.
They were up and over two of the hills, the scent having scattered a little when they spotted movement.
“Get down.” His own voice barely below human threshold, Donovan knew Wade would hear him but the woman wouldn’t. In unison, they crouched slowly then popped up together.
Two voices in sync yelled, “Hands up. FBI!”
She turned slowly, her own weapon raising up.
Donovan was glad she was listening to them, he’d had no idea she was armed. She wasn’t one third of the way turned to face him when he started swearing. “God-dammit! Sorry El.”
She heaved a sigh as Wade apologized, too. “At least I know I’m heading in the right direction if you two are out here.”
Relaxed now, no longer worried about her own partners shooting her, she let her weapon drop to her side. Donovan kept his eyes darting around. “I can smell her, Eleri. It’s strong. She was here.”
“Really?” Eleri looked between them. “Do you know which way she went?”
He let Wade keep lookout while he walked a tight circle checking for direction. “I’m not sure, but I think this way.” He pointed in between two of the small dunes, back toward a squat building that housed some kind of mechanical shop.
“Then you two head that way and I’ll try the other way.” She was walking off before Donovan could answer.
But she was the senior agent. “Where should we meet back up if we don’t find anything?”
She sighed a moment but didn’t look back at them. “I guess at the office. See you there.” And she headed off in search of Mina Aroya.
Wade and Donovan followed the trail farther. Until Wade growled.
“Son of a bitch! We just made a loop. She looped us.”
Donovan was feeling the lead weight of missing her in his chest and tried another ten minutes to find where she exited the loop. But they came right back where they’d been before. After three tries he gave up. “The scent’s too scattered.”
“I’m not surprised.” Wade shook his head, clearly as disgusted as Donovan was. “The wind kicked up a little. There’s only scrub here to hold the scent. I mean, I can catch it, but I can’t tell which way it goes. If I was in full wolf I could do it, but I don’t see any way to do that now.”
“I guess we admit defeat and head in.” He tried not to let his irritation take his guard down. His eyes darted one way then another, the way he’d been trained. At the time, he’d thought all of FBI preparation a violation of his Hippocratic oath. He hadn’t meant any of it. He’d learned how to shoot, roll, fight, and follow leads along with his Quantico cohort. Though he’d taken the physician’s oath more as fact of training than ruling of his heart, he’d never thought either of them would stick. Yet here he was with a gun in his hand, ready to shoot, and beyond hopeful that the good he did far outweighed the harm.
Wade fell into step beside him as they headed back toward the branch building. They’d come around far enough to head in the side door on the opposite end from where they’d exited. This meant the guard wouldn’t immediately recognize them. They stayed quiet, one of them always watching—and more importantly listening—behind them.
They entered the building and had to check in. Donovan flipped his badge open and passed through security like the pro he’d somehow become. It hit him then, maybe the need to entertain himself while security ran his badge, or maybe just that he’d been wanting to know. “Wade, why did you come back for this case?”
“You haven’t figured it out yet?” Wade almost grinned as he flipped his ow
n wallet open, showing his badge, waiting while security ran a finger over the surface and checked the numbers.
Donovan shook his head as he was waved through.
“You don’t get to leave unless Westerfield says you can.” Wade told him, his own information clearing the system. “He can call me back whenever he wants and I can say no, but that can be overridden.”
“Is that all of us?” Donovan asked, frowning now as he headed down the hallway, taking turns that would lead them back to where the charred corpse of Dr. Bethany Kellogg was waiting.
“Some more than others.” Wade shrugged.
“But you’ve seemed more involved in this case. You ran from L.A. as fast as you could. You’re happier on this one.”
Wade nodded. “A few things at play. I’ve been under investigation for building bombs before. I cleared, but I’m one of a few people who probably could have devised what we found on an old case. I know what those bombers could do, and I didn’t want to be near it. I didn’t want to be accused.” He sighed. “But also, Randall.”
“Randall?” Donovan asked, remembering Wade had said he was dating the man off and on. Not telling him the truth about what he really was.
They took another turn and Wade continued. “He said when I told stories about my time with the Bureau, I sounded excited, alive. I like physics, but the grant-writing is killing me. I’m considering coming back.”
“We’d love to have you.” Donovan clapped him on the back, offering a one-armed hug and wondering when the hell he’d started reaching out and touching people. Living people. Lord.
Another hallway and another corner and they were facing the throng stuck at the bottleneck of the doorway into the vault their witness had been stored in. Christina hung out at the back of the crowd.
Donovan came up behind her, making his presence clear. “Did Eleri get back yet?”
“No.” She responded. “This case is killing me. I take it you didn’t find anything?”
“Well, not after we lost the trail.”
“You had a trail? How far?”
He frowned, growing worried. “Out to where we saw Eleri. I mean after that, it looped. She should be back by now.”
“What?” Christina asked him. “After you saw Eleri? She headed to the lab. The bones from under the Aroyas’ house arrived.”
“No. She was out there.” Donovan pointed out the door that was now visible at the end of the hallway, just beyond the small security checkpoint. “Beyond the parking lot.”
“Donovan, what are you talking about? She was here until five minutes ago.” Christina stared at him like he was nuts.
Turning to Wade, he saw the understanding register on his friend’s face at the same time.
37
Eleri set the last tiny piece of bone aside. They were crumbs really. Burned to a black, ashy consistency, not unlike charcoal. The small pieces were sometimes hard to catalog.
The size and curve of the piece would determine that it was part of the shaft of a long bone, but whether it was humerus or femur, right or left, would take more work. She’d set it aside.
It was the skull pieces that she’d sorted out first. Laying them out, she tried to put the facial elements in position by where they belonged, creating a sinister looking template on the large paper she was using. Eleri thought the face calming rather than terrifying. The person had burned. They deserved closure at the least. Determined to find it, she assembled the back of the skull the same way, though it was as much gap as bone.
Ignoring the rest of it, she focused on the small pieces she had. Normally, she’d take calipers and get a series of specific measurements—distance between the zygomatic arches, specific markers on the forehead to the base of the skull, width of the eye sockets, and so on—to feed into a computer program. While it gave no definitive answers, the program analyzed the results and told them who the skull most likely belonged to: man or woman, some ancestry, maybe age. She had none of that.
Limited to the tiny fragments, she picked them up one by one. The eye socket piece she’d noticed in the picture was her first stop. She set it back down, then checked the width and curve on the small piece of jawbone she had. She checked the sutures at the back of the skull last and concluded that the skeleton was most likely female. Most likely in her thirties to forties. The sutures she’d checked were late to seal. These hadn’t quite fully fused, but were close.
There were a few fragments of the hip girdle, which were thicker and harder to burn. Eleri found she was impressed at the thorough job done on this skeleton. Most people didn’t know that even a crematorium generally left a few pieces of larger bone incompletely burned. Those would be ground to dust by hand and put back in with the ashes given to families, and crematory fires ran hot. Very, very hot. These pelvic girdle pieces were near crumbling as she touched them. They’d burned hot and long. They also indicated that the human had been female. There was no way to tell if she’d given birth or not—not from such an incomplete skeleton.
On a whim, Eleri pulled out all the records she had on the bodies associated with the case. She was carrying the big file around, much of it on paper, some of it in x-ray film that had been sent by the dentists and various hospitals the Bureau had drawn records from.
In a separate spot on the table, she set the stack and pulled the first one off.
Leona Hiller’s file was set aside. Her body was found intact. Then Eleri had a thought and picked it back up. What did the report say? So many times, bodies were identified by the fact that they matched relatively well and who else would have been there? Errors in identification were rare, but could happen. Eleri double-checked it.
Husband had IDed her at the morgue. Tattoo matched. Necklace matched. Even Eleri could look at the pictures from the autopsy and match them to Leona Hiller. Eleri ruled her out and went to the next.
Marcy Davis, the school teacher who was a possible victim. Watch, bracelet, photo ID, no family confirmation. Dental records. Eleri pulled them out and held the small film up showing the molars. In the bones, she had two molars, one almost intact and one with a set of three roots, though the crown was gone. Neither matched anything in Marcy Davis’s mouth. Eleri set that file aside, ruling it out, too.
She’d been part of the team IDing Gennida Orlov’s body, so this wasn’t Mina Aroya’s mother. Eleri set that file aside as well as all the ones of the men. The last one she had was Mina herself. Though Eleri was sure Mina was up and alive and torturing the Kellogg family, she couldn’t mark it off on that belief alone. If anyone asked, she needed to say she did an official rule-out.
Picking up her pen and noting yet another comparison in her notebook, she grabbed the two sets of dental films they had for Mina. The x-rays had been taken almost ten years before. So not finding a match didn’t mean anything unless Eleri could prove that the tooth she held was the same position and side as one in the old picture and that it didn’t match. That’s what she was hoping.
She held the small film up to the light and picked up one of the teeth.
Of the three roots, one twisted oddly. It was good to have anomalies like that. Made a rule-out easier. Tooth roots didn’t just change and twist, those things were permanent, unless the tooth was pulled or knocked out or such.
Eleri froze. She picked up another film, an even older one. But there it was. The twisted root. It showed up better on the second film—it had simply been taken at a better angle to spot it. Eleri set down that tooth and picked up the other. This one was relatively easy to identify. It was tooth number twenty-nine. All teeth were numbered according to an American chart. This one was on the lower right side and different from the others.
Though the films were trying to catch the molars from that side, about three-quarters of this tooth was captured in the picture.
Eleri stopped breathing.
It matched.
It wasn’t enough to declare that the bones she held belonged to Mina Aroya, but it was more than enough to try to e
xtract any DNA that might still be there. It was more than enough to start considering that Mina Aroya had been dead for a while. No, Eleri had enough to believe.
She snapped the gloves off and was walking out the door when she had a second thought. In their last case, bones had been stolen from an FBI office. She wasn’t letting that happen now. So, while she wanted to tell the team what she’d found, she first packed up her files, checked the pictures she’d taken, then laid the bones back in their padded and disturbingly small box. All that was left of Mina Aroya fit in a box the size of a binder.
She tucked it under her arm with new reverence and headed down the hallway to Dana and the team. Her burden was heavy, both physically and mentally.
Two minutes later she was on the other side of the building, back in the stupid conference room that looked like every other conference room in any FBI branch. The only difference was, this one held her friends.
Though they’d been talking, they all looked up at her as she entered the room full tilt, plopping her bag unceremoniously onto the end of the table. She held up the small box of remains just as Dana asked, “You’ve got something?”
“This,” Eleri announced, “is Mina Aroya.”
“What?” Dana’s head popped forward in disbelief.
“Well,” Eleri conceded, “there’s not much here and I wouldn’t swear on it in court, but . . .”
“But?” Dana prompted while the others stayed cloyingly silent. Eleri focused on her boss.
“But she was found under the Aroyas’ house. Estimates put her time of death after Peter’s and right around the time the bills stopped getting paid. This set of remains also has two teeth intact enough to do a comparison. While I can’t declare that this is definitively Mina Aroya, I do have more than enough information to try to do DNA matching or look for more history on Mina to find adequate proof.”
The NightShade Forensic Files: Echo and Ember (Book 4) Page 25