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

by A. J. Scudiere

  He nodded. The answer had been too pat. The snarl behind it had been a ‘bitch had it coming’ and not the same outrage she’d had when talking about her father’s death. “Same with the baby sister.”

  “The baby sister bothers me.” Eleri said, but he couldn’t untangle it.

  Did it bother her because she’d lost her own sister at a young age? Did it bother her because it was a cruel act of a probably sociopathic mind? Or what? He added his own two cents. “I think she did it.”

  “Yes, that part sounded true, but there’s something I’m missing.”

  “You didn’t ask about the grandmother,” he prompted.

  “Picking my battles.” Eleri shrugged, pacing more but not talking. She’d made about three turns when her phone rang.

  “Avery?” she asked with some joy.

  Donovan paid only half attention, able to hear both sides of the conversation as he rolled up his sleeve to check his burn. Peeling back the tube gauze and the pads that covered the gooey mess of burned skin and ugly salve, he examined it as he heard Avery press Eleri about her history.

  Was she really a witch? Had she really not known? What could she do?

  He heard her breath hitch and thought about getting out of the room. But he didn’t walk well, and she was in between him and the door. He stayed put, tried to be quiet.

  “I don’t need this now, Avery!”

  Oh shit. He was here for a fight.

  Avery asked something else that Donovan blocked, but he wasn’t able to block Eleri yelling back at her boyfriend quite as well. “My boss died on me yesterday, though I tried to save her. I was in a burning house and I almost died today when—”

  She cut herself off before revealing classified information in the middle of a fight. He heard her breath suck in. He could almost hear the tears welling in the corners of her eyes.

  “Eleri.” Donovan heard Avery’s voice, both the plea and the anger behind it.

  But maybe Eleri didn’t. “I don’t need your inquisition or your damned witch hunt right now!”

  She hung up and threw the phone into a chair where it bounced and tumbled to the floor. She didn’t look, but Donovan did. It didn’t break.

  Heavy breaths moved her shoulders as she stood there holding it in. Her hands braced on her hips in angry fists. He could practically hear her counting in her head. Three. Four. Five. The phone rang again, lighting up the screen with Avery’s face.

  Donovan made a move to fetch it, but she shook her head at him.

  With a nod, he waited, sitting back down, getting the pressure off his injured foot. He fiddled with the bandage on his arm so as not to pay attention to her and to give her what space he could. The burn looked better he thought, though it was hard to tell from the edge. Grandmere was a voodoo genius, and there was no telling what powers coursed through Eleri’s blood. Just apparently not any that would allow her to speak calmly to her boyfriend.

  She looked at him then, square in the eyes even though they shimmered with unshed tears.

  “I’ve got it.”

  He listened, grateful for the change of subject.

  “When the Aroyas lived near Leona Hiller, Grace was young. She said ‘she watched us.’ But the baby wasn’t born until much later. Those bones aren’t that old. Leona Hiller probably never met the baby.”

  Donovan was frowning at her as a heavy pounding started at the door. Though he was standing, Eleri was already across the room. He was wondering if he could put Grandmere’s healing salve on his foot, too. If he ran out, would she know to send him more? He figured she would.

  His odd train of thoughts was interrupted by Christina barging through the doorway, shaking her tablet. She’d taken up Dana’s mantle of collecting all incoming information and distributing it to the team. But now her eyes were wide.

  “We fucked up.” The words were even harsher coming out of her so often quiet mouth. But she was not only yelling it, she was shaking.

  Donovan agreed, but it was Eleri who put her arm around Christina. They had fucked up. They’d saved Bonnie Kellogg and her family, but they’d done it by offering themselves up as targets instead. They’d lost Dana in the process.

  Christina shrugged her off and Wade came running into the room through the open door. Everyone was now in Eleri’s hotel room—and “everyone” was now one person less than it used to be. Donovan’s heart pinched at the thought and at Christina’s obvious distress. He pushed it aside.

  Ignoring Wade, Christina growled at the two of them. “Remember we said Grace Faith was a stupid name? Well, it is!”

  Donovan was nodding, applying his training and the “let them get it off their chest even if it’s dumb or just venting” portion of his communications courses both from med school and the Quantico. But Christina wasn’t bitching about the stupidity.

  “It’s two names.” She waved the tablet. “We got the warrant to read Dr. Benjamin Kellogg Junior’s will. Remember Bethany said her brother thought he might be the girl’s father? Well he left them something in his will. Them. Faith and Grace are twins.”

  Donovan felt his jaw drop and his heart stutter as his brain clicked. The split in the path that he and Wade had smelled outside the Arvads’ house. Two kids had been walking down the street before Burt Riser’s murder. Of the four girls at Dr. Ben Kellogg’s nursing home, the desk clerk could ID only two of them.

  “Us!” Eleri shouted, joining Christina’s previously one-woman fray. “She said ‘us’ but the baby wasn’t old enough. That’s what she lied about. She didn’t kill the baby, her sister did.”

  “Or they did,” Donovan added in. “Either her sister or they together killed the mother—Mina Aroya—too.”

  His heart sank. Christina was right. More right than she could know. They’d fucked up.

  “Eleri?” He asked her because she was the most educated in this area, though they’d all had some training. “You called her a ‘little sociopath,’ did you mean that as something mean to say or as a real diagnosis?”

  “Real diagnosis. Not that I’m qualified to make it, but yes. And maybe even psychopath, depending on how you want to define it. Why?”

  He understood her question: why was this important when they had one in custody but not the other?

  He asked that next. “What’s the likelihood that the sister is also a sociopath? Or psychopath?”

  With a gulp of breath, Eleri fell backwards into a seated position on the end of the bed. In the background, Wade tapped frantically at the tablet he’d brought.

  “High.” Eleri’s voice was flat. “Given the way they’ve been working together. I mean . . . if we’re very lucky, Grace Aroya is the sociopath and she’s been forcing her sister to do all these things and Faith Aroya will disappear now that her sister’s in custody.”

  “How lucky would we have to be for that?” He asked. In the background, Wade pulled out his phone and made a call.

  Eleri looked at him solemnly. “Luckier than we have ever been.”

  “So, assuming the sister’s out and about. We have one of them. We have the one who controls the fire—you smelled it, right, Wade?”

  It took a moment and re-asking the question to get Wade to nod “yes” and Donovan’s thoughts started cranking through the options again.

  “Or they both have that skill.” Christina added.

  “Shit.” That had not occurred to him. “How do we even figure out which girl has what? Or if we even have Grace and not Faith?”

  “Names don’t matter as much,” Christina told him, “Remember when I caught Grace at the safehouse. I had her and she kept saying ‘stay back’ and ‘you can’t get me now’?”

  It clicked in his head as it clearly already had for Christina. “She was talking to her sister, not us.”

  Christina nodded. “And the sister, the one who’s out and about, she can do the override. I don’t know if this sister can—”

  “She can’t,” Eleri interrupted with conviction. “She didn’t even
try to override us to get out of there. I don’t think she can. She only tried to burn her way out.” Then she looked confused. “The other sister has the override?”

  “She has to have it. Dana was still completely unable to breathe even after I’d overridden the girl I had the choke hold on. Dana still was unable to breathe after the girl I held was unconscious. Because I was fighting the wrong sister.”

  Donovan heard a short sniff of breath, a soft sound bordering on terror from Wade across the room. He looked up at the other man to see Wade’s eyes wide and his chest heave as he worked to get the words out.

  “I’ve tried five different people. No one can get contact from the outpost.”

  46

  Donovan smelled it before they arrived at the compound. The scent was strong enough to blow in from miles away. He took a deeper breath trying to sort out the components. With each passing second it became clearer as Eleri drove them over the smoother-than-it-looked road out into the desert.

  “Building’s burning.” He said it calmly, as though he were saying how much two and two was.

  “The agents?” She asked as she went hand over hand on the steering wheel around the next turn.

  Wade was in the front seat next to her and shook his head before Donovan could answer.

  “Fuck,” Eleri muttered as though that might help or change things.

  In the back, beside him, Donovan kept an eye on Christina. She didn’t even flinch at the mention of the burning building. He reached out with the back of his hand and touched her on the shoulder. “We need you on your A-game.”

  Turning, she faced him without blinking. Her expression was blank enough to look deadly. Her eyes, no longer red, were focused and sharp. “I am on my A-game.”

  He shouldn’t have said anything. He’d thought she was sad and grieving. Maybe she would feel it later, but Christina Pines was past tears. She’d moved through the pissed-as-hell stage of grief and directly into the revenge stage. Faith and Grace Aroya didn’t stand a chance.

  They bounced around another curve and Eleri silently pointed out the front window. A wisp of black smoke curled up in the distance where the compound was. Or had been. He knew it was gone now. Despite the fact that it was fire retardant, it was burning. That had to be one hell of a fire Grace Aroya put on that place. Or had Faith Aroya done it? How much did they look alike?

  The agents were walking into a shitstorm. But if anyone was still alive here, this NightShade team was their only chance.

  Christina took a short breath and faced forward. Then she started talking. Maybe more words than he’d ever heard from her at once. “I’ve been walking back through the scene at Bonnie Kellogg’s house. Given what we know now, I’ve come to several conclusions. Correct me if I’m wrong, question me if I don’t have all my facts.”

  The SUV bounced again, but it didn’t seem to affect Christina. Maybe it was enough that they weren’t stuffed in because they no longer had five agents on the team.

  “One, there aren’t three of them. There isn’t a third sister. We have only two names. And Benjamin Kellogg Junior wasn’t aware of a third child.” She waited a beat until no one contested her. “Faith Aroya—the twin we didn’t capture—doesn’t have any fire skills. When I started the chokehold on Grace—the twin we captured—the fire stopped growing and then didn’t flare at all. I can only conclude that Faith would have added to the fire in the attempt to kill us if she could.”

  This time Donovan spoke up. “What if she was afraid of burning her twin?”

  “Then she doesn’t have a real fire skill. Grace Aroya kept a clean, clear area around herself—and probably her twin—at all times. She had no burn marks when we had her in custody,” Christina countered. Donovan had to agree.

  “Grace Aroya has no override skills,” she started again. “If she did, then she would likely have tried them on us in the compound when we interviewed her.”

  Eleri shook her head. “We had the Faraday cage.”

  “That Faraday cage was crap.” Christina countered. “I made her flip her hands over several times. I made Donovan scratch his head.”

  “Hey!” The reaction was immediate and not what he’d been trained for. “Why me?”

  “They were interviewing. They needed to not be interrupted. After I did you, I did the girl. She didn’t seem to know she was being overridden.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Eleri fought a small measure of anger. Donovan could hear it in her voice.

  “Because, it worked inside the cage. No one inside could override the people outside. Or vice versa.” This time the sigh was packed with emotion, but she stuffed it back down. He smelled it, then it faded. “I didn’t say anything because I thought she’d probably tried it on the men outside and it didn’t work. I thought she’d given up and wasn’t going to do anything more. I didn’t want to let her know she could do it to us. Then . . . I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t at my best. I am now.”

  If it was an apology, it wasn’t outright, but it was solid. Donovan just nodded at her as they pulled up closer to the compound. The smoke was carrying up—a blessing, if it could be called that.

  The agent that had been on the roof was nowhere to be seen, but Donovan climbed out of the back door and looked up anyway as though he could see through the thick, spiraling smoke. From the smell, it seemed the agent up there was still on the roof. The two who had flanked the door still did, though they were neither upright nor moving.

  Eleri ran out of the car, leaving the door open. She dug her fingers under their gear to feel for a pulse. Donovan could have told her there was nothing to find, but her actions were faster than his words.

  He drew his weapon, keeping it aimed at the ground and stood guard around Eleri. In less than a moment, Wade had joined him, the two of them watching over their boss as she turned the bodies, presumably checking out the scene. It was now a forensic scene, and whether it appeared as one or not, it was a murder. Her specialty.

  Donovan breathed steadily in and out, controlling the situation rather than letting it control him. It took forty breaths before Eleri made a pronouncement. “It looks like they shot each other.”

  Shit, he thought it but didn’t say the word.

  Eleri continued, “The door looks like it wasn’t forced. The security is so tight I don’t know how it would be.”

  She stepped up to the door, into the smoke even though most of it was being carried away by the light wind. She coughed several times, but continued to push buttons. “It looks like the agents here were the last ones to access it. The duress codes weren’t used.”

  Of course they weren’t. Donovan tried not to blink. He couldn’t afford to miss anything.

  “That’s Faith Aroya.” The words came from Christina who was starting to creep around the corner of the building now that Eleri was coming back to join the small group.

  “Come back,” Eleri told her, firmly, clearly, and with a touch of fear. “None of us can afford to go out there alone. If Faith Aroya overrides you before you get to her, you’re toast. If Grace Aroya burns you before you can override her—”

  “You’re literally toast.” Donovan finished the sentence for her and watched Eleri and Christina acknowledge that with a raised eyebrow and a tip of the head from each.

  Christina pulled back. She spoke to Eleri without taking her eyes off the surrounding landscape. “We need to check.”

  Donovan turned to Wade, who hadn’t participated in the conversation yet. Wade was staying tight, but checking out the place with his nose to the ground as best he could in human form. “What do you have?”

  “She was here.” Wade knew he was confirming what Donovan had picked up. But that was as important as anything. Either of these girls could likely kill any or all of them on a whim. If the twins stuck together, it was possible even the NightShade team couldn’t defeat them. And they stuck together.

  Wade turned his head side to side, then shook it as though disgusted with
himself. “I can distinguish two scents now that I’m trying. They use the same soaps, wear the same clothes, have the same physiology. It’s almost like they’re trying to hide the separate scents.”

  “Or maybe they’re teenage girls who share everything.” Though Eleri’s voice sounded like she was chatting at a cocktail, her expression was focused on the seemingly empty land around them. Her stance was deadly.

  Donovan couldn’t smell the distinctions yet, just that “she” had been here. Then again, he didn’t have his nose to the ground, he had his head up.

  Eleri’s voice came low, but clear. “Let’s move.”

  They followed Christina in a tight formation. For a moment, Donovan thought it might be funny if he were watching it on TV or such. But he wasn’t. He was here. And possibly so were Grace and Faith Aroya, which meant he could wind up dead in a very short time period. Dana had not thought she’d die before the end of this case.

  He took his steps carefully, placing one foot over the other. Gun out, ready, aimed downward, he scanned the horizon looking for shadows rather than people. He trusted his nose more than his eyes. He wondered if his hearing would pick anything up and he strained to sort the sounds coming from far away.

  Nothing.

  He watched as Eleri, taking the lead now, steadied herself with a deep breath as she reached the corner. She set her shoulder against the brick, tipped her head, moved her hands. In position now, her gun was up and ready, and she rotated. Donovan knew she was using the corner as cover and getting just one eye and the tip of her gun around the edge to see. She could shoot someone center mass, but she would only be exposed at part of her head, one eye, and part of one shoulder. It was an excellent mathematical trick of angles that defied every TV cop show he’d ever seen.

  “Clear.” She breathed it out, not hiding her relief as she slipped around the corner, using the brick at her back for cover. Though things in the building still burned, the brick and stucco was designed to be fireproof. The smoke vented out the top, and though it was hot to the touch, it was still the safest place to be.