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  The NightShade Forensic Files: Garden of Bone

  Copyright © 2018 by AJ Scudiere

  Griffyn Ink. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  * * *

  FIRST EDITION

  Contents

  Books by A.J.

  Join Renegades

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  About the Author

  Want a free story?

  Go to www.ReadAJS.com/free-book to get free short stories.

  * * *

  Look for other novels by A.J. Scudiere.

  Available in bookstores, online, and at ReadAJS.com.

  * * *

  The NightShade Forensic Files

  Book 1 - Under Dark Skies

  Book 2 - Fracture Five

  Book 3 - The Atlas Defect

  Book 4 - Echo and Ember

  Book 5 - Salvage (A Shadow Files Novel)

  Book 6 - Garden of Bone

  Book 7 - The Camelot Gambit (Available Apr 2, 2019)

  Book 8 - Dead Tide (Available Oct 17, 2019)

  Book 9 - Sabotage (A Shadow Files Novel) (coming 2020)

  * * *

  Black Carbon

  Book 1 - Mutation (Available Aug 6, 2019)

  * * *

  Legends

  The Landa Landa & The Aellai (Available Jan 22, 2019)

  * * *

  FORTUNE (red)

  FORTUNE (gray)

  FORTUNE (Red & Gray)

  * * *

  The Vendetta Trifecta

  Vengeance

  Retribution

  Justice

  The Complete Vendetta Trifecta

  * * *

  Stand Alone Stories - Available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited

  * * *

  Resonance

  * * *

  Dissonance - a companion novella to Resonance

  * * *

  God's Eye

  * * *

  Phoenix

  * * *

  The Shadow Constant

  * * *

  Stand Alone Novels by A.J. Scudiere: Resonance, God’s Eye, Phoenix, The Shadow Constant

  * * *

  A Collection of Blogs

  Smart Chickens - Deliver Us From Email

  Smart Chickens - We’re Not Like Other Families

  Smart Chickens - Tele Me More

  Smart Chickens - Omega Dog

  Join A.J.’s Renegades here: www.ReadAJS.com

  "There are really just 2 types of readers—those who are fans of AJ Scudiere, and those who will be."

  -Bill Salina, Reviewer, Amazon

  * * *

  For The Shadow Constant:

  "The Shadow Constant by A.J. Scudiere was one of those novels I got wrapped up in quickly and had a hard time putting down."

  -Thomas Duff, Reviewer, Amazon

  * * *

  For Phoenix:

  "It's not a book you read and forget; this is a book you read and think about, again and again . . . everything that has happened in this book could be true. That's why it sticks in your mind and keeps coming back for rethought."

  -Jo Ann Hakola, The Book Faerie

  * * *

  For God's Eye:

  "I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading - it's well-written and brilliantly characterized. I've read all of A.J.'s books and they just keep getting better."

  -Katy Sozaeva, Reviewer, Amazon

  * * *

  For Vengeance:

  "Vengeance is an attention-grabbing story that lovers of action-driven novels will fall hard for. I hightly recommend it."

  -Melissa Levine, Professional Reviewer

  * * *

  For Resonance:

  "Resonance is an action-packed thriller, highly recommended. 5 stars."

  -Midwest Book Review

  An intellectual is a man who doesn’t know how to park a bike.

  —Agnew

  1

  “The body was clearly murdered,” Donovan told her by way of greeting.

  “It’s good to see you, too.” Eleri climbed into the car, glad to let him throw her bag into the trunk. “If it’s clear, then this shouldn’t be a case for us. Why are we even here?”

  For a moment, she entertained the idea of turning around and going home. But right now, home was nowhere to be found.

  “Because while our vic was obviously murdered, no one has any idea why, and there are no signs of how the murder was committed.” Donovan was almost smiling at the bizarre case.

  “Of course. What else could it be?” Eleri quipped as she let her head fall back against the passenger seat headrest. She was exhausted, and this one time she hadn’t done all the required reading. She had little idea what she was walking into, only that she had no choice but to walk into it. "We're undercover, right?"

  Donovan nodded and turned the steering wheel, hand over hand, as they passed street lamps with metal corn husk designs wrapped around them. Yes, Eleri thought, they were definitely in Nebraska.

  She hadn't been undercover in—Jesus—years, and even then, it had only been for short, brief assignments. She had no idea how long she and Donovan would be here. “This murder is already going on six days old, isn’t it?”

  At forty-eight hours in, the window to solve a crime began shrinking. Though the time frame wasn’t the be-all, end-all that TV shows made it out to be, passing time did make things harder. This window was way past that. Though Donovan had gotten here two-and-a-half days before her and had already begun the investigation, he admitted he’d made no real headway.

  That fact bothered Eleri as much as anything. Donovan was good. If he couldn’t find a thread to pull, there probably weren’t any. “I’m doing as well as I can, given that no one is supposed to know I’m actually a medical examiner. But yes, it’s six days out and I don’t have much.”

&nb
sp; His I would now become we, and Eleri was grateful they didn’t have a second body—though, from the looks of it, they might soon get one.

  Donovan took several turns, already at least a little familiar with the area, though the GPS talked him through the whole way. "We're actually heading to the morgue here in Lincoln first. The good news is, with Curie being so small and not having a morgue or a medical examiner of its own, we get to be here. That will, hopefully, be less obvious than trying to examine the murder in town."

  She nodded, and then said, "Please don't hate me, but I did not read the case files on this one well enough." She'd been dealing with her sister's remains, the funeral service, and shaking the hands of family members she had not seen in years while they grieved the sister Eleri had grieved a decade ago. They all must have wondered why she was so emotionless and seemed to assume it was due to shock. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Even so, it had been exhausting.

  Eleri's plane had landed in Lincoln, Nebraska right on time, but Eleri already felt as though she were late. She'd stayed at home, at Patton Hall, only one day after her sister's funeral service. Eleri spent her week struggling to convince her mother of Emmaline’s wishes without letting on that she'd been speaking to her sister for ten years after she'd disappeared. During the worst of their fights, Eleri had wondered if the storm that raged around the house had been nature's doing, or her own…or her mother's. Leaving had been a blessing.

  But it seemed she’d buried one body, only to come here and deal with another. Both the death and the town of Curie were worthy of suspicion.

  Donovan launched into what she’d missed while dealing with her family. "The deceased is Marat Rychenkov. Immigrant to the U.S. fifteen years ago, became a citizen ten years ago—which is fast. That’s because he’s a high-demand scientist—or he was, before he retired. As of right now, there's no clear reason for the murder, and it looks like a serial killing, though it's bizarre for a serial to go after such a prominent member of society."

  "Prominent how?" Eleri asked as they wove their way through the town of Lincoln. “Prominent” could mean the mayor or the old guy who sat in front of the hardware store and waved hello to everyone. It really depended on the situation.

  "As in: heading to work continually, always on time, interacting with a handful of other scientists in town, and generally being very well-liked. He was considered a contender for a Nobel.”

  Eleri blinked. That definitely counted as high profile.

  “He wasn't missing twenty-four hours before the neighbors went over and picked their way through the lock," Donovan added as he aimed them toward the Regional CDC center. “We’ve got the body here because it gives us better access without raising suspicion.”

  Eleri raised an eyebrow. When being at the CDC was less suspicious, things were batshit. But she didn’t say that out loud. Instead she asked, “What about the wife? And wait, he's got neighbors who can pick locks?"

  "Wife was out of town visiting family. As to the lock picking, I wouldn’t put anything past the residents of Curie. Apparently, three or four of them got together and hacked his computer-aided security system, to which he and his wife were known to change the code every week."

  "Holy shit," Eleri muttered. She was not prepared for the town of Curie, Nebraska, and she knew it. What little she had read in the case files was bizarre.

  Marshall Bennett, a billionaire businessman who was now eighty-six years old and supposedly retired, had spent the last several decades putting together what he considered a dream society. Apparently, Marshall had gotten tired of stupid people one day and decided he was going to build a town that had an IQ requirement. It had taken a decade for him to buy the land and gather the necessary permits. He'd searched out and hired the best city planners in the world and created the town from scratch out of cornfields in Nebraska. Nestled south of both Lincoln and Omaha, Curie was a marvel unto itself.

  Eleri's head lolled toward Donovan. "So, I don't recall taking an IQ test to get into town."

  Donovan laughed. "Westerfield said he faked ours."

  "That's awesome," Eleri said. "What is the IQ requirement? Are we going to be the blazingly stupid ones who clearly cheated our way in? I mean, that might blow our cover."

  "I don't think so. It's high, but I like to think we'd make it if we tried."

  "I like that Westerfield didn't even give us a chance," she laughed. "Maybe he thinks we'd flunk."

  Donovan laughed, too. "I automatically assumed it was just about expediency, but now that you put it that way. . . You’re right, though. We have to be super smart just to fit in."

  "Is that what you're finding from your first few days?"

  "Absolutely. A few of them are disturbingly friendly."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Southern neighborhood type stuff. They see there’s somebody in the new house, and they bring you a pie."

  "You got pie?"

  "Well, sure, but the pie is their own recipe. The crust has been cut into fractal patterns." He grinned. “No basket-weave crust in Curie!”

  "Fractal patterns?" Eleri asked, stunned. She wasn’t even sure how one would do that.

  "Hey, when scientists bake, you get fractal-pattern pie. The neighbor on our right, LeDonRic, did not bake me a pie, but he has a Dalmatian named Lady Macbeth so he can open his door and yell, 'Out, out, damn spot,' every morning."

  Eleri threw her head back and laughed again. She felt bad, given that she was here to examine a murder, but so far, Curie was sounding like a big batch of crazy. "And our cover?" she asked him.

  "Still Donovan and Eleri, but with new last names."

  Yes, she remembered that. "Good, because I’m not much of an actress. Professions are adjacent to our own, if I remember correctly." She was grateful when he nodded in response.

  "I'm a research physician. You're a biodiversity specialist."

  "Well, shit. I don't know enough about animals or plants."

  "Human biodiversity."

  She almost laughed again. She'd seen so much human biodiversity in this past handful of cases since she'd joined Nightshade, that she probably was an expert. "Okay, so we have a really smart town and a murder of a Nobel-worthy robotics specialist. What's so special about the murder?" She still hadn't read enough to wrap her head around why Westerfield had sent them out right away. Why was this even a NightShade case?

  "The first issue," Donovan explained, "is the serial element."

  "Okay. BAU?" she asked, knowing he would understand immediately that she was asking if the behavioral analysis unit had been contacted and if they’d managed to provide a profile.

  He shook his head as he parked the car in the back lot of the CDC building. "That may be on you. They searched everything, but it doesn't match anything in the databases. And they’re struggling to put together a profile without any reference data."

  That’s weird, Eleri thought. Serials operated from human urges—bad ones, but human ones. That this didn’t resemble anything the BAU could put even a small tracer on was concerning. As she climbed out, she looked at him across the hood of the car, making sure first that no one was in earshot. “Is it…supernatural?”

  But he shook his head no. They didn't speak about the case as they entered the building and he led her down through the twisted hallways to the morgue. She figured doctors had that ability, just like forensic scientists did, to find the morgue in any building they were in.

  It was when he pulled the drawer open for the body that she finally understood why it was their case.

  "I don't see anything."

  "That's just it, El. You can see his hands and wrists were bound, but it looks like he just died."

  2

  Donovan parked his car in the garage of his “new home.” Of course, it didn't belong to Donovan Heath, it belonged to Donovan Naman, a name he was relatively sure he was not going to remember very well. He knew the first time someone hollered out, "Dr. Naman, Dr. Naman!" as he walked down the s
treet, he was going to have to remind himself to turn around and act like he belonged to the random sounds they were calling out. He did not see this going well.

  The code to get into the house had been 1776, set by the real estate agent. He’d already changed it to 1492 out of spite. As they entered, he showed Eleri the code and how to activate it as he punched it in and opened the door from the garage into the laundry room/mudroom.

  "Correct me if I'm wrong," Eleri said as she stepped into the building behind him, "but according to the stone sign at the neighborhood entry, we live in Pythagoras Point?"

  Donovan nodded. "Just you wait, it gets nerdier."

  "I'm not sure it can."