The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five (Book 2) Read online

  The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five

  Book 2

  A.J. Scudiere

  Contents

  Foreword

  Also by A.J. Scudiere

  Untitled

  Untitled

  Untitled

  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

  Untitled

  Also by A.J. Scudiere

  About the Author

  The NightShade Forensic Files: Fracture Five

  Copyright © 2016 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

  ISBN: 978-1-937996-43-7

  ISBN: 978-1-937996-43-7

  Created with Vellum

  Foreword

  There’s so much in a book that’s not on the page. During the course of writing Fracture Five, I started a master’s degree program at the University of Tennessee in Forensics. As you read, you’ll see the contribution of that new knowledge. You’ll find it in book #3 The Atlas Defect, as well. Huge thanks go out to all the professors in the program, particularly to Dr. Murray Marks who has faithfully gotten this massive undertaking underway. (Keep an eye on that name . . .) Thanks also go out to my friend Katherine Coble. Deeply knowledgeable about religions in general and a writer herself, she was incredibly helpful with this text. She pointed me in the direction of Saint Issa—the history of which made this story richer.

  As always, much love to my support system at home: Eli, Daddy, Guy, Jarett & January. As well as the puppies, Mayhem and Travesty, and our kitty, Delilah. Snuggles are excellent for writers.

  Thank you all!!

  This one is for my lifelong friend, Heather Widener Debord.

  I’ve been a writer since I was taught to compose a paragraph. I wrote an 80-page novella in third grade—and Heather motivated me to do it. She was a writer, too, and she always encouraged me to write and to write more. We wrote our stories longhand, me on whatever I could find, but Heather always wrote on yellow legal pads, with Bic erasable blue pens. I can see her small, round writing in my mind to this day.

  What’s even better is that a portion of the book you now hold in your hands was written with Heather across the table from me. Now we write on laptops and tablets. Her with a fortune taped to the top of her screen, me with my squishy keyboard; sometimes we’re in a coffee shop. It’s a much more grownup endeavor these days.

  Heather—you are such a large part of the reason there are any AJ books out today.

  Thank you.

  Look for other novels by A.J. Scudiere.

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

  The NightShade Forensic Files

  Book 1 - Under Dark Skies

  Coming Soon: Book 3 - The Atlas Defect

  The Sin Trilogy

  Vengeance

  Retribution

  Justice

  Resonance

  God's Eye

  Phoenix

  The Shadow Constant

  Want a free book?

  Go to www.ReadAJS.com/free-book to get a free novel.

  "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 we are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn.”

  --author unknown

  “We stopped checking for monsters under the bed when we realized they are inside us.”

  --author unknown

  1

  Cooper Rollins figured he knew how to say goodbye.

  His son didn't. Christopher had sticky fingers and a wandering attention. He squirmed a lot.

  "You're holding him too tight." His wife's voice was sharp as she stood over them. Alyssa Rollins knew better than to pull Christopher away from him, but she didn't have any patience either. "Cooper!"

  Lately it seemed her voice only grated. Was the change in him or in her? He couldn’t be sure. Cooper didn't trust his own senses anymore.

  Still, he abruptly scooped the toddler up tight and whispered in his ear. "Daddy loves you, more than anything." Then just as abruptly, he let his boy go.

  "Come on, Chris." Alyssa reached out with baby wipes and cleaned the sticky fingers. She didn't offer any to the man who was still legally her husband.

  Didn't matter. Cooper could wash his own hands.

  She didn't say goodbye to him either.

  Also didn't matter. She hadn't said goodbye to him since she'd said it in the grand sense six months earlier.

  For a moment, he watched the two of them walk off together—his son's tiny stride not quite keeping up with Alyssa’s. She was patient with him. She'd turned to sandpaper where her husband was concerned, but she was always soft with their boy. He'd give her that.

  Cooper had no legitimate complaints against her parenting. He just wanted to be a part of it—and not an every-other-Sunday, if-he-was-feeling-up-to-it kind of part. Unfortunately, it seemed he wasn't good for much more.

  He'd slept through their initial meeting time, so she was right to be pissy. He just wished she wouldn't be so sharp.

  Cooper turned away, unable to watch any more. Unable to wonder—as he always did—if this goodbye would be the last one. He'd been to too many last goodbyes. He’d missed too many of them, too.

  Inside his skull itched. On the right side. Above his ear.

  He was used to things rattling around in there—thoughts bouncing randomly, voices that wouldn't shut up, friends saying goodbye over and over—but the itching was bad.

  Someone was going to die.

  He felt his stomach turn and for a moment he wished that someone else could be him so he wouldn't have to have this feeling again.

  His skin grew
cold, his breathing shallow, and he started to sweat.

  Noises came rushing back from his memory, putting him somewhere else. He couldn't tell if it was real. Not the noises, not the words, not even the gut-deep certainty that someone was almost done.

  Had he said goodbye?

  Would it be Christopher? Or Alyssa?

  Cooper felt the curb under his ass, though he didn't remember sitting down. A cigarette butt taunted him from the dirt in the gutter. A hand came down on his shoulder and a voice, louder than the others, asked, "Are you all right, man?"

  The sound that exploded from his throat was primal and out of his control. The hand shouldn't have been there. They shouldn't touch him. He curled away and didn't pay attention as the Samaritan muttered and walked off.

  A popping noise made Cooper look around, but he saw nothing other than beautiful, sane people walking down the street. They gave him a wide berth. The sun was out. A shadow from the puff of a palm tree brushed the ground next to him. He scooted away, his breath still coming in short gasps.

  It was too late.

  The popping noises, the wet color.

  He could see it, the awfulness of the vision creeping around the edges of reality, though he knew both worlds were real.

  It was already over for someone. He just couldn't remember who.

  2

  Eleri Eames looked out the window at the Pacific below her. The flight pattern took them out over the water, then swung back before landing at LAX. She felt as though she'd just been plucked from the opposite ocean and plopped into this plane.

  It was almost literally true. Her beach vacation had been ended early. Thoughts of returning to the office and waiting for another case to come along had been banished as quickly as she'd hung up the phone.

  She blinked, the world she was in now so different from her days with the profilers. Then, she'd worked at the FBI home office, each night she'd returned to her own apartment, left alone with her dreams. Now she was being thrown from one end of the country to another, a field agent under odd circumstances at best.

  Next to her, Donovan Heath flipped through a newspaper, his long face set off by dark eyes turned downward to the print. His jet black hair fell over his brows, slightly longer than the usual nearly-military style favored by so many agents. He looked like the nerd he was, not FBI.

  Then again, he looked completely human, too—which was also a bit deceptive.

  He flipped another page and Eleri pulled her shoulders to the side to get out of his way. First class. Wider seats. A magazine would have fit comfortably, but the man found a print newspaper. Where did he get that thing? Couldn't he e-read like everyone else?

  Biting back a sigh, Eleri reminded herself there wasn't much that Donovan did like everyone else. And besides, who was she to complain about a little oddity?

  Okay. A lot of oddity.

  She turned her gaze out the window again. Public access plane. No reading classified files. She was left turning the case over in her brain.

  Two bombs.

  Two people, practically vaporized in their own space—one at home, one at a rented office only he used.

  Connected by not much more than their method of death.

  And the hint of terrorism.

  She wondered if Donovan had ever seen anything like it in his ME days, and she wanted to ask, but did not want to start a discussion of bombs on a plane. Besides, would a medical examiner even get the body when there wasn't one? Likely anything similar in the past would have gone straight to forensics, or maybe odontology for a dental identification. If any teeth could be found.

  She wanted to ask him not to take up so much space, but she couldn't. He'd switched seats with her after she’d suffered a panic attack upon first sitting down. The sudden fear of flying wasn't her own, but the result of the seat's occupant from the previous flight. Three hours of near hyperventilation had permeated the upholstery and leached out into Eleri's conscious. Donovan absorbed no such feelings from the seat and traded places without comment.

  Eleri quickly shifted right, closer to the window, to avoid the edge of the wide newspaper as Donovan flipped the page again.

  Disturbingly, her stomach lurched as the plane began its descent into L.A. Not because of the dip in altitude and not even because she was headed to see bodies that were merely a collection of remaining bits of tissue in sealed plastic bags. Her stomach rolled because she was excited.

  She'd survived her first assignment and been given a second. She'd survived her partner despite great oddity, and he'd survived her. Eleri almost smiled.

  Leaning toward him this time she asked, "Does the change in altitude hurt your ears?"

  His expression stayed flat, his body going still. He only softly replied, "No."

  He didn't like to talk about it, but she did. He was remarkable. While she wouldn't put him under glass, or cage him, or even call him a freak, she was going to study him. "Hmmm."

  His ears were so sensitive. Then again maybe not so much when in human form. Not that she could say such things on this plane.

  People around her were putting their things away, pulling out their earbuds, and starting to look around as they approached the runway. Eleri didn't have much to gather—her bag had at her feet, her firearm checked in her luggage. There had not been a Sky Marshal on this flight, but she hadn't wanted the gun, could think of no situation where it would be better than what she had. Or rather, what Donovan had. She almost laughed.

  As she studied him and he ignored her doing it, he slowly folded the paper with nerd-like precision and tucked it under his arm. Then he leaned back and stared straight ahead for a moment before saying, "What?"

  "Nothing." She shook her head and looked out the window as the ground came up.

  Fifteen minutes later, she stepped off the ramp and into the chaos that was LAX airport. Even inside, the air felt different. People pushed past them as they made their way to baggage claim. Despite not having to fight the crowd at the carousel—due to the badges and checked guns—getting their things was still a bitch. They still had to hit the lower level and weave their way to the office.

  No one paid them any attention. What a change from the small Texas towns they'd been in for their last case. There, they'd stuck out like sore thumbs, just because no one knew them and their family histories for about three generations back. Here, people bumped into her and didn't say 'excuse me.' They didn't seem to care that she carried herself like a cop. She stopped for a moment and someone bumped into her back.

  Shit.

  Donovan had moved on ahead, almost to the floor-to-ceiling window that was the baggage check. If he hadn't been so tall, she might have lost him in the effort to reclaim their bags, get a rental car, and find the local Bureau branch.

  The logistics were a struggle.

  Though she'd driven in L.A. before, it was always a struggle. Even the traffic patterns she remembered from before seemed to have changed. Wilshire was more crowded, 3rd Street less so. By the time they got to the office she was ready for a nap, though she didn't think that was very agent-y of her.

  It seemed the two of them didn't rate any special treatment. It meant she still had her carryon slung over her shoulder as she pocketed the envelope and the address to a small house then followed Agent Vasquez down the hall to a conference room.

  Marina Vasquez was the only one who sat down with them and after a moment, Eleri became convinced she was the only one who was going to. On top of that, Vasquez was irritable. "I've been on this thing since the first death, six months ago."

  Ahh. Finally, something Eleri understood. "You finally caught something and you have to hand it over to us."

  Vasquez didn't answer, just pushed the slim file across the table, her eyes showing a rough combination of anger and acceptance. Eleri fought the urge to apologize.

  "I found Rollins." The words were flat, just a self-acknowledgment that she'd uncovered the one break there was.

  "No one found him yet, I
thought." Donovan spoke before Eleri could, but she felt her own frown forming. Had something happened while they were in the air?

  No, Agent Marina Vasquez backpedaled on her choice of words. "I mean, I found the connection; apparently I'm not qualified to find the man."

  Eleri couldn't tell the woman that it may have less to do with Vasquez and her qualifications than the fact that the case had been handed over to the NightShade Division.

  Not her fault, Eleri reminded herself and watched as Vasquez visibly swallowed her bitterness and became a professional. "Here's what we know, and what you need to know."

  Flipping open the file, she began spreading out pictures by feel. "You've seen this one, but these are worth looking at and knowing. He'll be hard to find."

  Her fingers deftly sorted through shots from various angles, some with sun-bleached hair that was nearly blond, some with beards and without.

  "His eyes." Eleri reached out a finger and touched a photo.

  "He's not above using contacts, but you're right. His eyes are a bit unique." Vasquez tipped her head, nearly black hair sliding off her shoulder in thick curls.

  Her brain churning, her gaze checking each picture for what she could pull from it, Eleri wondered if his eyes would look as bright all the time or if that was an effect of something else. But Vasquez was already onto the next topic.

  This then was the issue with the new job. Someone else started things and handed them over. Often reluctantly—most people didn't like having their project taken away. But the low-toned, female voice pulled her back.

  "Here's his military history. I suggest you memorize it. It's quite varied and has likely played into why no one can find him." This time she looked directly at each of them, her eyes conveying the seriousness of the case and her attachment to it. They weren't supposed to get attached, but if anyone understood, it was Eleri.