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

  THE NIGHTSHADE FORENSIC FILES: ECHO AND EMBER

  BOOK 4

  A.J. SCUDIERE

  The NightShade Forensic Files: Atlas Defect

  Copyright © 2017 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: 978-1-937996-67-3

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  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

  Introduction

  About the Author

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  -Jo Ann Hakola, The Book Faerie

  “Our tales of monsters tell us more about ourselves than about the monsters.”

  —author unknown

  1

  Eleri stood looking at the pictures of the crime scene as she stared at the body in the morgue. None of the evidence lined up, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why.

  Maybe it was because she was distracted by Dana Brantley, NightShade Agent and higher ranked officer. The woman stood over the body wearing what looked like an FBI issued suit and a corresponding FBI issued sense of focus. Her dark hair hung in curly rings that seemed to understand even they should obey her. Something about Dana stuck out as being “off” or “weird.” Coming from Eleri, that was saying a lot.

  There was barely room around the body for all five of the agents, though they’d managed to flash their badges and run the medical examiner off.

  Eleri watched as Donovan looked over his shoulder at the door. Through the window, the M.E. looked at the group of them as though they were going to chop up his dead body for steaks or something. Donovan and Wade could probably smell the man’s suspicious thoughts from here.

  “I remember that.” Donovan muttered. He’d been an M.E. in South Carolina for a handful of years before getting recruited into the FBI. “Nothing sucks more than having your best cases pulled out from under you.”

  “Did you get tired of the standard gunshot wounds and murder-by-knife cases?” Wade asked with a small grin. His eyes didn’t stray from the gray body on the gurney in front of them.

  “GSWs are the worst. I was planning on researching an imaging system to be able to x-ray or PET scan the body and see the trajectories. I had the grants written and everything, but I got recruited,” he commented as his eyes came back to the gray skin and the clearly dead man with no outward signs of murder.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Eleri said. “You would have had to talk to people to develop that.”

  “Shut up,” Donovan returned.

  “Shut up, both of you.” Agent Pines added her two cents dead tone. “Dana needs quiet.”

  Dana Brantley was apparently communing with the body. Christina Pines was standing by. Though her suit was pale gray with pinstripes running through it, she looked like the other half of Dana Brantley’s matched set. Pines had her blondish hair pulled straight back into a bun with nary a hair escaping. She clasped her hands in front of her as though standing guard.

  Thus, it looked like Pines was functioning as Agent Dana Brantley’s protector—or at least that was her only skill that Eleri had figured out yet. Still, Eleri shut up; Wade remembered Dana from his days in NightShade and spoke highly of her. Eleri decided to pin him down for clarification later.

  She turned to Dana. “Would it be better if we left you alone with the body for a minute?”

  “No, having you here is good.” Dana spoke softly, as though even her own voice interrupted her work. “I’m getting things off the body and things off the handful of you—what you’re getting off the body. So that helps. Just quiet . . . is good.”

  Eleri didn’t respond, figuring what Dana most likely knew was that she—Eleri—wasn’t contributing anything to this examination.

  The man was dead. His skin was gray, he hadn’t had a Y incision yet—Donovan was going to do that when Dana decided she’d had enough of speaking to the dead. So as of right now, they were investigating a murder that could have been a heart attack.

  Only it wasn’t a heart attack.

  Eleri knew that for a fact—if only by the gathering of people around the body. Having her and Donovan here was enough to rule out any natural death. But her Agent in Charge had sent not only her and her partner, but he’d pulled Wade de Gottardi out of retirement again. “Retirement” was a strong word for Wade’s gallivanting around the world and giving lectures on his latest research in the rarified world of sub-atomic physics.

  Then, Westerfield told Eleri and Donovan that, for the first time, they would have another set of NightShade partners working with them. Enter Dana Brantley and Christina Pines.

  Pines had no discernable skills as of yet. Eleri only had time to read the dossier on Dana during the quick flight into Wyoming. But since Dana could apparently get visions and read things—almost like Eleri did—Eleri was concerned that Dana was going to turn and light into her at any moment, telling her exactly what Christina Pines did for the NightShade division of the FBI.

  Eleri pushed her thoughts back toward the case.

  The man on the table looked like he might have suffocated. She wanted to say so. The blue shade of his skin didn’t hit any one particular spot like a bruise. His lips didn’t show signs of distress. His eyes hadn’t shown any petechial hemorrhaging—bursting of the vessels in the eyes that signaled hard-end strangulation.

  She turned her attention to the rest of him, even as she noticed both Wade
and Donovan taking slow deep breaths. Since Dana said no one should touch him yet, they were smelling him.

  Eleri did a full body scan of the naked corpse.

  Healthy enough looking man. Mid-forties—she’d read that on his chart when she came in. But if she’d had to look at him and guess, that’s where she would have landed. He had that look of a man who was working out and coloring his hair and realizing that time was moving him forward whether he wanted it to or not. He was fighting it every step of the way. His body—in addition to saying “dead”—said gym time.

  His nails were manicured. Office job? Probably, given the corporate haircut and the shape of his feet. The curl of his toes indicated that he’d spent a long time in wingtips or something similar. Eleri had seen it often enough.

  He didn’t look like her end of the spectrum though, not her parents’ kind of money. Those men looked only sun wrinkled, they usually didn’t have the same urge to fight time—because time made them richer, thus they didn’t have to be better-looking. Eleri felt the corner of her mouth pull at the thought. Still, she’d learned long ago never to judge a dead body.

  “We need to CT scan him next.” Dana finally spoke, her eyes open and darting around the room to all the rest of them as though she’d only blinked for a minute. “Anyone else?”

  Eleri didn’t know if Dana meant “Did anyone agree?” Or “Did anyone else want to contribute?” to what was rapidly becoming her one-woman show.

  “He was afraid.” Wade spoke up and Donovan quickly nodded in agreement. “My guess is that he saw his killer and he knew he was going to die.”

  “He was also surprised.” That was Donovan’s voice and Eleri was almost startled by his voluntary group participation.

  “That’s it!” Wade commented. He’d clearly smelled the same thing and couldn’t place it. “I’ve been out of the smelling-bodies game for a bit. You don’t get ‘I see my killer’ scent in the general population, you know.”

  Eleri almost laughed out loud, but this man had died a serious death. “What was surprising?” she asked.

  “Don’t know.” Donovan didn’t shrug with it. He was calmer, more withdrawn with the others around. It wasn’t Wade, Eleri knew that. Donovan had been comfortable around Wade since he’d gotten over that two-wolves-pissing-over-territory thing they’d done when they met. The worst part was that she had been the territory, even if she wasn’t the kind one would expect in that situation. She was Donovan’s FBI partner, and his first real friend, though he was working his way up to three these days. And Wade was gay, so she wasn’t ever going to be that kind of territory to him. But the two men had actually growled and almost gotten into a full-blown wolf-fight in the middle of Wade’s sub-particle physics lab the first time they’d met. Now they were buds. She shook her head at the thought and picked up the chart.

  She hadn’t wanted to look at it at first. She wanted to make an unbiased assessment. They all had.

  Dana looked at her. “What does it say?”

  “Well, it says he wore wingtips to work every day.”

  Pines’ eyebrows rose, though if that was her version of laughter or a comment that Eleri wasn’t as funny as she thought she was, Eleri couldn’t tell.

  “He worked in a genetics lab—”

  “Oh fuck.” Donovan sighed. “Not again.”

  “What?” Dana asked, looking back and forth between the two of them.

  “We just came off a nasty case with kids and genetic therapies.” Eleri told her.

  “Was that the one down in New Mexico? I heard hints.” Dana commented and Eleri only nodded.

  Turning back to the chart, she kept going. “His lab designed genetically based drugs for cancers and . . . Oh, that’s lovely.” She stopped and looked up at them. “He did classified work for several of the major pharmaceutical companies.”

  “Classified? As in ‘government classified’?” Pines asked. When Eleri nodded at her, she responded, “I didn’t know they did classified work. I mean sure, proprietary, but you’re talking national security clearance, right?”

  Eleri nodded again. She already didn’t like this case.

  Donovan looked at her and sighed. “At least we’re indoors.”

  She grinned, thinking back to three feet of snow and riding ATVs through gritty desert winds. Inside was good. But she didn’t think it would last long. Again, she turned back to the case at hand. “Forty-four years old, black hair, blue eyes, Burt Riser. PhD in biomedical research.”

  Dana grinned. She probably knew this guy, or at least his type. Dana had been a lab rat, from what Eleri had read on her. Well, the parts that weren’t redacted for being above her pay grade. Dana was also the lead on this case—something Eleri still hadn’t quite acclimated to. She was used to herself and Donovan being their own little world. They only had to answer to Westerfield. But apparently, Dana did, too. So at least they would stay roughly on the same track, even if Eleri was no longer the senior agent.

  Pines grabbed the edge of the metal gurney. “Let’s get him into the CT machine then and see what he tells us.”

  Without comment, they all put hands on the metal cart and got the body out of the room. They passed by the M.E., who was still eyeing them as though they were going to do some zombie ritual, and they headed into the biomedical scan room. They’d done a quick tour of the facility before they even looked at the dead guy for just this reason—they didn’t want to tip the ME to what was going on even by asking for certain tests or options. NightShade protocol demanded it. So they closed the door and used the equipment at hand.

  Eleri understood the man’s ire. They came in, stole his case, and used his supplies to do it. Aside from the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanding that this case be remanded to a higher office than the local M.E., they were just douches. Pines might even be an actual one. The jury was still out on that.

  Thirty minutes later, when they’d all gone through the hands-on manipulations of moving a dead body into and out of the machine and then stitching together all the smaller films they had, they managed to make a good full body image. Casper, Wyoming was home to tech companies like the one Burt Riser worked for, but the morgue had yet to become state of the art.

  Donovan taped all the scans to the wall in the shape of Burt Riser while the rest of them stood back. Shining light from the front wasn’t ideal. Eleri was glad the wall was white. The only other option here was to put each film on the light box and trust their brains to put it together. They could do that later. Right now, they needed the big picture.

  “I don’t see anything.” Eleri commented. Surely, she was missing something and one of them would say so.

  But they didn’t.

  Donovan, fully in his wheelhouse, pointed. “Hyoid’s intact. He wasn’t strangled or if he was, it was an incredibly gentle job.”

  “It was probably gentle, whatever it was.” Eleri commented, feeling more at ease as though she was only talking to Donovan. “His coloring doesn’t show the mottling or bruising you would expect in a violent death, right?”

  “Right.” He turned to the other two, working harder than she was to be inclusive. “I was an M.E. for years. Externally, I see no defensive wounds, no indication of anyone with hands on the victim, and though he was afraid when he died and probably knew his killer, his death wasn’t violent. Looking here at the skeletal structures—”

  “He had bruises on his legs.” Dana interrupted.

  “They were older. You can tell by the color.” Donovan didn’t seem bothered the comment. “They might not have even shown when he was alive. Sometimes they only appear after death when the blood flow changes. Honestly, it’s consistent with him running into his coffee table repeatedly, or something like that.”

  Eleri looked at him. She loved when he talked about what he saw as an M.E. She couldn’t distinguish scents like he did, and she would never gain that skill, but she could learn to discern bruising and tell what kind of things bodies had done. She had some of it, but
her background was more skeletal and chemical than autopsy related. “How do you know?”

  “The bruises were slightly different colors and sizes, but the marks all fell within a one-inch height of each other—which would be normal if he’s walking near the same thing repeatedly in different footwear. Anywhere from barefoot to shoes. Plus, the marks are all horizonal—like a table edge—and have a distinct edge at the top, look.”