Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 26
She'd found the marks on the forearms of all three victims. And that's how she thought of them now, as victims. It was also a chain, indicating a serial killing, though not like what most people would think of as a serial killer. And—her own suspicions were, though she had no proof yet—these murders likely were not the work of a single person.
One of the sets of bones had a severe notch on the cervical vertebrae. Eleri strongly suspected that victim’s throat had been slashed or the bone had been damaged in an attempt to cut the head off. She could not accept that a child had died that way. Not that there was any acceptable death for someone so young, but that kind of ending would not have been kind.
Whoever was taking these children was bloodletting them over timespans of at least several years. The scarring on the bones showed that time passage, with older scars indicating healing of the first time the bone had been breached. Fresher scars showed that the cutting continued for these kids.
Eleri had ignored some of the femurs and tarsals, leaving them dirty, with little pieces of Louisiana grave dirt clinging to them. Perhaps there was something there, but they no longer interested her the way the cut bones did. She wouldn’t have had time to clean and inspect everything. She had to choose what she worked on.
She also realized that holding these bones in her possession any longer than necessary would constitute further crimes than she'd already committed. She was only willing to go so far. Right now, she thought, Agent Almasi might find a way to forgive her her trespasses—but if she waited any longer, he wouldn’t be able to protect her identity or her illegal activity here.
She laid out the arm bones, the radii and the ulnas, of each of the three victims. Lining them up, she shot photo after photo. Two showed evidence of repeated cutting over long periods of time. The third skeleton, however, the youngest at time of death, had only a few cuts on each arm. Just as her Grandmere had done, whoever had done this had flayed the forearm down to the bone.
If it was anything like what her Grandmere had done, the perpetrators likely also had the skills to heal the wound as quickly as they could cut it. And if they could do that, they could use one of these children as a blood source for an extended period of time.
But the third, the smallest victim, the one who had the notch in the cervical vertebrae, indicating something had happened to him—something severe and almost definitely fatal—at his neck. He had the fewest scars on his arms.
Eleri began to form a theory.
She suspected all these children had gone missing right around the same age. Given what she knew of Mackenzie Burke’s and her own sister Emmaline's disappearance, she suspected that age was somewhere between seven and ten. Still young enough to be lured away, still young enough to grow and be manipulated by the family's needs or machinations.
Eleri suspected it was a family that was doing this. It might be a cult. That was still a possibility. She wouldn't reveal all of her suspicions to Agent Almasi. She had a few more.
After a full night without rest, she had become so tired, she was unable to shake the feeling “in her bones” that something was wrong. She looked up at Donovan.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
She nodded, unable to voice the words, still a little trapped in the stories the children’s skeletons told her.
He'd made yet another trip out, this time fetching file boxes packaged as flat pieces of cardboard. He'd neatly folded them up into their proper shapes.
She'd labeled them, Subject One, Subject Two, Subject Three. She'd had Donovan write up a sheet of paper to put in each, indicating her findings and the suspected age range for the victim. She included the locations of each of the major bones, the skull, and the name on the grave from which they had been collected. It was obvious that the tombstone inscriptions did not name the victims she’d found. She hadn’t breached a single closed casket, but maybe the inscriptions held clues. At the least, they were necessary evidence, something Almasi would have collected had he done the dig himself. So she provided it.
In the second two boxes, she'd included small Tupperware containers, just regular plastic ware that could be bought at a big box store, with soil samples from various layers they had scraped. Each plastic storage box had a corresponding photograph and a notation of the depth where they’d retrieved the sample.
She couldn't tell just by looking if someone had been coming and filling in the dirt over the graves. Donovan had not been able to sniff out a difference in the dirt layers, either. So that would be up to the labs to determine.
They'd added a USB drive with copies of every single picture she’d taken at the graves, but not the ones she’d taken of the bones laid out on Grandmere’s table. She didn’t want to implicate her great-grandmother in this. The USB would have to do. She taped it to the inside of one of the boxes. She couldn’t sort all the photos with their proper victims, because of course, Grandmere did not have a computer printer available, and this wasn't the kind of thing they could run through the local copy shop.
Donovan looked at her again. "You're not ready, Eleri."
He motioned with his hand up and down her form as she stood and she realized he wasn’t referring to the fact that she was loathe to give away her evidence. He was instead pointing out that she was still in the same pants she'd been digging in all night. The dirt stains on her knees revealed less dirty rectangular patches from the knee pads she'd eventually put on, which had only done a little to protect her knees and nothing to protect her back. She was wondering now if her spine would ever straighten out again. But if she found Emmaline, it would be worth it.
She showered, as Donovan had done when they'd first come home, and tried to make herself presentable. They stacked the boxes in the back of the car and asked Grandmere if they were safe to leave.
Grandmere looked back and forth between them. "You're as safe as I can make you," she said again. Eleri thought that would be pretty good until her Grandmere shook her head. "I've done what I can. But I am one person, and I don't know how strong the other side is.”
Eleri listened carefully to the phrasing her grandmother chose. The others, Grandmere said when referring to them now, as though they were in some kind of epic battle. She'd thought once again of the Hatfields and McCoys. But how simple those gun battles seemed compared to this.
Before they walked out of the house, she picked up her own phone and turned it on. She saw several messages and texts from Avery. I should return those, she thought. But she needed to call Agent Almasi and turn off her phone again before she left the house. She'd have to reply to Avery later tonight, perhaps after she got some sleep. She didn’t want to say anything that didn't make sense or, God forbid, anything she might regret.
She bypassed those messages and dialed up Almasi. He answered right away.
"Eleri Eames!” he said, surprised. "I didn't expect to hear from you again, or maybe not so soon. What's going on? Did you find your sister?"
"No," Eleri replied, not liking the sound of the single syllable falling off her tongue. She wanted to say yes. Deep in her spine, she felt that she was much, much closer. Instead, she offered, "I have something for you."
"Do you want to bring it by the office?” he asked.
"No," she said. This time, the same syllable sounded stronger, determined. "I can't." She left it at that. She could almost hear the frown pulling his features together.
"Can you tell me what it is?"
"No," she replied, "but it's bigger than a breadbox."
"Ohhhkayyyy?" He drew out the word, but the question at the end was one she would not yet answer.
She needed him to be away from the office. She needed to not get caught on video meeting with him. And she knew the branch offices were thoroughly monitored. "Is this some clandestine meeting in a park?" he asked almost jokingly.
Eleri replied, "Yes. My partner, Donovan Heath, will be with me. But please don't record any of that. I'm going to give you something, and I'd like you to take it into the office as your own find."
Through the silence she heard his curiosity building—and then the dawning recognition. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"Well," she replied, "I think it's going to crack some things wide open for you. You might love that part. But the rest of it—no, you're not going to like it at all."
53
"Walter called,” Donovan told her, and Eleri’s ears perked, glad he’d heard from his girlfriend. He continued, “I called her back last night."
"Oh, that's wonderful." Eleri was relieved to hear that he was managing to maintain that relationship. It had been hard in the beginning, with Walter in Los Angeles running a private investigations business. She figured Westerfield snatching Walter up for the FBI division probably put exponential pressure on the two of them. She was grateful every time she heard that things were going well.
But Donovan's expression turned darker, and Eleri had only a moment to wonder before he dropped a bombshell.
"She gave me some news that she and GJ are dealing with.” He paused dramatically, in a very un-Donovan-like way. “Dr. Murray Marks has gone AWOL."
"I'm sorry, what?" Eleri’s head snapped up. She’d been expecting “Walter says hi,” or something equally inane. Though his statement was totally unrelated to this case, it was a shock she’d not been prepared for.
She felt the thought pass her mind at warp speed: at least, she hoped this news was totally unrelated. But who knew? She filed the thought so she could work it over later and turned her attention to him, surprise still coloring her features.
"Are you serious? Wasn't he in prison?” she asked. Even as her brain wrapped around the thought, she still didn't fully believe it.
"That’s what we were told, but he wasn’t being held in any prison Walter could find. Not in gen pop and he wasn't in solitary. They had him in some specific, unnamed holding area."
"What happened? Did his people come and break him out?" It was the only thing Eleri could think of that might have worked. If he was at a safe house, if they found out where he was … if someone had leaked information …
She was trying to put the pieces together when Donovan said, "I asked Walter the same thing, and that's what she and GJ guess, but no one is saying anything. So as of right now, they don't know where he was being held or specifically how it was that he got out. The only thing Westerfield will confirm is that he was alive when they last saw him—"
"Oh my God," Eleri interrupted, actually putting her hand to her heart. “The case has been hard enough for GJ. She had to arrest her own grandfather and investigate the sordid activities he’d been into. But now?”
"Exactly," Donovan said. "So he was alive the last time they saw him, and then he escaped. They didn't say that he was on his own, if they expected to catch up with him, or anything else. Only that he's gone."
"Shit," Eleri muttered. "He was probably gone for several days by the time Walter and GJ heard about it.”
If they'd been able to recapture him, Westerfield might never have mentioned it. She was pretty sure she knew how her boss worked after several years in his employ. She had to let all these thoughts turn over for a few moments. Although Donovan had known this since last night, he gave her the time to think about it. Then, as the thought struck, she looked up at him.
"This means we're even more likely to be pulled back into this case,” she said. “We’re going to have to look for him.”
He nodded. "It's either us or else Westerfield’s going to hand it to GJ again. She's probably the best one to track him."
"Or the worst," Eleri said with a shrug.
If Westerfield gave them the assignment, it was going to be a hard call. She did not want to be yanked off of this—not when she felt so close to finding her sister and her sister's killer. She knew now, from the scars on the bones and from what she had dreamed of Emmaline, that her sister had been used as a source. Spells had been cast using Emmaline's blood. Eleri shuddered again at the thought that it just as easily could have been her.
They'd both been out riding that day. Whoever had taken Emmaline could just as easily have arrived fifteen minutes earlier and taken Eleri instead. They shared the same blood, and that's what the kidnappers had been after, it seemed. It was a crap shoot which girl they got. Either would have sufficed. Once again, she wished it had been her. Still, there was nothing she could change about the past.
With her heart heavy, she looked at Donovan. "I don't know if I'll go if Westerfield calls me."
In the few seconds since she’d first thought of the possibility of getting yanked off her own investigation, Eleri had made up her mind. She needed to finish this search—even if it cost her her job.
Donovan nodded, but she couldn’t tell what that meant. Did it mean he understood her dedication? Would he go back if their boss demanded it?
She understood that. Donovan needed to keep his job. Most people did. She was the oddball here, both in her trust fund and her missing sister. Still, she wanted to keep working for the NightShade division, she thought. It would just need to be after Emmaline’s remains were found. She wasn’t sure that refusing an assignment would put her job in jeopardy, or worse, put Donovan’s job in jeopardy, but she knew it might.
He didn't deserve that kind of friendship from her, but her sister didn't deserve to be let go either. Not after all these years.
For now, she would wait. She would decide whether to cross that bridge when they came to it.
Eleri truly hoped that they wouldn't come to it—because she didn't know what it would look like or if she would have to burn it down.
54
Donovan had tried to sleep the night before, but found he just couldn’t slide over the edge into rest.
He was tired enough. The day had been well over thirty-six hours long, and the work had been back-breaking. He’d dealt with the constant addition of tasks. Every time he thought that his work was done, something else came up. He’d turned around and driven back to the store more than twice. He’d fetched multiple rounds of goodies for Eleri to clean her bones or set them up nicely for delivery to the FBI branch office.
Donovan had not met with Agent Almasi, though he'd gone along. Eleri was trying desperately to shield him from the effects of their little grave-robbing expedition, and Donovan appreciated the effort, although this was the only time he took her up on her efforts to minimize his role. This time, they’d actually borderline committed a crime. So he laid low, knowing that she had a relationship with the agent she was meeting with and it would likely go well.
It had gone as well as it could. When they returned home, he had once again believed he would crash and finally sleep. But he hadn't.
Eleri stayed up and helped her Grandmere make dinner before she wandered off to her room. He, on the other hand, had helped Grandmere eat the dinner.
Apparently, being what he was burned a mega shit ton of calories. He'd long assumed he was just one of those big-eater kind of guys. But the more he hung around Wade and saw the others, the more he realized it wasn't a personal trait so much as a species one. Still, he should've rolled into bed and been well asleep before he was fully horizontal.
It hadn't happened. Instead, he lay still with his eyes aimed at the ceiling, counting the swirls from whatever kind of paintbrush had been used to cover Grandmere's ceiling with a thick, puffy paint. He wasn't even sure what era the paint job was from, only that it wasn't from this one.
He couldn’t shake the memory of the smell of the man in the alley. The word brother kept running through his head. But he was an only child. He tried to think it through, tried to remember. What did he know? That his mother had died when he was young. But how? Had he seen her body? He had no idea. He was torn between wanting to tell Eleri more and not burdening her with his imaginary sibling, when her real sister was in the ground somewhere. He continued staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep.
Eventually, he turned his phone on and collected several texts from Walter. He'd texted back, not expecting anything in return. He was happy when he'd gotten a quick response.
In short bursts, Walter relayed to him GJ's anger about her grandfather escaping. Apparently, it had been hard enough that she’d had to tell her mother that her grandfather was a criminal. Telling her family that Dr. Marks had escaped opened a whole new can of worms. Unfortunately, GJ had been left to relay that information to her family—because no one really knew where he'd been held. The FBI wasn’t giving out information. GJ might not have either, but there was a very real possibility the man might turn up at his daughter’s home. Thus, the task had fallen to GJ’s irritated shoulders.
Walter had no updates on anything beyond that. At least, she said, she and GJ had not yet been sent out to find the man. For that, she was grateful. However, the assignment that she thought would last three days to a week to clean out Dr. Marks' lab had now become exponentially longer.
They’d started with an assignment of a few days. But the time frame had grown from the moment they’d begun cataloging the information and realized it was a bigger task than planned. It got longer again when they found the body in the kettle and tried to identify it. Now, it stretched out even further, because Dr. Marks had escaped.
She and GJ were officially on guard duty at a large home with a large staff and an even larger basement laboratory. They were asked to guard the secret entrance to this lab—despite the fact that they still had not found it.
Walter was not pleased.
Donovan thought about helping her out. He could call Westerfield and even Wade and ask what they thought of the likelihood that Marks would head to the burned-out family compound outside Billings—or maybe the family compound in the Ozarks. But he didn't call. Walter didn’t need him stepping in. Besides, she’d gotten her information from Westerfield, and Westerfield had surely considered all these options. If he'd told Walter, then he would have also told Wade. So, in the end, there was nothing for Donovan to worry about. It wasn’t his responsibility to let anyone else know.
