The axis legacy, p.3
The Axis Legacy, page 3
He didn't think he'd visibly jumped or anything, but Eleri picked up on it. She looked up, a question in her eyes and Donovan didn't even let her ask.
Looking around the room at the three other agents, Donovan told them, “He just sent two more.”
5
Donovan leaned back, gripping the armrest as the flight encountered yet another bout of turbulence. None of it was horrible, but he'd never been a fan of flying and the jolting movements weren't making him like it any better.
As a kid he'd always thought he would love to fly. He'd dreamed about his first time on a plane though he hadn't made it until he was an adult. And, after twenty good minutes of looking out the window at the stunning views, he'd been sorely disappointed to find out it wasn't all it had been cracked up to be.
As tall as he was, the seats were uncomfortable. The food was pointless. And the smells had to be put up with. Beside him, Eleri—small and a world traveler from birth—handled it all much better. In fact, she almost looked as if she didn't even notice the turbulence.
No, the smell of fear came not from her, but in the row in front of him. The husband was freaking out and, though the wife was trying to comfort him, the sharp, slightly rancid smell was wafting back. Donovan did not breathe through his nose.
He and Eleri had left GJ's mansion relatively quickly after Westfield's call. They'd both immediately driven to their respective homes, not sure exactly how much their boss might or might not be charting their movements, so they hadn't wanted to get on a plane. Eleri at least had been smart enough to lie and say that she was ready to ship out right away. At least they hadn't tipped Westerfield off that something was unusual enough that, for whatever reason, neither of them could leave their homes yet.
Still, if Westerfield wasn't tracking them, then hopefully they'd evaded any major scrutiny over their little side trips. But if he was already, then they were merely idiots wasting time. Donovan had no idea yet which one it was.
While it was tempting to divide and conquer—one of them to continue the search for the parchment and the other to read the new case files—it simply wasn't feasible. They both needed to be up to speed on the materials, they each had different backgrounds, caught different things.
GJ and Walter, at least, stayed where they were, continuing their way through the boxes, looking for parchment pieces or anything that might lead to one. So far, no calls or texts had come through with any eureka moments.
Dr. Marks was exactly the person to be hoarding something like that in his personal collection. No master list existed—at least nothing that GJ knew about—and it was likely because Marks didn't want anyone to know what he had. So Donovan didn't hold out any grand hopes.
Finally home last night, he'd started reading. He was hours behind where he should be on the case, unable to read while he was making the massive trek. In the wee hours, he'd called Eleri to chat about what he was seeing. The good news was Eleri didn't seem to be having any PTSD about missing children. Donovan didn't know if Westerfield was going to make that some kind of carte blanche to put her on those cases in the future or not. But that was nothing they could predict.
It wasn't clear yet why, exactly, this was a NightShade case, but it certainly was already shaping up to be a bizarre one. When the plane jostled again, Donovan's fingers again involuntarily grasped the armrests a little tighter. Eleri obviously noticed, but didn't say anything.
His gut rolled with the next bump and he could smell his own stomach acid at the back of his throat. He calmed himself with thoughts of the case and why the local team had stopped the dig partway through and simply called the FBI.
The girl was buried, posed as though she were curled up asleep. A teddy bear was tucked under one arm. Her fully skeletal remains and most of her clothing were all that was left. In and of itself, it was bizarre. However, members of the local police force and several of the forensic team recognized this as a hallmark of a known serial killer.
The Sleepytime Killer had murdered adult women—everyone from prostitutes and homeless women to high-ranking socialites and even a representative taken from their posh homes. Bradley James Tate had been in jail for over a decade for the crimes. The appearance of a child's body in the same pose and with the exact same style of teddy bear, in what appeared to be a much more recent grave, had rung a lot of alarm bells. Enough apparently, to make the local team step back and call in the Feds.
When Donovan had finally consulted Eleri, all he'd said as way of greeting was, “This is weird.”
She hadn't been asleep, of course, despite the late hour, despite their need to be in the air by noon the next day. Who could be okay after reading that kind of case file?
“Which part specifically do you want to start with?” She laughed.
“The Sleepytime Killer posed the bodies this way,” Donovan started. He put the phone next to him on the table, speaker button on as he spoke into the still night air of a house that had been unoccupied for a few days. There was no one for miles around to possibly hear.
Eleri added in, “but the others were buried between two to three feet deep. They were always found in recent graves.”
The search dogs had found them. Donovan thought that through now, “Do you think the dogs always found them, or were these simply the bodies that the dogs were able to find?”
Though Tate was in prison for the crimes, he'd never fully confessed. Who knew how many he'd actually killed? There were dozens more missing that were never accounted for. And likely dozens more that had never even been counted as missing in the first place.
Donovan hadn't thought of the grave depth as an issue but he thought about what she'd said last night. “This girl was never intended to be found.”
Trying to keep his mind on something other than the bumping and rocking, the sudden dips that the plane took, that played havoc with his stomach and his sanity, Donovan tried to focus on that now.
The team had come in, started to dig her up and quit partway through when they realized it was likely a serial killing case. But Donovan realized now that nothing in the report had told them how the local investigators actually had found the body in the first place.
6
Eleri leaned back on her heels. Her back ached and she cringed at the sweat dripping down her spine. Tipping her head one way then another, she next turned her head ninety degrees to the left, then right, and realized that wasn't going to be enough. She needed a real stretch or she was going to regret not doing it.
Standing up, she felt the ligaments and joints creaking and tried to refrain from suggesting—even just inside her own head—that she was simply too old for this. She couldn't be. In school, she'd been down on her hands and knees, digging, more hours than she could count. But these days, this kind of work was relatively few and far between.
It was different work from, say, tiling a floor. At that point you were working at ground level. Pulling a body out required working at least several feet below it.
“You okay?” Donovan asked, looking up from where he, too, leaned over the body. Spotlights behind them heated the area as well as making up for afternoon shadows under the trees. She didn't need the heat, the work was enough in itself, but they couldn't turn them off.
Orange twine ran at ninety degree angles across the opening left by the original forensics team. The ends were staked far enough away to not fall into the grave if the walls crumbled a bit and, at four feet down, they were likely to.
A pendulum was tied directly at the cross. It hung down into the center of the dig, giving them a plumb line and a point to take measurements from. As deep as they were, most of the work was done from a shelf that had been dug out alongside the body. The climb into the hole still felt like she was climbing into her own grave.
“I'll be fine in a minute,” she told Donovan, “just stayed in one position too long.”
In fact, she didn't even have to make her recommendation to him. He brushed several more times at the bone he was clearing before he stood up. Even though the top of him cleared the hole much better than her own short stature did, he seemed to emerge from deep in the ground. Once out, he began to stretch his own muscles.
“Any conclusions yet?” He understood she was happy to talk while she was excavating, but really only if she initiated it. If she was quiet it was usually because she needed to concentrate. While she was out and stretching he could hit her with everything he'd saved up.
She shook her head. She'd found nothing more than they already had. She'd sent off soil samples already, from multiple points around the body even telling one of the teams to do a drill several feet away. It would tell them if the fluids had leeched out that far. She would get other samples from underneath the body once they got down that far.
“We've made good progress,” she told him.
But what they hadn't made progress on was understanding exactly how the body had been discovered. It was several feet down in a solidly constructed grave. An interesting conundrum, because the positioning and the teddy bear seemed to have been done solely for the body and the ritual itself, not for display.
Eleri was struggling to wrap her head around that. The Sleepytime Killer was all about display. His bodies were buried lightly, just enough to keep the animals from finding them, but all about being found.
Not this girl.
Needing to stay upright just a little longer, Eleri asked Donovan, “Copycat?”
For as little context as she had given him, he picked it right up. “It almost has to be. The Sleepytime Killer has been in jail for a decade. So either this body is older than that, and you don't think it is, or—”
He stopped, not trailing away but almost cutting himself off.
Eleri understood. “Or the wrong person's in prison.”
They'd looked up Tate the night before, wanting to know what they were dealing with. Sure enough, some of the burials involved information that had not been released to the public. This burial contained some of those elements.
Eleri shook her head. “Bradley James Tate had details that others didn't. Details about the killing that only the killer should have known.”
Donovan paced several steps before giving up and simply starting to do lunges, which Eleri realized was probably a really great idea. Even though they looked like complete fucking fools, she couldn't afford to care. Putting her hands on her hips, she rotated her shoulders up and down and took a big step forward dropping low.
Donovan continued his own broad steps, which altered the cadence of his words a little bit. “But he never confessed to other killings. Killings that were suspected to be his. He only admitted to the ones that they had evidence for.”
Eleri stood up straight, feeling the lunge in several muscles where she'd not expected to. That was exactly where she would tense up later if she didn't do something about it now. She took another big step forward and sank low into her knees. “What do you think was the cause of that? Wouldn't his lawyer have encouraged him only to confess to the ones they could actively prosecute?”
“Maybe.”
She tried again, “Wouldn't he have likely been offered a deal where he could serve less time had he confessed to others? If he led the families to the bodies or offered up some kind of closure?”
Whether or not that would indicate remorse of any level, Eleri didn't know. But she did remember that remorse was one of the big legal pieces for rehabilitation, for reduced sentencing, for early release. All things that Tate should want . . . shouldn't he?
There were no answers here. Certainly none they would get right now.
“Let's get back to it,” she told Donovan. “I'm hoping to get her out before the sun sets.”
Given that they'd started with the body already partially exhumed, Eleri figured if they didn't run into anything too crazy, they could be finished before tonight. She was anxious to get off of her hands and knees. Anxious to remove the straps from the knee pads. Hoping to transition to a job where she could be upright.
Creaking a little in her bones as she climbed back down into the grave, she crouched next to the small body and tried to give it the reverence it deserved. Shovel in one hand, her gloved knuckles braced against the edge of the dirt. With her other hand, she leaned in, using a brush first then grabbing a bottle of water to pour over it to loosen the dirt. Then she brushed that away, slowly exposing more and more bone.
They'd have to clean the skeleton of all the mud they were creating, but at least they would know that they hadn't damaged or nicked the bone with their own instruments, that anything they found was something that was originally there.
Thirty painstaking minutes later, she loosened the bottom femur.
They were getting close. Most of the small bones were accounted for. Teams along the sides were sifting dirt as she and Donovan brought it up. They'd found only the remnants of a single cigarette, but Eleri didn't lay any hope that it would yield anything useful—like the killer's DNA. Still, they kept it to send for testing.
What she wouldn't give to have the team from Florida here. Glenda and Luna had known what they were doing. Eleri didn't trust much of anyone, so this time, she'd only allowed Donovan down in. The locals were probably happy to wash their hands of the responsibility.
Pulling the femur up, she poured water over it strategically, holding it out over the pelvis and letting the water drip there, too. She was hoping to have that large bone out soon as well.
As the water cleared away the dirt and the mud she made, she flipped the bone over, getting a good first glimpse of it. “Donovan. Look.”
7
Donovan held the skull for Eleri while she used the x-ray gun and the tiny bite-wing screen to X-ray the teeth and roots. These came out slightly different than when they were done on a live human. He'd seen her do this before, so he wasn't surprised when she checked the image on her tablet and then changed the settings.
A skeleton didn't have skin and tissue for the X-ray to go through. It was easy to blow out the images. On top of this first issue, they were only getting standard x-rays of the teeth right now. More would need to be taken for any set that might possibly be a match.
“I wish we could put it in a scan for a full panorama,” Donovan mused.
Eleri only laughed and tipped the gun at him, then she motioned for him to open the jaw and close it one more time as she got more images. “We did that once in school.”
“Where?” he asked, truly wanting to know where one went to get a skull into a full panorama machine—since they weren't used on matches much.
“In a dental office! We stuffed the head with sponges and used those to hold it the right direction on the end of a broomstick. We needed the broomstick to imitate the spine. Which is because we found out that the computer system on the panorama accounts for the spine. It strategically removes the bone mass there so that you get a good image.”
“So when you don't have a spine, it filters out other parts of the image?” Donovan asked, both surprised and not surprised by that information. “Did the broomstick work?”
“Not brilliantly.” She leaned down and continued getting her images on the child's skull in front of them. “It's not bone, but it worked well enough that we got better images.”
“Was anyone in the office when you did this?”
“No.” She shook her head at him as if to ask if he was crazy. “It was late at night after they were closed. One of the local dentists liked being part of the program, I think. He had everything on hand and taught us how to make dental molds and do all the machine adjustments.”
“Was it worth it?” Donovan asked.
“The panorama itself was great.” She still didn't look at him, just checked the image on her tablet and motioned for him to rotate the skull for her again. “But we once forgot to put their settings back. The dental office staff got a bit miffed. Rightly so. They weren't all that excited to have dead bodies in the office at night . . . even just the skeletons.”
She motioned again, this time for him to turn the skull to the other side. She adjusted the bite-wing plate again. This wasn't work that he had ever done as an ME, but having worked with Eleri for a while he understood what she wanted.
The goal was to line up the skeletal X-ray exactly as the original X-ray had been done when the person had been alive and visiting the dentist. That afforded the best chance—and best legal case—for a dental match. Right now, they had a handful of files of missing persons to check against.
Eleri had estimated the girls age at eight or under. Currently, they were also assuming the victim was female, because of the clothing that had been with the body and the fact that the Sleepytime Killer had killed mostly women.
But again, Donovan thought, A child was already a deviation. A boy child dressed in girls clothing? Possibly. He couldn't cross it off the list yet. As Eleri liked to remind him, they said she on a guess. Because a fully skeletonized body prior to puberty couldn't be distinguished male from female. Only DNA would tell what the genetics said.
There would be more to do regarding the full exam later. Their initial goal was identification, but now Donovan looked at the time. There were too many moving parts. They had a handful of missing persons reports from the area.
So they gathered all the information and moved out of the autopsy room into the adjoining, small conference space. Here they were at another local morgue that they had taken over in the late hours of the night. They'd once again flashed their FBI badges and tried to do all this while making friends with the medical examiner.
Donovan understood the other side. When he'd run his own morgue, he'd been the M.E. the FBI had once asked for help on a case. He'd let them use the facilities, realizing he didn't really have the right to refuse. And that had only been what he now referred to as “regular FBI.”
