Mid May, FBI Academy

Dr Laine sat at her desk, it was past six o'clock PM but a new case file opened on her desk and she was typing her notes. The Childress case was cold and no longer theirs, her boss had shuffled her to new work on two homicides in Massachusetts. No black rock slabs or weird vibes, just standard wrath. 

Never far from her thoughts was West Virginia and as she perused the autopsy reports she picked up her phone. Scrolling through the contacts she stopped at Tom Stewart, then tapped it. 

Wherever Tom was his phone would light up with the incoming call.

[i]“SSA Stewart, how may I help you?”[/i]

"Hey, Tom," a soft feminine voice on the other end replied. "It's Dr Heather Laine, from Quantico. We met in West Virginia. Are you busy?"

Laine kept it simple, unsure if she was on speaker, realizing it was the time when normal people went home and ate dinner. 

[i]“Heather! How are you?”[/i]

"Doing about as well as expected, just working late on a case from your neck of the woods and I thought about you," she said, "How about you?"

[i]“I’m doing well. West Virginia feels like a lifetime ago now. I know it was only a month, but things have gotten better here. What case are you working on? Maybe I can help?”[/i]

"That's great to hear, Tom," Laine replied, feeling a small knot of envy as she still was not sleeping well. "Oh, the case. Yes, it's a John and Jane Doe, both found washed up along the coast near..."

Laine checked the location again, "Near Cohasset, I probably butchered that pronunciation. Anyway, both unsolved, unidentified and bodies damaged by exposure on the water within a week of each other. State police first caught the case but it went cold pretty fast. So we're taking a look at it."

She paused, feeling the weight of the questions she really wanted to ask.

[i]“I do recall this case. The bodies were reportedly in the water for over a week. They were quite bloated. The first was a male close to 30 wearing a tracksuit found near Kimball’s Point and the second a female in her early 20s found on Black Rock Beach near Forest Ave. The salt water could have been used as a forensics countermeasure. The only thing CPAC could uncover was that the people in Cohasset wouldn’t tell them anything. It wasn’t just that possibly they didn’t know, but they appeared frightened about something, fearing that if they did talk it could mean the end of their life; kind of like Whitey Bulger’s Winter Hill Gang.”[/i]

"Being dumped at sea certainly is a forensic countermeasure," Laine said wryly, then took a few notes on a steno pad. "It does have a strong feeling of execution. Cause of death was determined as multiple GSW on both. And the track suit, suggests Russians, it was Adidas after all."

There was a hint of dark humor in her voice then she sobered, "I'm glad you're familiar with this case. It was just given to me today to try and create a profile of the suspect."

[i]“Yea, that’s about right. I kind of suspected the Russians too. They haven’t really taken over much in Boston, but are growing in Providence and are entrenched in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn. I even hear they are making inroads in Bridgeport, Connecticut. You know who grew up in Bridgeport, right?”[/i] Tom didn’t wait for Dr. Laine to respond. [i]“Aaron Hernandez!”

“Hey, are you coming up to Boston or are you doing your work from Virginia?”[/i]

Laine blinked at the name, leaning over to reach the keyboard and searched it on Google before answering. "Oh, the football player convicted murderer, they must be very proud. I might pop up there, check out the crime scene area. It's probably not going to help much but I miss the water. And maybe talk to some people mentioned in this case file. Sometimes they're willing to share more with a stranger, someone that will be gone in a few days and never pull them over for a speeding ticket. I'll have to see how far I get with the autopsies, our pathologist is going over them with me."

[i]“Sounds great, give me a call when you come to town. I can pick you up and go check on some of your leads together. It was good hearing from you, Heather. I do need to get going.”[/i]

"Thanks for the help," Laine said then hurriedly asked, "Have you heard from Donnelley or Foster, or any of the others?"

[i]“No, you are the only one. I’ve tried to put that behind me for now. I am still curious and will respond when he calls...I’m sure he will call again.”[/i]

"That's probably a good idea, have a good night, Tom," she said. 

Once the call ended, Laine added her notes from his details and leaned back in her chair. He put it behind him, she wished she could but her mind continued to dwell on the matter, picking at details when she was not occupied. It probably helped that Tom had a wife and family life outside work. 

Not long after hanging up with him, her phone buzzed again and Mariana's contact picture popped up. 

"Hey girl," she said when Laine answered, "Catch you driving?"

"No, I'm still here at the office, what's up?"

*****
The coffee table was littered with the detritus of a near empty bottle of wine and the remnants of take out Pad Thai. Laine sat on the sofa, a BBC nature documentary playing in the background. When she was lonely, David Attenbourgh’s voice was pleasant and soothing. She finished the last of the wine and got up to toss it in the trash, then went to the freezer. The cherry vodka was almost empty but she took it anyway. 

Pouring it into her wine glass, she raised it sardonically at a picture of Mariana and herself, when they graduated at UC Irvine. Their last chat had been rough, an unexpected turn. Mariana had broke the news that her mother was insisting her sister be the maid of honor rather than Laine. She knew her sister and Mari had never been close, they were antagonistic but her best friend had a strong willed mother. Laine was disappointed, not so much that she wanted the status but it was the last act as two single women. She would be giving her friend away as much as Mariana’s father would be. 

Maybe it was already over, when their lives had parted ways and they had been keeping the deep friendship on life support over a continent and an engagement. Laine took a drink of vodka, knowing she was being dramatic and winced as she reminded herself suddenly of her self centered mother.

The wedding was less than three months away, she still had to be fitted for the [i]seafoam blue[/i] bridesmaid dress and find shoes and book her flight and hotel. Laine would be there for her best friend, the time off was already approved for both wedding and bachelorette party. Mariana had reminded her that if she did not have a date there was plenty of eligible groomsmen. 

Laine shuddered. Drunk ex frat dudes driving Escalades. They probably had khakis on under their tuxedo pants. She needed a buffer against that nightmare but not many prospects to fly across the country for a wedding. 

Laine had not had a serious relationship for over a year, since she and Alex broke up. He was still a friend, she thought about reaching out to him. He might be a safe choice but the temptation to want to get back with him might prove too much while surrounded by newly wedded bliss. She put her phone down and looked at the ceiling, maybe she would just find some hot juicy Marine on the base nearby with a week of leave to spare. 

********

Early June (collab between idlehands and Ionisus)

	There was nothing like a summer downpour in Houston, the stifling heat met with an equally oppressive torrent. A thunderstorm had made the world a scalding sauna and the rain beat mercilessly into the night, thumping the windows of a rental house with each gust of wind. The humidity seeped inside and choked the air, but the night had provided a reprieve from the worst of the heat. Jason was still damp with sweat, and now he was itchy. It was the percocets he had washed down an hour ago with a healthy swig of a disgusting banana flavored vodka. He could never avoid a stupid cheap bottle of booze. 

	The storm outside flashed and he looked out the window, vodka bottle in one hand and his cell phone in the other. [i] There it was[/i], he thought, [i]the secrets of the universe flashing in the blue[/i]. He was beginning to see the world as a codified veil where only the dark truths were found in its cracks. Lightning, darkness, the instant of a strange moment and its quick passing. It flashed the proof of something dark, unknown. Something like Mrs. Baughman, or Ghazni. 

Whether it was the storm, the pills, or the restless two months since West Virginia Jason needed to connect with [i]it[/i]. The high strangeness, the paranormal, the unknown riding the rim of the knowable and comfortable and sane. He had the team’s numbers but reaching out to most he found unappealing. In all their own ways Jason would feel silly, too vulnerable to connect with over [i]it[/i]. Dr. Laine came to mind, and before he could sift through the haze of liquor and opiates he was dialing her number. 

	[i]Fuck, too late now[/i].

Dr Laine sat up in her bed  laptop open to work files, Netflix playing on the flat screen so only flickers of light from changing scenes was noticed. Music from her computer filled the quiet as she typed and read, flipping among several tabs of photos. Her phone lay on the comforter nearby and from the corner of her eye she saw her screen pop up with an incoming call. Jason Jimenez, or as she had him in her phone, “Freckles”. 

“Hello?” Laine answered. 

“Hey,” Jason said, sounding relaxed. “I, uh, well…” As he trailed off another flash of blue came in from the rain pelted windows and the boom of thunder followed it. 

“I was wondering if you had a minute to talk,” he finally said. 

Laine sat up, turning down the music and setting aside the computer. “Yes, of course,” she answered, interest perking up. “What’s going on?” 

She had not heard from anyone else since her two calls and despite the time that went by, West Virginia was always in a corner of her mind. 

“Ah, nothin’ going on,” Jason answered. “I just can’t stop thinking about Black River and uh-”

Jason paused, staring out the window and assessing the moment. It was hard, he was addled and comfortably numb. He took a sip of vodka, and said, “I feel like if I don’t talk about it I might start bouncing off the walls. Now that I think about it it sounds dumb. It all meant something else to you.”

“It doesn’t sound dumb,” Laine assured him, rolling off her bed, walking barefoot through the carpeted hall in her oversized Smiths t-shirt. “Trust me, it’s never far from thought for me. I haven’t talked about it, who would I tell that would believe me? Huh...no, it’s been psychologist heal thyself.”

She opened the refrigerator and took out a leftover bottle of  red moscato from the block party the complex had held. One she had went to despite her apathy for her neighbors and she had stood in the back, the weird girl in black at the party once again. The free booze had made up for the boredom. 

“I can’t say it’s worked too well,” Laine admitted, pouring a glass of chilled wine and took a sip. “So let’s talk about it, Jason. Tell me what’s on your mind.” 

Jason chuckled. “Not like that,” he said. “You’re talking to me like you should be taking notes.”

He looked down at himself, pantsless in socks and a moth chewed shirt. The storm spoke again from outside, rain smacking the empty house in heavy sheets. He was happy to be alone, if only in the unfamiliar spaces he always seemed to be in these days. 

“It makes me feel validated in a way,” he said, and sighed. “Donnelley mentioned we had all seen something, and that morning sort of proves it was real for me, but now I want all the answers and that world is still hidden away from us.”

Laine leaned forward, as if to listen harder to him. Donnelley had been cryptic and Tom wanted to hide from it but here was what she wanted. Answers. Not just for Marlene but for Sofie and perhaps for that [i]thing[/i] she thought she saw under the pier that summer she was fourteen. 

“I want that, too,” she said intensely and she took another drink. The frustrations of having her work taken away and the silence after bubbled near the surface. “I have seen things, sensed them. A murder I was working on...”

Laine paused, she was not ready to spill about the pier at Redondo Beach. Not yet. 

“A college girl kidnapped and murdered in a forest, laid over a black slab of stone that was putting out some bad juju. You could feel it in the air, like vibrations. Just like all the bad in the world was in tune with this thing. I’ve been to dozens of murder scenes, you know? Nothing ever like this. The field agent from Seattle spent time around it the most, investigating the body and he ended up killing himself two days later.” 

“Shit,” Jason breathed.

Laine stopped, slightly breathless after spilling what had constantly battled in her mind. “What it has to do with poor Mrs Baughman, I don’t know but good old powers that be swept away all the evidence and reports on Sofie Childress. I was never able to complete a good profile...the killer is still walking around out there.”

She drank deeply then sighed, “Sorry, you wanted to talk and I just hit you with a wave. But I can’t let it go.”

“It’s all kind of the same thing,” Jason said. He sank as best he could into a stiff couch, the bottle cradled in his lap. “I’ve been thinking about my own experience. It’s always sort of there, you know, lurking in the background world. What happened to me...I think I saw it again. Before I got the call.”

He shook his head, looked around the vacant room and its furnishings. There was no identity, nothing of a home. It might as well been a hotel room or cell. “I’m not saying it’s connected, or your killer either, but maybe the connection is us. Not like we were picked because the shoe fits. More like we were meant to be here.”

Jason chuckled at himself and the opiate itch spread to his back, a shuffling muffle heard over the phone as he scratched at it. 

Laine thought about it, refilling her glass and walked back to her bedroom. She stood still, the dark room illuminated only by the mute television, blue light flickering and the shadows shifted and grew. “Maybe we are,” she said finally, setting the wine on the nightstand then went to the bed, jumping slightly to keep her feet from the edge of the bedskirt. An old childhood habit that had long ago disappeared, the fear of monsters snatching her ankles. Laine rolled her eyes at herself, then settled back against the black decorative pillows. 

“What did you see out there?” she asked, a gentle urging in her tone.
 
The question gave Jason pause. He had been so apt to call her, to brush against the idea of the unknown, but now when she wanted it out of him he felt hesitant. Was he avoiding it? He had spent years holding the story back, keeping it to himself. There had been no reason to chip away at its memory with each skeptical snicker or doubtful explanation. 

“I, uh…” he said, and after a pause continued, “I was in Afghanistan. Called out to a firefight that turned south, we were the backup.” 

He took a swig of vodka, this time exhaling its noxious sweet fumes from his mouth.

“Something happened out there. The people we were meant to save, they turned on us. Kicked our ass really, but the whole time I was hearing these horrible sounds. I can’t describe them, not like any animal I’ve ever heard but still animalistic. And then uh…”

Another pause, one clear with the silence of someone suddenly in the midst of their trauma. The storm roared and it pulled him back into the present. 

“The guy we were all supposed to be there for, I found him. He was doing something, looked like a ritual of some sort, like some crazy shit you see in a movie. And it felt like your stones, Dr. Laine. Like the world wasn’t meant for it.” He had left out mention of the Three, of their guiding presence that night in Ghazni, or their lurking in the video. He wasn’t ready to reveal their presence to the larger world.

“I’ve spent the last two months trying to figure out what the hell Baughman did. Donnelley talked like he did something to make his wife that way. Have you...have you considered what it might be?”

She listened, fighting the urge to write notes and instead just heard him out. In her mind’s eye could see flickering fire, muzzle flashes and tried to imagine what sound her might have heard. Before West Virginia she might have reasoned it out, effects of combat stress and unfamiliar tribal culture but now it was different. There was nothing she could do to explain a murderous corpse living in a septic tank. 

“I believe you,” Laine said simply, “As for Baughman, I don’t know. I think he might have tried to bring his wife back, I would like to look at records of where she was buried. Maybe she was dug up illegally and who Clyde Baughman was. If he had some sort of medical or science background. I asked our pathologist here, Dr. Bakker, if he thought it was possible to reanimate the dead. He said so far some guys at Yale were able to bring brain cells back to life from some slaughtered pigs but the pigs never regained consciousness and it lasted only two days. But you’re talking about a lab at Yale fully equipped with some of the best in their field, not some cabin in the woods.” 

Laine paused, “I didn’t tell him anything else, he’s used to my macabre questions.” 

She reached over, picking up her wine glass and downed half of it. “You said you witnessed a ritual. What were they trying to accomplish? If you had to guess.”

There was a prolonged pause and Jason considered his words. "Perhaps ritual is too strong a word. Maybe it was just that. In any case I haven't a clue. People were dying, I was wounded, it was all a fuckin' mess. I couldn't tell you what any of it was. If anyone did know they weren't talking and they made sure to bury me with the secret." 

He sighed, and continued," If I had to guess it felt like something was supposed to 'arrive.' I have no idea what that means but I felt it. Like intuition but in a survival sense." 

"Whatever we encountered--Mrs. Baughman--that was the interview. I have a feeling training wheels come off next time around." 

Laine stayed quiet after he had finished, whatever he had seen it had been violent and intense, perhaps enough for lasting trauma. As Jason had said, maybe they were chosen for the weird shit they saw or maybe it was something more. She needed more than a glass of wine to deal with it. 

[i]Something arriving, drawn by blood. Or was it the dying?[/i] 

“It certainly sounds like ritual sacrifice and that is what I thought of when I saw the Childress scene. What is sacrifice but an offering for a higher power...something otherworldly. The Aztecs ripped out hearts and offered them to Huitzilopochtli. Ancient Celts threw their sacrifices into a bog after strangling them or cutting their throats. The modern world forgets easily but culture does not, sometimes old habits die hard. Maybe this is a cult or some kind of ancient tribal tradition that existed before the word of Muhammed ever came to that corner of the world,” Laine said, shifting on the bed then remembered. “Baughman had some papers in that box, research about Native American stories and some artifacts. I don’t know if or how they tie in with his wife but it was apparently important enough to keep hidden.” 
 
“Yeah,” Jason responded. He leaned over and grabbed at the water damaged book resting on the coffee table in front of him. He had found it tucked away in nondescript used bookstore downtown. “Sky Devils,” he read on the cover. “Archetypical Figures in Native American Mythology. He had a copy in the footlocker. I just picked it up. Next time we meet I’ll have read it but it doesn’t look like that type of book.”

She pulled her knees up, wrapping an arm around them as she thought over the situation and over what Jason had described. While there was a chance the trauma had played into his memory of events she did not doubt he saw something frightening and unexplainable. Not after the cabin. Empirical senses were for deducting but sometimes a good investigator used his or her gut. And Jason’s gut had helped keep him alive. 

“That’s my thoughts. Read it  anyway, everything is a clue until it’s a dead end,” she said after a deep breath. “As for what lays ahead, it’s probably places angels fear to tread.”

Angels. How fitting a word, [i]how ironic[/i]. Pararescuemen were called Guardian Angels. Jason had always felt pride in their motto, “That others may live.” The reminiscence in all of its shallow comfort turned at the thought of Anis al-Shamard. He hadn’t been saving anyone these days. Just killing or sending off to be killed. “That you may live.”

“...Weren’t meant for the clouds,” he muttered, thinking of what Laine had just said. “My mom said that to me once. Wherever we go, Laine, we deserve to be there.” 

“Deserve is a heavy word,” she replied after a moment of silence. “Maybe we’re not being punished, but we’re what is needed to help... ‘fight the only war that matters’. Whatever that means, it’s what Donnelley told me anyway.”

Laine fidgeted with the hem of the old t-shirt, pulling on a thread. It started to unravel, the seam fraying under her finger tips.

"I'm already tired of fighting wars I don't understand for and against powers I don't even know. Right now we're just doing more of the same. Hell, I don't even care anymore. I just keep going to see where I end up, where I burrow down in this universe." 

Jason realized he was overstaying his welcome in the phone call. Between lucidity and stupor he had a knack for becoming abstract, and the combination of sickly sweet vodka and pain pills made his social filter degrade into a slur of consciousness. At least he could recognize as much.

"Don't you ever get sick of the comfort of putting one foot in front of the other? Until we get real answers that is all this is. One foot in front of the other fighting someone else's shadow war."

Outside the wind howled. It rattled the windows and sent wood creaks ticking throughout the hollow spaces of the house. Something distant was calling, beckoning. 

"Listen, sorry to cut this off but I gotta go."

“I haven’t shared that experience, and I am not envious of you. What you’ve seen and done, it’s ...well, it’s appreciated. I suppose, necessary even, ” she said, referring to the war.  She added quickly, not quite hiding the sardonic tone in her voice, “Or not and we’re all just tools of great powers to use and throw away.” 

Laine at least thought she understood what she fought, humans with mental or behavioral conditions that lead them to gruesome murder. Nothing evil, nothing other worldly, just humans being inhuman. The experience with Childress case, then Marlene Baughman were new.  “I have to keep going, because the answers I need are out there.” 

When he said he had to go, Laine nodded in the darkness, “Take care of yourself, Jason. Call me if you need anything. Good night.” 

After the line went dead, Laine sat up in bed, watching the mute tv flickering blankly in the dark bedroom. Jason’s words had stirred a faint anxiety, for both him and herself. There was so much unknown out there, Laine doubted if she even knew the right questions to ask, let alone what the answers would do for her. The Baughmans, Sofie Childress and now Jason’s story of the tribesmen and the madness of that night. Sooner or later the call would come and Laine would answer it.