The Plane’s Children – Chapter Three – Emersli1

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Anthony DiNozzo looked at the pristine body of the young Guide, dead on the ground with a look on her face that expressed such horror and pain he could barely stand to look at it.

“Have you got the pictures?”  Looking towards his officers documenting the scene Chief Inspector DiNozzo with the Sentinel and Guide Criminal Investigative Division received an affirming nod.  Reaching out, the Inspector closed her eyes.

Looking at the body disposal site, Tony began netting it out in his head.  The body had been rolled off the overlook above and left where it fell.  “Parker, Jackson.  Get up to the road above and see what you can find.

The Sentinel and Guide pair hurried to follow his directions, moving to climb up the steep sides of the ravine in which the body had been found … by a pair of birdwatchers of all things.

Turning back to the young woman DiNozzo knelt down and studied what her body could tell him without disturbing it.  “Who were you?  And how did you come to be here?”

As the only member of his division not online, sometimes Tony felt as though he was the ‘bum wheel’ on the bus.  But whenever he got down like that, Blair was quick to point out that he had been recruited for his investigative skill and experience.  They had plenty of people who could do the legwork, but not so many who could put all the pieces together.

Now visually surveying the body, he focused not on the tiniest of details which the Sentinels would pick out, but on the overall condition of the woman.  She was small.  About 5’5” and 140.  She had curly brown hair she wore in a bob.  Her fingertips were manicured and polished in a fun, sparkly bright blue.

Her clothing was undisturbed, making it less likely she’d been molested.  The bottoms of her shoes showed no wear and tear like you’d expect to see if she’d hiked this far herself, so probably already dead and carried from a vehicle of some sort.

“Sir, we got a hit on the name.”  Tony’s young sergeant was eager to report.  While the Guide band on her wrist had led to their callout, someone had smashed it badly enough to disable its connection to the S/G Database.  It was in fact the only readily visible sign of violence.

“So, who is she, Brandon?”  A name would give him a place to start.

“Her name’s Amalda Vernon.  She’s a registered Guide with the Annapolis Center.  She’s bonded to Sentinel Matthew Caulfield, registered with the same Center.”  Tony studied the young woman’s body one last time.

“Amalda.”  A sound above made him look up to see the people from the Medical Examiner’s department coming down the steep slope.

Dr. Saxon stopped by Tony, looking down at the body with a dispassionate professionalism that was mirrored by her egret spirit animal, and sometimes made her hard to take.  If Tony hadn’t happened to catch her once, crying silently while performing an autopsy on a child, he probably would have bought the act.

“Interesting.  No apparent injuries or cause of death.  Just a second and I’ll get you a preliminary TOD.”  Kneeling and opening her kit she removed a liver probe.  “Sometime within the last twenty-four hours certainly.  Probably between one and five yesterday afternoon.  I might be able to narrow that down for you once I get her on the table.”

“Thanks Doc.  I’m off to do the notification and ruin someone’s day, though I suspect he already knows.”  Tony would be very surprised if Matthew Caulfield didn’t know that his bonded partner was gone.  He just hoped the man had some helpful direction or information for the investigative team.

“Brandon, we’re heading out.”  Summoning his sergeant Tony moved away towards their vehicle.  “We get an address for Caulfield?”

“Yes Boss.  Lives in Annapolis.  I’ve got the exact address for the GPS.”  The young man bounded ahead eagerly, his golden retriever spirit animal running alongside.

As he climbed the trail back behind his sergeant, Tony couldn’t help but wonder what his own spirit animal would have been if he’d come online.  He always felt so alone, despite friends and colleagues all around him.

Sighing he put the matter out of his head.  He had a job to do, and a young woman who deserved justice.  Tony planned to see that she got it.

Looking around the empty apartment in Annapolis, Tony knew he was looking at a secondary crime scene.  This was probably where Amalda had been taken, and by the look of the place Matthew had been taken with her.

Certainly, someone had been here and put up a fight.  Amalda Vernon might turn out to have been fierce, but she was too small to cause the kind of chaos Tony was seeing.  No, his investigative instincts were telling him that both Sentinel and Guide had been taken.

Walking through the place he thought it through.

“What do you think happened here, Boss?”  Brandon looked around in dismay.  The young guide hadn’t been with Tony long, and this was his first major case in the field.

Carefully examining everything Tony answered.  “You have to look at everything, together, and separately.  Even chaos has patterns within it.”

“I think he knocked on the door.  Either she let him in or he overpowered her and pushed his way in.  She struggled with him, here.”  Tony pointed out the overturned hall table.  “He incapacitated her very quickly.  Since I don’t see any blood here it was either a sleeper hold or something like chloroform.  Maybe ketamine.  We’ll have the Sentinel forensic team check for blood of course, but I don’t think the scene’s been cleaned.”

Moving to the hallway leading to the bathroom and bedrooms, Tony looked back towards the door.  “Caulfield came in to find her already slumped.  If the perp was lucky, Matt thought he was rendering aid and ran over to help.  That would have made the fight easier.  Though as you can see, Caulfield didn’t go down easily.”  The overturned bookcase, armchair, and floor lamp definitely indicated that a very physical altercation had taken place.

“There’s a small amount of blood, but not enough to be from a head wound, so leaning towards an injectable now.  Ketamine is looking better and better.”  Tony moved back to the door.  “What will be very interesting is figuring out how he got two unconscious people out of this apartment without being noticed.”

Moving back into the hallway he met the crime scene team coming up the stairs.  “Now the question becomes … where is Matthew Caulfield?”

Back in his office in the DC Sentinel and Guide Center, Tony picked up the phone.

“Tony.  We’re already on the way.”  Blair Sandberg wasn’t usually this abrupt.  “Something has happened.  All the Shamans felt it.  If it weren’t so serious I’d call it a disturbance in the Force.”

“What are you talking about, Blair?  I was just calling you about a case we caught today.  I have a dead guide, and a missing sentinel.  I was hoping you could do a little communing with the psionic plane and help me find him.”  Tony didn’t know of anything major that had happened recently.  Something that would have all the Shamans on alert would have to be big.

“The only way I can describe it is that the psionic plane is furious.  I’ve never felt anything like it.  Neither have any of the others.  Even our oldest cultures don’t have legends about this.  Something terrible has happened.  And the epicenter seems to be your area.  When you logged your case, we thought it was worth checking out.”  Blair turned away from the phone to talk to someone else for a moment, then came back on.  “Jim says we’ll be landing in about twenty minutes, so allowing for traffic, we’ll meet you at your office in about an hour and half.”

“OK.  Hopefully I’ll have more for you by then than I have right now.”  The missing sentinel worried Tony.  Caulfield may already be dead, but if he wasn’t … well he was almost certainly in trouble.  Tony needed to find him … before this case became a double homicide.

Hanging up with Blair, Tony moved over to a whiteboard and started listing what he knew about Amalda Vernon.  “Brandon, have you pulled Amalda’s file from the Database yet?”

“Um.  Working on it Boss.”  In other words, no.  Tony sighed.  “The most important person at any crime scene is the victim.  And right now, she’s literally ALL we’ve got.  We need to do a deep dive into her life and habits.  Because somewhere along the way she crossed paths with a murderer.  And the only place we have to look for him is in her life.”

“And we can get a start on that information from her SG Database file.  Got it.”  The young man flushed as he worked intently on his tablet for a moment.  “Amalda Vernon, online at nineteen following a car accident.  Bonded with Sentinel Matthew Caulfield at twenty-four.  Moved to the Annapolis area for work three years later.  They’ve lived here for about six months.”

“Six months.  That’s our time frame, to start.  I want to know every step Amalda’s taken in the past six months.  He may be lurking further back, but most likely this is someone she’s stumbled into recently.”  Tony wrote the basic information down on his victim board, trying not to be irritated at his young sergeant.  The man had good instincts.  He just needed training and some experience.

And at least he was willing to learn from Tony.  Eager, even.  Not like … yeah, not going back there.  That time was behind him.

Tony had never regretted accepting Blair’s offer to head up the new Investigative Division.

He hoped he wasn’t about to start now.

Dr. Saxon made it to Tony’s office about ten minutes behind Blair Sandberg and Jim Ellison.

It was a little overcrowded, but no one wanted to leave.  All of them were focused on the whiteboard, slowly filling in with information about their victim.

Amalda was a mid-level guide who had lived a simple life.  She worked as a second-grade teacher at one of the local S/G Foundation schools.  She liked to read and made regular trips to the library.  She was a bit of a history nerd and spent her weekends exploring the local museums and historical sites.  She shopped at the organic food store down the street from her apartment complex.  

When she wanted to work out, she biked or swam at the local YWCA.  She wasn’t much for opera, but she loved the symphony and she and Caulfield had splurged on box seats for the upcoming season.  Her parents had died in the car accident that brought her online, but she’d managed to save her two younger siblings, pulling them out of the burning car and getting them to safety before the engine blew.

They were devastated, and on their way to Annapolis now.  Tony just hoped he had something to tell them when they got here.

“Well, I can tell you that she was a generally healthy young woman, until about a week ago.”  Dr. Saxon began sharing her autopsy findings.  “She’s seriously dehydrated and her intestinal tract was almost empty.  It looks like she may have eaten one or twice in the last week, and it wasn’t much.  She probably was given a small amount of water daily, since she didn’t die of dehydration.”

“What did she die of?”  Brandon asked the question that was on everyone’s minds, then looked sheepish.  “I mean, do we have a cause of death?”

Saxon slowly shook her head.  “Not really.  I mean, her heart stopped … obviously.  But there’s no reason why it should’ve.  I can’t verify the ketamine, since it metabolizes so quickly and any injection site would have long since healed.  But it’s as good a working theory as any.  Her tox screen came back clean, so he wasn’t keeping her drugged.  No abrasions, so she wasn’t tied up.”

Saxon’s egret trilled comfortingly and rubbed its head against hers.  “I basically have a whole lot of negative results.  The only abnormal thing about the body is the expression on her face.  So, the best hypothesis I have to give you, and it’s just a hypothesis, is that she was somehow scared to death.  Literally.”

“We need to find Matthew Caulfield.”  Tony was adamant.  That had to be their focus.  While the little techno-moles ran their searches and Dr. Saxon’s tissue samples were analyzed for more in-depth results … somewhere, living or dead, there was a missing man who might hold the key to this puzzle box.

They needed to find him.  Soon.