Saving Faith By: David Baldacci

button. Faith threw open the door, leaned out and vomited.

He reached across and put his hand on her shoulder, squeezing tightly

until she stopped shaking. He spoke in a slow, steady tone. “You’re

gonna be okay.” He paused and waited until she was able to sit back up

and close the door before continuing. “First we need to ditch this

car. Mine’s on the other side of the woods. It’ll only take a few

minutes to get there. Then I know a place where you can be safe.

Okay?”

“Okay,” Faith managed to say.

CHAPTER 7

BARELY TWENTY MINUTES LATER, a sedan pulled into the cottage’s driveway

and a man and woman got out. The metal of their weapons reflected off

the light thrown from the car’s headlights. Approaching the dead man,

the woman knelt down and looked at the body. If she hadn’t known Ken

Newman very well, she might not have recognized him. She had seen

human death before, yet she still felt something rising from her

stomach to her throat. She quickly stood and turned away. The pair

searched the cottage thoroughly and then did a quick sweep of the tree

line before coming back to the body.

The large, barrel-chested fellow looked down at Ken Newman’s body and

uttered a curse. Howard Constantinople was “Connie” to all who knew

him. A veteran FBI agent, he had seen just about everything in his

career. However, tonight was new territory even for him. Ken Newman

was a good friend of his. Connie looked as though he might burst into

sobs.

The woman stood next to him. At six feet one, she matched Connie’s

height. Her brunette hair was cut very short, curving over her ears.

Her face was long, narrow and intelligent, and she was dressed in a

stylishly fitting pantsuit. Both the years and the stress of her

occupation had hammered fine lines around her mouth and around her

dark, sad eyes. Her gaze swept the surrounding area with the ease of

someone accustomed not only to observing but also to making accurate

deductions from what she observed. There was an edge to her features

that clearly demonstrated a powerful internal anger.

At age thirty-nine, Brooke Reynolds’s attractive features and tall,

lean physique would make her appealing to men for as long as she

desired the attention. However, immersed as she was in the middle of a

bitter divorce that had wreaked havoc on her two young children, she

questioned whether she would ever again want the companionship of a

man.

Reynolds had been christened, over the objections of her mother,

Brooklyn Dodgers Reynolds by her overzealous baseball-fan father. Her

old man had never been the same when his beloved ball club went to

California. Almost from day one, her mother had insisted she be

called

Brooke.

“My God,” Reynolds finally said, her gaze fixed on her dead

colleague.

Connie looked over at her. “So what do we do now?”

She shook off the net of despair that had settled over her. Action was

called for, swift but methodical. “We have a crime scene, Connie. We

don’t have much choice.”

“Locals?”

“This is an AFO,” she said, referring to an assault on a federal

officer, so the Bureau will be in the lead.” She found she couldn’t

take her gaze from the body. “But we’ll still have to work with the

county and state people. I have contacts with them, so I’m reasonably

sure we can control the information flow.”

“With an AFO we have the Bureau’s Violent Crime Unit. That breaks our

Chinese wall.”

Reynolds took a deep breath to quell the tears she felt rising to her

eyes. “We’ll do the best we can. The first thing we have to do is

secure the crime scene, not that it’s going to be too difficult out

here. I’ll call Paul Fisher at HQ and fill him in.” Reynolds mentally

went up her chain of command at the Bureau’s Washington Field Office,

or WFO. The ASAC, SAC and ADIC would have to be notified; the ADIC, or

assistant director in charge, was the head of the WFO, really only a

notch below the director of the FBI himself. Soon, she thought, there

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