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