Backblast by Candace Irving (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

The source appeared impervious to both as he reached into his suit jacket with his free hand so he could flash his badge. "Special Agent Sam Riyad, NCIS. I'm assisting—"

"Wrong. What you're doing is blowing this for us."

"Us?"

She flashed her own credentials for the third time that night. "Mira Ellis; I work out of the field office. Where are your gloves?"

"In my car. But this isn't part of the crime scene—"

"Yes, it is." The whole damned condo was. Meaning every single item within every single room was evidence, until Jerry deemed otherwise.

As for the sheet of paper that had made it into Riyad's naked hand, one look at the fingers holding it, and the compromising prints they were leaving behind, and Jerry would toss them out on their collective asses.

Former colleagues, old friends and classified hot potato or not.

Riyad's cheeks flushed as he appeared to accept that he had indeed committed the most basic of procedural violations.

Mira ignored the man's embarrassment in favor of her surging panic as she caught the faint thump of boots climbing the stairs. Any second now and the ME would be passing this room—and Jerry would be with him.

Talk about shit's creek.

She tugged the spare gloves from her suit pocket and tossed them to her de facto partner. "Hurry."

She'd deal with the fallout of extraneous prints with Jerry later.

The thumps reached the third-floor landing and came to a halt outside the condo door as her fellow agent blew precious seconds working the first of his 'size-large' hands into her 'size-small' gloves. The thumps resumed.

"Turn around."

The boots reached the study door as Riyad complied, and continued on. Jerry's loafers did not.

"Everything okay?"

Mira caught the soft snap of a successfully sheathed second glove as she pivoted to the door. "Yup."

Jerry nodded. "Let's get in there then. The ME's ready to do his thing. By the way, this one prefers to work in silence, even at crime scenes. Talking's okay—just not to him. At least, not until he's finished."

Curiosity piqued, Mira abandoned Riyad to the study and followed Jerry down the hall. They passed a meticulously pristine galley kitchen and followed the increasingly nauseating stench of days-old death into a bedroom that was anything but.

"Jesus."

Jerry cracked his gallows grin. "Ah, Mir. Didn't realize you'd found religion."

She shook her head. "I haven't."

Another few rooms like this, and she never would.

At first glance, the JAG's private sanctuary looked a lot like the public bathroom Mira had woken in almost two weeks earlier, skull throbbing, ears ringing and her entire body covered in blood—and worse. The fallout had been everywhere.

Then…and now.

Mira swallowed the bile that threatened as the rooms and victims merged. One male, one female. One Marine, one Navy. Both so senselessly dead. Her increasingly tenuous hold on the present must've shown, because Jerry's hand found her shoulder once more. A solid squeeze infused with a bald, but reassuring been there, survived that, and you will too followed.

She dragged in an icy, death-laden breath as she cupped her hand over Jerry's to better cling to his support. To her surprise and relief, his simple touch worked a heck of a lot better than some shrink's endless questions and rambling, esoteric platitudes.

For the first time in two weeks, she managed to shake loose the past. Jerry's hand fell away with it.

The present remained.

This room, this blood.

It was everywhere, staining damned near everything. The gauzy sheers bunched at the corners of the iron four-poster were splattered with it, as were the pale peach walls beyond. Hell, even the mint-green area rug was covered in smeared swathes and the distinct arcs of dark arterial spurts. Damned near a hundred tented, yellow crime scene numbers were scattered about the room, some nestled in amid the blood, others marking remaining evidence of interest. But those weren't what drew her attention.

It was the body.

The victim was naked and tied spread-eagle atop a rumpled, once-white coverlet. It was a good thing they knew the JAG's name, because battered, bruised and painfully bloated forms did not make for easy ID's. But that wasn't the worst of it. Their victim had been violated in at least two orifices. In the mouth—and lower. A filthy gag spilled from blackened lips, while the bulk of the wine bottle that'd once complemented the shattered goblet on the floor was visible between the woman's legs.

The sheer amount of blood confirmed that the JAG had been alive for damned near all of it.

She turned to Jerry as the eerily mute ME leaned over the body to insert a thermometer into the JAG's liver. "Whoever did this wanted something. Badly." She'd lay odds, the bastard also had a serious issue with women in general or this woman in particular, too.

Given that the woman was a lawyer, her instincts were leaning toward the latter.

Jerry nodded.

"But judging from the contusions—not to mention the depth of that bottle—I don't think he got it."

Another nod.

Mira caught sight of an antiqued photo frame on the nightstand. An intriguing square of smudged paper lay folded up beside it. But as she stepped forward to get a better look at the square of paper, the photo shanghaied her attention. The paper's mysteries on hold, she took another step. Like the rest of the room, the glass covering the photo was splattered with blood. She could make out the outline of a man and woman beneath, striking the standard hand-in-crooked-arm pose snapped at the beginning of countless formal military functions. Both the man and the woman posing within wore Navy Dress Blues.

But something about the dimpled, sweetheart curve to the woman's jaw teased at the recesses of Mira's brain.

She arched a brow toward Jerry. "May I?"

"Go ahead. Initial photos are done."

She eased the frame from the nightstand, flipping it so she could unlatch the prongs on the reverse as the ME cut the scarf securing the victim's right hand to the bed. Mira slid the photo free, her stomach bottoming out as the couple came into