Special Forces Saviour. Janie Crouch

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СКАЧАТЬ looked over at Jon and Liam. “We need to call this in. Omega and local PD.”

      Liam already had his phone out. “On it.”

      “Okay, stay with the body until they get here.” Derek turned back toward the house. “Jon, let’s go see if there’s anything in the house. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

      They hadn’t gone more than a few steps before they smelled it. Smoke, coming from the building the potential terrorist had just vacated.

      If possible, Derek’s curse was even more vile. A burned house would destroy all possible evidence. The poor dead guy had probably just been a decoy to lure the Omega team away so whoever was left could start the fire.

      Jon and Derek sprinted back to the house. Smoke was pouring out of the windows. If they were going to be able to salvage anything useful, they’d have to do it in a hurry. As safely as possible, Derek opened the back door, throwing a latex glove onto one hand to grab anything that might be useful for the investigation. Then he took off his jacket to use as a filter over his mouth.

      Inside, everything was in flames. Whoever had been here had used some sort of accelerating agent, probably gasoline, to make the place burn more quickly. Bending low under the smoke, he and Jon made their way farther inside.

      They’d been in the house less than a minute, squinting their way through the smoke and heat, when Jon pulled on Derek’s shoulder, gesturing back toward the door. Jon was right. This was too dangerous. They needed answers about the terrorist attack, but it wasn’t worth either of them losing their lives.

      Derek saw a few pieces of some sort of computer hardware sitting broken on the floor. He crawled to them, wincing as his hand was burned picking up the more substantial pieces and placing them inside his jacket pocket. Jon was pulling on him again and Derek could feel the hairs singeing on his arms from the heat. It was time to go.

      As they rushed to get out, Derek saw something just under the layer of smoke lying near the edge of the kitchen table. It looked like some sort of communication device, or maybe some sort of drive, about half the size of a cell phone. Derek pushed Jon toward the door, then dropped to his hands and knees to crawl to it. The smoke was now too heavy to remain upright. Derek smelled the putrid stench of burning flesh just before he felt pain on his shoulders and back. He was too close to the heat and it was burning his skin. He grabbed the device and wrapped it in his jacket, then began crawling for the door.

      Or at least he hoped he was crawling in the direction of the door. He could no longer see in the smoke. Breathing was becoming damn near impossible. Derek kept crawling forward.

      Hands reached from in front of him, grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him out of the building and into blessed clean and cool air.

      “You are one stubborn son of a bitch,” Jon murmured to him as he dragged Derek down the three steps onto the ground.

      “I’m okay,” Derek wheezed out, crawling a few more steps before sprawling on the ground. The pain in his back and shoulders was uncomfortable, but not excruciating. His lungs, though, felt seared. Both men lay, watching the building burn for long minutes, Derek’s lungs finally feeling a bit of ease as he continued to breathe clean air. Eventually he could hear the sirens signaling the firefighters’ arrival.

      “I hope you got something in there,” Jon told him, obviously hearing the sirens, too. “Because the only thing that destroys evidence quicker than fire—”

      “Is extinguishing it,” Derek finished for him. Water, foam, the firemen themselves. All were hell on evidence.

      “Yep.”

      “I think I might have gotten something important.” Still lying in the mostly dead grass of a lawn that hadn’t seen proper care for decades, Derek explained about the communication device. “We need to get it back to the lab so Molly can try to recover information from it.”

      Jon snickered. “Uh, o-o-okay, D-Derek.” The stuttering was completely for show.

      Sitting up, Derek rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Jon. She’s not that bad.” Derek knew he shouldn’t try to defend Molly Humphries, the forensic lab director. Yeah, the pretty pathologist tended to get a little tongue-tied around Derek. But the more he tried to defend her to his colleagues when they mentioned it—which was as often as damn possible—the worse everyone teased.

      Jon smiled. “Hey, you know I like sweet Molly as much as anyone. But I have to admit that watching her go from the most intelligent scientist I know to a blushing, stammering schoolgirl around you is one of my favorite pastimes.”

      “Shut up, Jon,” Derek repeated. “Just focus on the case.”

      Jon was wise enough not to say anything else about Molly Humphries.

      Both Jon and Derek were seen by paramedics as they waited for the firefighters to finish their job. Derek was decreed as suffering from first-degree burns on his shoulders and smoke inhalation, but didn’t require further medical attention. As he and Jon watched the firefighters work diligently, neither held out much hope of finding any further evidence. They would still check.

      Liam joined them once local law enforcement came to pick up the body of the guy who had shot himself. Liam had taken the dead man’s prints and his weapon, as well as a sample of the man’s DNA. The body would be delivered to the Omega morgue later. All the items Liam had collected would go straight back to the lab.

      A dead suspect, a burnt building and a few broken pieces of possible evidence. All in all a pretty terrible day. Definitely not any closer to solving the terrorist attack on Chicago. And Derek knew they were going to get chewed out again for it. Govermental-type bigwigs all the way up the food chain were demanding answers for the bombing. Derek was scheduled to provide an update to a committee via teleconference in just a few hours.

      Derek wasn’t looking forward to that. Especially not now, with nothing to show.

      Derek’s only hope now was that Molly, with all her magic in her lab, could salvage something out of this mess. Molly had saved Derek before. He prayed she could do it again.

       Chapter Two

      Molly Humphries caught a look at her shoes as she carried an armful of case files across the lab to her desk. How she hated her sensible shoes. They were flat, unimaginative and...well, just sensible. Plain and brown.

      That her shoes were a symbolic reflection of her personal life was not lost on Molly.

      She had no idea why the shoes were offending her so much on this particular day, when she’d been wearing them every day for over six months. They’d faithfully seen her through long weeks at the lab where she’d sometimes put in sixty or seventy hours a week. Her shoes got the job done, gave her no cause for complaints and never drew attention to themselves for the wrong reasons.

      Oh man, the metaphors just kept coming, didn’t they?

      She should be thankful for her shoes now, for their comfort and sensibleness, since she’d already been on her feet for ten hours, and the day wasn’t close to over. Molly loved her job as director of Omega Critical Response Division’s main forensic lab here in Colorado Springs. Her work was challenging and fulfilling. Molly excelled at it, both as one of the leading pathologists СКАЧАТЬ