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A WAGON TRAIN OF FIRE trucks, aot to Venice

There were beach cops everywhere, on four-wheelers and in 4x4s and pickups Most of the M-16s Crime-scene tape fluttered as aviation whipped past low overhead in a buzz of bright, shaking light

There were dozens upon dozens of citizens pressed up against the crime tape Most were shirtless One interested observer see out of the Vic, I looked over my shoulder as I heard a suspicious click-clack But it was just some bushy-haired thirty-year-old skateboarder attracted to the bright, shiny flashing lights

Getting out of the G-car, E, hitched to a public water fountain, and went under the cri off and going off and going off like a broken alarm clock

There was reason to be alar leads to try to find the fifteen-year-veteran agent who’d been snatched in broad daylight Her husband, as FaceTi with her at the moment of abduction, had called it in from Brazil, of all places, where he was on a business trip I didn’t envy the man

Especially now that we’d finally found his wife

The crooked s above black water was the first thing to greet us as alked down to the sand There was the soft, distant boo, the sound of the pal in the wind We stepped under a second strip of crime tape and across a deserted bike path

Beside the path, just in the sand and facing the water, Agent Mara sat in a wheelchair with two bullet holes in her head A dirty blanket covered her loosely There was blood on the right corner of herthat, we had already heard froue

She’d been strapped to a wheelchair with tie wraps, obviously killed somewhere else This was just a dump site Her left elbow had been delare of the five-hundred-watt halogen work light the crime-scene people had set up It looked like it had almost been severed with some blunt-force trauma She’d been tortured, no doubt

We turned as Detective Bassht up to us

“Hey,” he said “We looked for video in the stores along Ocean Front Walk, but it’s not looking good There’s no evidence here No prints anywhere No witnesses No nothing I got the coroner to red-ball the autopsy so we can get her back to her faet here yet?”

“Still in the air,” Emily said

“Probably for the best He shouldn’t see this Unbelievable I know I’ve given you feds souys work I kno bad it feels when one of your faets taken from you”

He quickly handed Emily a stack of bills

“Passed the hat around Get her poor kids so fro to stop until we drop every last one of the people who hurt their mother”