He felt the tremor of her muscles, but she nodded, and he let her go.
A sharp two-fingered signal to Grant, and he followed the man into the room.
The acrid taste of iron hit the back of his throat.
“Holy shit,” Grant muttered.
In the red glow of the tactical light, the blood looked like black streaks painted over multiple surfaces. While Grant cleared the adjoining bathroom and walk-in closet, Adam holstered his weapon, and switched on the LED attached to his vest.
Careful to avoid contaminating the crime scene, he approached the bed. Lying in a pool of his own blood, the judge hadn’t been dead for long. Not more than a few hours by Adam’s guesstimate.
Eyelids open, Roland Matthew’s glassy eyes stared at the ceiling. In contrast, his jaw hung low, gaping and stiff in a moderate state of rigor mortis. Beneath his chin, the deep punctures of multiple stab wounds dotted his chest.
Too many lesions to count, and too much congealed blood to differentiate from one blow to the next, made it impossible to avoid the truth. The judge’s death had been painful, violent, and going by the lack of defensive wounds, perpetrated by someone close to him.
At the sound of Eve’s gasp, he turned. She stood on the threshold, her expression stricken, and before he could reach her, she cried out, her horrified wail knifing straight through the silence of the house.
CHAPTERFORTY
Gatheredin the manor’s library, Adam kept a close watch on Eve as they waited for Grant and his search team to return. In the frozen grip of shock, she sat on the edge of a small couch by the cold hearth. Her spine rigid. Her hands folded in her lap. Her expression blank.
The horror of finding her adoptive father dead had sent her over the edge, and her coping mechanisms had shut her down. Jesus, Adam wished she hadn’t seen the judge’s body. It was one thing to know he’d been murdered in his bed. Another thing altogether to witness the violent way he’d died.
“Leave her,” Gray said softly, laying her hand on his arm to prevent him from going to Eve. “She needs to be alone right now. If you try to comfort her, she’ll start crying and won’t be able to stop. She doesn’t want to break down. Not here…not in front of everyone.”
Adam looked at his sister. It had been a little over a month since their own father had been murdered, and despite her strained relationship with the colonel, she still mourned his loss. After what she’d been through, if anyone could understand how Eve felt in this moment, it would be Gray.
“Do you think Bryan did it?” Davis asked.
“No idea,” Adam replied, shaking his head and keeping his voice low. “Eve didn’t think he was capable of murder. But who knows? He’s been involved in the kidnapping and imprisonment of over a dozen women in the last ten years. Under the right circumstances, he could be capable of anything.”
“No sign of him,” Grant said, returning with his team after re-sweeping the entire manor looking for Eve’s missing brother.
“And nothing in the luggage,” Chase added, coming through the door a second behind. “No passports, no papers, no electronics.”
“Makes no sense,” Gray replied. “Everything else is ready to go. Do you think we missed a safe or something?”
“Maybe Bryan took them when he left,” Cody said.
“Nothing on the CCTV recordings either.” Seated in one of the leather club chairs facing the massive desk, Jay closed his laptop with a decisive click. “The system was shut off this morning and the existing data only goes back three days. No unusual activity recorded. Everything else has been manually wiped out at the source. No way for me to recover any of it.”
“Shit,” Gray said. “Now what?”
Adam glanced at his watch. They had two hours before the power came back on, but without Bryan, or the evidence they needed, they had no reason to prolong their departure. “We head back to the airport.”
“No,” Gray said, breaking from the group and charging her way to the judge’s desk. “We can’t give up. There has to be something we missed.” She threw herself into the leather chair and started to rifle through the drawers, her gloved fingers coasting over the odd bits and pieces that tended to collect over the years.
“There’s nothing of value in the drawers, baby. I already checked.” Chase followed in her footsteps.
“But—”
“Trust me, Gray. It’s not over, and we’re not done, but Adam’s right, there’s nothing more we can do from here.” He ran his hand over the back of her head. “Let’s get Eve home, okay?”
Gray looked from Chase to Eve and nodded.
“Alright,” Adam said. “We leave the way we came. Pack it up, and let’s go.” Order given the group prepared for departure while he went to collect Eve. “Time to go, princess.” She didn’t acknowledge, but neither did she resist when he took her by the elbow to help her stand. “Can you walk?” She nodded and took a wobbly step.
Arm around her waist, he led her across the floor to join the rest of the JTT. They circled around her, an unspoken show of support as they filed out of the library and moved down the dim hallway toward the kitchen.
