Exposed

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Book: Exposed by Alex Kava Read Free Book Online
Authors: Alex Kava
Tags: thriller, Suspense, adventure, Contemporary, Mystery
the bed where it looked like a pile of bedding had been dumped in the middle. The SWAT team swarmed the outside room, moving so quietly Maggie didn’t even notice them brush behind her, already in the bedroom.
    “Mommy, Mommy, someone came to help,” Mary Louise sang out to the swaddled bundle.
    Cunningham rushed over and he swooped the girl into his arms, cradling her close to his chest. But then he stopped dead in his tracks, and turned back to Maggie. There was a flicker of panic in his eyes, but his voice remained calm and soothing as he said, “There’s blood.”
    A pause and another glance, then, “A lot of it.”
    Maggie came in closer. She could see only the woman’s head, matted hair sticking to her forehead. She was gasping, almost a gurgle. Blood spurted from her mouth and nose onto a stained pillowcase. There was blood all over the bedding. But she couldn’t see any external wounds.
    Then Maggie remembered the note’s warning. She realized it was too late. There was no bomb. There were no explosives.
    “We may have expected the wrong kind of crash,” Maggie said. Instead of relief, her stomach took a plunge.
    “What are you talking about?” Cunningham tried to get a closer look while the little girl squirmed in his arms.
    “Instead of a bomb squad we should have brought a hazmat team.” She could feel everything around her grind to a halt. The bomb squad and SWAT team were frozen in place by her words.
    That’s when Mary Louise started throwing up. Her upset tummy spewed up red and green all over the front of Cunningham, spraying Maggie, too.
    “Christ!” he muttered as he wiped vomit and spittle from his face.

CHAPTER 9
    Quantico, Virginia
    R. J. Tully watched Keith Ganza process the envelope with the indentation using an ESDA (Electronic Detection Apparatus). He remembered as a kid rubbing the side of a number-two pencil over indentations in a notepad to reveal what had been written on the page that used to be on top. He probably read how to do it in Encyclopedia Brown. He was crazy for those books when he was about nine or ten, long before he even knew what an FBI agent was or did. They had an influence. Made him realize how much he loved solving puzzles. If only Emma read something more than Bride and Glamour . He had no clue what she was interested in these days, although if text messaging became a career skill she’d have that mastered.
    It amazed him how much that generation depended on computers. Kids knew how to access e-mail and create MySpace profiles, but logic and ingenuity, even puzzle solving, were foreign concepts. As Tully watched Ganza he couldn’t help but think that a lead pencil would do the trick and be quicker. At least they would have known already whether there was something to process. But the expensive equipment didn’t destroy the evidence. And that was important.
    Ganza adjusted the light on the ESDA. He had the envelope sandwiched between the metal bed and a Mylar overlay. When he was ready he’d pour a mixture of photocopier toner and tiny glass beads over the Mylar. The machine created an electric static charge with the glass beads scattering the toner and attaching it to the indented parts of the paper, almost like inking an embossed image. At least that’s how Tully understood it. With the image visible they could then take a picture of it and enlarge it.
    Sometimes the images appeared to be only scribbles. But this time it looked like they had more. The envelope had definitely been underneath a piece of paper that someone had written on, pressing hard enough to leave indentations. The solution almost seemed too easy. But even criminals, especially cocky ones, got sloppy. Could they be that lucky?
    “You think it’s his handwriting?” Tully asked, meaning the guy who left the bomb threat. “Or just some accident? Maybe someone at the bakery?”
    “He’d never let the note out of his sight or put it in the doughnut box until he was ready to unload

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