Unseen (Will Trent / Atlanta Series)

made the introductions.
    Faith asked, “You just get here?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” Nell wouldn’t take her eyes off the couch. Faith seemed to note the arrangement, but made no comment. Shesmiled at Sara in a way that let her know there was enough discomfort to go around.
    Sara said, “We saw Charlie.”
    “He’s still packing up the van.”
    Nell noisily started unpacking the bags, banging the bottle of bleach and box of gloves down on the plywood counter.
    Faith walked around the front room, picking up items, obviously trying to get a feel for the place. Will’s partner was one year his junior, but she’d come up through the Atlanta police force before joining the GBI and was equal parts pragmatic and cynical. Sara could not have wished for a better agent to back up Will. Faith was clever and competent. She hated taking risks. In other words, she was the complete opposite of Lena Adams.
    She was also nosy as hell. She walked around the room with a judgmental air, taking in the curtains and furnishings with the same sharp eye as Nell.
    Sara felt slow on the uptake. Nell wasn’t just here to clean. Lena was pushing her out of Jared’s hospital room, so Nell was invading Lena’s home.
    Nell had finished unpacking the bags. She braced her hands on the wooden counter. “I should probably look at it first.”
    There was no use arguing with her. Nell was obviously determined to keep moving forward. Sara and Faith silently followed her toward the hallway.
    Nell didn’t get far. She stopped just outside the guest bathroom. The shower curtain was pulled back. A dirty sliver of soap was beside a bottle of Axe shampoo. The seat was up on the toilet. The counter was cluttered with men’s toiletries—deodorant, a razor and shaving cream, a toothbrush that needed replacing and a half-empty tube of toothpaste. Little hairs filled the sink where Jared had shaved and failed to wash out the bowl.
    Nell continued down the hall, mumbling, “I guess she kicked him out of the bathroom, too.”
    Faith mumbled in an equally low voice, “You couldn’t pay me to share my bathroom with a man.”
    “Amen,” Sara answered as she trailed Nell down the hallway. She stepped over a white chalk outline on the floor where Charlie had taken some DNA. Sara guessed from the look of it that someone had spat in the hall, probably to make a point.
    Which further supported the idea that the shooters hadn’t randomly chosen their victims.
    There was a spare bedroom on either side of the hall. The first one was being used as an office. The second appeared to be another unfinished project. The walls were a cheery yellow. The closet door was propped up on two sawhorses. Nell shook her head as she passed by, probably adding it to the list of Possum’s chores. She stopped a few feet from the master bedroom.
    Sara heard Nell draw in a sharp breath. The woman’s hands shook as she grabbed the doorframe.
    Charlie’s estimate may have been too conservative. Despite the passage of time, the pool of blood where Jared had fallen was still congealing. Light glimmered on the wet surface. The edges had curdled into a dark rust that seeped into the hardwood floor.
    The rest of the blood had dried hours ago, leaving burgundy stains that told the story of violent altercation. The ceiling and walls weren’t the worst of it. Large boot prints mixed with Lena’s bare footprints back and forth across the floor. Splatter. Spatter. Spray. Drops. Knee prints. Handprints. Smears where an area rug must’ve gotten bunched up beneath Jared’s body. Tracks that showed where someone had crawled toward the bed. Still more shoe prints indicated where the neighbors and first responders rushed in to work on Jared. They must have all been covered in blood by the time they left. Long trails of red even managed to seep into the grout lines in the bathroom floor.
    But the area around the door to the bedroom told the real story. This was where Jared had been shot. This was where Lena hadfirst taken on the intruders. The dried blood splattering and spattering the walls and ceiling could fill a forensic textbook. They varied in size and shape, in coverage and scope, and would help map out every second of what had obviously been an extremely violent struggle. Even with the pieces of tooth and bone gone, the hammer and weapons taken into evidence, the shadow of death lurked in every corner.
    Nell’s voice caught. “I can’t … I don’t know what …”
    Sara didn’t