Dead Shall Speak (An FBI/Romance Thriller Book 10) by Morgan Kelley

generally cool under pressure. It would be interesting to see him lose it.
    Well, as long as it wasn’t directed at him.
    Standing beside the open chasm, Jaxon noticed one thing. The man she loved was excited to have his team there. She could tell that he was thrilled to be back on the job. His eyes were bright with joy, and from the tone of his voice, he was ecstatic to be using his brain once more.
    She realized something.
    Well, two things.
    The first was that he needed to feel fulfilled in his job. The FBI gave him the satisfaction he needed to carry on with his day. It was true that he was giving back to people who had no chance at justice without their help.
    It touched her.
    Then, she realized something even more important. He must love her a lot. He’d followed her to a hole in the ground, did endless paperwork, and left his friends and family to stay by her side.
    Every day had to be hell for him. If that wasn’t total adoration, what was?
    Now her heart ached with the love that threatened to swamp her. Never had she ever felt anything like this before. Tony Magnus was a good man.
    “Doctor?” Callen asked, touching her arm. “Are you okay?”
    She shook her head, pulling out of the sexy daydream about the man she adored. “I’m sorry, Director. I was just thinking. When I get sucked in, I get lost.” Yeah, and lately, when it came to Tony that was more and more often.
    Chris and Tony had moved from the third victim back to the first one, or what appeared to be the remains of the first one.
    “Give me something, Doctor Leonard,” Ethan Blackhawk demanded. If he was going to make this work, they needed to know what they were up against.
    Tony waited while his partner in death got ready to give out the basics.
    “Victim number one is in the worst condition decomp wise. She’s been in the ground around one year. You can tell by the missing flesh and the slight staining of the bones which are showing. This is a clay dense area, and that red soil has taken effect on the body.”
    Ethan made notes on his phone. “Continue, Doctors.”
    Tony picked up, knowing how the man operated his scenes. Pointing at the pelvis, he gave the information that he could decipher from the mess of her remains. “We definitely have a female. Since her pelvis is openly visible, I can give you gender. There is a more outwardly flare to her hip bones, the sciatic notch is broad, and there is an open, circular pelvic inlet. In a male, there is more of a heart shaped opening.”
    “Okay, so we have a female. What else?” Ethan asked.
    “The bone structure is more delicate, where as a male would be broader and thicker.”
    “Continue.”
    “Victim one has never given birth.”
    Chris continued, “I can give you the basics. She had black  hair, since some is still beneath the body. She was approximately five foot seven, and was on her feet a great deal.”
    Ethan glanced up from his phone. “Explain.”
    Tony lifted her mostly decayed leg with gentle fingers. “Our victim has an extra foot bone. The accessory navicular would have made dancing almost impossible, so we can narrow down that kind of foot stress.”
    They all looked at the woman’s foot. Funny, they didn't see anything of the sort. It must be a bone thing.
    Tony continued, “From the wear on the back of her foot bones, to the stress on the heel, she was in some kind of service industry, including manual labor.”
    “Age?” Callen asked. It was hard not to be fascinated by what the men were doing. While they only saw a dead body, these men painted a completely different picture for them. It was like they saw the woman before she was hurt. They were reading the bones, almost like an investigator would read a case file.
    Jaxon took this one. “She was young. When I found her, I could tell by her clavicle. She’d just reached maturity. I’d put her around twenty five years old.”
    Ethan was impressed, not by her ability to spout the information, but that she was