Chapter: 9

Evidence of Things Unseen

It took a few minutes of laying down on the ground for Renee to be able to walk again without getting dizzy. Jumping back into the hole, she had blown into the ground. She needed to get back into the car to grab her dry bag. All of her evidence was hidden in a secret compartment she had sowed in the bottom.

Pulling out the dry bag, she was met with five very confused faces. Her brother and the entire team of NCIS agents were not sure why she would need to go back into the car she had just blown up. The team didn't realize that the blast was a directed explosion meaning that it went in a single direction. It had left the rest of the car totally untouched.

Pulling the bag out of the car, Renee dumped it out to get to the bottom of the bag. Taking out the dive knife that Gibbs had given her since the knife was also in the bag.

Using her Swiss Army knife, Renee needed to rip out the seam in order to get the remote WiFi-enabled hard drive that Renee had sowed into the liner.

Her spy camera saved the photos and videos remotely, so it didn't have an SD card in it. It did need the hard drive to be near it to save the photos and videos.

Her camera was a very small one that Renee had managed to hide on her shirt. The evidence that she had gathered on the suspect was shocking, to say the least. Renee had managed to get photos and videos that were very damning.

Photos included evidence that he was moving not only people and drugs, but he also moved guns too. Some of the videos showed him moving the ingredients needed to manufacture C-4, TATP, and PETN on mass quantities. All of those compounds were highly explosive.

The gun shipments included M16's, prima-cord, detonators, blasting caps, AK-47's, one hundred round drum clips, and massive ammunition crates. He also was transporting and manufacturing Cocaine, Methamphetamine, Heroin, Fentanyl, and Carfentanil. He was even into the human trafficking of women and young girls.

When Renee gave the evidence to Patton, he was able to use facial recognition on the women and young girls that the suspect was moving.

Shockingly Patton was able to link one of the young women to the victim. One of the victims of human trafficking was the victim's younger sister.

Her name was Sabrina Mancini. The victim Jeff Mancini was the caregiver of the young woman. Their parents were killed when they were younger.

When Jeff joined the Navy, he had left his sister with a family friend. His sister was just shy of seventeen years old, and nobody had filed a missing person report since the family friend had been arrested for drug possession and was currently serving time in NOPD jail.

The evidence showed that the young woman was still alive, but that is probably why the victim was killed. Renee had been able to get the suspect to confess to killing the victim.

The suspect was not aware that it was being recorded since Renee had a hidden microphone sewed in her shirt. The mic was so small it was not found when she was getting patted down by the suspect's subordinates. The suspect confessed after Renee had been dosed with some kind of drug.

Renee had told Horatio and the NCIS agents that she didn't need to go to the hospital, but her brother insisted on it.

Arriving at the hospital, Horatio tells the nurse, "My sister passed out after escaping from a buried car. She had told me that she remembers getting stuck with something but had no memory of anything that happened between getting stuck and when she woke up in the trunk of the car." Asking the nurse to rush a toxicology report. Horatio had to know what kind of drug his baby sister was dosed with.

It took a few hours for the toxicology report to come in. Apparently, his sister was dosed with Ketamine, which is known as a very powerful horse tranquilizer.

Renee was released from the hospital after the toxicology report came in. While Renee was in the hospital, Patton traced all of the victim's movements before he was killed. The victim was strangled by a garrote.

The evidence that Renee had gathered was enough to get a search warrant. It covered the complete property that was owned by the suspect. Dr. Wade suspects that the tool which was used to kill the victim was a length of steel wire since she had found tiny pieces of steel in the deep cut in his throat.

Horatio's sister insisted on going with the NCIS agents to search the property. Getting to the property, they found a boat on fire, and the property cleared out. Pride and his team were able to extinguish the boat fire before the boat sank.

The fire destroyed most of the evidence but not a large amount of blood that was on the floor. Blood tests from the middle of the blood pool proved that that blood was from the victim.

The team had found where the victim was killed but not how he was killed or by who. They also needed to find out how the body got from the place he was killed to where he was found five miles away.

Pride and his team really needed to find the suspect who had again used the bayou to disappear. By now, the entire NCIS office was getting tired of this person always being one step ahead. The team was going to have to get one step ahead of the suspect, but how?

Pride and his team were all very impressed with how well Renee and Echo worked together. Pride being a Louisiana native, knew that Echo was part Catahoula Leopard Dog.

Catahoula's bond with one person and tend to be wary of strangers, but Echo was also part Rhodesian Ridgeback, and that breed is friendlier than the Catahoula. Pride couldn't think of a better crossbreed for police work. He had never met a police canine that was cross-trained over so many fields.

Renee had trained both Echo and Charlie across multiple disciplines. Both dogs could detect drugs, firearms, arson, explosives, currency, people, cadaver, and search and rescue. They were also well trained in the traditional patrol and apprehension. Pride and his team were impressed, but they still hadn't seen Echo actually do what she was trained to do.

So when Echo started to alert on something at the compound

Pride and his team were not aware of what Echo was alerting them too. Echo herself was pawing and barking at a duffel bag. The bag had been left in the middle of the compound.

In fact, if Renee and Horatio had not looked around to find where Echo had gone off to, they would have never found the massive explosives that the suspect had rigged to the entire building.

Seeing her canine alerting the way that the dog was Renee turned to the team and asked them how long Echo had been barking. She couldn't blame the team for not realizing that Echo was alerting since they didn't know the dog's alerts.

Renee and Horatio, however, knew that based on the level of desperation in the dog, it was an explosive with a timer. The dog could clearly hear the timer clicking away, and she was desperate to get her people to safety.

Renee walked up to Echo and tells the canine, "Show me."

A command that the dog very rapidly, quickly, and emphatically responded to. Pointing with her nose to the bag and the dog started to paw at the bag and bark incessantly. Since Renee didn't know what type of explosive it was, she pulled the dog back. Not wanting to accidentally set the explosive off with the moving of the bag.

Renee called out to her brother, who she knew was an explosives expert, "H, Echo says that there is an explosive in the bag. The dog alerted to a explosive that was on a timer." The dog will paw at timed devices but not bombs that are rigged.

Renee further explains that her brother can open the bag since the zipper was not rigged to explode.

When Horatio hears that there was an explosive, he tried to get the rest of the people to back up to a safe distance. He, however, knew his sister was not going anywhere. Renee did take Echo to a safe distance then told the dog to stay.

She was not willing to put the police canine's life in danger unless it was completely unavoidable and necessary. Pride stayed with Renee and Horatio, but he did order his team to back away.

Gregorio, however, was not going anywhere without Pride.

Telling her boss and friend, "Where you go… I go... If you are here… I'm here."

Pride was not happy about it, but he also knew that there was no arguing Gregorio into listening to him.

Slowly and carefully, Horatio pulled back the zipper and opened the bag to get a better look at the explosive. Quickly realizing that he could disarm it with relative ease. He just needed to get the pin out. The pin was pushed into the Plastic Explosive, and it was connected to the timed detonator.

While Horatio was pulling out the pin, the team all hear a very loud beeping. Being the Miami's team explosives and arson expert, Horatio knew that he needed to get everyone in the building out now because it was going to blow, and he couldn't stop it.

"Everyone out! The bomb had a secondary trigger that I accidentally tripped when I pulled out the pin in the first explosive," Horatio yells at the team, all while pushing everyone to the door.

No sooner than he gets the building clear, they are knocked down by the concussive force of the explosion.

The team searched through the debris of what was left of the building. Horatio looks for the bomb's brains and anything connected to the explosive.

The team was having a hard time locating any forensic evidence of the bomb. Remembering that they had taught Echo to locate forensic evidence and explosives, Renee got an idea.

Bringing Echo into the rubble, she gave her canine the "seek" command and waited for the dog to get a hit on the odor. Echo didn't disappoint her partner. The canine found the bomb trigger and the rest of the bomb's brains within minutes. The team had been searching for hours but were unable to locate the pieces that they were looking for.

Pride and his team weren't even aware that you could train a canine to detect to forensic evidence in the first place.

The explosion meant that the team needed to start at square one. All of the possible evidence had gone up in smoke. Well, not quite all evidence, the boat that had the victim's blood in it was at a different location on the property than the building. The team stopped the boat from burning into the water when they had gotten to the property.

Horatio hoped and prayed that they would find enough evidence to get an arrest warrant on the suspect based on the evidence that was gathered from the boat.

The boat had a lot of blood, so the team took swabs of every single pool. They even took several swabs from different locations if it was a large pool. Hoping that by chance, the suspect got hurt and bled in the same location as the victim.

Since they suspect that a Garrote was used, it would not be beyond plausibility that whoever it was that killed the victim would have cut himself on the tool. They just needed to find what was used to kill the victim. The victim's blood and whoever it was that had killed him's DNA would be found on it.

On a hunch, Horatio grabs his sister. Pulling her to the side, he asks her, "Can Echo detect mixed evidence. Can she smell the victim's blood, and the unknown suspects DNA in the same item."

Quickly Renee tells her brother, "Echo can smell anything and detect anything. Has she not proven that already?"

Embarrassed, Horatio hangs his head and tells his sister, "Point taken."

Privately Renee thought to herself, "Even if we find the evidence, we still need to find the suspect. He has more than proven that he will do anything to keep doing what he was doing, including killing cops."

Renee would never tell her brother her fears, though. He needed to focus on the case and not on her fears.

Pride and the team were amazed at how effective the use of a canine had proven thus far.

Hannah and Gregorio had to go back to the NCIS headquarters. They needed to follow up on some leads on the location of the suspect. Patton was still running the faces of the trafficked women and girls through facial recognition.

When some of the victims were identified as Sabrina's best friends, Emily and Ivy, he was intrigued. How did the suspect manage to get three friends at the same time? Patton continued to work on finding the human trafficking victims that Renee had managed to video the suspect moving.

Sebastian was back at the morgue, working on the forensic evidence. This left Horatio, Renee, and Pride to look for more evidence in order to track the suspect through the bayou.

The suspect was really good at covering his tracks since no other law enforcement agencies have been able to track him.

With Patton at the home base, they were able to locate the suspect fairly quickly. Horatio and Renee were driving back from breakfast when they hear over the radio that their suspect had been spotted