by Lisa Childs
The detective touched his ear, where he must have been wearing a radio piece. “It’s too late,” he said, as if he had read her mind.
“What’s too late?” she asked, fearfully. Had Parker already found him?
“He’s dead.”
She gasped as her heart kicked against her ribs. “Who’s dead?”
“The bodyguard—Chuck,” he said.
Her breath shuddered out in relief. That relief was short-lived, though, when she realized that just because the bodyguard was dead didn’t mean that Parker was alive.
The detective hadn’t missed her initial reaction. “That makes you happy? I guess it would since a dead man can’t refute your statement.”
“Are you going to accuse me of killing him, too?” she wondered aloud. “I don’t even know his last name.”
“Parker Payne knows it,” he said. “He was at the man’s apartment when we found his corpse.”
That was where Parker had gone. He had tracked down the bodyguard. But what had happened when he’d found him?
She remembered and repeated the detective’s choice of word. “Corpse?”
“The coroner thinks Chuck Horowitz died around the same time the judge must have.”
So someone had killed them both? She shuddered.
The man leaned forward again, and his eyes narrowed speculatively. “What do you know about Parker Payne, Ms. Wells?”
“That the judge trusted him,” she said.
“Do you?” the detective asked.
She had thought she could. But now she wasn’t so certain. “If the bodyguard was killed weeks ago, then Parker didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Do you know what he was doing weeks ago?”
No. She had been in hiding. If the news was to be believed, though, he had been getting shot at and nearly blown up. “But I think you know.”
The detective shrugged. “Payne Protection has definitely been filing a lot of police reports recently.”
“Then you know that Parker is in danger.” Just like she was, but if he didn’t know about the hit on her, she wasn’t going to draw Detective Sharpe’s attention to it. Brenda had warned her to trust no one but Parker. Now she was going to trust no one—not even Parker.
“Or maybe he is the danger. I thought you just needed to watch out for him because he’s a playboy, but maybe you need to watch out for him because he’s a killer,” the detective warned her.
She shook her head. “He’s not shooting at himself or trying to blow himself up.”
“But he could have killed the judge,” the detective persisted. “He could have also killed the bodyguard.”
“And gone back tonight?” she asked. “Why?”
Detective Sharpe shrugged again. “Your grandfather never told you about the criminals who returned to the scenes of their crimes?”
“Parker Payne is no criminal.” Her instinctive defense of him laid to rest those doubts she’d kept having about him. While her mind found reasons why she shouldn’t trust him, her gut trusted him instinctively. Her heart trusted him.
The detective cocked his head as if considering the veracity of her statement; he obviously didn’t know and respect Parker like the older officer who had spoken with her at the hospital or the bald-headed officer at the judge’s house.
“I would have agreed with you,” Sharpe admitted, “but he has recently started associating with some known criminals.”
She shrugged now. She had no idea with whom Parker associated. “I wouldn’t know—”
“The Kozminskis,” he said, as if she had asked. “They were at the hospital earlier when the bomb went off in the parking lot. They were with their new brother-in-law—Logan Payne.”
They must have been the blond men with the light-colored eyes who had found out that someone had put out a hit on her as well as Parker.
“The Kozminskis have long criminal records,” Detective Sharpe continued, “starting with stints in juvie for theft and murder....”
“I don’t know the Kozminskis.” But if they were any part of the reason for her interrogation, she didn’t like them very much. “I have nothing to do with any of this. Not only am I physically incapable of doing—” an involuntary shudder struck her with the memory of Brenda’s corpse “—what was done to the judge, but I have no motive to hurt her. Now that she’s dead I have no job.”
No mentor to help her pass the bar. Not that Brenda had been much help on Sharon’s previous attempts. She had even suggested that Sharon give up on law and continue as Ethan’s nanny. Now she wouldn’t even be able to do that—and that was the far greater loss to Sharon.
The detective snorted. “You have the biggest motive, Ms. Wells.”
“Unemployment?” she scoffed.
“Inheritance.”
The detective had obviously lost it. “What inheritance?” The judge hadn’t even paid her that well.
“When the judge’s murder was reported on television, her lawyer contacted us about her child. He thought the child would be with you....”
“He—he’s with...friends.” Given the detective’s opinion of the Paynes and the Kozminskis, she didn’t dare be more specific, or else he might send a police car to pick up Ethan, too.
“The judge’s will made you the guardian of her son and the trustee of the estate he’ll inherit from her—a sizable estate from which you’ll draw a sizable salary for his care.” His smirk was back. “That gives you a very big motive for her murder.”
“I am Judge Wells’s granddaughter,” she reminded the dim-witted detective. “I don’t need money.” And maybe that was why Brenda hadn’t paid her very much. The judge had known what Sharon had inherited when her grandparents had passed away a few years ago—a lot of money. But they had never given Sharon what she had really wanted from them: their love.
“I would never kill anyone....”
“Not even for that little boy?” he asked. “The judge must have really trusted you with him to appoint you as his guardian in her will.”
Sharon had lied to the detective...because Ethan was the one person for whom she would kill. She would do anything to protect that little boy.
She shrugged. “I never really knew what Judge Foster was thinking or what she was involved in. You will need to investigate her life to find out who killed her. Not mine.” Because Sharon had never really had much of a life. She had studied and she had worked. “So unless you’re going to press charges, I’m leaving, Detective.”
She stood up and walked to the door. She tried to turn the knob, but it was locked in place. He had locked her inside the interrogation room, the small, windowless room. All those memories that had already rushed over her once that evening rushed back again, overwhelming her.
Her legs weakened, and her shaking body dropped to the floor. She briefly registered the hardness of the concrete beneath her before she passed out.
* * *
PARKER’S HEART BEAT a frantic pace as he watched the paramedics wheel Sharon’s unconscious body into the hospital, where he had been pacing the emergency room while he waited for her arrival. “You were supposed to protect her!” he yelled at his sister as soon as she ran in behind the paramedics.
As Cooper followed Nikki inside, he shook his head. “Back off. She couldn’t go into the interrogation room with her.”
“She was hurt in the interrogation room?” he asked. “Who the hell was interrogating her?”
“Sharpe,” Nikki reminded him.
Parker’s temper flared with frustration with himself and with the detective. That little weasel wouldn’t have made detective if his mother wasn’t the chief’s little sister. “I’ll kill him.”
The jerk already thought Parker was a killer. He had actually had a police officer following him from
the judge’s house to the bodyguard’s apartment. Parker had nearly shot the damn kid who’d been too scared at Chuck Horowitz’s crime scene to identify himself as a police officer. If not for Logan showing up behind the kid...
“Don’t go making any threats,” Logan advised as he showed up behind Parker now.
“But what the hell did he do to her?”
Nikki and Cooper both shrugged. His younger brother replied, “He had her in the interrogation room for a long time.”
“And she was already in shock from the crime scene,” Nikki added, her dark eyes flashing with frustration. “She should have gone from the judge’s house to the hospital, not to the police station.”
Detective Sharpe stepped through the doors behind Nikki and Cooper. But before Parker could reach for his scrawny little neck, Logan pulled him back. “No threats. Calm down,” his older brother advised. “Or he will have the authority to arrest you this time.”
“Let him,” Parker growled. Then he whirled on Sharpe. “What the hell did you do to her?”
The man’s eyes widened. “What did I do? It’s what you did—bringing Sharon Wells to a murder scene!”
“I didn’t know it was a murder scene,” he said. “Any more than I knew that there was a murder scene at Chuck Horowitz’s house.”
The man nodded with a patronizing smile pasted on his pallid face. “That’s what all the criminals say....”
“Okay, maybe you should hit him,” Logan remarked. “You’re way out of line here, Sharpe.”
Parker didn’t care what the jerk said about him. He cared about Sharon. “What did you mean about Sharon? What do you know about her?”
“You don’t know who she is?” Sharpe asked smugly.
Parker really wanted to hit him. “Just tell me what you know...” He bit off the insult he wanted to add; it wouldn’t get him anywhere when the man thought so highly of himself. “...about Sharon.”
“She’s Judge Wells’s granddaughter....”
Judge Wells? The name sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe Parker had testified before him in a drug-arrest case back in the days when he’d worked undercover vice for River City P.D. He shrugged. “I don’t remember much about him.”
“Guess you only pay attention to the female judges.”
He really, really wanted to hit him now, but he restrained himself. “How old is this Judge Wells?” After all, he was her grandfather.
“He’s dead.”
“Then how would I know the guy?”
“Ooooh.” The word slipped out of Nikki with a sudden nod of understanding.
“Your sister knows,” Sharpe said, “and she’s younger than you are.”
He turned toward Nikki; he would rather hear it from her than the defective detective anyway. “What do you know, Niks?”
Nikki shuddered. “It was a tragic story....”
“Oh,” Logan said. “I remember....”
“Where was I?” Parker wondered.
“We were kids when it happened,” Logan said. “It’s just that people seemed to bring it up every time they talked about the judge....”
Like people had brought up their father’s murder every time they talked about any other Payne. Yeah, they never forgot tragic deaths.
“Who died?” Parker asked.
“Sharon’s mother,” Nikki said. “She was really young. She was just a teenager when she had Sharon. The story goes that the judge and his wife didn’t approve, so she ran away from home. She was working nights at a gas station—” her forehead creased as she searched her memory “—or a convenience store when she was murdered.”
“That’s awful,” Parker said. Like Ethan, Sharon had also lost her mother when she was young. She would be able to identify with the little boy even more than she already seemed to.
Nikki shuddered again. “What was worse is that the girl couldn’t afford a babysitter, so she brought Sharon to work with her. She was there when her mother was murdered.”
“How old was she?” Old enough to remember?
“I think three or four,” Nikki said. “When customers came in, her mother would have her crawl into a cupboard behind the counter. The killer didn’t know she was there or she probably would have been killed, too.”
Horror gripped Parker. “Do you think she saw what happened?”
“She picked the killer out of a line-up.” Logan chimed in with the detail that he, as a former detective, would of course remember best.
“At three or four years old?” he asked in disbelief. He knew that young witnesses weren’t always the most reliable. But then, the face of her mother’s killer was probably one Sharon would never forget—even more than twenty years later. “Did she testify?”
“It didn’t go to trial,” Logan said. “The killer didn’t know there was a witness, so he confessed.”
At least she had been spared a trial. But the horror she must have witnessed...and finding Brenda murdered so violently had probably brought back all the old nightmares. He had to talk to her doctor. But would her doctor talk to him?
Parker was nobody to her. He wasn’t family. He wasn’t even her friend or he wouldn’t have left her alone to deal with the police. But he hadn’t known....
He’d had no idea how upset she must have been. He couldn’t keep his anger to himself, though, so he reached out for Sharpe. But Logan dragged him back. “You know all this about her and you still interrogated her in some little room? You sadistic blowhard! You have to know that she couldn’t have hurt her employer.”
“Maybe she wasn’t strong enough to have broken the judge’s neck,” the detective admitted. “But we know that she was the last one to go past the security system. We don’t know if she was alone.”
“She wasn’t,” Parker said. “The bodyguard was with Brenda.”
“I meant Ms. Wells,” he said. “She may have brought someone with her—someone who killed the judge for her.”
He was an even bigger idiot than Parker had thought. “Really? So she willingly put herself through witnessing another murder? That’s ridiculous.”
“It really is,” Logan added. “Have you ever even cleared a case, Sharpe?”
Finally color flushed the man’s pasty face, giving Logan his answer.
“She has no motive, either,” Parker pointed out.
“The judge made her trustee of the estate with a generous income.”
Nikki laughed. “She’s Judge Wells’s granddaughter. I hardly think she needs money.”
The color deepened in Sharpe’s face. “But she doesn’t just get money out of the deal. She gets the kid, too.”
“What?” Parker asked.
“Brenda Foster’s will awards Sharon Wells custody of the kid.”
“But the kid has a father,” Parker pointed out. He was Ethan’s father. But he wasn’t about to announce that in front of Sharpe and provide the man with his own motive for killing Brenda.
Sharpe shook his head. “Birth certificate states father unknown. She probably used a sperm donor.”
Now Parker’s face was the one that flushed with embarrassment. He had been a sperm donor—but an unwitting one. He had even insisted on using a condom, but Brenda must have compromised it somehow.
“But if someone can prove he’s the boy’s father,” Parker persisted, “as the sole parent, he would become the boy’s guardian.”
Sharpe shrugged. “It would probably go to court. He’d have to fight for custody. I doubt he would have killed the judge because it probably just complicates his life.”
So Parker was off the hook for murder. And fatherhood?
But he wanted his son. He wanted to fight, but he didn’t want to fight a woman who had already been through too much in her life. Could Sharon even handle a fight?
Hell, she couldn’t handle any more attempts on her life. Parker would deal with the custody issue after he’d dealt with whoever wanted him and Sharon dead.
Chapter Nine
If someone can prove he’s the boy’s father...
The words she had heard as she’d walked out to join the others in the waiting room still rang in Sharon’s ears now, as she stared down at the sleeping baby.
Why had they been waiting for her? She was scarcely more than a stranger to them. But when they had turned toward her, she’d seen it on all of their faces—that overly solicitous concern that told her they knew. They knew what had happened to her mother. And they thought that witnessing it had made Sharon fragile.
Weak.
And passing out in the interrogation room had only proved their opinion of her. Would Parker use that against her in court when he fought her for custody of his child?
“Didn’t he even wake up?” Sharon asked the boy’s grandmother. She had been gone so long, away from the baby for far longer than she had wanted to be away.
“He woke up,” Mrs. Payne said with a sigh. “And he cried most of the time you were gone. He only fell back to sleep a short while ago.”
So he had cried for hours without her?
When Parker exercised his parental rights, she would be away from Ethan for far longer than a few hours. She would be cut out of the rest of his life. And he wouldn’t remember her any more than he was likely to remember his dead mother.
Tears stung her eyes, but she blinked them back. Too many of the Paynes already thought she was weak.
But Mrs. Payne must have caught her action because she rubbed her back, as she probably had the crying baby’s to soothe him to sleep. “While he’s sleeping, you should get some rest. You must be exhausted.”
She had been exhausted a couple of sleepless nights ago. She was beyond exhausted now. But she worried that if she slept, she wouldn’t see Ethan again. “I—I just want to watch him sleep....”
To assure herself that he was all right, that he wasn’t gone like his mother, like the bodyguard, like all those people who had died for no reason that she could fathom...
