A Judge's Secrets

by Danica Winters

  Hanes opened the door. Standing there, immaculate in his black suit, was the best-looking man she had ever seen in real life. He had short blond hair that edged the right way into red and a matching well-kempt beard. His sunglasses were perched on his head, and if she had to guess, he was some kind of agent. Had Hanes called in a joint task force?

  Her body willed her toward him, but she resisted the urge. She didn’t need anything that good-looking in her life. Nope. No way. Not today. Not ever. Good-looking men had a heck of a way of coming into her life and leaving her with nothing more than a bladder infection and a required date with her battery-operated best friend.

  This was one man she would make sure to steer clear of; she didn’t need antibiotics.

  He walked into the office, smiling as he looked to her. Her cheeks warmed and she looked away from his green eyes.

  She needed to get out more if this was going to be her reaction to handsome men in the same room with her.

  “Good evening,” Judge Hanes said, motioning for the man to take the chair next to her as if deliberately trying to make her squirm. “Thank you for coming on such short notice, Mr. Spade.” He picked up a pen beside his computer and clicked it open and closed, a nervous tic she’d witnessed often.

  “Please call me Evan.” He gave the judge a nod in greeting, but extended his hand to her.

  “Pleasure,” she said, shaking his hand with as little contact as she could make happen without appearing to be a germaphobe. Even though their hands barely touched, she could still make out the distinct charge of attraction pulsing from her. Hopefully, he hadn’t felt it, too.

  “Evan is going to be working security for me,” Judge Hanes said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat and ran his hand over his mouth, looking physically uncomfortable. He cleared his throat again. “He is with STEALTH, a military contracting group out of Missoula here and he comes highly recommended.” He coughed, taking another drink of his scotch. “Nice. Man,” he croaked.

  “I’m glad to see you hired some extra security,” she said, trying to ignore the judge’s discomfort. She looked over at Evan, heat once again rising in her as she caught his gaze.

  The judge glanced at Evan, and as he did, she noticed his nose appeared to be taking on a strange purple hue. He moved to speak, but a strangled gurgling noise lurched from his throat, replacing his words.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, jumping to her feet but two steps behind Evan, who was already standing beside the judge and had his hand on his back.

  He collapsed toward the floor, but Evan caught him and laid him down gently.

  “Do you smell that?” Evan asked, looking to her.

  She shook her head.

  “Mustard,” he said. “Cover your mouth and get back.”

  She wanted to listen, she did, but instead she stood there in shock, watching.

  After taking a black zippered kit out of his chest pocket, Evan opened it and pulled out a syringe. He plunged it deep into the judge’s chest and pushed down the depressor before extracting the needle.

  The judge coughed, harder and harder with each passing second. A bloody spittle dotted his lips and he glanced back up at her with wide, terrified eyes. His body went rigid and he started convulsing. Between his attacks, her honorary father whispered the words she had never known could strike so much fear into her heart, “It’s...too late.”

  Chapter Two

  The freshly dead had a distinct smell, usually that of body gases and drying blood. He hated it. To him, it was the odor of life’s greatest fears. Most people avoided the sources of such things, and yet, he rarely had the luxury.

  Dealing with death came with the territory of working in surveillance and military contracting for STEALTH, and it was one of his least favorite aspects of his job. If he smelled death at this range, either he had done something very right or very, very wrong—and damn if he hadn’t caught a whiff.

  In this case, if the judge died, his death would be on Evan’s hands—he had failed to protect and he had failed at his mission.

  Damn it all to hell.

  He watched as the EMS workers put the judge into the back of their wagon and turned on their sirens to head toward the hospital. Hopefully, he had acted in time, injecting the pyridostigmine and atropine straight into the judge’s heart. Though he wasn’t the medic for his STEALTH team, they had all been trained in how to deal with chemical nerve agents that didn’t immediately kill.

  Thankfully, the police had yet to be called. When Judge Hanes had hired him for protection, he had made it clear he was to keep everything private, and any sort of legal action would be taken by Hanes himself and none other. So far as the EMS had been told, the judge had come into contact with some sort of allergen and had an anaphylactic response—thus the atropine. The doctors could figure out what had really happened with a little lab work.

  In the meantime Evan needed to figure out who would have done this to the judge and why. And his first inclination was to look at the woman who had been sitting in the judge’s office when he’d walked in. From what the judge had told him, there were only a small handful of people who were allowed into his private sanctum, and those were on an invitation-only basis.

  “What is your name? We didn’t seem to make it that far,” he said, turning to face the blonde.

  She didn’t seem to want to meet his gaze, which only made the hairs on the backs of his arms tingle that much more. She was definitely acting guilty of something.

  “My name is Natalie. Umm... Natalie DeSalvo. I’m a district court judge. Steven was my mentor.”

  Had she added those unnecessary details, details he hadn’t requested, in order to passively tell him that she wasn’t someone who would have been behind this attack on the judge? Something like that, preemptive information, was often a tell of guilt. And she had used past tense when talking about her mentor—odd for a person who didn’t know if he was dead. But then again, nothing was ever simple when it came to his line of work in surveillance and security. Maybe she was as nervous as he was about what had taken place.

  “Ah,” he said with a slight nod. “Nice to meet you, officially. I wish it had been under slightly different circumstances, but here we are.” He gave a dry, dark laugh.

  She didn’t seem to appreciate his humor and her face puckered with distaste.

  “I am sorry about your friend,” he said, meaning it.

  “Thank you.” She stared in the direction the paramedics had been. “Do you think he’s going to make it?”

  Evan shrugged. “Depends. The meds I gave him should completely go into effect in about another fifteen minutes. Until then, he is in the EMS’s hands.”

  “Yeah. By the way, what did you give him?”

  Funny enough, he wanted to ask her the same question.

  “Something to keep his heart pumping and neutralize whatever chemicals he had come into contact with—hopefully.”

  She scowled at him. “You think it was a chemical attack?”

  For a woman who was topping his current suspect’s list, she was either completely oblivious or playing oblivious rather well. Either way, he was going to have to keep her close until he had his answers.

  “He presented with the correct symptoms. But we are going to have to dig into things.”

  Her frown disappeared. “We?”

  “I need to know if you are in danger, as well, or if you were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He smiled, as if trying to make her feel more comfortable. “I noticed you guys had glasses of something. Were you drinking together?”

  She guppied for a moment, her mouth opening and closing, looking as if she had lost her words. “I...we...we were drinking scotch. I didn’t drink much of mine. Just a sip.” She paused. “Am I...” The words fell like ashes from her fiery lips.

  “If you didn’t have a reaction yet,
you should be fine. Are you feeling okay?” He watched her green eyes, a shade darker than his. She looked terrified.

  And yet, he couldn’t let himself believe she was innocent just because she was a beautiful damsel in distress—his weakness.

  He took a step back as if being just a few inches farther from her physically could also distance him emotionally and mentally from the woman.

  “I’m okay,” she said, looking down at her body and running her hands over her curvy figure as if she was looking for a bullet hole.

  He held back a smile at her reaction.

  He took another step away.

  “You look okay, but I think we should go back to the judge’s office. Take a look around before anyone else gets a chance to go in there. Do you have access?”

  She nodded, but her mouth was still opening and closing slowly like she was trying to recover the words that she had lost.

  “You are okay. This will be okay,” he said, equally concerned and on guard. “We just need to learn exactly what happened.”

  She nodded and started to walk back into the courthouse. He followed behind her, trying not to notice the way her pencil skirt hugged her hips.

  Scanning her card, she keyed in the code through a series of doors until they were finally back into the judge’s chambers. He watched carefully and was sure that, if push came to shove, he could get himself back into this area if the need arose. In fact, he couldn’t help but feel like the security in this area and the courthouse was woefully lacking. The place didn’t even have metal detectors. Any geek off the street could walk in, strapped. It would only take a bailiff being slightly distracted and just about anyone could get killed here. Even something like a shooting—hard to pull off in a building like this—wasn’t out of the question if the wrong person had the right incentive.

  And as for the courtroom, he couldn’t think of a more emotionally fraught environment. Here there was everything, good and bad, but copious amounts of the latter. Just look at himself—no one had blinked an eye when he strode through the building. Those who worked here had been acclimatized to the risk; that was perhaps what made danger even more of a possibility.

  Complacency was death’s knell, and today it sounded for Hanes.

  The one thing he couldn’t make clear sense of was the mechanism of death. There were many easy ways to kill a person, and yet, this attacker had chosen poison. Strange.

  He had often heard that poison was the work of a woman, but having been in Iraq he could definitely say with 100 percent certainty that poisons and nerve agents were just as likely to come from a man in a war-torn country. Chemical nerve agents were one of the most effective and deadly weapons on the battlefield. A tiny bit of sarin released via unmanned aerial vehicles, and an entire town could be wiped out in a matter of hours.

  And that was to say nothing about the fear that a little white phosphorous could drive into a soldier’s heart. Weapons like those had often kept him up at night and were some of the reasons he was glad he was back working in the States—for now.

  Yep, he liked his McDonalds and Americans’ conversations about politics far more than just about anything that came with standing in the middle of a war zone. And yet, there was always one thing that drew him back into the fray—adventure.

  There was nothing better than the feeling of being alive after a day spent just millimeters from death. That crap was addictive. It was like taking a straight shot of adrenaline each and every day. Being without it felt exactly like what he assumed drug addicts went through when they were trying to get clean.

  This life, his life, was a drug, and damn if he couldn’t ever get enough.

  Natalie turned to face him as they entered the judge’s office. “Here you go. What do you think we should be looking for? What are you thinking? How can I help?” In finding her words again, she seemed to want to say them all at the same time.

  “Hard to say, but I’m sure I will know it when I see it.” He didn’t actually believe what he was trying to sell her, but he had to fake it until he made it.

  One of the most common chemical nerve agents was sarin gas. But if their attacker had used that against the judge, how had he and Natalie not been affected?

  He mulled over the thought as he walked around the spacious office, touching nothing. Everything seemed to have its place and was in immaculate order.

  He kept his house and his apartment at the STEALTH compound just as clean. He was constantly picking up after his siblings’ messes. A tiny smile took over his lips as he thought about his brothers and sisters and their dream team for STEALTH. Life had been amazing in bringing them all together and working for the same company. The past year had been fun, relying on one another and working as a well-oiled unit of people he knew without a doubt he could trust with anything—even things more valuable than his life.

  Walking to the corner of the room, he noticed there was an open cabinet door beneath a number of shelves of books. Inside was a collection of what he recognized as expensive bottles of scotch. The judge had good taste. On the edge of the shelf was an opened bottle of water.

  Sarin could be mixed effectively with any liquid. Was it possible that someone had drugged the water bottle, knowing how the judge took his scotch?

  He didn’t want to sniff the open container, but at the same time if there was any sarin in the water it was unlikely to give off much of an odor. He wafted his hand over the top, but all he detected was the mineral-rich scent of expensive bottled water.

  Sarin, if in its impure form, could smell of either burned rubber or mustard. He’d caught a tinge of that when the judge had collapsed.

  And yet, he reminded himself, he wasn’t even sure if that was what they were dealing with here or not. There were a number of chemical nerve agents, many of which he probably hadn’t even heard of yet.

  Natalie tapped him on his shoulder.

  “Hmm?” he asked, turning away from the side bar and glancing at her.

  She looked afraid, her skin pale and a thin layer of sweat on her brow. “Steven had a tic.” She pointed to the judge’s desk.

  “Okay,” he said, the word coming out more like a question.

  “When he was deep in thought, he always clicked his pen. Some days it drives me absolutely nuts.” She pointed at a pen that rested beside his keyboard. “He clicked it when you walked in. Do you think someone could have delivered a nerve agent with that?”

  Hell yes, they could have.

  He nodded, trying to tamp down his excitement at a possible source. “Good idea.” He pulled a Ziploc bag out of his back pocket and flipped it inside out over his hand. Moving to the desk, he picked up the pen and folded the bag around it, careful not to let the pen touch his fingers. As he zipped it closed, he caught the faint, distinct aroma of mustard again. He clicked the pen; at its tip was a ruptured rice-size capsule.

  They had their suspect’s weapon.

  Chapter Three

  He was watching her; Natalie could feel it. This security guard, this ridiculously good-looking man who probably had a variety pack of smoldering gazes at the ready, was staring at her. She hadn’t blushed this much since she was in high school. What was wrong with her?

  There were a million things she should have been concentrating on—making it to the end of the day would have been a great start—and instead here she was, twitterpated by Mr. Sexy Face.

  She watched him carefully hold the bagged pen. He looked irritated. “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Huh? Yeah. Fine.” His words rang false. “I think it would be best if we get out of here. If there has been a nerve agent deployed in here, we can still be in immediate danger.”

  “So you are now sure that was what happened? You don’t think it could have been anything else?” she asked. She had been hoping against all hope that the attack had been something besides what he’d suggested.<
br />
  He showed her the pen and its exploded tip. “This was definitely filled with sarin gas, or a close derivative of it. You are lucky to be alive.” He took her by the arm and gently led her out of the office.

  She felt the ache in her gut grow more intense. He had told her that she would have already been affected if she was to have been targeted by the attacker, but she didn’t know this man from Adam. He could have been telling her anything just in an attempt to make her feel better.

  If she didn’t have anything to worry about, then why would he have been in a big rush to get her out of the office? Was he concealing critical information...or bad intentions?

  At the realization, some of her insta-attraction diminished. Yes, more of that. She had to get this lust fest under control, and by thinking him a jerk, it would work like a charm. And she definitely didn’t like that a man would just take her by the arm and lead her, but then again, he was trying to save her from being further exposed to a potentially lethal nerve agent. Yet, it still irked her.

  Yes. She smiled at herself. More derision toward his behavior and she would be out of lust in no time.

  “Is there anyone else working in this area right now?” he asked, looking around and then toward the ceiling as if he was searching for an overhead camera.

  Yeah, right; we are closer to Flintstone tech than the Jetsons up in this place.

  She glanced down at her watch. “The cleaning staff normally starts coming in an hour. They will be throughout the building for the rest of the night, but for now it is pretty quiet here.”

  “No cameras?” he asked.

  This time his question made her wonder why he was so keen on knowing if there were potential witnesses nearby. “Why do you ask?” She stepped back from him. “The sheriff’s department headquarters is just one floor up and we have deputies coming and going all the time. There are plenty of people around who’d catch a criminal in the act.” It was as close to a threat as she could muster.