with Wendy gone, it would be difficult to prove that the chain of evidence had remained unbroken. Since she’d collected it from the murder scene, she was the most important link in the chain.
Luther Mills leaned back on the thin mattress in his cell and uttered a sigh. He wouldn’t be here much longer. The plan was already starting to work. He’d just been informed that the eyewitness had gone out a window.
Sure, that hadn’t exactly been part of the plan. The crew he’d sent after her was supposed to have shot her. But her apartment was on the third floor. A fall from that height had probably killed her and the man they’d said had gone out the window with her. Clint Quarters. What the hell had the former vice cop been doing there?
Had he just been checking on Rosie out of guilt? Quarters was the cop who’d got her brother killed by turning him into an informant. That kind of betrayal deserved the death sentence Luther had given Javier Mendez.
It was too bad Luther had had to deliver that same sentence to Rosie. If only she’d learned the lesson her brother should have… If only she had kept her sexy damn mouth shut…
But her testimony wasn’t Luther’s only problem. There was all that evidence from the scene, too.
Evidence that shouldn’t have been found.
That wouldn’t have been found if probably any other crime scene tech had been involved. Everybody knew not to look too closely at a crime he’d committed.
Little Miss By-the-Book Wendy Thompson was as big a pain in Luther’s ass as this damn uncomfortable jailhouse mattress.
But he would get rid of her and the evidence just as easily as he’d got rid of the eyewitness.
“That’s lucky for you,” Jocelyn Gerber remarked after Rosie Mendez left the conference room with the chief and Parker Payne, her bodyguard, Clint Quarters, trailing behind them.
Wendy was so tired that she didn’t understand what the assistant district attorney was talking about. “What’s lucky for me?”
“That the eyewitness is still alive,” Jocelyn said.
“She might not stay that way if she keeps fighting having a bodyguard,” Hart remarked with a pointed glance at Wendy.
She shivered, but she wasn’t scared for her safety, despite how much Hart and the assistant district attorney seemed to be trying to scare her. She was probably just cold. A thin T-shirt wasn’t enough protection against the chill of the late autumn evening.
And maybe she was a little chilled from the threats, as well. Needing backup, she looked down the conference table at Spencer Dubridge. “Don’t you think this is ridiculous, too?” she asked the detective who had had the pleasure of arresting Luther Mills. “We can protect ourselves.”
He glanced sideways at his female bodyguard and snorted. “I certainly can protect myself better than Bodyguard Barbie can protect me.”
Keeli Abbott glared at him and Wendy suspected Dubridge’s former coworker might be from whom the detective most needed to protect himself.
The conference room door opened and the chief stepped back inside. As if he’d overheard their conversation, he insisted, “Everyone is going to have a bodyguard—” he stared hard at Dubridge “—no matter who they are, until this trial is over and Luther Mills is sentenced to life behind bars.”
Judge Holmes shook his head. “I can’t be party to this conversation.”
“You didn’t need to be here,” the chief told him. “Your daughter is the one being threatened.” Bella Holmes was not a minor; she had to be at least midtwenties.
“And she wouldn’t leave her damn party until her father told her she had to,” Tyce Jackson grumbled through his bushy beard. Even though he didn’t work Vice anymore, he still looked like he had when he’d gone deep undercover.
Hart must have never worked undercover because he’d always been clean-shaved and well-groomed. That was why Wendy had had such a crush on him. He’d always looked so handsome.
Bella Holmes glared at Tyce. “I didn’t know who you were.” Maybe she’d judged him by the way he looked.
Tyce had been one of those vice cops who’d gone so deeply undercover that sometimes it was difficult to return to the life they’d once lived. Wendy suspected that was the case with him.
“If you’d listened to your dad’s message, you wouldn’t have been at that damn party,” Tyce griped.
So Wendy wasn’t the only one who hadn’t played a voice mail that she’d needed to hear. She didn’t feel any better about the situation, though. If she’d listened, she could have spared her dad a surprise and herself having to lie to him again.
“We are not going to stop living our lives just because of these threats,” Wendy reminded the chief. “So how do we explain having bodyguards? How is the rest of the precinct going to feel that you didn’t trust our fellow officers to protect me or Detective Dubridge or even Ms. Gerber?”
“You told your father that I’m your boyfriend,” Hart reminded her. “Maybe we just tell everyone else the same damn thing.”
Heat rushed to her face again, chasing away that chill she’d briefly felt.
Dubridge chuckled. “That’ll work for her. Everybody in the department knows she had a crush on Fisher even back when he was married.”
Wendy gasped in shock that everyone else had known about the crush she’d shared with only a few close coworkers. Maybe Hart was right. She couldn’t trust them.
The detective blithely continued. “But that won’t work for everyone else.”
The judge’s daughter glanced sideways at Tyce and nodded. “I should say not…”
“You’re not my type, either,” Tyce assured her, his voice so deep it was just a rumble.
“And chauvinist pig is certainly not mine,” Keeli Abbott remarked.
The chief groaned. His voice rising with frustration, he yelled, “You’re all supposed to be professionals here. Figure it out!”
“Professional partier maybe,” Tyce Jackson murmured with a glance at Bella Holmes.
She glared at him again.
Wendy didn’t even dare to glance at Hart. What did he think of her? He probably pitied her if he had heard the rumors like Dubridge had. Did he know she’d had a crush on him even when he was married—like some adolescent girl with a crush on a teen idol?
Still arguing, everyone else filed out of the conference room, leaving Wendy and Hart alone. Even the chief had stepped out, deep in conversation with Jocelyn Gerber. But
