Bridegroom Bodyguard (5 page)

Chapter Seven

Parker could not help Sharon now. The police were questioning her the same way that he had—wondering why she was the last person to have seen her employer alive. Only she hadn’t been the last person.

And he would prove that for her. But first he had to settle something else. So he hurried across the driveway to chase down the person who had tried sneaking away from the crime scene.

“Why didn’t you come see me at the hospital?” Parker asked his sister. Nikki turned away from him again. But he grabbed her shoulder and turned her back.

She squirmed beneath his grasp and ducked away. But before she turned away from him again, he caught the shimmer of tears in her eyes.

“Niks, what’s wrong?”

She shrugged. “Nothing...”

“Niks?”

He grabbed her again and didn’t let her get away this time as he folded her into a hug. His little sister never cried; she was too tough for that—or at least too determined to prove to her brothers that she was every bit as tough as they were.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “so sorry...”

That she hadn’t visited him in the hospital?

“It’s okay,” he assured her. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” And this was another reason that he had never had a long-term relationship; he wasn’t sensitive enough to a woman’s feelings.

“I feel bad because it was my fault,” she murmured, her voice cracking with emotion.

Thoroughly confused, Parker had to ask, “What was your fault?”

“It was my fault that you nearly got blown up!” she exclaimed.

“You didn’t put the bomb in my SUV,” he said, unable to follow her logic or understand her guilt. He loved his sister, but he had never understood her as easily as he had his brothers.

“I sent you back out there to change my lunch order,” she said, her voice cracking with the tears she fought so hard with furious blinking and sniffling. “If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been hurt....”

“I’m not hurt,” he assured her. He ignored the pounding in his head; it had gone down to a dull thud anyway.

“You have a concussion,” she said. “You can’t even remember the mother of your child....”

She hadn’t visited him in the hospital but she had obviously been apprised of everything that had happened there. His family had no secrets from each other.

“Oh, I remember her....” He glanced to where morgue technicians loaded Brenda Foster’s body into the back of the coroner’s van.

Poor Ethan.
He was so young that he wouldn’t even remember his mother.

“That’s good,” Nikki said with a deep breath of relief. “I’m glad your memory is back.”

It had never really been gone. He couldn’t blame the concussion for not remembering meeting Sharon at the judge’s office. With the security at the courthouse, he hadn’t had to assess any of them as threats, so he hadn’t paid much attention to the people who had already gone through metal detectors and body screeners.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Parker said even though the information Nikki had recovered from the security system might hurt Sharon more than help her.

He glanced to where she sat in the back of a police car. According to Officer Green, Detective Sharpe had ordered them to bring her down to the police department so that he could personally interrogate her. Sharpe had just recently been promoted—though he hadn’t earned it. So he was probably just trying to scare her; he needn’t have bothered.

The poor woman had been absolutely terrified when she had found Brenda’s body. There was no way she could have killed her. Physically, she wasn’t strong enough. Emotionally, she was too sensitive and too empathetic to hurt anyone.

“Did you tell her that I’m your sister?” Nikki asked.

Parker couldn’t remember if he had introduced them; he’d been preoccupied with finding the judge’s body and with trying to find out who had killed her and how.

If her bodyguard had been there when the judge had sent Sharon and Ethan into hiding, why hadn’t he protected Brenda? Why hadn’t he even tried?

Parker wouldn’t have failed a client like that. He would have died trying to keep her safe. But maybe he
had
failed a client. If he hadn’t let Brenda fire him just so they could sleep together, she would still be alive. He wouldn’t have let anyone hurt her.

And he wouldn’t let anyone hurt Sharon, either.

“When they take her to the police department to give her statement,” he told Nikki, “you need to go with her and make sure she stays safe.” He didn’t want his sister in danger, either, though, so he would call his brother Cooper for backup. After seeing how brutally Brenda had been murdered, Parker was going to heed the judge’s warning to trust no one but him. And his family, of course.

“Where are you going?” Nikki asked.

“You tell me,” he said. “Find out who this Chuck is who was supposed to be protecting the judge.” Logan probably would have known. As the CEO of Payne Protection Agency, he was aware of the other security firms in the area. But those firms were no competition for Payne Protection—obviously.

“There was no Chuck with fingerprint access to the judge’s home,” Nikki said with a glance at the police car. “Could she have been lying?”

He shook his head. “No.” He didn’t think Sharon was capable of lying. He never should have doubted her—even for a minute. “Brenda must not have trusted the guy enough to give him access.”

“Then why would she have had him protecting her?”

Because she had fired Parker...

Maybe it was his fault that she had been killed....

As Parker had suspected, Logan knew who the Chuck was that worked bodyguard detail. Charles “Chuck” Horowitz.

Parker stood outside the man’s apartment; he was supposed to wait for Logan—since his twin had warned that Chuck was more of a mercenary than a bodyguard. His loyalty went to the person who paid him the most. But Parker did not need backup. He preferred that Logan protect his son and their mother. Parker could take care of himself.

Someone had been trying to kill him for two weeks and had not succeeded yet. And that was before Parker had realized the hit was on him. Now that he knew, he was ready.

An outside stairwell led to Chuck Horowitz’s second-story combination apartment-office. Brenda had really dropped her standards when she had fired Payne Protection and hired this yahoo.

Glad that he had changed into dark clothes, Parker kept to the shadows as he climbed the stairs. He didn’t need to make himself a target for all the people who would take up that hit for the money.

God, he hoped Sharon was safe. His brother Cooper had assured him that nothing would happen to her or Nikki. But while Cooper could protect her on the outside, if she was arrested...

There was nothing Cooper or Parker could do for her but help try to prove her innocence....

The defense lawyer should be able to prove that although Sharon was taller than Brenda, she wasn’t strong enough to have so violently broken the woman’s neck. Even the coroner should be able to conclude that it would take a very strong man to do something like that.

A twinge of regret and loss struck Parker’s heart. One day Ethan might learn, either through the internet or gossip, how brutally his mother had died. Parker knew from experience that people never forgot tragic deaths like his father’s. When the day came that Ethan heard about the murder, Parker wanted to be able to tell his son that he had caught and brought his mother’s killer to justice.

He reached the narrow landing at the top of the stairs. But before he could knock on the door, his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it and reached for his gun instead. But it continued to vibrate, so he pulled out the cell. And after lowering his voice to a whisper, he answered it. “Damn it, Logan—”

His voice a shout, Logan burst out, “Don’t go in there alone!”

“Do you have eyes on me?” He glanced around in the darkness. He wouldn’t have put it past his twin to have assigned one of their bodyguards to tail him. It would actually explain why Logan hadn’t fought him that hard when Parker had insisted on leaving the safe house.

“I just know you,” Logan replied, which really didn’t answer Parker’s question. “I know that when you’re mad you get hotheaded—too hotheaded to wait for backup.”

Parker
was
mad. He was mad that someone was trying to kill him. He was mad that someone was trying to kill Sharon. And he was mad that innocent people had died in their places.

“I don’t need backup, big brother.” Logan would never let him forget that he had entered the world a whole ten minutes before him. “I got this.”

“Before he got kicked out of the league some years ago, Chuck Horowitz was a mixed-martial-arts champion. He could kill you with his bare hands.”

Parker’s guts tightened—not with fear but with certainty. Brenda had been killed with someone’s bare hands. An MMA champ would have easily been able to kill her. He’d just thought the bodyguard had failed to protect her. But had he actually murdered her?

Parker tightened his grip on his gun. “A bullet will stop him.”

“Wait for me,” Logan ordered again. “I’m on my way there.”

“I told you to stay with Ethan and Mom.” He had no way of knowing if Chuck Horowitz was even in his apartment.

“Candace is protecting them,” Logan assured him. Because of her military and police background, Candace was not just their best female bodyguard but also one of their most competent bodyguards overall.

But Parker didn’t feel all that reassured. He glanced down toward the dark street. Not even street lamps glowed in this area of town. But yet he caught a glint of something in the enveloping darkness. Either a glint of eyes...or perhaps of metal...like a gun. “You don’t have Candace tailing me?”

“Not since you left the judge’s mansion.”

So he had had the female bodyguard protecting him and Sharon. If only he had known that, he could have left her outside so the poor woman wouldn’t have had to see her employer’s corpse....

Parker cursed his twin.

“Hey, it was for your protection.”

“It would have been better protection if I had known....” Like now. “Is there anyone following me now?”

“I don’t know,” Logan said. “You’ve been driving to make sure you wouldn’t have a tail....”

Apparently that hadn’t worked with Candace. But then, she had a lot of experience as a security expert and, before then, police and military experience. Someone else would have had more trouble following him...unless...

“But
you
know where I am,” Parker pointed out. So Logan could have sent someone ahead of him—someone who watched him now from the darkness.

“And I’m almost there,” Logan said. “So wait for me...”

What if Chuck Horowitz was the judge’s killer? Then he probably hadn’t just killed the judge; he had been trying to kill Sharon and Parker, too, which meant he had mistaken Logan and Cooper for Parker more than once already. That wasn’t a risk Parker was willing to take. He didn’t want Logan taking a bullet meant for him.

So he clicked off his cell and slid it back into his pocket. Then he gripped the gun with both hands and kicked open the door to Chuck Horowitz’s office/apartment. Better to take the man by surprise than give him a chance to react or arm himself.

Using the flashlight on the barrel, Parker swung it around the tiny apartment. The place was trashed—really trashed. The couch was overturned and gutted, stuffing strewn across the dirty carpet. Holes had been smashed through the drywall. There had been a hell of a struggle within those walls. If this was what Chuck had done to his own place, maybe Parker should have waited for backup.

But then the beam of his flashlight glanced across a pair of glazed-over eyes. Dead eyes. Parker trained the light on the man tied to the chair behind his desk. From the bloating and the stench, which Parker only noticed now as it overwhelmed the stale odor of cigarette smoke, it was obvious this corpse had been here awhile.

Chuck Horowitz had been tied up and beaten. But Parker noticed something else about him—the scratches on his hands and arms and the side of his face. The mercenary bodyguard hadn’t gotten those scratches from whoever had beaten him to death.

He had probably gotten those from the woman he had killed. Brenda had fought him even though she would have known that she couldn’t have overpowered him. What she had done was get his DNA under her nails; she had been smart and resourceful as she had provided evidence for police to arrest her killer and for prosecutors to win the trial against him.

But they wouldn’t be able to prosecute a dead man. Shortly after he had killed the judge, someone had killed Chuck Horowitz. But before they’d done that, they had torn his place apart looking for something—and they had tortured him to find out where that something was.

What had his killer wanted? Chuck had already killed the judge—undoubtedly for money. Hadn’t that been enough?

From the destruction of the apartment and the corpse, Parker suspected that Chuck’s killer hadn’t found whatever he had been looking for. Maybe that killer thought he or Sharon had whatever they wanted. Did they have something in their possession that they weren’t aware they had? Or did they know something that somebody didn’t want them knowing? Was that why someone had put out a hit on them, too?

He heard the click of a gun cocking, and then another light, on high beam, flashed in his face—blinding him so that he couldn’t see whoever had sneaked into the apartment behind him. But he didn’t need to see to know that it wasn’t his brother—Logan wouldn’t have pulled a gun on him.

And if Logan had sent backup for him, whoever it was wouldn’t have pulled a gun on Parker, either. But a hired killer would....

Chapter Eight

Sharon couldn’t stop shaking, but she was no longer in shock. She was angry. Parker Payne was supposed to be the one person she could trust, but he had let the police take her down to the station. And he had just disappeared.

How could he desert her like that when she had needed him?

Because he didn’t need her. She wasn’t the mother of his son. She had no information to lead him to the person who had offered money for his murder. And hers...

She had nothing to offer Parker Payne. So he had offered her nothing. He hadn’t even acknowledged her when the police car had driven off with her in the backseat. Of course, he had been preoccupied with the auburn-haired woman.

“I have answered all of your questions,” she told the detective who sat across the table from her in the small, windowless interrogation room. “You have no reason to hold me here.”

When the officer had questioned her at the hospital, he had used an office with a window. It hadn’t been so confining and suffocating.

“You were the last one to see the Honorable Brenda Foster alive,” the detective said—again. He had kept repeating it as if that statement alone would force her to confess to something she hadn’t done.

And Brenda Foster honorable? Sharon wasn’t so sure about that. After working for her awhile and listening to her brag about how she had tricked Parker into fathering her child, Sharon had learned that her idol had had clay feet. Now Brenda had a broken neck. Sharon grimaced as an image of the woman’s dead and grotesquely contorted body flashed through her mind.

Her head pounded, too, with stress and exhaustion. Maybe that was part of why she kept shaking. “Her bodyguard was the last person to see her alive,” Sharon repeated for the umpteenth time.

“A man whose last name you don’t even know,” the detective said with the snide little smirk he had been flashing her for the past couple of hours. He was older than her but not by much, so he had apparently made detective young enough that it had gone to his head. “That’s quite convenient.”

Nothing about this had been convenient for Sharon. Maybe it was the fatigue or the headache, but her tenuous control over the anger she had been feeling snapped. “It’s quite convenient that you’re forgetting I have rights, Detective Sharpe. Rights that you haven’t read me because you have no evidence to put me under arrest.”

His smirk widened. “Now I can tell that you’ve been working for a judge for a while. So then you should know that I can hold you as a material witness—”

“I didn’t witness anything.” This time. “And I haven’t just worked for a judge.”

His voice rising with excitement, he leaned across the small, scratched-up metal table. “Oh, you and Judge Foster were more than employee and employer?” He obviously thought he had found a salacious motive for the judge’s murder. A lover’s quarrel...

Sharon couldn’t believe that such an idiot had made detective. He had to know that there was no physical way that she could have broken her boss’s neck. So with her temper rising even higher, she pulled out a card she had never played before. “I haven’t just worked for a judge,” she repeated. “I am the granddaughter of a judge.”

He leaned back and lifted a brow. “Really?”

“I am Judge Wells’s granddaughter.” It wasn’t something he had ever freely or happily admitted, but it was an irrefutable fact. Like Judge Foster, police officers had respected Judge Wells for his tough sentences.

The guy leaned forward again and he got
that
look on his face—that look of horror and concern—that told her he knew her story. Even as young as he was, he had heard it. “I’m sorry....”

Not that she was Judge Wells’s granddaughter. He was sorry for the rest of it.

“That must have been tough tonight, seeing the judge’s corpse....” He shuddered for her.

It had been more than twenty years, but she still occasionally had the nightmares. She had no doubt that she would have one tonight...if she ever slept. She nodded.

“But that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have killed her.”

She lifted her hands. “I couldn’t have. Physically, I couldn’t have, and you know that.”

He shrugged. “Maybe you used a weapon. Did you really have nothing with you when the officers brought you in?”

She shook her head. “I have no idea what kind of weapon could have done that to Brenda.” Now she shuddered for herself and for her dead employer.

“If that were true, why did you hide your things from the officers at the scene?” he asked.

“What things?” she asked. “I didn’t bring anything with me.” Thanks to the car explosion, she had nothing left.

The detective sighed, as if frustrated with her. “Miss Wells—”

“You’re wasting your time with me when you should be finding Judge Foster’s bodyguard,” she said. “He was the last one to see her alive—because he was with her when I left her house.”

And Chuck had been such a burly man that he wouldn’t have needed a weapon to kill Brenda or even a man twice her size. Had Parker gone after him? Was that why he hadn’t come to the police department with her?

If he had tracked down Chuck on his own, he could wind up as brutally murdered as Brenda had been. Despite the heat of the stale air in the small room, her blood chilled, and she shivered in reaction.

“You need to find that man right now,” she said. Before Parker found him—unless it was already too late.

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.

* * *

P
ARKER
’
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!”