Lone wolf bounty hunter, p.3
Lone Wolf Bounty Hunter, page 3
So far, the best defense she had found against sharks was being the biggest one in the ocean.
She pulled up to the Bradshaw Law office and noticed a dark-colored rental truck driving by the parking lot. She didn’t know why it caught her attention, but something about it made the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention. Though she was sure it was just her being back here that was making her paranoid, she’d long ago learned to respect her body’s innate intuition. It probably had nothing to do with the truck, but she needed to pay attention.
First, she needed to get her act together. The fates always favored those prepared. No doubt, the Bradshaw Group had received the court filing notifying them she had taken on the case. Which meant they had been doing hours of research on her before she would ever set foot in that office. Aside from the little bit of research she had done this morning and what AJ had told her about the case, she’d not gotten much and hadn’t had time to do the level of digging she required.
In the middle of chastising herself, her phone pinged with an email from Zoey, the leader of the STEALTH team. Clicking on it, she wondered if Zoey could read her mind. The email itself was simple: Thought you might need this. Good luck.
Attached was an encrypted dossier on the Bradshaw Law Group, Senator Dean Clark and the lawsuit they had filed against STEALTH.
Most of what Zoey had provided was low-level dirt, the kind anyone could find with a little bit of searching around on the internet. Kendra also knew the senator had jumped bail, missing a preliminary hearing on his trial. The rat was so confident of public approval, he obviously didn’t feel the need to abide by the rules. Lucky for her family, this would make defending the defamation lawsuit a little easier.
Kendra needed more information. However, if she played her cards right, the other counselor would give her everything she needed. She’d like to hope she’d get lucky, but over the last few days, luck certainly hadn’t seemed to be on her side.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the same dark truck as before, pulling into the parking lot across the street from her. The area was a large industrial complex with a variety of office buildings, but once again she found herself prickling.
She reached down for her purse, making sure that her concealed carry was in place. With a job like hers, she always had enemies. Every so often, ghosts from her past cases would float into her life and haunt her. It didn’t seem likely that here in the middle of nowhere Montana one of her ghosts would find her, but complacency was a lawyer’s worst enemy.
She stepped out of her truck, keeping her hand on her concealed carry inside her purse, looking as though she was digging around for ChapStick or some other irrelevant item, but she made sure to keep her eyes on the truck.
She couldn’t see through the truck’s tinted windows, and the realization brought her no comfort. She picked up her pace and hurried into the building, not stopping until she was safely masked by a stairwell leading up. She stopped behind what limited cover there was and looked out. A man in a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve shirt had gotten out, but his back was to her and she couldn’t see his face. More than likely, he was just another lawyer going to one of the offices across the street or something.
She was losing her mind.
Maybe this was what she got for trying to trust her instincts. Maybe this level of paranoia had simply been set in motion thanks to AJ and her family. It was really no wonder—every time she was around them, something bad happened.
She gave a long exhale and turned away from the man in the jeans. Something about him reminded her of the guy from the airplane yesterday.
Maybe if she had just talked to the guy on the plane, or made idle chitchat with anyone, she wouldn’t be as paranoid as she was feeling right now. Maybe she had needed a single-serving friend to come to take the edge off. Oh well—now it was too late to worry about things like that. Now she needed to put her game face on.
I am the shark.
According to the sign in the main lobby, the Bradshaw Law Group took up the entirety of the third floor. They definitely weren’t a fly-by-night firm. They were making enough in the small town to pay for an entire floor in an upscale neighborhood. Not only that, but it said something that Senator Dean Clark was one of their clients.
Having his case was a feather in any law firm’s cap, and undoubtedly they would pull no punches and stop at nothing to make sure he got whatever it was that he wanted. In this case, he wanted to take her family down. No matter what, that wasn’t going to happen.
She’d faced tougher adversaries in and out of the courtroom than this man hell-bent on revenge. According to what she’d been sent, he was upset after his wife had been murdered and his daughter had been kidnapped—according to the news, he had allegedly been behind the abductions in hopes of swaying public favor to help him get reelected. As such, he had a criminal case pending for his role in kidnapping, which had led to his wife’s death and led to him losing custody of his daughter—permanently. Even with those marks against him, he had won his reelection campaign.
When STEALTH had been in control of the daughter’s personal security, they’d had very limited control over the family’s movements, only tasked with watching the girl outside the home and when and if the wife asked them to do so beyond that. According to the protocol and the contracts between STEALTH and the family, they had done everything by the book.
In fact, she would go so far as to say they had gone above and beyond the call of duty in helping search for the daughter and the wife as well as playing an integral role in bringing the killer down...and learning the senator himself was complicit in the kidnapping. It was the senator’s malfeasance that had gotten him in this hot water. This lawsuit was nothing more than some trumped-up malarkey to make it appear STEALTH and her family were inept and had some sort of vendetta against the senator—though nothing could have been further from the truth.
Once again, the senator was just posturing. It seemed to be the only thing he was good at.
He probably wouldn’t even be in the office today. If she was sitting on the opposite side of the courtroom on this one, she would’ve told him to stay as far away from this meeting as possible. It was all about grandstanding and playing head games.
As she reached the third floor, she straightened her blouse and ran a hand over her hair to make sure every strand was in place in her no-nonsense bun. The best defense was a strong offense.
Game on.
She allowed her heart rate to slow and her breath to steady before she reached down and opened the door to the firm’s lobby. She was half surprised that an office this high-end didn’t have a buzzer system, but then again, this was Montana.
The lobby was reminiscent of a doctor’s office, complete with the obligatory white orchid in the corner and a water cooler by the door to the main offices. Behind a pane of glass was the secretary’s desk, which was conspicuously vacant. The phone was ringing, and she could hear another from somewhere behind the wall of glass.
The hairs on her arms prickled. Something about the place—perhaps it was the eerie quiet on what should have been a busy day, or the fact that she had been on edge since seeing the truck outside, but something didn’t feel right.
She sucked in a breath and made her way over to the secretary’s area. Certainly, there had to be someone working. Maybe they had just stepped out for a drink or were running an errand for one of the attorneys. Just because her gut was roiling didn’t mean anything. Kendra had been on high alert for two days now. If anything, she just needed to get through this meeting, get things handled for her family and hit the bricks.
Approaching the window, she caught a strange scent. At first, she couldn’t quite put her finger on it thanks to the thick and heavy aroma of industrial cleaners they must have used in the office, but as she stopped at the marble ledge in front of the secretary’s window, she recognized the smell—it was the acrid, metallic scent of gunpowder.
Her hand instinctively moved to her purse, and she wrapped her fingers around her Glock’s grip.
This is wrong.
Something’s happened here. Something bad.
She did a quick scan around the secretary’s desk. At first appearance, she was alone. No signs of a struggle, and nothing was amiss. She didn’t dare let her guard down, but she moved closer to the glass after checking the area for potential threats.
The secretary’s tan leather chair was pulled out and pointing toward the back offices. On the seat was a long smear of blood. On the floor leading away from it was a series of droplets, as though whoever this blood belonged to had stood up and run, dripping, toward the back.
She moved closer to the glass, hoping to see where the person had gone. As she did, she spotted the bottom of a high-heeled shoe and a woman’s ankle; the rest of the woman was out of sight behind a tall desk-like partition. The woman wasn’t moving. Perhaps the woman had hit her head...had a bloody nose and passed out on the way to the bathroom.
Any number of things could have happened. This woman can’t be dead.
For a moment, she dissociated and found herself wondering why she didn’t also smell blood if what she was fearing was true—if the woman was dead, if she had been shot, there would be more blood. Right?
Was this some ploy the office had set up to put her off her game? Was the woman going to jump up like this was all some kind of sick joke?
The phone rang again, pulling her from her disjointed and nonsensical thoughts.
She knocked on the window. “Hello? Are you all right?” The question sounded stupid as she said it aloud. “Ma’am? Are you okay?” she asked again, her voice getting a bit higher with every passing syllable.
She grabbed the door leading to the back and was surprised to find it unlocked. It was heavy, and she opened it just far enough to slip through. It eased closed behind her, and its sluggishness made her wonder if it was the door or if time had slowed down. It could have been her mind’s reaction to trauma—that moment in a fight for life or death in which a person’s perception heightened and the imperceptible became a still-life reality.
Kendra moved behind the desk. A pool of blood snaked around and slipped under the edges like it was trying to escape. Moving toward the blood, she found the woman. Her face, or what would have been her face, was misshapen and oddly lopsided. The tilt of her head was like she was confused, as if the last thing she’d seen was so out of place that she cocked her head even in death.
The woman appeared to be in her late twenties, and she was looking straight ahead, her eyes dark and sightless as she stared into death’s maw. Her hair was curled, and part of it had slipped down and rested in her open mouth. It wasn’t until Kendra blinked and focused on the sight in front of her that she realized what was wrong with the woman’s face—part of her head was missing where it was pressed into the gray industrial carpet.
Her phone pinged, and a woman’s voice sounded from the device. “Nine-one-one, this is Erin. How can we be of assistance?”
In her many years working as a prosecutor, she’d heard many of these kinds of calls on recordings when they played them for judges and juries. Never had she assumed she would be the one who dialed the number—and strangely, she couldn’t remember when she had even taken her phone out of her purse.
“Hello?” the dispatcher repeated. “How can I be of assistance?” she repeated, this time her tone taking on a slightly higher sound as though she could sense the fear in Kendra.
It wasn’t the first time Kendra had been this close to a dead body, and as she stared at the dark blood, she picked out the little bits of lighter, fatty pink bits that she recognized as pieces of brain. Once, in a case like this, one in which her key witness had been present at the murder, the woman had described how she had screamed. In that case, she said the sound had come from deep in her lungs and from a place so dark within her that she hadn’t even recognized that she was the one who had been making the sound.
She stared at the woman’s fingernails. Acrylics. Bright pink with jewels and fresh glitter. No nail beds were exposed. She probably had just gotten them done.
“Do you need assistance?” the dispatcher asked, this time really pulling Kendra from her trauma-induced trance.
“Uh,” she said, lifting the phone to her ear and falling back into attorney mode—unflappable in the face of the terrifying and unexpected. “Hello, my name is Kendra Spade, and I have just come upon a deceased woman.”
She rattled off the building’s address. Her voice was even and her affect was flat. If she was on the stand and sounded like this, no one would believe her because of her lack of emotion—especially in a situation in which she was standing in view of a murdered woman.
“Have you taken the woman’s pulse?” the dispatcher asked.
She thought about telling the dispatcher that this woman couldn’t possibly have a pulse, but instead she found herself on her knees. She pushed back a bit of the woman’s dark hair, pulling it out of her mouth and gently moving it over her shoulder, and then pressed her fingers into the still-warm flesh of the woman’s neck. “There’s no pulse.”
“Okay,” the dispatcher said. “I have the emergency crews en route to your location. Stay on the phone with me.”
She didn’t want to stay on the phone. She didn’t want to do anything but get to her feet and leave the office and head straight to the airport and catch the first plane to any place but here. Instead, she did as the dispatcher said. Getting up, she moved down the hallway, where she heard the continuing distinct ring of a cell phone coming from the corner office.
Her stomach clenched as she neared the ringing sound. No attorney she knew would ever let their phone ring for so long without answering it. She tried to convince herself it was nothing, that it was probably just some burner that was left behind and she wouldn’t find another scene like that in the lobby. Yet her past and all the horrors she had experienced had her girding her loins. This was one of those times in her life she could pick apart later, but for now she needed to keep being strong and face the reality as it presented itself—gore and all.
The dispatcher was speaking to her, asking her something, but her voice was muffled and drowned out by the fear ringing in Kendra’s ears. She held her phone, but her hands drooped to her sides as she nearly floated down the hall.
The office door was open, and she stepped inside. Hanging over the desk was a man. The tips of his brown loafers were grazing the papers on his desk. He was wearing dark blue dress pants and a white button-down shirt with a red satin tie. The brown nylon-looking rope was looped around his neck, his flesh bulging out slightly above the ligature. His skin was bruised and mottled, and his eyes were open and bloodshot—she recognized it as petechia, the breakage of the capillaries in the eye that was indicative of a strangling.
Did this attorney kill the secretary and then hang himself?
Her mind worked fast as she tried to make sense of the scene in front of her. There was no gun on the desk, but some of the man’s papers had been pushed off and were scattered haphazardly across the floor. His computer was askew, leaning precariously over the edge, but it was close to his feet. Perhaps he had kicked it and the papers in his attempt to commit suicide? Or was this a murder as well?
Had the secretary seen something threatening—the murderer? Gotten up to run to the attorney’s office? Or maybe to lock the door, but she was shot before she had time to stop the assailant? But why would a murderer shoot her and then hang the attorney?
It didn’t make sense.
And then she heard it, a strange keening wail. It was almost quiet at first, and then she dropped to her knees and her phone slipped from her hand to the ground. A feeling of sickness filled her. The sound echoing around the office...was coming from her.
A hand touched her shoulder, and the keen turned to the piercing sound of fear as she jerked away from the touch. Standing behind her was the man from the plane. Without even thinking, she pulled out her gun and pointed it up at his center mass. She stared at his face, looking to see if he meant help or harm, but in his eyes she found only questions.
Chapter Four
Trent hadn’t meant to scare his mark. He hadn’t even been trying to expose that he had been tracking and following her, but this wasn’t a normal situation. Nothing about this bounty hunt had been what he considered average—not by a long way, but here they were.
“It’s okay,” he said, trying to console the woman and get her to calm down. “I’m not here to hurt you. I heard your screams. Are you hurt?” He glanced down to the phone on the ground beside her.
Her gun barrel didn’t waver as she closed her mouth and stared at him. Her eyes were wide with fear, and he put his hands up in surrender. “Put the gun down. I’m not here to hurt you.”
The barrel dipped slightly. “You’re the man from the plane.”
He nodded, but he could feel a faint heat rising in his cheeks. This was the first time he’d been made ahead of schedule, and he felt utterly exposed and at a loss. “Yes, but you don’t need to worry. I’m not a threat.” He reached down and picked up her phone, clicking it off when he saw 911 was still on the other end of the line.
The dispatcher didn’t need any more information—they’d be here soon.
“If you’re not a threat, then what in the hell are you doing taking my phone away?” She jabbed the gun at him like it was a knife, giving away her fear.
“You put the gun away and I’ll give you your phone.”
She slipped the gun back into her cross-body purse. “Phone, please.”
“Here,” he said, handing it back to her. “Is there anyone else here?” He glanced back out into the hallway. There hadn’t been time to clear the rooms once he’d rushed in at the sound of her screams, and he was annoyed with his safety oversight, but it was what it was. At the very least, he had made it to her side without taking a bullet. He’d have to chalk that up as a win—even if everything else had gone a bit assways.
