THE PROSECUTOR (18 page)

Zac watched it all, occasionally checking his watch and sighing. For once, Emma didn’t mind the wait. Not when anticipating the moment her brother would be free offered such excitement.

“There’s one thing I’m wondering,” Emma said.

Zac clucked his tongue. “Only one?”

“Hardy-har. A comedian now. Why did that nasty Detective Leeks threaten me? If his son was innocent, why did he care? I should have asked him that before I slugged him.”

Zac gave her a thumbs-up. “That was a heck of a shot.”

“He deserved it. I still wonder, though.”

“I think he either wasn’t sure his kid was innocent, or he knew the investigation had been screwed up and he didn’t want their name dragged into it. Maybe both.”

“I guess. It makes me sad for the Moore family. We all trusted Alex Belson. They trusted him for very different reasons, but we were all traumatized. I hope that creep never gets out.”

“He’ll go away for a long time. Between the murder, obstruction of justice, what he did to you, arson, and the litany of other charges my office will come up with, he’ll be an old man if he ever gets out.”

A buzz sounded and Emma glanced up. Inside the fence, her brother stepped out of the building, flanked by two guards. Emma’s pulse kicked. Brian wore baggy jeans and a wrinkled, button-down shirt—the clothes he’d been arrested in that were now a size too big. He held a bag in his hands, most likely his personal effects. From where she stood, Emma couldn’t see if his bruises had healed. Who was she kidding? Even if they’d faded, eagle-eye Mom would probably notice and Emma would finally have to explain. Later. Much later.

He’s coming home
. Emma placed her hands over her mouth and looked up at Zac. “I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it.” He put an arm around her and squeezed. “Emma Sinclair, I think you’re the love of my life.”

“You
think?
Charming,
Zachary
. Charming.”

“I do what I can.” He turned toward her, rested one arm on top of the limo. “I should thank you. At the beginning of this, I was bent on proving that your brother was a murderer. I had it all figured out. He did it and I was gonna be the guy to prove it. Except nothing was what I thought. I had to experience that. Plus, I got to meet you. Something tells me that will change my life in the best way possible. I don’t want to freak you out, but now that this case is history, I’ll be all over you. Just so you know.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?”

“Nope. Keeping you updated.”

She tugged on his jacket, went on tiptoes and kissed him quick. “Excellent. And just so
you
know, I will be an eager participant as it relates to your affections.”

“Glad we got that clarified.”

Another buzz sounded and Emma faced front as the long steel gate slid open. Her brother stopped and looked at each guard, waiting for permission to leave. Apparently, he was stunned by the morning’s activities. One of the guards set his hand on Brian’s back, gave him a smile and shoved him through the gate.

The guards, like most people, were fond of Brian.

And then, for the first time in eighteen months, her brother stepped out of the prison gate. He stood there, on freedom’s side of the entrance, staring at the pavement. Emma absorbed the simple joy of seeing her brother experiencing freedom. Let it heal her. No one moved. Not even their mother. Somehow, they understood that Brian needed a moment. Finally, he pushed his shoulders back and raised his head. His gaze locked on Emma’s and held. Joy fused with the pain of lost time and unfurled in her chest. For months she’d imagined this moment, imagined the hoots and hollers and yet there was only quiet. The celebration would come later, but now, in the parking lot, the prison gate behind them, there was only Emma, Brian and their mother. Together.

Finally.

They’d done it.

Mom broke the spell and ran to Brian, throwing her arms around him. She sobbed, the sound of it loud and piercing and wonderful. Emma turned into Zac’s side and buried her head in his shoulder.

Zac kissed the top of her head. “You did it.”

Head still buried, she nodded. “He’s coming home.” She straightened, looked up into Zac’s blue eyes and her smile, for a change, came easy. She’d smile more now. Life would be for living again. She grabbed Zac’s hand and pulled him toward the gate. “We did it. He’s got his life back.”

“He’s not the only one.”

“Yep. And you,
Zachary,
will be part of it. Are you good with that? Because you have to help me with constitutional law.”

“Honey, I’m great with that. We’ll be a happy, twisted family.”

Family. Emma’s heart banged and she slapped her hand over it. For the first time since her father had passed, she pictured a complete unit.
Her
complete unit. Zac, Mom and Brian. If she threw Penny into the mix, she’d have the sister she’d always wanted. Even if Penny was crazy. Now, with Brian free, she’d grab hold of that unit and never let go. What more could a girl want? Finally, after years of losses, she’d won.

Her luck had definitely changed.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from BRIDAL JEOPARDY by Rebecca York.

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Prologue

The horror of that day had replayed over and over in
Craig Branson’s mind. What if he, Mom, Dad and Sam had gone to a different
restaurant? What if they’d stayed home and ordered in? Life as he knew it would
have continued on the same happy track.

But Dad had just brought in a big ad buy at the local TV
station where he was promotions manager, and he’d been in the mood to celebrate
his hard work.

“Where should we go to dinner?” he’d asked his twin sons, two
dark-haired, dark-eyed boys only a few people could tell apart.

Craig and Sam were identical twins, born when a single egg had
split in their mother’s womb. Twins were supposed to be close, but there was
more between these two eight-year-olds than anyone else knew. There was a hidden
bond and a fierce love born of the connection they could never explain to anyone
else.

They’d looked at each other and begun a silent conversation
about the merits of various choices.

Then Sam had spoken for the two of them. He’d asked to go to
Venario’s, an Italian restaurant. If they ate at Venario’s, they could order an
extra pizza and have it for breakfast the next morning.

Mom had protested that pizza was no kind of breakfast, but Dad
let the boys have their way. If it made his twins happy to bring home pizza, he
was all for it, as long as they had a nice portion of chicken or veal for
dinner.

That evening they’d sat across from each other at the square
table topped by a snowy cloth, silently debating the merits of ground beef or
ham on their take-home pizza. Almost as soon as they’d come home from the
hospital, they’d been able to read each other’s thoughts, a skill they
instinctively kept hidden from the world. Mom suspected, but she had never asked
them about it because the idea was too outlandish for her to wrap her brain
around. She was a down-to-earth woman who wanted her sons to be strong and
independent, even when their inclination was to present a united front.

At the next table, a group of men was talking loudly; their
voices annoyed Mom and Dad, but they didn’t interfere with the Branson boys’
happy conversation.

That was another what-if that had tortured Craig for the
twenty-two years since that night when his whole world had been shattered.

What if he and Sam hadn’t been so focused on each other? What
if they’d been paying more attention to their surroundings?

Could Craig have saved Sam’s life?

He didn’t know because it all had happened so fast.

The door burst open, and two men had charged into the
restaurant with guns drawn, already shooting as they ran. The guys at the next
table hardly had time to react. One of them tried to stand and went down in a
hail of bullets. Another one collapsed in his chair. And the third fell to the
side, hitting Mom as she screamed in horror.

People all over the confined space were crying out and hitting
the floor. But the chaos around Craig had hardly registered. His total attention
was focused on Sam, who had been sitting closer to the scene of disaster.

He’d made a strangled sound and had fallen forward, his head
hitting the table as blood spread across the crisp white cloth. His chest had
been a mass of pain that Craig felt as though it were his own body on fire.

He’d leaped out of his seat, charging around the table to his
brother’s side, slipping from his father’s grasp as he reached for Sam,
struggling to maintain the fading connection between them. Panic rose inside
him, and he’d clutched at his brother with his hand and with his mind.

Sam, don’t leave me.

Craig?

Sam. I can’t hear you, Sam.

I...can’t...

Those were his last memories of his brother. He had started
screaming then, his cries drowning out the sound of a siren approaching.

His father’s arms had folded him close, protecting him from
harm. But the harm was already done.

Sam was gone, vanished as though he had never been—leaving an
aching gap in Craig’s soul.

Despair and anger raged inside the boy who lived. But even at
the age of eight, Craig knew that he would find out who had killed his brother
and avenge his death.

Chapter One

The light from the computer screen gave a harsh cast to
Craig Branson’s angular features, yet he couldn’t conceal the feeling of elation
surging inside himself.

He’d only been eight when his twin brother had been cruelly
ripped away from him, but on that terrible day, he’d vowed that he would find
the killers and bring them to justice. Now, finally, he had a lead on one of the
shooters in a gangland assassination twenty-two years ago.

The restaurant where crime boss Jackie Montana and two of his
men had been gunned down had been full of witnesses. Many of the patrons had
identified the killers from their mug shots. They were two hired hit men named
Joe Lipton and Arthur Polaski who had taken jobs all over the U.S.

Although the cops knew the assassins’ names, the men fled the
scene and disappeared from the face of the earth. Now Craig knew why.

Unable to sit still, he stood and strode out of his office,
then paced into the hall of the brick ranch house where he’d lived in Bethesda,
Maryland, for the past few years.

It was in an upscale neighborhood just outside the nation’s
capital, the perfect place for the career he’d started planning even before
Sam’s funeral. He would make sure he was tough enough, smart enough and well
trained enough to find his brother’s killers. To that end he’d graduated from
college at George Washington University, then enlisted in the army and gone to
officer-candidate school right after basic training. From there he got his first
choice of assignments, the military intelligence service. After learning
everything he could about investigative techniques, he returned to civilian life
and started his own detective agency.

When his dad died nine months after Mom, he inherited all the
money he’d ever need—if you considered his unassuming lifestyle. He had no
family. No wife and children, because he knew he was lacking something that most
people took for granted—the ability to connect with others on a deep, personal
level. He craved those things with a fierce sense of loss because he’d had them
with Sam. When his brother had been ripped from him, his anchor to the human
race had been severed.

Although that was a pretty dramatic way to put it, he
understood the concept perfectly. Other people formed close friendships and
loving relationships. He’d never been able to manage either, although he thought
he faked it pretty well. He had friends. He’d had physically satisfying affairs
with women, but he had always known that marrying one of them would mean
cheating her out of the warmth and closeness she deserved.

Failing that, he’d focused on his work, partly because it was
intensely rewarding to put bad guys away and partly because it was a means to an
end.

He
would
find who had killed his
brother, and he
would
make sure they would pay for
what they had done.

He’d traveled around the U.S., and he maintained contacts with
police departments all over the country. One of those contacts had just paid off
big-time.

He walked back to his desk, activated the printer and made a
copy of the report that had come in from a lieutenant named Ike Broussard in the
New Orleans P.D. According to the detective, the body of one of the men who had
shot up that restaurant, Arthur Polaski, had just turned up dead on private
property outside the city. The local police had identified him by dental
records, and the murder weapon was with him.

A very neat package. Maybe too neat.

Craig skimmed the report again. Polaski was beyond his reach,
but that didn’t mean there would be no justice for Sam. The hit man hadn’t been
operating on his own. Every indication was that he’d been working for a local
New Orleans bigwig named John Reynard.

As a boy, Craig had focused on bringing Polaski and Lipton to
justice. But as he’d matured, he’d come to understand that the shooters were
just hired thugs working for someone who wanted a rival crime boss dead. Now
Polaski had led Craig to John Reynard.

Craig worked into the evening, collecting information on his
quarry. Finally, when he saw that it was almost ten, he got up and stretched,
then fixed himself a ham-and-cheese sandwich, which he took back to the
computer, along with a bottle of beer. One advantage of living alone was that he
didn’t have to stick to regular meal times, eat at the table or stop work while
he fueled up. Once he knew about Reynard, it was easy to find a boatload of
information on the man. He was in his early sixties and owned an import-export
business in New Orleans, probably a front for drug smuggling. But the cops
apparently didn’t look into his company too carefully, undoubtedly because
Reynard was very generous with his bribes and also contributed significant
amounts to local charities. Public record presented him as an upstanding
citizen, although it was interesting that two of his former wives had died while
married to him.

Craig took a swallow of beer as he came to an intriguing piece
of information. Reynard was about to tie the knot again. In the society pages of
the
Times-Picayune,
there were pictures of him
with his bride-to-be at several charity events. She was a very lovely blonde
woman named Stephanie Swift who looked to be half the age of the man she was
going to marry.

Craig shook his head. He could see why Reynard was attracted to
the woman. But what did she see in him?

As Craig studied her wide-set eyes, her narrow nose, her nicely
shaped lips and the blond hair that fell in waves to her shoulders, he felt an
unexpected jolt of awareness. Something about her drew him, and he struggled to
dismiss the feeling of attraction to her. He didn’t want to like her. What kind
of a woman would marry a lowlife like Reynard? Could it be that she was too
stupid or unaware to understand what kind of man her fiancé was? Or maybe she
was attracted to his money, and she didn’t care what the man was really
like.

He made a snorting sound, then warned himself to stay
objective. That usually wasn’t a problem for him, but apparently it was with Ms.
Swift, and letting himself feel anything for her would be a big mistake.

With another shake of his head, he clicked away from a smiling
picture of her with Reynard and went back to her dossier. Apparently she came
from a family that had been prominent in the city. But the Swifts must have
fallen on hard times because now she spent her days in the dress shop that she
owned in the French Quarter.

Well, she’d be able to give up that business and get back to
her society lifestyle once she married Reynard.

But maybe in the meantime she’d be useful to Craig. What if he
got to know her before he made a move on Reynard? Yes, that might be the way to
go.

* * *

T
HE
BELL
OVER
the shop door jingled,
and Stephanie Swift looked up. It was a delivery man, carrying a long cardboard
box. When she saw the logo on the package, she stiffened, but she kept her voice
pleasant as she spoke to the deliveryman.

“Thanks so much.”

He nodded to her as he set the package down on the counter and
left her Royal Street shop.

Before the bell stopped jingling again, her assistant, Claire
Dupree, came out of the back room, where she’d been unpacking merchandise that
had arrived from New York that morning. Claire was a pretty, dark-haired young
woman who wanted to get into fashion, and she’d offered to work for Stephanie at
minimum wage for the chance to learn the business. She was a quick study, and
Stephanie had come to rely on her.

“You’ve been expecting your wedding dress. Is that it?” she
asked.

“Yes.”

Claire eyed the box. “I’m dying to see it.”

“We’ll open it in the back room,” Stephanie answered,
struggling to sound enthusiastic. She’d known all along that John Reynard was
the wrong man for her. Or she’d known that perhaps there
was
no right man, given the way she failed to connect with anyone on
a truly intimate level. But she’d held out hope for...something more.

Then fate had overtaken her hopes.

Still, she wasn’t going to let on to her assistant that she had
doubts about her upcoming wedding. She was too private a person to talk about
her secret worries. And she couldn’t shake the nagging impression that it might
be dangerous to reveal her state of mind to anyone. Besides, even if she weren’t
marrying John Reynard out of love, maybe it would turn out okay.

That was what she told herself, even when she feared she was
heading for disaster. Too bad she was stuck with the bargain she’d made.

“Should I open the box?” Claire called from the next room.

“I’ll be right there,” she answered, then took a couple of deep
breaths as she looked around the shop that had been the major focus of her life
for the past two years. It was feminine and nicely decorated, a showplace where
women could relax while they browsed the dresses and evening outfits that
Stephanie imported from designers on the East Coast and Europe.

She’d always dressed well and loved fashion, but her interest
morphed from an avocation into a business when her father had given her the bad
news about his gambling debts.

She’d wanted to scream at him, but she hadn’t bothered raging
about his lack of regard for anyone but himself. The criticism would just roll
off his back like rain off a yellow slicker.

Instead, she’d taken her sense of style and the money that her
mother had left her and bought a small shop in the French Quarter, a shop that
had done well until a downturn in the city’s business cycle had put her in
jeopardy.

She stepped into the back room and found Claire talking on her
cell phone. When she saw Stephanie, she clicked off at once.

“Sorry. I was just checking in with Mom.”

“Sure,” Stephanie answered, distracted. She knew that Claire’s
mother was living in a nursing home and that her daughter spoke to her
frequently.

Taking a pair of scissors, she began to carefully open the
dress box. The top came off, revealing layers of tissue paper. Beneath them was
an ivory-colored sleeveless gown decorated with seed pearls and delicate lace.
She’d seen it at a wedding outlet in New York and had used her professional
capacity to order it at the wholesale price.

“Beautiful,” Claire breathed as she touched the delicate silk
fabric.

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you try it on? I can help you with the buttons up
the back.”

“Not now.”

Stephanie slipped the dress onto a hanger, then turned away to
put it on the rack in back of her, where it dangled like a headless hanging
victim.

She winced, wishing she hadn’t thought of that image.

Of course, that wasn’t the only thing she wished. What if she’d
never met John Reynard? What if her shop hadn’t taken that downturn? What if she
met a man who could connect with her in ways that she could only imagine?

She made a disgusted sound. As if that was going to happen.

“What?” Claire asked.

“Nothing. I’m not really feeling well. Do you mind if I get out
of here for a few hours?”

Claire gave her a sympathetic look. “Oh, no. You’ve got that
reception with John this evening.”

Stephanie felt a wave of anxiety sweep over her. She’d put the
reception out of her mind, but now she knew what had been making her feel
unsettled—even before the dress had arrived. “Lord, I forgot all about
that.”

“You’d better go home and rest. You don’t want to disappoint
him.”

“Right.” Once again, she wished that she’d never met John
Reynard. Wished that he hadn’t listened to her dad’s sob story, then stepped in
to pay her debts—and Dad’s. But she’d taken his money because her father had
begged her to let John Reynard handle their problems. And at the time, it had
seemed the only way out. She’d been willing to let her shop go under. She could
always find a job with someone else, but that wouldn’t work out so well for Dad.
He’d lose the house—his last tie to the luxurious past that the family had
enjoyed. And she’d known deep down that would kill him.

If she were the cause of that, her guilt would be too great for
her to bear. Which was the irony of this situation. She’d never really felt
close to her parents, yet she was compelled to make sure her father ended his
days in the manner to which he was accustomed. Probably because she’d never felt
like a dutiful daughter—and Dad had made sure she understood that.

Claire’s voice broke into her troubled thoughts.

“Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks.” She thought for a moment. “If Mrs. Arlington calls to
ask about her ball gown, tell her it hasn’t come in yet.”

“Of course. Don’t trouble yourself about it,” Claire
repeated.

Stephanie nodded, wishing she could really relax and stop
worrying about her future.

Copyright © 2014 by Ruth Glick