Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4)

by Miller, Melissa F.

  “Slide your weapon away from your body.”

  She released her knee cap and did as he ordered. She used both hands to push the rifle forward on the ground. It skidded to a stop about ten feet from Sasha.

  “Cover your boy with that, Sasha.” Connelly jerked his head toward the long-gun.

  “He’s not going anywhere. Trust me.”

  “Sasha, please,” Connelly said.

  She huffed out a breath and bent to retrieve the rifle. The wood felt cold even through her gloves.

  She aimed it in the general vicinity of the prone man, who rolled from side to side, moaning. Air whistled through his busted nose.

  She turned her head to see that Anna had taken the fallen man’s rifle and was stalking across the field toward her husband.

  “Connelly,” Sasha said, her voice sharp with warning.

  He looked back.

  “Anna, don’t,” he said in a calm, low-key voice.

  His words didn’t seem to register. She just kept walking, the gun in front of her, straight at Bricker.

  “Anna,” he said in a firmer voice.

  “He killed Gavin. He was going to kill me. My husband was going to execute me so I wouldn’t interfere with his plan to infect hundreds of thousands of people with a deadly virus,” she said, her voice shaking with anger and emotion.

  Bricker stared at her. A slow smile spread across his face.

  “You won’t do it, Anna. You don’t have it in you,” he said.

  He wants his wife to shoot him, Sasha thought.

  Anna raised the rifle, pointing it at his head.

  “Anna, wait,” Sasha said.

  The armed woman didn’t turn to look at her, but Sasha kept talking. “Look at him smiling. He wants you to do it. Why do you think that is?”

  Anna didn’t respond immediately, but Sasha thought her shoulders relaxed.

  “The kids. If I kill him, I’ll go to prison and won’t be able to be with my babies. He wants me to lose the kids,” she said after a long pause.

  “That’s right,” Connelly agreed.

  Anna stepped closer to her husband.

  Sasha held her breath and waited for the gun to fire.

  Instead, Anna spat. Her saliva dribbled down his face.

  She dropped the gun to the ground.

  Sasha took her by the arm and guided her away from her husband, the battered preppers, and Gavin’s corpse.

  Anna buried her head in Sasha’s shoulder and cried—great gulping sobs.

  “I’m so sorry about your friend,” Anna wailed.

  Sasha closed her eyes. So was she.

  CHAPTER 46

  By the time the SWAT team arrived at the compound the pre-dawn sky was a light gray.

  Anna had left hours ago. With Hank’s blessing, Trooper Royerson had returned and picked her up to take her to a Comfort Inn to be reunited with her children. She’d be subjected to a series of long and unpleasant interviews in the coming days, but first she’d have a chance to hug her kids and try to explain how their lives had fallen apart.

  Lydia and the other prepper, who identified himself as George Rollins, were the next to leave the scene. The first FBI agents to reach the camp had assessed their injuries, taken them into custody, and then bundled them into the back of an ambulance for the long trip to Clear Brook County General Hospital.

  Next, they’d hustled Bricker into the back of their car to be interrogated.

  Sasha and Connelly just stood in the field and kept vigil over Gavin’s body.

  Most of the remaining preppers stayed inside their cabins. The few who emerged did so with their hands up, looked around, and then ducked back inside. There was no uprising, no call to resist. They just waited to be told what to do.

  At some point, someone had thrown a light green wool blanket over Sasha’s shoulders and pressed a thermos of hot coffee into her hands. She was grateful for both.

  She was more grateful for Connelly, who smoothed her hair back from the large swollen lump on her forehead and told her Gavin’s death wasn’t her fault.

  Finally, the coroner arrived for Gavin.

  “Wait,” Sasha said.

  She bent and folded the blanket over his body.

  “You’re right,” she whispered, “this coffee is crap.”

  Then, she turned so she wouldn’t have to watch the waiting medic zipper him into the black body bag.

  Connelly put a hand on her shoulder, touching it lightly, as if he knew how tender it was from plowing into Rollins.

  They stood in silence and watched as Gavin was loaded into the coroner’s wagon. When the door closed with a loud, final bang, they turned away in unison.

  One of the agents stood a respectful distance away and cleared his throat.

  Connelly turned to him.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but we do need to interview you and Ms. McCandless about the shooting and, uh, scuffle. Separately. Just as a formality,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “We’re about ready to send the guys cabin to cabin rousting these losers. You want to wait or do it now?”

  “Now is fine with me. Sasha?” Connelly said.

  She was staring at the first cabin on the far left. Off to the side of it was a fire pit ringed with white stone. She recognized that fire pit. And the cabin.

  “No one’s come out of that cabin, right?” she asked Connelly, pointing at it.

  “I don’t think so.”

  She turned to face him. “Tate’s in there.”

  Connelly looked at her for a long moment, then he said to the agent, “Actually, let’s do the interview later. Come with me.”

  Sasha watched them approach the cabin, guns drawn. Connelly was talking to the agent in a low voice.

  “FBI!” the agent shouted as he banged on the door.

  After a moment, the door opened and Oliver Tate’s face, paler and considerably less cheerful than it had been in the photograph, flashed into view. Behind him, two teenage girls huddled together.

  Connelly and the agent stepped through the doorway and closed the door.

  Sasha wandered away to watch the hazmat-suited CDC workers trundling in and out of the cabin where Gavin had been quarantined. She stood just outside the hot zone they’d cordoned off.

  The workers bagged and removed every piece of furniture and every stitch of bedding from the cabin, making trips back and forth like ants carrying away a fallen sandwich bit by bit.

  On one of his return trips, one of the workers made his way toward her, his arms extended and his legs stiff in an awkward spaceman walk.

  “Ma’am,” he said, through his helmet, “is it true you broke a guy’s nose with your forehead?”

  She gave him a faint smile in answer.

  The spaceman flushed but pressed on, “If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s badass, ma’am.”

  He raised his arm in an awkward salute and then turned to head back into the cabin.

  Behind her, she heard Connelly’s laugh.

  She turned and he pressed his lips to her forehead and said, “Let’s go home, badass.”

  And in that moment, she was home. It didn’t matter if the mailing address was in Pittsburgh or D.C. or someplace else entirely, being home meant being with Connelly. The realization hit her like a wave, knocking her a little sideways.

  “What about the interviews?” she managed.

  “You were right about Oliver. Right now, they’re more interested in talking to him than us, since he’s good for federal charges. Of course, he’s lawyering up, but the arresting agent will still get to cover himself in glory,” he said with a wry grin.

  “So, we can go?”

  “We can go. They know where to find us.”

  “What about Tate’s daughters?” Sasha asked.

  “Mom’s on her way and she’s pissed. If I were Tate, I might be more worried about her than the FBI right now,” Connelly laughed.

  Sasha smiled up at him. “Let’s get out of here.”
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  CHAPTER 47

  They didn’t go home.

  Instead, Connelly drove to the lake house. Away from the news reports of the murder at the prepper camp and the belated, reactionary panic to the news that the Doomsday virus had been stolen and then recovered. Away from everything and everyone else.

  By the time the adrenaline had drained from their bodies, replaced by sheer exhaustion, it was mid-morning. Connelly built a fire in the hearth. They wrapped themselves in blankets and stared at it, too tired to sleep.

  After the noon news shows aired, their cell phones started to ring.

  Naya. Hank. Her parents. Grace. Her brothers.

  They let the calls go to voicemail, not yet ready to talk to anyone else.

  Sasha sent out a text message that said they were okay and would be in touch soon, and then she closed her eyes and rested her head against Connelly’s shoulder.

  She thought she might actually sleep.

  Then her phone buzzed and a number with a 202 area code popped up on the display. She knew she should recognize it, but through the cloud of fatigue, she couldn’t place it.

  “Who was that?” Connelly said.

  “I’m not sure,” she answered, returning her head to its spot on his shoulder.

  His phone trilled to life. The same 202 number.

  “Take it,” Sasha said.

  He picked up the call through his speakerphone.

  “Hello?”

  “Leo?” a husky female voice said.

  Sasha placed the voice immediately—it was Colleen, the criminal defense attorney.

  “What can I do for you, Colleen?” Leo asked in a cold, formal voice.

  “Listen, I won’t keep you long, I know you must need time to decompress, but, trust me, you want to hear this news,” Colleen said in a sunny, amused voice. “Hey, is Sasha with you?”

  “Hi, Colleen,” Sasha said, mildly curious.

  “Okay. I was at a breakfast meeting today with a friend who practices real estate litigation. Mainly he represents rich homeowners in front of the Historical Review Board when they want to appeal the denial of their permit to replace the windows that were on the house when John Adams slept there or whatever.”

  “This story needs to get much better very quickly,” Connelly said.

  “Patience, grasshopper. Anyway, he mentioned this sexy new trespass case he got in this morning. And, I must have rolled my eyes a little too hard, because he started dishing details.”

  “Colleen—” Sasha began.

  “Fine. You two are no fun. So, some high society couple came into his office in an outrage, toting a nanny cam. The missus thought the maid was stealing her jewels, so they rigged up this camera in their closet, where she kept her jewelry armoire. They play back the tape, expecting to see Luisa shoving pearls into her pockets and what do they see instead?” Colleen paused for effect.

  Sasha didn’t know where Colleen’s tale was headed, but she had to admit the criminal lawyer was a good storyteller.

  “I don’t know. What?” Connelly asked, intrigued.

  Colleen burst into staccato laughter. “They saw their penthouse neighbor across the hall—one Colton Anders Maxwell, Chief Executive Office of ViraGene—sidling through a false panel that he’d apparently installed between the apartments’ closets.”

  “Maxwell was stealing his neighbor’s jewelry?” Connelly asked in disbelief.

  “No, better. He was using the drop space between their closet and his as storage for his illicit goodies.”

  “Like what?” Sasha asked.

  “Like five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of silver ingots and an ampule of H17N10.”

  Sasha and Connelly sat in stunned silence.

  Colleen hurried to explain. “Don’t worry. The virus has been secured. The neighbors had the sense to call the police immediately, and I’m told your boy Bardman swooped in and took control of the scene.”

  “Oh, good,” Sasha said, breathing out in relief.

  “Yep. And Anna Bricker has given a statement that ties her husband to the silver, which he traded for a vial of the virus. Maxwell is dead in the water,” Colleen cackled.

  “Good,” Sasha said.

  “And, I also heard that Serumceutical’s new security officer has already gotten the human resources director to admit that the Gerig woman had been a referral from Oliver Tate himself.”

  Good for Grace, Sasha thought. She’d get off on the right foot with the board of directors if her investigation was both swift and thorough.

  “How do you know all this?” Connelly asked.

  “I don’t reveal my sources,” Colleen said. “But, I thought you might be interested in the news.”

  “Thanks for the call,” Connelly said.

  “No problem. You two take good care of each other,” she said and hung up.

  Sasha looked at Connelly and smiled. “Let’s do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Take good care of each other,” she answered, snuggling into his side.

  Several weeks later

  CHAPTER 48

  On Christmas Eve, they had dinner with the entire McCandless clan—plus Naya and Carl.

  Everyone crowded around Sasha’s parents’ dining room table, ate too much food, and drank too much wine, shouting to be heard over the excited squeals of the Sasha’s nieces and nephews.

  After a dessert of cookies and truffles, Naya and Carl peeled off to attend the pageant that Naya worked so hard on. The McCandlesses waved goodbye to them and then walked en mass to the neighborhood Catholic church, where Sasha had made her First Communion, and took up two full pews during the candlelit midnight mass.

  From there, Connelly and Sasha each carried a heavy, sleeping child back to her parents’ house, as her brothers helped their hugely pregnant wives navigate the snow-dusted sidewalks.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay here tonight?” Sasha’s dad asked her, as she hugged him goodbye.

  She shook her head. “We’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, Dad.”

  “Merry Christmas, baby,” he said.

  “Merry Christmas.”

  Then she rescued Connelly from her mother, who had trapped him on the porch and was regaling him with her secrets for a juicy turkey.

  “He’ll taste it tomorrow, Mom,” she said, giving her mother a kiss on her perfume-scented forehead.

  “Okay, okay, you lovebirds go. Drive carefully, please,” her mother said, waving them off the porch.

  Sasha leaned back against the headrest of Connelly’s SUV and closed her eyes. “I’m beat, let’s go home and get some sleep.”

  She’d been tired for weeks. The aftermath of yet another near-disaster had been an exhausting gauntlet of interviews with the FBI, inquiries from the press, calls from concerned friends and former coworkers, and the increase in new clients who were inexplicably drawn to a commercial attorney with a penchant for highly publicized trouble.

  Connelly didn’t answer.

  He started the car and pulled out from the parking spot wordlessly.

  Half-asleep, Sasha hummed “What Child Is This” and wriggled her toes out of her high heels.

  She was getting accustomed to having Connelly around again, she thought to herself drowsily. He’d had several job offers from around the country as a result of their notoriety—including an invitation to return to Serumceutical, which he turned down immediately. He said he was staying in Pittsburgh, beyond that, he had no plans. That suited her fine.

  The SUV came to an abrupt stop far too soon for them to be home.

  She opened her eyes to see if there had been an accident in front of them. There hadn’t. Connelly was parked illegally in front of the USX Tower.

  He took the keys from the ignition and smiled at her. “Come on.”

  She slipped the shoes back on and joined him outside the SUV.

  They crossed the brick plaza and skirted the fountain to stand in front of the nativity scene.

  She stare
d up at the stable and thought about the destruction that Bricker would have created if he’d released the Doomsday virus. She shivered.

  “Are you cold?”

  “No.”

  He tilted his head and studied her face.

  “Merry Christmas, Sasha.”

  “Merry Christmas, Leo.”

  His eyebrow shot up his forehead. “Leo? Did you just call me Leo? That’s twice this month. What’s the occasion?”

  “Christmas, you idiot.”

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Thank you for reading Indispensable Party; I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you did enjoy it, I hope you’ll pick up the rest of my books. The fifth book in this series, Improper Influence, will be available in the Spring of 2013. In the meantime, here are some ideas to pass the time while you wait:

  Share it. If you liked this book, please lend your copy to a friend who might enjoy it.

  Review it. Please consider posting a short review on Amazon at http://amzn.to/13NFjuM. Reader reviews help others decide whether they’ll enjoy a book.

  Connect with me. I’d love to hear from you by email at melissa@melissafmiller.com. Or you can stop by my Facebook page for updates, cover reveals, and general time wasting at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Melissa-F-Miller-Author/192328657456509.

  Sign up. To be the first to know when I have a new release, sign up for my email newsletter at www.melissafmiller.com. I only send emails when I have book news—I promise.

  Finally, you can always find an up-to-date list of the entire series for Kindle at smarturl.it/sashaseries

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Melissa F. Miller is a commercial litigator. She has practiced in the offices of international law firms in Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, D.C. She and her husband now practice law together in their two-person firm in South Central Pennsylvania, where they live with their three young children. When not in court or on the playground, Melissa writes crime fiction. Like Sasha McCandless, she drinks entirely too much coffee; unlike Sasha, she cannot kill you with her bare hands.