Close Quarters With the Bodyguard

by Lisa Childs

  She nodded, and her black hair swung around her face, only slightly tangled from her ordeal. “Yes, but Landon’s in surgery,” she said, her voice shaking with concern.

  “What happened?” He’d heard about the shooting—that it involved the assistant district attorney and her bodyguard—but he didn’t know entirely what had happened.

  “Landon and I were walking to the SUV when we noticed the backup bodyguards.” Her voice caught. “They were slumped against the windows of their SUV. We thought they were dead.”

  Instinctively, Woodrow reached for Nikki, pulling her into a hug. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  Nikki squeezed him before pulling back. Her face was flushed with embarrassment. “Lars and I must have been drugged,” she said. “We fell asleep...only waking up when we heard the gunshots.”

  “Somebody was shooting at us,” Jocelyn said.

  “Did you see who?” Woodrow asked.

  She shook her head. “Landon pushed me down so fast that I didn’t even see where the shots were coming from.”

  Spencer Dubridge stepped behind the curtain with Keeli Abbott at his side. “Landon’s out of surgery—”

  “How is he?” Jocelyn asked, her blue eyes full of concern.

  “The doctor said he’d be fine. The bullet just nicked an artery in his neck—that’s why there was so much blood. But they’ve repaired it. Because he lost so much blood, though, he’s not awake yet.” Dubridge said the last with recrimination, as if he was angry that Landon was unconscious.

  “Give him a minute or two to recover before you hassle him for his statement,” Keeli remarked.

  He glared at her before realizing everyone was staring at him with the same condemnation she was. “We need to find out who the hell this perp is,” he said. “It’s gotta be someone in the DA’s office.”

  Nikki nodded. “He’s right. It has to be. That’s where Lars and I drank the coffee that must have been drugged.”

  Jocelyn looked even paler than she had moments ago. “You were right,” she murmured to the chief.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It doesn’t feel good to know you’ve been working with a traitor.”

  Now there was a sudden rush of color to her face. She looked around and asked the others, “Can you give me a few minutes alone with the chief?”

  Nikki shook her head. “I promised Landon that I wouldn’t leave your side,” she said. “That’s the only way he agreed to be treated.”

  “I know,” Jocelyn said. “But this is private.”

  Woodrow swallowed a groan. Did she still suspect Landon was working for Luther—even after all the times he’d saved her life?

  But he had things he needed to share with her, as well. “It’s okay,” he told the others. “I have some experience with law enforcement. I think I can protect her for a few minutes.”

  Dubridge chuckled. “Yeah, well, if you get into any trouble, let us know.”

  “So you’re a smart-ass even to the chief,” Keeli muttered as she followed him out of the area.

  Nikki hesitated a moment longer. “Are you sure?”

  Woodrow nodded. “Yes. Where’s your husband? Is he okay?” She was married to Lars Ecklund, the fellow bodyguard she’d mentioned who had also been drugged.

  She nodded. “He’s in the parking garage, looking for anything Detective Dubridge might have missed.”

  So nobody trusted his department anymore. But with a rookie cop nearly killing the eyewitness, Woodrow could hardly blame them—especially after what had happened today. Once Nikki left, he turned back to Jocelyn and told her, “You were right.”

  She tensed. “You know?”

  He nodded. “About the CSI, yeah. You were right that it had to be one of them getting rid of evidence.”

  She gasped. “Not Wendy Thompson.”

  “No. Terrance Gibbs.”

  “I thought he was retired,” she said.

  “Just a short time ago,” he said. “But he came back recently to help out.” He hadn’t been trying to help the River City PD, though. He’d been trying to help Luther Mills to get rid of the evidence against him.

  Her brow puckered as if she was searching her memory. Then she nodded. “I think he collected some of the evidence that went missing...”

  “Well, he won’t be a problem anymore,” Woodrow assured her. The former CSI had died while he’d been trying to kill Wendy.

  “That’s good,” she said. “Because we have another one.”

  And this was what she’d wanted privacy to tell him. Dread settled heavily into the pit of his stomach. “What is it?”

  “I told you I had concerns about Parker Payne’s team of bodyguards...”

  He released his groan this time. “How can you—after how many times Landon’s risked his life for you?”

  “I don’t know if he even knows this,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to tell you first. But then the judge has to hear it, too. He needs to be warned.”

  “Warned about what?”

  “Luther Mills’s brother works for the Payne Protection Agency.”

  Just as Woodrow hadn’t been the chief for very long, he hadn’t been a resident of River City for long either. He didn’t know the history everyone else seemed to know. “I wasn’t aware that he had a brother.”

  “Neither was I,” she admitted. “I just learned today.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Tyce Jackson. The man protecting the judge’s daughter.”

  Woodrow sucked in a breath, shocked. He shook his head. “Are you sure that’s true? Where did you learn that?”

  “From someone within my office,” she said.

  “Can you trust that person?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t trust anyone.” She looked speculatively at him, as if she was wondering if she could even trust him.

  “Then you don’t know that’s true,” he pointed out.

  “I doubt this person—another assistant district attorney—would have told me something that could be easily disproved,” she said. “It would only make him look guiltier.”

  Maybe that was all the man had been trying to do—cast guilt onto someone else. But she was right. Woodrow needed to look into it—to hopefully disprove it. Like the other bodyguards, Tyce Jackson had risked his life several times to save the judge’s daughter, so Woodrow couldn’t believe he was any threat to her.

  “I’ll find out,” he promised, and he pulled back the curtain. He didn’t see Nikki or the others. But he doubted Jocelyn, with her scraped knees, was going anywhere. And as she’d said, she didn’t trust anyone right now.

  So he wasn’t worried about her. He was worried about the judge’s daughter and just how far reaching Luther Mills’s influence was.

  Jocelyn had had her doubts about his hiring Parker’s team. He hoped she was wrong, though. Or he had put everybody in greater danger—just as she’d feared.

  Pain shot through Landon’s neck, blood spurting from the wound. Instinctively, he reached for Jocelyn, pushing her to the ground. But had he been too late? Had she been shot, too?

  He reached out, but something tugged on his arm. And he jerked awake. Then he flinched and squinted against the bright lights. “Jocelyn!”

  “She’s fine,” a deep voice assured him. And he turned to find Spencer Dubridge sitting next to his bed. That was not who he’d wanted to see.

  As if he’d guessed as much, Dubridge chuckled. “She’s talking to the chief in the ER. That’s why she’s not here.”

  “In the ER,” Landon said. “So she is hurt!”

  Spencer shook his head. “Just a little bruised and scraped from you shoving her down.”

  He flinched again with regret that he’d hurt her.

  “You saved her life,” Dubridge said. “Did you see who it was? Who was sho
oting at you?”

  He shook his head. “It looked like the car—same make and model—that tried hitting us the other day. But the tinted windshield had been replaced.”

  Dubridge cursed. “I checked all the glass replacement companies in the area.”

  Landon shrugged. There were a lot of places that didn’t like giving information to cops, even if served with a warrant. He cared less about finding the car than finding the driver. He had a feeling the guy was smart enough to make sure the car couldn’t be traced to him anyway.

  “What’re Jocelyn and the chief talking about?” he asked. And why hadn’t she come to see him yet?

  “She didn’t want us to know,” Keeli said, speaking up from where she stood at the door—as if protecting both the detective and him.

  Dubridge nodded. “Yeah, she wanted to talk to him in private.”

  Landon tensed. He didn’t like the sound of that. Was she trying again to get the chief to fire the Payne Protection Agency?

  Ever since she’d spoken to Garza alone, she’d been acting strangely. He needed to see her—needed to make sure she was all right. He gripped the railings on his bed and sat up.

  “What are you doing?” Keeli asked as she stepped toward his bed.

  He pushed down one of the railings and tried to swing his legs over the side. But his body felt so damn heavy that he could barely move them.

  “You have to take it easy,” Keeli said. “You lost a lot of blood.”

  He lifted his fingers to his neck and felt the bandage covering the wound. “It was nothing...”

  “If you hadn’t kept your hand on it...” Keeli shuddered. “You were lucky.”

  He had a feeling that luck was about to change as a strange chill chased down his spine. “You need to check on Jocelyn,” he said.

  “I need to take your statement,” Dubridge told him.

  “I gave you my statement,” he said, frustration tightening the muscles of his already aching stomach. “I saw nothing more than I did the last time. I don’t know who the hell is after Jocelyn.”

  “Someone in her office,” Dubridge said. “That’s where Nikki thinks she and Lars were drugged. They were lucky they made it to the parking garage without crashing.”

  “Lars was driving, and he’s a big guy,” Keeli said. “So the sleeping aid didn’t work as quickly on him as it did on Nikki.”

  “Another reason petite women should not be bodyguards,” Spencer murmured.

  Ignoring their bickering, Landon managed to get to his feet. The room tilted for a moment, and spots danced before his eyes. But he powered through—because, like Lars, he was a big guy. Yet it wasn’t just his strength driving him. It was his concern for Jocelyn.

  And once he got dressed, with Dubridge’s help, and made it down to the ER, he found his concern was warranted. She was gone.

  Jocelyn knew she shouldn’t have slipped out of the ER without telling anyone. That she shouldn’t have gone off alone. But she thought she might be safer alone than with anyone else right now. She did not know whom to trust.

  Sure, Landon kept saving her life, but had he known the whole time who was putting her in danger? Was he aware that one of his team members—one of his friends—was Luther Mills’s brother? And he hadn’t told her?

  She wanted to trust him. Most of all, she wanted to make sure he was all right. But Dubridge had assured her that he would be. Still, she felt a sickening lurch in her stomach as she stepped out of the cab onto the sidewalk outside the front entry of the district attorney’s office building.

  While she wanted to trust Landon, she could not bring herself to trust the others. She didn’t know what they knew about Tyce Jackson’s relationship to Luther—if they were keeping him apprised of everyone else’s whereabouts. So she hadn’t told them hers.

  It was bad enough that Tyce was protecting the judge’s daughter. So she’d warned him.

  Judge Holmes had been shocked, the way she had been.

  She had to make sure she had no more surprises. She needed to find out who in her office could be working with Luther. She could no longer deny that someone was, not after the backup bodyguards were drugged.

  Dubridge had probably already sent a crime-scene tech to retrieve the coffeepot. Since she worked in an office of caffeine junkies, she suspected everybody’s prints would be on it. And the break room didn’t have a security camera that might have caught the culprit in the act. They didn’t have enough cause to legally search everybody’s office.

  She swiped her ID badge through the reader outside, and the exterior doors opened for her. She hurried through the lobby to the elevators. Despite it being way after hours, the elevator worked. The cleaning staff was in the building.

  Jocelyn searched until she found one of the unmanned carts and lifted the ring of keys from it. Even if whatever she found wouldn’t be admissible, she intended to search everybody’s offices; she needed to know who was working for Luther.

  But the first office she unlocked was her own. She intended to put her briefcase inside while she searched the others, so she left the door open behind her. But when she opened the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet to slide her briefcase inside it, she found a couple of things.

  Things that she had not put there.

  An orange prescription bottle with the label torn off, as well as a cell phone. So someone else had already lifted the office keys from the cleaning person’s cart. And they’d used those keys to plant evidence in Jocelyn’s office.

  But it made no sense. Why would she drug the bodyguards who were protecting her? She’d nearly been killed—too many times. And she clearly wasn’t the one firing those shots or running herself down.

  She stared down at the bottle. She needed a plastic bag or something to put it in so that it could be checked for prints. Whereas the coffeepot would have a lot, she doubted the bottle would have any. The same with the cell phone. She would bet it had been wiped down and was an untraceable burner phone—a phone that no doubt had a record of calls to Luther Mills or to his lawyer.

  Whoever had put the prescription bottle and phone in her filing cabinet was desperate not to be caught. Maybe that was why the things had been placed in her office, just to get them out of the one in which they had really belonged. Hopefully, even with the label torn off, there was a way to trace the pills—some pharmacy serial number or something.

  She leaned over to peer closer at the bottle without touching it when she felt a sudden presence. Before she could straighten up and turn around, something slipped over her head and wound tightly around her throat.

  She gasped for breath as she clawed at it, trying to scream for help.

  No. She shouldn’t have gone off without her bodyguards because now there was no one to save her from her attacker.

  Chapter 17

  Landon had been torn between heading to Jocelyn’s house or to her office. He’d chosen the building for the district attorney because he figured she had left the hospital determined to find out who in her office was working for Luther Mills.

  He’d had to wait for a security guard to let him into the building, though. The guard confirmed that her key card had opened the doors just a short time ago. So he wasn’t far behind her.

  But even a few minutes was too long for her to be alone—with someone very determined to kill her. Her attacker would take any opportunity she gave him, and by going off alone, she’d given him a big one.

  Landon rushed over to the elevator and stabbed the button for her floor. If he was feeling stronger, he would have used the stairs. But it would take too long for him to make it up the five flights.

  Finally the elevator dinged, and the doors slid open. He jumped into the car and pressed the button for five. And he willed it to hurry as a sudden urgency gripped him. She would have been safer had she gone home to her cat and her high-tech security system.r />
  Here the distracted security guard was her only protection. And there was no way he could hear her screaming from the lobby. The elevator lurched to a stop, the movement adding to the dizziness Landon was already fighting from all his blood loss. He pressed his fingers to his head and tried to clear it.

  Maybe he should have waited for Keeli and Dubridge. But he’d rushed off without them as backup—without any backup. He regretted that now as he worried that he might not be strong enough to save Jocelyn if she needed saving.

  And he was afraid that she did the moment he looked through the window in her office door and noticed two dark shadows. One leaned over the other. He shoved open the door and rushed into the room.

  The taller shadow charged him, knocking Landon over as he ran into the hallway. The other shadow dropped to the floor. The lamp on Jocelyn’s desk cast a glow onto her pale face. She lay across the open bottom drawer of her filing cabinet. Her skin was so ashen but for the angry red mark across her throat.

  Whoever had been inside the office with her had been strangling her.

  “Jocelyn!” Landon shouted her name.

  But her long black lashes lay against her cheeks. Her lids didn’t so much as flicker. She had to be unconscious.

  He refused to consider the alternative. That he’d been too late.

  That he’d lost her.

  “Jocelyn...” He murmured her name as he crouched over her. Then, with shaking fingers, he reached out and checked her damaged throat for a pulse. Panic pressed on him when he felt nothing but the coolness of her silky skin.

  His chest ached, and his lungs burned. “Jocelyn!”

  He leaned down and pressed his lips to hers, breathing through her lips as he began compressions. He was trained in CPR and regularly recertified, and he was never more grateful than now for that training.

  He couldn’t lose her.

  She had to come back to him.