Indispensable Party (Sasha McCandless Legal Thriller No. 4) (33 page)

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.”

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.

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 stared 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: