Page 7 of After The Storm
Nick shrugged. “No, that’s not it. She very well might be a target of the person who killed her boss and his client since she probably knew about the case, but it seems strange we don’t know what that case was about.”
“I can call him back, but I think this Kate Sheridan is in real danger, gentleman. Why don’t we start working this case, and when I find out the details about this legal case, I’ll send it to Roman.”
The two men agreed, and as she began walking to her desk, she looked back at Roman. “The plane is waiting for you. Tess can have the helicopter ready to go when you are, but I don’t think we should wait much longer to get going.”
Roman had worked for Persephone long enough to know when she was truly worried about a client. She didn’t show it on the outside, remaining cool and collected like always, but concern hung off every word. She had a sixth sense about this kind of thing, and he couldn’t explain it other than the fact that she herself had gone through something hellish that made her start the group to help women in danger. Whatever it was, he didn’t doubt her gut feeling on things like this.
It dawned on Roman that he had no idea what this Kate Sheridan looked like. “I need to see a picture of our client and then I’ll be on my way.”
Nick spun his laptop screen around to show him a picture of a woman with brown shoulder length hair and blue eyes. Next to it, he read her vitals. Twenty-eight years old, single, five foot seven. He found himself staring at her image because something about her screamed smart and confident even with her girl next door looks.
He had to admit he liked the combination.
Standing to leave, Nick stopped him with a serious glance. “Watch yourself down there, Roman. Mob hit or not, something sounds wrong with this case.”
“Don’t worry. You know me. I take care of business and then I leave. I’ll probably be finished before the weekend and then I’ll be back to dealing with going stir crazy in this house again.”
Roman hoped that wouldn’t be how it went down, though. He craved some excitement in his life. The last thing he wanted was another schoolteacher case he could wrap up in a couple days.
At the very least, he hoped this Kate Sheridan would turn out as interesting as he’d decided she was from her picture.
Chapter Three
Her eyes flutteredopen, and Kate saw the reality of the room around her hadn’t all been just some horrible nightmare. The bedspread with its bizarre red and brown geometric print and triangles that looked like they would stab a person in their sleep still lay underneath her. She’d pulled it back when she got to the room and there in front of her eyes were dingy white sheets with stains she didn’t even want to think about or guess where they came from.
Or who they came from.
Eve hadn’t been wrong. The Bayou Motel could best be described as a dive. The idea that cheating spouses came to this place to have their sexy rendezvous made Kate’s stomach turn. She’d had to talk herself into sleeping on top of the bedspread. No amount of convincing, even if it was from the sexiest man on the planet, would ever get her beneath those sheets.
Rolling over, she looked down at the floor and the worn green carpet that matched nothing else in the room. Green floor, strange red and brown pointy triangle bedspread, and draperies that had been white at some point in their existence but now appeared like what she thought the color white would look like if all the other colors in the spectrum had ganged up on it, beating white senseless and leaving nasty streaks of their colors on it after their brawl.
The entire feel of Room 12 at the Bayou Motel made her sick to her stomach.
Inhaling, she couldn’t say the smell helped either. The room had a putrid odor to it, but she couldn’t place the scent. Possibilities ran through her mind, each one worse than the one before. Did dried blood smell like that? She thought she caught a whiff of vomit in the mixture that threatened to make her add to the horrible smell around her.
The thought of putting her feet down on that carpet caused her to cringe, so she’d slept with her shoes on. The only other choice would have been to recreate the game of lava floor she and her sister had played when they were kids. The problem with that was there was nothing to climb on to avoid touching that ugly carpet with God only knew what stains on it. Even the pillows at the top of the bed looked disgusting with their dingy off-white color, so she couldn’t use them to create a pathway around the room either.
Staring up at the ceiling with its brown water stains, she mumbled, “I can’t believe this is what my life has become.”
The truth of it was her life would now be her on the run until she figured out what to do. With Jonas dead, she had no job, but even worse, whoever killed him and his client would likely be looking for her too because they’d guess she knew the details of the case as well as Jonas.
Even if she didn’t.
That fact made everything that had happened so much worse. Jonas had kept her in the dark about much of the Darnell case. She’d asked him over and over about it because each time he gave her something to do regarding it, she had nothing to work with. Being in the dark about the details, she constantly had to ask him for help. But each time, he refused to give her anything more than the sparsest details she needed to do what he wanted.
Even thinking about it now, she still had no clear idea what Mr. Darnell had come to Jonas for. A carpenter from Slidell, he hadn’t been in an accident of any kind. Those were usually the kinds of cases Jonas represented, but Samuel Darnell wasn’t disabled from a car crash or industrial mishap. In fact, she’d only seen this mysterious client once and he’d looked perfectly average and healthy to her.
A white man in his early fifties or so, he didn’t walk with a cane and appeared fit. So why had he hired Jonas Flynn, a lawyer who spent much of his career on what many would consider ambulance chasing? Whatever personal injury his client had suffered, Kate had never been able to ascertain exactly what it was and how it affected him.
Or why he’d need an attorney.
Jonas had kept her so much in the dark that she didn’t even do his filings for that case. Her job had been relegated to looking up old newspaper articles about Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath in Lafayette. And when she’d ask him why, he simply nodded his head before returning to whatever work he was busy with.
Except for two nights ago. Then, she asked why he needed all this information, and his eyes grew wide. Never before had she seen Jonas look afraid, but that night in his office, the terror she saw in his eyes told her something or someone had scared the hell out of him. And then he said the words she’d never forget until the day she died.
“This case is going to cause an earthquake in this state, Kate. I’m doing everything I can to protect you, but if I fail, trust no one, especially the police and the government.”
He refused to say anything more, and she was left with two statements that made little sense and even less when put together. His words rang in her ears now as she sat in that horrible motel room near the river, sending a chill down her spine like they had when he’d first said them.