LITMIR.BIZ

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DA was in the hospital. Gall bladder surgery and then complications,” she explained. “Luck of the draw meant he was out of the office for weeks.”

      Vince smirked. “Luck? You never take a day off and were there, ready and able, to assume control.”

      “She’ll be a star in the witness box.” Simone’s eyes narrowed as she plowed on. “She’s unshakable, actually. Or so I thought. We hit a rough patch a little while ago and she got spooked. She thought someone was following her. So after some convincing, I assigned two deputies to watch her. She was back on board, until this morning.” She was staring at him, hard. “She took off, Vince. Poof. The deputies guarding her were drugged and when they went up to her apartment to get her, they found she was gone—her car, too. Now they’ve been suspended pending an investigation that shouldn’t even be open. I need someone completely unconnected to law enforcement. This could be good for you, Vince. Maybe you need this. I need you.”

      If only that were true. “You’re certain she took off?” Vince purposely flipped the pages over to obscure the photograph. The facts and details blurred, got lost behind the past, locked away by sheer will. “You sure she wasn’t bought off?”

      Simone inclined her head and frowned; he recognized the move. “Bought off? You mean bribed?”

      “You didn’t think of that?” he asked. Could his ex be that naive? He wouldn’t have thought so.

      “No.” She sagged in her seat to the point he wanted to reach over and gently erase the lines of concern between her brows. “No, honestly, it never crossed my mind. She’s not that kind of person, Vince. But you thought it immediately, which proves I’ve come to the right person. Maybe she got scared again, or...”

      “Or maybe someone got to her.”

      “I can’t let myself think that.” He heard a hint of desperation in her voice, one that had slipped through her defenses. “Not yet.”

      Whatever sharp retort Vince considered throwing at her became stuck in his throat. He might know what buttons to push when it came to Simone and her devotion to protecting people—especially women. But he wasn’t so callous as to use the unsolved murder of her childhood friend as a verbal weapon against her.

      “Will you please take the case?” she pleaded.

      “Based on what you’ve told me?” Despite his instincts, his mind was already ticking off avenues to pursue: the girl’s address, her friends, family. He still had contacts at various phone companies to trace the girl’s cell phone. Wouldn’t take much to get a feel for things. “No.”

      “If it’s money—” His eyes narrowed and she held up her hands in surrender. “Sorry. I know. Touchy subject.”

      “Only where you’re concerned.” Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined he’d end up marrying a woman with a trust fund larger than a small country’s national budget. She hadn’t lorded it over him, but her too-generous offer of spousal support had left a giant hole in his ego. As if he needed or wanted anything from Simone other than...Simone. “There has to be more to this than a simple missing witness, Simone. What aren’t you telling me?”

      “A lot.” Her lips were pinched. “But nothing I can prove. Yet. I only have ten days before I’m back in court. If we can find her by then—”

      “What do you mean we? You hire me, I do the job and report to you. I don’t play well with others. And you definitely don’t play well with me.”

      “Right. It said that on the divorce decree.”

      “Simone—”

      “If you take the job, you work for me,” she said. “My terms. Not the DA’s office. And not officially. I’m paying you. Off the books. In cash. Up front if you want. But I need to be involved, Vince. Especially when you find her. I need her to verify on the stand where those books of Denton’s came from. Without her, my case falls apart and Denton—and whoever he might be connected to—will get off.”

      When he found Mara, not if. Did she honestly expect to find...no! He couldn’t go down this road again. Except that deep chasm opening moments before hadn’t been despair, he realized; it had been Simone’s rabbit hole of a conscience. Mara was one of Simone’s crusades; one of those “I’m going to save her and fix her” situations his ex kept getting involved in.

      When was she going to accept that no matter what, she couldn’t go back and save Chloe Evans?

      Vince tapped his fingers against the file. It didn’t matter how long Simone spent in the criminal justice system, she clung to that optimism of hers like a life preserver. In Vince’s experience, cases like this rarely ended well. But he also knew Simone well enough to admit that telling her would only make her dig her heels in.

      He honestly didn’t know what she’d do if he didn’t take the case.

      “Well?” Simone asked. “Are you going to help me?”

      “Depends.”

      “Depends on what?”

      Vince’s eyebrows shot up. Did she just whine? “Depends if you’re honest with me about when was the last time you ate.”

      “What’s that got to do with—?” There it was again, that tightness in her voice, as if it was a rubber band about to snap. When she pushed her hair behind her ear—her telltale sign of nerves—her hand trembled. “All right. I ate part of a croissant after court this morning.”

      Vince chuckled. She might excel at taking care of other people, but when it came to taking care of herself, she was last in line. “That’s what I thought. Stay here. Decompress for a few minutes. I’ll fix you something in the kitchen. And no,” he added when she opened her mouth. “It won’t be anything you’d usually have. You need some protein. I’ll have Travis bring you coffee since we know what happens when you’ve had too much wine on an empty stomach. We’ll eat, we’ll catch up a bit and then maybe discuss Mara’s situation.”

      She grabbed his wrist as he stood and squeezed hard enough to make his heart skip a beat. “Thank you, Vince.”

      “Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t said yes.”

      But even before he left the table, he knew he would.

       Chapter 3

      He’d help her.

      Simone saw it in his eyes, beyond the reluctance, the suspicion. The grief. The distrust and betrayal that had come between them years ago wouldn’t matter. When all was said and done, Vince Sutton was too honorable a man to say no when he could do something to help someone. Even her.

      With Vince in play, with her feet on more solid ground, she called her boss.

      “Would you like to guess how many times I’ve thought about firing you today, Simone?” Ward’s tense voice made her cringe. “It’s not like you to run and hide, not to mention dodge my calls.”

      “Damage control takes concentration.” She dug her fingernail into a groove on the table. After her Deep Throat conversation with Russo, the last thing she felt comfortable doing was confiding in people she wasn’t sure of. And if whoever was behind this was going after Russo and his partner, she had to be on someone’s hit list, too. “I needed to regroup and I couldn’t do that surrounded by a dozen voices yelling at me.”

      “No one was going to yell at you,” Ward said. “I run a civilized office.”

      “Tell me you didn’t have at least half the office offering to replace me on the Denton case?”

      “A little less than that, actually,” Ward replied. “Look, Simone, we can both agree that your hinging the Denton case on one witness seriously backfired. I’m sure the pressure got to Mara, but without her and now this postponement—”

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