About That Night

Or maybe he’ll just slam the door in my face.

Probably not the best time to tell her new boss that she’d kissed the defendant in her first case, then given him the cut direct in court.

“And if that doesn’t work?” Ryla

“All the way.” Cameron sat forward in her chair, turning serious and appearing every bit the U.S. attorney right then. “When I took over this office after my highly unesteemed predecessor, I made a vow to take down government corruption at all levels. Based on what the FBI has told me, we’ve got a federal corrections officer who’s been exacting his own form of justice against inmates, and his actions have now led to a man’s death. He’s not getting away with that on my watch.” She looked Ryla

Seeing the look of determination on her boss’s face, Ryla

“Consider it done.”

Nine

NOT HAVING ANY plans that evening, Ryla

“Well, if isn’t the woman of the hour,” Helen Pierce said with a note of pride when she answered the phone. “Why didn’t you tell me you were working on the Twitter Terrorist case? I’ve been showing off your photograph to everyone in the neighborhood. The one they got of you in the courtroom, standing next to that Kyle Rhodes.”

“It was a last-minute thing,” Ryla

“I think he’s staring at your chest.”

It took Ryla

“Then what’s with the look? That’s the kind of look a man gives you when he’s seen you naked. Or wants to.”

Immediately, Ryla

He’d remembered her, all right.

“I didn’t notice anything strange about the look,” she fibbed.

Helen didn’t seem entirely convinced. “Hmm. Good thing your work on that case is done, or I’d probably have to give you some kind of lecture about staying away from boys like that. Motherly duty and all.”

Ryla

“Oh, believe me, I noticed.”

Ewww. Ryla

“So aside from the Twitter Terrorist case, what else do they have you working on?” Helen asked. Before retiring, she’d been a paralegal at a criminal defense firm in Chicago and enjoyed talking shop about Ryla

For much of Ryla

Even as a young girl, however, Ryla

Ryla

And, wow, she’d just come dangerously close to feeling sorry for herself there. Good thing she had work to focus on—that, at least, never changed.

Seated at the kitchen counter, she read through the files. Despite the fact that the Brown case was neither the biggest nor the most glamorous case she had ever handled, she’d already bumped it up to the top of her priority list. First of all, a man had been brutally beaten to death. Not much got the prosecutorial juices flowing more than that. Second, the case was clearly important to the U.S. attorney. And if the case was important to Cameron, there was no way that Ryla

Which meant that she and Kyle Rhodes had some unfinished business to tend to.

ON MONDAY MORNING, Ryla

As soon as she’d settled in at her desk, she looked up the phone number for the law firm representing Kyle. Technically, she was permitted to contact him directly, since the matter she wanted to speak to him about wasn’t one for which he had obtained counsel or was under investigation. Nevertheless, she thought it prudent to reach out to his attorneys first as a courtesy.

A courtesy that, unfortunately, was not returned.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the FBI, Ms. Pierce. You’re out of your goddamn mind if you think I’m letting you talk to my client,” was the blistering reply from Mark Whitehead, Kyle’s lead defense attorney. “Not after the way your office railroaded him five months ago.”

“This has nothing to do with Mr. Rhodes’s case,” Ryla

Mark scoffed at that. “My client wasn’t even at MCC two weeks ago. He’d been released prior to that.”

“Even more reason for you to trust me when I say he isn’t under suspicion.”

“It’s still a no. If you want to talk to Kyle Rhodes, go get a subpoena,” Mark said.

“With all due respect, we both know that I don’t need your permission. I’ll contact Mr. Rhodes directly if I have to,” Ryla

Mark laughed. “Good luck with that. I’m sure the Twitter Terrorist has several things he’d love to say to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Although I doubt any of them would be helpful to your investigation.”

“We can do this the easy way, Mark, or I can go to the grand jury and drag him in. And if I have to do that, you don’t get to be there,” Ryla

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Mark sighed. “And I thought Morgan was a pain in the ass. All right, I’ll call Rhodes. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

Ryla