Cavanaugh Judgment Read online

  And then she blinked.

  “How long have you been under the illusion that you’re bulletproof, Detective O’Brien?” Kincannon asked her gruffly.

  The question instantly pulled her back into the eye of the courtroom hurricane. “I’m not,” she heard herself answering.

  “Then what are you doing on top of me?”

  “Saving your life, Your Honor,” she snapped.

  Her heart slowed down to a mere double time. There was a criminal to subdue. The thought telegraphed itself through her brain. Greer scrambled up to her feet. As did the judge.

  “Stay down!” she ordered sharply, circumventing his desk.

  Kincannon clearly had no intention of being ordered around or of staying down, cowering behind his desk. His court had just been disrespected. The judge stood directly behind her, his robe billowing out on the sides like some fantasy superhero’s cape.

  “My courtroom,” Kincannon informed her, raising his voice above the din, “my rules.”

  His courtroom, Greer noted as she swiftly scanned the area, taking everything in, was in utter chaos. It was also apparently missing one felon. The second gunshot that had rung out had come from the purloined weapon, and the bullet—whether intentionally or not—had hit the bailiff whose weapon had been stolen by Munro. The latter, on the job all of six months, was on the floor, clutching his shoulder. Blood was seeping out between his fingers.

  Munro was nowhere to be seen.

  Inside a secured courtroom with law enforcement officers throughout the building, Munro had done the impossible. The drug dealer had escaped.

  A glance to the left told her the chief of detectives was missing, as well.

  For one terrifying moment, an utterly unacceptable scenario suggested itself to her, but she dismissed it. Brian Cavanaugh was too much of a policeman to have ever allowed himself to be taken hostage. If Munro had even attempted it, she was certain the dealer would have been lying on the floor in several disjointed pieces.

  The man would have instinctively known that avoiding the chief at all costs was the only way he was going to make it out of the courthouse alive.

  Greer refused to believe that Munro had already gotten out of the building. Not enough time had gone by.

  She ran through the double doors that led out of the courtroom into the hallway. She didn’t have to look over her shoulder to know Kincannon was right behind her. Did the man have a death wish? she wondered, annoyed.

  There was more chaos beyond the leather padded doors. People, fleeing for their lives, were hiding in alcoves, pressed as far against the beige walls as humanly possible in an attempt to avoid the escaping criminal’s attention.

  Damn it, things like this just don’t happen, Greer thought angrily.

  Except that it just had.

  She scanned the hallway again, hoping that she’d missed something. Hoping that Munro was trying to hide in plain sight. But he wasn’t.

  At first glance, it appeared that Eddie Munro had turned out to be far cleverer than she’d initially thought. The drug dealer had managed to disappear.

  She saw the chief. He was standing a few feet away and had taken charge of the bailiffs who had come running in response to the gunshot. On the phone, he’d already put in a call for reinforcements.

  “I want everything shut down,” he ordered the uniformed men and women gathered around him. “Except for my people, nobody leaves, nobody comes in. Understand?”

  Acquiescing murmurs responded to his words.

  He looked at the bailiffs. “I want every courtroom, every office, every closet on every floor gone through.” His penetrating look swept over the collective. “Do it in teams. I don’t want anyone caught off guard. One damn surprise is enough for the day. You—” he singled out the closest bailiff “—call for an ambulance. I want that bailiff who got shot attended to.”

  The man rushed off to place the call. As the other men and women he’d just addressed scattered, Brian turned his attention to Greer. His eyes swept over her, taking full measure. Looking for a wound. Finding none, he still asked, “Are you all right, Greer?”

  Self-conscious at being singled out this way—did he think she couldn’t take care of herself?—Greer dismissed the concern she heard in her superior’s voice. “I’m fine, Chief.” And then she couldn’t help herself. She had to know. “Why are you asking?”

  He laughed shortly, shaking his head. “Well, for one thing,” he began wryly, “I saw you take that half-gainer over the judge’s desk—”

  “She had a soft landing,” Kincannon told him as he came up to the chief.

  Greer shifted slightly. “Not so soft,” she muttered under her breath. She’d been acutely aware of every single contour she’d come in contact with and soft was not the word that readily came to mind.

  Calling out to Janelle, who he saw hurrying out of the courtroom and looking around, Brian didn’t appear to have heard Greer’s comment.

  But the judge did.

  Chapter 2

  Greer turned around. The moment she did, her eyes met Kincannon’s.

  He’d heard her. She was certain of it.

  What she didn’t know was how he’d received the offhand comment that had just slipped out. Was that a hint of amusement she saw on his face, or was it something else? She’d never been around the man in one of his lighter moments—didn’t even know if he had lighter moments—so she couldn’t gauge what was going on in his head right now.

  Talk about awkward, she thought. And it was of her own making. Someday, she was going to learn to think before she spoke, or at least that was what her brothers were always saying to her.

  “Someday, that mouth of yours is going to get you in a whole lot of trouble,” Ethan had warned her more than once.

  She could take that kind of a comment from Ethan far more easily than she could from Kyle. From Kyle, it sounded more like criticism. Besides, she was closer to Ethan than to Kyle, which was odd, given that the three of them had drawn their first breaths less than seven minutes apart. According to birth order, Kyle was technically the “oldest,” then her, then Ethan. “The baby,” their mother used to fondly call him.

  Kyle had called him that, as well, until Ethan had given Kyle his first black eye. The word baby hadn’t come up again in approximately sixteen years.

  None of that changed the fact that her brothers were both right. She had a tendency to let her thoughts reach her lips, completely bypassing her brain. Most of the time, it didn’t matter. But most of the time she didn’t find herself on top of a judge who had a rock-solid body hidden beneath his imposing black robes.

  Raising her chin, Greer stoically waited to be upbraided for her comment regarding the judge’s body. Instead, without so much as uttering a word, Kincannon turned on his heel and made his way back into the courtroom.

  Was she off the hook?

  Or was he planning on denouncing her formally later on? Her experience with judges, as with lawyers, had not yielded a great deal of positive reinforcement.

  “Greer.” The chief’s voice cut through the din in the hall. She turned around to face him, waiting to be dispatched where she could do the most good. Brian motioned toward the courtroom. “Stay with him,” he instructed.

  Greer opened her mouth to protest that she would be more useful looking for the prisoner, but then she shut it again, for once keeping her words to herself. She knew better than to argue with authority, even with someone as genial and affable as the chief. She wasn’t about to abuse the fact that he was her uncle. Years ago in the school yard, she’d learned the wisdom of picking her battles judiciously.

  “Yes, Chief.” The sound of numerous feet running toward them told her that the officers Brian had sent for had arrived. She’d already turned away and was hurrying back into the courtroom. Behind her, she heard Brian continue to organize the search for Munro.

  Greer wouldn’t have wanted to be in the drug dealer’s shoes when Brian found him for any amount of money
in the world.

  Entering the courtroom, she noted that it was mostly empty. She glanced toward Kincannon’s desk.

  He wasn’t there.

  Before her adrenaline had the opportunity to ramp up, she spotted the judge on the floor. He was kneeling beside the wounded bailiff.

  Coming closer, Greer saw that the bottom of the judge’s robe was torn and ragged. Though she hadn’t thought it was possible, Kincannon had somehow managed to tear a long strip off his robe and was now using it to form a tourniquet for the wounded bailiff. Moreover, he was doing it himself rather than instructing the other bailiff to do it.

  Admiration stirred within her. Too often judges thought themselves above the people they interacted with. Nice to know that wasn’t a hard and fast rule.

  “Lie flat, Tim,” Kincannon told the bailiff when the injured man tried to sit up.

  So he knew him, she thought. From the job or from somewhere else?

  To underscore his words, the judge put the flat of his hand against the young bailiff’s blood-soaked shirt and exerted just enough pressure to make the man remain down. In his weakened state, Tim could offer no real resistance.

  Joining them, Greer squatted down beside the judge as she looked at the bailiff. “Better do as he says if you ever want to work in his courtroom again,” she advised with an encouraging smile.

  Tim looked like a kid, she thought. She did her best to sound upbeat for the bailiff’s sake. He looked scared and he’d lost a lot of blood. She was rather surprised that Tim was still conscious, much less making an attempt to sit up.

  “Nice work,” she said to Kincannon, nodding at the tourniquet he’d fashioned. She slanted a glance in his direction, forcing herself not to look away too quickly. “Let me guess, you earned a merit badge in first aid when you were a kid.”

  Blake secured the ends of the strip as best he could. That should hold until the paramedics get here, he thought.

  Sitting back on his heels, he continued to maintain eye contact with the frightened bailiff. He couldn’t remember ever being that young. It seemed to Blake that somehow, through a trick of fate, he’d been born old.

  “Nothing wrong with being an Eagle Scout,” he responded.

  “Wow, an Eagle Scout.” Somehow, she had envisioned Kincannon being more of a rebel. Not too much call for rebels in the Boy Scouts. When he looked at her quizzically, she explained, “My brother Kyle only lasted a month in the Cub Scouts.”

  Kincannon continued looking at her. “Let me guess, he didn’t think the rules applied to him.” Kyle never thought the rules applied to him. He made his own as he went along.

  Of course, all that was going to change soon. Kyle had actually found his soul mate and was planning on getting married.

  Who would have ever thought…?

  Greer lifted a shoulder in a semi-shrug. “Something like that.”

  “Family trait?” Kincannon mused.

  Greer looked at him. To ask that, the judge would have had to be familiar with her family. Granted, she and her brothers were all detectives with the Aurora police department, but she was not so self-centered as to think that the world revolved around her family. Besides, she usually kept a low profile.

  She wanted to know his reasoning. “Why would you say that?”

  “I’m a fairly good judge of character, no pun intended.” He gave his handiwork a once-over to make sure it was secure. Satisfied, he nodded to himself. But rather than standing up, Kincannon looked at the woman beside him for a long moment. “Rather than duck out of range, the way everyone else in the courtroom did, you jumped on my desk, making yourself the most visible target in the room.”

  Her eyes narrowed just a little, even as she told herself not to take offense. She hadn’t expected him to thank her profusely, but neither had she expected him to take her to task for it, either.

  “With all due respect, Your Honor, I didn’t exactly break into a tap dance, searching for my fifteen seconds of fame. I jumped on the desk because it was the fastest way to get you out of harm’s way.”

  “It’s fifteen minutes, not seconds,” he corrected mildly, “and at thirty-four, I’m perfectly capable of getting out of harm’s way on my own.”

  Greer squared her shoulders. Infected with a little hubris, are we? It looked as if she might just have to revise her opinion of Kincannon. Again.

  “I’m assuming, Your Honor, that at thirty-four, your eyesight is still twenty-twenty.”

  Rather than answer in the affirmative, Kincannon’s eyes held hers as he rose to his feet. “What are you getting at?”

  She was in no hurry to blurt out her answer. “That Munro discharged the weapon twice. The second bullet went into the bailiff you just bandaged.”

  His eyes never left hers. Even so, there wasn’t even the slightest hint as to what was going on in his head. Was he taking offense, highly amused or just giving her enough rope in hopes that she’d hang herself?

  Not today, Judge.

  “You’re going to tell me about the first bullet, aren’t you?” he asked, his tone mild.

  “Absolutely,” she said cheerfully. Greer marched over to Kincannon’s desk and rounded it, going directly to the wall behind it. He followed. She pointed to an area that was the exact same height as his throat was from the floor. Her meaning was clear. Had he been standing where he’d been a moment longer, he wouldn’t have been with them now. “You were his first target.”

  Blake dismissed her conclusion with an indifferent shrug. “Coincidence.”

  Greer suppressed an annoyed sigh. So he was thick-headed. Maybe the bullet wouldn’t have penetrated after all.

  This wasn’t the time to get into an argument, she told herself silently. There was nothing to be gained by butting heads with this man. Her energy could be better spent otherwise.

  But that still didn’t keep her from looking as if she was merely humoring him. She inclined her head like an acquiescing servant. “Have it your way.”

  Rather than taking her tone as confrontational, he murmured, “I usually do.”

  I just bet you do.

  Greer pressed her lips together in a physical effort to keep a retort from making it out into the open. It wasn’t easy.

  But before she could give in to the urge to break her silence, the doors to the courtroom were thrown open and two uniformed paramedics, pushing a gurney between them, hurried into the room.

  “He’s over here,” Kincannon called out to the duo, beckoning the men over as he made his way over to the bailiff. They reached Tim at the same time. The wounded bailiff was no longer bleeding, thanks to the tourniquet, but he was exceedingly pale. “One shot to the chest,” Blake told them. “The bullet’s still inside. I just applied the tourniquet a couple of minutes ago.”

  The paramedic closest to him nodded at the information as he appeared to make a quick assessment of the makeshift bandage.

  “Nice job, Judge,” the man commented approvingly. His partner released the brakes that were holding the gurney upright. The mobile stretcher instantly collapsed like a fainting patient. “We’re going to shift you onto the gurney, sir,” the first paramedic told Tim. “It’s going to hurt a bit,” he warned.

  Tim looked as if he was struggling to remain conscious. He moaned. His expression indicated that he had no idea where the sound was coming from.

  “On three,” the first paramedic instructed. The other paramedic fumbled slightly, bumping Tim’s shoulders against the corner of the gurney. It earned him a black look from his partner. “Good help’s hard to find these days,” he commented, addressing his words to the judge.

  Once Tim was on the gurney and strapped in, the two paramedics snapped the stretcher into its upright position again. “Let’s get that wound looked at,” the first paramedic said to Tim. With his partner, they began to maneuver the gurney back to the double doors.

  “Judge,” Tim suddenly called out, his voice weak and cracking.

  Three quick strides had Kincannon cat
ching up to the gurney. He trotted to keep up alongside Tim. The paramedics never stopped, never even slowed down.

  The wound was undoubtedly more serious than first anticipated, Blake thought. Looking down at the bailiff’s face, he asked, “What is it, Tim?”

  Tim pressed his lips together. Were they trembling? Greer wondered as she followed beside Kincannon. And why was the bailiff looking at the paramedics as if he was terrified? Her next thought was that the young man was probably afraid. No one applied for the job thinking they’d get shot.

  “I’m sorry,” Tim was saying, then repeated, “I’m sorry.”

  Blake put his own interpretation to the apology. Tim was sorry that he hadn’t been able to stop the prisoner from escaping. Blake squeezed the wounded bailiff’s good hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Tim, we’ll get him. I promise.”

  There wasn’t so much as a shred of doubt in the man’s voice, Greer thought. Either Kincannon had a hell of a lot more confidence in the system and in the department’s ability to track Munro down for a second time than she did, or he was just naïve.

  Kincannon didn’t look like a naïve man.

  But then, she thought, smart people were fooled all the time. Look at her and her brothers. They’d been unwittingly duped for twenty-six years by the one person they had all loved unconditionally. That kind of thing shook up your faith in the world and made you reassess all your existing values and views.

  Offering the wounded man an encouraging smile, Kincannon slipped his hand out of Tim’s fingers. The judge dropped back as the two paramedics swiftly whisked the wounded bailiff through the double doors and out into the hall.

  He walked like a man who owned his destiny and his surroundings, Greer thought, watching him cross back to her. Maybe he’d gotten over his wife’s death and moved on. For his sake, she certainly hoped so. The man she remembered encountering in the hospital had been all but broken.

  “You probably saved his life,” Greer said as Kincannon came closer to her.