“You’re free to go, but don’t leave town.”
“Didn’t plan on it.”
Bennett walked them out to the elevators. She pressed the button for them and turned to go. Before she went, she leaned in too close to Cade and dropped her voice to a murmur. A cop stepped out into the hall, forms held clumsily in the fingers that stuck out of his scribbled-on cast, and then backtracked through the door as he saw the confrontation.
“Attack lawyer or not,” she said, “I will find out how you’re involved in this and how you dragged Marlow into it. You’re lying, and I can tell.”
“I’d be more impressed with your insight,” Cade said, “if you didn’t actually believe that Marlow would do this.”
“I don’t believe it,” Bennett said with an angry crack in her voice, “Iknowit. Franklin caught him red-handed, and Marlow tried to kill him. Guilty or not, though, he’s not going down for this alone.”
The elevator chimed, and the doors slid open.
“Mr. Deacon,” Beth said. “We should go before you give them anything for free.”
Cade glanced at her and nodded. You didn’t pay a lawyer and ignore her advice. He stepped around Bennett and into the lift. Habit made him step back and lean against the wall, his hands braced on the railing.
The glass was cold against his shoulders, and the taste of blood was on the back of his throat.
In front of him, Marlow stood, weight shifted to one side to accommodate the heavy bag slung over his shoulder. The hair on the back of Marlow’s neck was prickled with awareness and tight with his determinationnotto look around at Cade.
Heat unfurled in Cade’s stomach with slow, pleased-with-itself inevitability. How had he not noticed this Marlow before? he wondered.
“I have a question for you,” he said, ignoring Beth’s aggrieved hiss of “Not now” as she jammed her finger against the ground floor button. Bennett set her jaw, tucked her hands in her pockets, and waited. “If Marlow wanted Franklin dead, why didn’t he aim for the head?”
Bennett opened her mouth to answer and then closed it again as a frown pinched her eyebrows together. She shook the doubt off with a visible twitch of her shoulders, but the elevator doors shut in her face before she could rebut him.
“If you want someone to defend the man, Cade,” Beth said as the lift started up, “hire someone. ‘He didn’t try to kill that guy because he’s a good killer and would have succeeded if he wanted to’ isn’t actually the staunch support of his innocence that you think it is. Besides, aren’t cops taught to aim at center of mass?”
Cade snorted. “Not if they know someone is wearing Kevlar. Then you’re just going to—” He stopped mid-sentence as his brain caught up with his mouth.
“What?” Beth said.
“Knock them on their ass in an alley,” Cade said. In his head, he replayed the fight that Bennett had talked about, the way the bullets had thrown the mystery attacker on his ass before he’d escaped. Something else picked at his memory too. An insistent nudge from his subconscious that he’d missed something.
The woman in the car? No, that hadn’t been Bennett. Marlow trusted her, and Cade resented that enough he’d like her to be thoroughly implicated. She’d not have hidden in the car, though, or missed. Bennett wasn’t someone to stay out of a fight.
Ah. There it was. It had been before the alley, when Cade had followed Lance out of the strip club. The guy who’d grabbed Cade’s ass had probably taken a broken wrist home that night, just like the cop that had nearly tripped over himself to avoid… not Bennett, but Cade.
“What?” Beth repeated, irritated now. “Why do you look like the wolf that got the snout?”
“Because you forgot your phone,” Cade said.
“Doesn’t sound like me,” Beth said.
“I’ll owe you one,” Cade said.
Beth hesitated for a second and then sighed as she took her phone out of her pocket. She hiked her skirt up to expose the knife she wore strapped to her thigh. Cade looked away as she tucked the slim square of the phone under the strap. It only seemed polite, even if Beth’s leg wasn’t going to do anything for him.
“What do you need me to get?” she asked.
“Did you see that cop that decided he didn’t actually need to leave the room he was in?”
“Broken wrist?”
“That’s the one. Get his name,” Cade said. “He’s involved in this.”
Beth cleared her throat to let him know she was finished. She smoothed her skirt down over her legs with both hands.
