Page 35 of Mile High Mystery

She nodded. She didn’t want him to leave, but he was right. Nothing good would come of him staying. “Thank you for telling me the truth,” she said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say something before. Maybe if I had, Camille would still be alive.”

“You can’t know that. She liked taking risks. Maybe she was growing bored in WITSEC. If she hadn’t decided to leave protection to see you, she might have found some other excuse. She wouldn’t be the first person to take that kind of risk simply for the thrill. When you’ve been at the center of such intense excitement for years, a normal life must seem very dull.”

She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he believed her or not. “Good night,” he said, and walked out.

She locked the door behind him, then pressed her forehead to the cool metal of the door. Her hand was still warm where he had touched her. That one moment of intense chemistry had been such a rush. She shouldn’t have let it happen, but she could never regret it. Camille wasn’t the only person in this mess who liked to live dangerously.

Four years ago

“WEFINDTHEdefendants not guilty.”

Zach didn’t hear the next words. Not because the crowd erupted into shouts, the judge slamming down his gavel to restore order. Zach didn’t hear because the white noise of confusion filled his head. How could this be happening? Camille had been inside the Britannia Pub the night Judge Andrew Hennessey was murdered. She had heard the shot and looked into the dining room to see Charlie and Christopher Chalk standing over the dying man. She had testified to everything she had seen, not wavering when the Chalk brothers’ lawyer tried to bully her and practically accused her of lying.

He had never been more proud than he had been when seeing his sister seated in the witness box, head up and back straight, telling her story with no sign of fear, though the dark eyes of the Chalk brothers bored into her.

But something had gone wrong. The Chalk brothers weren’t going to prison for the rest of their lives. They were going to walk away from the courthouse as free men.

“What went wrong?” He lunged forward and grabbed the arm of the lead prosecutor as the man turned to leave the courtroom.

The man glared and shook him off. “No comment,” he said, and walked away.

Zach looked around the room for his parents, from whom he had become separated in the chaos after the verdict was announced. He spotted the back of his father’s head amid a sea of reporters wielding microphones and cameras, and bulled his way through the crowd to him. “How do you feel, knowing your daughter risked her life for nothing?” a man in a stylish blue suit and dark glasses asked as he thrust a microphone in Zach’s mother’s face.

Zach leaned forward and shoved the microphone away, then put his arm around his mother. “Come on, Mom,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

The surrounding reporters raised their voices, firing more questions. “No comment!” Zach all but shouted, then steered his parents away.

Two FBI agents emerged out of nowhere and herded Zach and his parents into an elevator and upstairs. “Where are you taking us?” Zach’s mother asked, but neither of the feds answered—two men in identical dark blue suits, with identical grim expressions.

They led the way to a door and opened it. Zach filed in after his parents, and Camille embraced them. She was pale, her eyes swollen and reddened, as if she had been crying. The prosecutor was there, too, looking less grim than before.

“What happened?” The question came from Zach’s dad now. His father, who was only fifty, was looking ten years older, his shoulders stooped, his hair thinning at the back.

“The defense team planted enough doubt that the jury failed to convict,” the prosecutor—a man named Zable—said.

“But I was there,” Camille said. “I saw the Chalk brothers standing over the judge’s body seconds after that gunshot.”

“But you didn’t see the gun or see them pull the trigger.”

Zach had heard the defense team make the argument that because Camille hadn’t witnessed the moment the bullet was fired, the jury couldn’t say with 100 percent certainty that the Chalk brothers had killed the judge. Their contention was that someone else had run in and fired that fatal shot while the Chalk brothers were meeting with the judge. Zach hadn’t thought anyone would believe that theory.

“Can you appeal?” he asked. “Ask for a new trial?”

“Not on a murder charge,” the prosecutor said. “Once a person is declared not guilty of murder, they can’t be tried again. Our constitution prohibits double jeopardy.”

Zach’s dad stood with his arm around his daughter. “What happens now?” he asked.

The prosecutor and the two agents looked at Camille. She eased away from her father. “It’s going to be okay, Dad,” she said. “I’m going to have police protection for a little while longer, just to make sure I’m okay.”

“Is she going to be okay?” His father addressed the agents. “These men are killers. Thugs. They know who Camille is and that she testified against them. What’s to keep them from going after her?”

“We have a lot of experience protecting witnesses,” one of the agents—the one with the grayer hair—said. “You don’t need to worry.” He turned to Camille. “You need to say goodbye so that we can leave.”

She blinked rapidly, as if fighting tears, then moved over to Zach and hugged him tightly. “Don’t say anything to anyone,” she whispered. “Promise me.”

“I already promised,” he said.

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