Page 2 of The Aura Answer
That crack had sounded an awful lot like a gunshot.
“Jax?” Alarmed when she received no answer, Evie shoved her phone in her pocket and rushed for the door. “Riot in progress. Gotta go. You can be the renovator who solves mysteries,” she shouted back at her sister. “I don’t have time.”
“You have wallpaper in your hair!” Gracie shouted back.
Trained in combat,Jax reacted instinctively at the first loud crack from above and shoved the current mayor toward Reuben. Acting as bodyguard, the ex-Marine and computer nerd pushed Larraine against the wall, providing a six-foot shield of muscle.
In a downpour of plaster to the second-floor rotunda, the courthouse ceiling collapsed.
Jax yanked short, white-haired Judge Satterwhite out of the raining chunks and back toward his courtroom while trying to see through the dust cloud descending on the melee of the news conference in the center.
Who had Block? He’d been at the podium...
A female reporter shrieked. Jax watched in disbelief as a stuffed comforter—sleeping bag?—plunged through the opening in the ceiling, landing smack on top of the former mayor. The bag must have contained something heavier than feathers because Block crumpled. Whatever it was, was small. Block was large. This did not compute.
Ancient plaster thickened the air while cameras rolled, and reporters shouted into microphones. After checking to be certain nothing else plummeted from above, Jax abandoned Satterwhite to his courtroom and the mayor to Reuben’s care. Beneath thegaping hole, he joined the sheriff and his deputy in pushing the crowd back. The collapsed former mayor was now hidden by the gruesome sight slipping from the sleeping bag.
The slight male body was pretty obviously a corpse, even if the stench wasn’t as strong as it might have been had it been midsummer and not December.
At a nod from the sheriff, a female Jax didn’t recognize dropped to her knees to shove aside the filthy comforter and examine Block, who wasn’t moving, cursing, or blustering as any normal man might had a corpse fallen on his face. Had he had a heart attack? Block was in his sixties, stout, and under a lot of stress. Jax prayed he was alive.
Still in his robes, Judge Rhodes warily appeared in his courtroom doorway to assess the situation. Younger and more athletic than white-haired Satterwhite, he wisely retreated from the reporters.
Wearing one of her quieter dark wigs and a sedate suit for her meeting with the judge and town council, Mayor Larraine Ward didn’t scream but watched warily from behind Reuben. The same couldn’t be said of a news reporter shouting into her microphone about dead bodies.
Out of habit, Jax tried to count heads, but it was impossible. This was a busy courthouse with two courtrooms in use and a news conference in progress. Whoever had scheduled the former mayor’s hearing at the same time as the current mayor’s conference had an evil mind. The entire town council—all Block supporters—had brought their own cheering sections and were now crowding around their downed leader.
Outside, a mob shouted for Block’s release...Crap. Block didn’t look to be going anywhere soon.
Jax stepped in front of a news camera. The sheriff had the same thought and began gesturing for the news crews to be removed. They protested.
“The man is due some privacy,” the sheriff shouted. “Put down your cameras.”
The woman examining Block shook her head sadly and stood.
Shit, crap, hell, unmerry Christmas. Jax couldn’t see the bodies clearly through the mob and the sleeping bag, but he was pretty damned certain the crack he’d heard before the corpse fell hadn’t just been the ceiling. If there was any chance at all that Block had been shot...
The mob outside was demanding Block’s release from custody and reinstatement. If the news of his death got out, shouting would escalate to a real riot. Larraine’s life could be in serious danger. Not to mention Evie’s mother and the rest of her... coven. Although he was pretty certain there were more than thirteen old hippies out there swinging signs protesting Block’s release and supporting Larraine’s zoning law—counter to everything the mob wanted.
The sheriff shouted orders to clear the area around the bodies in the center of the rotunda and set up a perimeter, making it official. Not one body—two.
As if the mob had already heard the news, a howl of fury bellowed from below.
Jax gestured Reuben toward the door of the courtroom they’d vacated only moments ago. “Judge’s chambers. Lock it.”
Shaking his head, his former military intelligence officer pointed upward, confirming what Jax had suspected. “Active shooter. I’m going in.”
He was no longer Reuben’s commanding officer. When Larraine didn’t countermand his suggestion, Jax held up a hand to make him wait and reached for his phone. It rang before he could open his contacts.
“The state better be sending riot gear,” Evie’s voice spoke in his ear.
Damn, he regretted calling her down here, but if her mother was out in that mob... At least neither of them were inside the courthouse. They both despised Block and would be instant suspects. “How do we get into the attic?”
Evie had grown up in Afterthought and knew everything, even when she shouldn’t.
“On second floor there’s an employee-only closet that ought to be locked but probably isn’t. Look for pull-down stairs in the ceiling. Attic’s full of guano. Wear a mask. Why?”
“No time to explain. Get your mother outnow.” While Larraine took her elegant self into the courtroom with the white-haired judge and several bystanders, Jax gestured at Reuben, indicated the employee door, and pointed upward. “The scene is about to go ballistic.”
