Free Inadvertent Disclosure by Melissa F Miller

him go and grinned at his eagerness
to escape. Then, he swiveled his chair around and thought. A violent
environmental protester. Seemed like there should be a way to use that to his
advantage. He turned the piece of information over in his mind, examining it
from all angles. He’d come up with something.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 8
     
    Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    Monday evening
     
    Sixteen hours and twenty
minutes after she’d left Pittsburgh for a twenty-minute discovery hearing,
Sasha pulled back in to her reserved parking spot at her condo. The sun, which
had not yet risen when she’d set out in the morning, had long since set. She
was tired, hungry, and cold.
    She trudged through the parking
lot and into the warm lobby. She was tempted to take the elevator instead of
the stairs, just this once. But that was how it started. Take the elevator
tonight because she was tired and her feet hurt from having been trapped in
three-inch stilettos all day, and then tomorrow she’d want to take it because
she was running late. Then, the next thing she knew she’d be taking elevators
all over the place because she got winded climbing stairs. Besides, stairways
gave more options in the event of an assault. Get attacked in an elevator and
you were a sitting duck.
    She straightened her back and
adjusted the weight of her bag over her shoulder. Then she pushed through the
metal door to the stairwell. To make up for her moment of weakness, she took
the stairs two at a time.
    That small burst of activity
improved her mood slightly. The smell of spices and roasting meat that emanated
from her unit put a smile on her face. By the time she opened the door to see
Connelly waiting for her with a glass of red wine in his hand, she’d forgotten
to be miserable.
    It had been six months since
Leo Connelly had entered her life in the oddest way imaginable. Sasha never
would have guessed that her longest relationship to date would be with a
federal air marshal whose nose and finger she broke while disarming him in the
apartment of a murdered stranger. But, as her nana used to say, there’s a lid
for every pot. So here he was, Agent Leo Connelly. Her lid. At least for the
present.
    “How are you doing?”  The
corners of his eyes crinkled with concern as he handed off the wine glass and
leaned in to kiss her.
    She gave herself a minute to
relax in his arms before pulling back.
    “Better now. Dinner smells
amazing.”
    She raised her glass in tribute
to his cooking skills before heading up the stairs to her loft bedroom to get
out of the high heels and change into a sweater and jeans.
    Over a second glass of syrah
and between mouthfuls of Connelly’s lamb tagine, she filled him in on the
goings on in Springport. He listened without interrupting, nodding along as he
processed the information. She could see him mentally sorting and cataloging it
between bites of food for later analysis.
    He put down his fork and raised
a hand to stop her when she got to the part about Danny Trees’s blank check.
    “Do you still have it?  You
haven’t deposited it yet, have you?”
    “No, I just wanted to get home.
I’m not sure I’m going to anyway. It could be viewed as settling any claim I
might have against Danny and PORE for the cost of the repairs. I think I’ll
give it a day to make sure they didn’t mess with anything else.”
    For all she knew, there was
sugar in her gas tank.
    He cracked a grin. “Spoken like
a true lawyer. If you give me the check, I can run his bank account through the
database and see what pops.”
    The database was Guardian, into
which law enforcement agencies from around the country fed suspicious activity
reports, called SARs. Six months earlier, while investigating a plane crash,
Connelly had accessed the classified database to make a connection between a
dead city laborer and a psychotic technology developer, leading him to the
apartment where they’d met. But that had been official business. This