Free Bridegroom Bodyguard by LISA CHILDS

heard it. “I’m sorry....”
    Not that she was Judge Wells’s granddaughter. He was sorry for the rest of it.
    “That must have been tough tonight, seeing the judge’s corpse....” He shuddered for her.
    It had been more than twenty years, but she still occasionally had the nightmares. She had no doubt that she would have one tonight...if she ever slept. She nodded.
    “But that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have killed her.”
    She lifted her hands. “I couldn’t have. Physically, I couldn’t have, and you know that.”
    He shrugged. “Maybe you used a weapon. Did you really have nothing with you when the officers brought you in?”
    She shook her head. “I have no idea what kind of weapon could have done that to Brenda.” Now she shuddered for herself and for her dead employer.
    “If that were true, why did you hide your things from the officers at the scene?” he asked.
    “What things?” she asked. “I didn’t bring anything with me.” Thanks to the car explosion, she had nothing left.
    The detective sighed, as if frustrated with her. “Miss Wells—”
    “You’re wasting your time with me when you should be finding Judge Foster’s bodyguard,” she said. “He was the last one to see her alive—because he was with her when I left her house.”
    And Chuck had been such a burly man that he wouldn’t have needed a weapon to kill Brenda or even a man twice her size. Had Parker gone after him? Was that why he hadn’t come to the police department with her?
    If he had tracked down Chuck on his own, he could wind up as brutally murdered as Brenda had been. Despite the heat of the stale air in the small room, her blood chilled, and she shivered in reaction.
    “You need to find that man right now,” she said. Before Parker found him—unless it was already too late.
    The detective touched his ear, where he must have been wearing a radio piece. “It’s too late,” he said, as if he had read her mind.
    “What’s too late?” she asked, fearfully. Had Parker already found him?
    “He’s dead.”
    She gasped as her heart kicked against her ribs. “Who’s dead?”
    “The bodyguard—Chuck,” he said.
    Her breath shuddered out in relief. That relief was short-lived, though, when she realized that just because the bodyguard was dead didn’t mean that Parker was alive.
    The detective hadn’t missed her initial reaction. “That makes you happy? I guess it would since a dead man can’t refute your statement.”
    “Are you going to accuse me of killing him, too?” she wondered aloud. “I don’t even know his last name.”
    “Parker Payne knows it,” he said. “He was at the man’s apartment when we found his corpse.”
    That was where Parker had gone. He had tracked down the bodyguard. But what had happened when he’d found him?
    She remembered and repeated the detective’s choice of word. “Corpse?”
    “The coroner thinks Chuck Horowitz died around the same time the judge must have.”
    So someone had killed them both? She shuddered.
    The man leaned forward again, and his eyes narrowed speculatively. “What do you know about Parker Payne, Ms. Wells?”
    “That the judge trusted him,” she said.
    “Do you?” the detective asked.
    She had thought she could. But now she wasn’t so certain. “If the bodyguard was killed weeks ago, then Parker didn’t have anything to do with it.”
    “Do you know what he was doing weeks ago?”
    No. She had been in hiding. If the news was to be believed, though, he had been getting shot at and nearly blown up. “But I think you know.”
    The detective shrugged. “Payne Protection has definitely been filing a lot of police reports recently.”
    “Then you know that Parker is in danger.” Just like she was, but if he didn’t know about the hit on her, she wasn’t going to draw Detective Sharpe’s attention to it. Brenda had warned her to trust no one but Parker. Now she was going to trust no one—not even Parker.
    “Or maybe he is the