CHAPTER TWELVE

Brent’s big, shiny, maroon-colored pickup truck came barreling to a quick stop directly in front of the hotel’s entrance and he hopped out and hurried inside.

But one of the younger valets hurried over to him. “You can’t park there, sir,” he said just as the head valet hurried to his younger subordinate and elbowed him.

“Hello Chief,” the older man said with a smile on his face as Brent ignored them both and hurried into the hotel. The head valet looked at his colleague. “That’s the chief of police you moron!”

“How was I supposed to know he was the police chief? I’ve never been in trouble before.”

“But have you ever watched the local news at least once in your entire miserable life? His name is mentioned every single night.”

When the kid hunched his shoulders as if he never had, the older man shook his head. “And you’re the future of this country. Great. Just great.” He went back to his post.

Brent took the stairs two at a time to the fourteenth floor, hurried around corridors until he saw one of his officers standing at the door to room 1498. The officer opened the door, and he walked on in.

As soon as he saw MaKayla seated at the table with Phil Baronski, his heart swelled with emotion. He was worried sick about her. That was his first and overriding emotion. Was she truly alright? Was she here when it happened like Doke said?

But his second emotion was harder to identify. Because she was in a hotel suite. Late at night. The same suite as Alvin Clayton’s body when she told him she had to go to a meeting, not to a hotel room. And the fact that his father specifically mentioned the judge when she left their booth, as if those rumors swirling around about their chumminess had some merit to them. And now this? He couldn’t ignore the fact that it didn’t bother him, because it did. But her well-being, in that moment, mattered more. Much more. But that didn’t negate the fact that he had questions.

MaKayla had questions too. But all of them centered on why Phil seemed convinced she was the perp rather than a victim too? Why was he even going down that road with her? No longer woozy, she was now wide awake and fully alert. And she was losing her patience with him fast. “Why do you keep asking me that over and over again, Phil? I told you what happened. I’ve told you repeatedly.”

“But it’s not adding up, Makayla.”

“What’s not adding up?” Brent asked, and both of them looked in his direction.

When Makayla saw him standing there, her heart soared. “ Brent ,” she said with rare emotion in her voice as she got up and hurried to him.

He could see the stress and strain in her eyes as she fell into his arms. He closed his own eyes as he held her tightly. He knew there was a forensics team all over that suite. He knew some uniforms were there too. But he didn’t care. He held her tightly. He didn’t want to let her go. No matter what the story, he didn’t want to let her go.

She pulled away first. “This is like a nightmare,” she said to him. “And all these questions.”

“But are you okay? Were you hurt at all?” When she seemed too flustered to respond, he pulled her further back to look over her entire body for himself. “Are you okay?”

But it was already obvious that she was not. “No,” she admitted. “Phil keeps asking all these questions and acting as if . . . As if . ..”

“As if what, Kayla? As if what?” But when she just shook her head and tears began to drop down her gorgeous face, he looked angrily at Phil. “What are you accusing her of?”

Phil got up and began walking over to Brent. He knew he was his boss, but there was a serious investigation that had to be conducted. “It’s not adding up, Brent.”

“What’s not adding up?”

Phil knew going up against that powerful Sinatra machine was career suicide, but he had a job to do. He was already facing resistance. Some of the officers were already giving him push back and trying to avoid any contact with those Sinatras to protect their own careers. But he did his job. “Her story doesn’t add up, Chief. It doesn’t add up in any way, shape, or form.”

Brent’s heart began to pound. He knew Phil was a straight shooter. He was no rogue cop. He called balls and strikes. “What part of her story is an issue?”

“She said she came here to meet an informant by the name of Jake Dalenti.”

“I did come here to meet Jake,” MaKayla said. “I don’t know why you’re acting as if I’m being untruthful about that. I came to meet Jake.”

“Have you forgotten she’s the DA?” Brent asked. “Informants work with the DA’s office all the time.”

“I know that. But she claims only two people knew about this informant: her and Deputy DA Darren McGuire. But we called McGuire, who’s in the hospital by the way, and he said he never heard of any Jake Dalenti.”

“That’s a lie,” MaKayla said. “I don’t know why Jake told you that lie.”

“Furthermore,” Phil continued, “McGuire said he never called her and told her to meet anybody anywhere tonight when she claimed he did.”

“I did get a call,” Makayla insisted. “Brent was sitting right beside me when I got that call.”

Phil waited for Brent to agree to that, but he instead said nothing. Mainly because Brent had no clue who she was talking to on that phone. And because of their lack of communication, she didn’t say who she was talking to. Never told him where she was going or whom she was going to meet up with either. And she sure as hell never mentioned Alvin Clayton.

“Based on what McGuire told me,” said Phil, “what she’s saying doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up.”

“McGuire is hospitalized after major surgery,” said Brent, although he knew he was making a weak argument. “He’s under serious medication. I wouldn’t put too much stock in what Darren is saying.”

“And he knows that too,” said Makayla. “Phil, you know I didn’t kill that man!”

“But I’m not basing my assessments only on what McGurie said.”

Brent looked at him. “What else are you basing it on?”

“Makayla said--”

“That’s Mrs. Sinatra to you,” Brent interrupted him firmly as he looked his sergeant squarely in the eyes. “You’re questioning my wife as if she’s a suspect. My wife !” He said it so firmly and with so much emotion that others in the room looked his way. “If we’re going to stand on ceremony,” Brent continued, “then we’re standing on that motherfucker. Keep it professional!”

Phil stiffened his spine. Here we go, he thought. The wheels of that machine were already beginning to turn just as he suspected they would. Brent’s little comment was enough to remind him of that Sinatra minefield he was wading into. But the facts were the facts. “ Mrs. Sinatra said that when she first walked in here a guy attacked her viciously and she had to fight for her life.”

Brent’s heart dropped. “Fight?” He looked at Makayla. “There was a struggle?”

Makayla nodded. Just the thought of what could have happened still gave her palpitations. “It was awful, Brent. He grabbed me from behind and I was just trying to stay alive. That’s all I was trying to do.”

“Who grabbed you from behind?” Judge Clayton , he wanted to ask her.

“I don’t know who it was. I never saw him. It was awful.” Then she looked angrily at the sergeant. “But Phil doesn’t believe me. He thinks I made it all up.”

“Not a scratch on her, sir. Not a hair out of place. She said they tore up the room during the fight. But when we got here, there was nothing torn up. Nothing out of place at all. She was sitting on the sofa with her briefcase by her side like nothing never happened. And although she’d been attacked viciously according to her, she hadn’t even bothered to call 911. It was another guest that called us when she heard a loud sound from this room, like a gunshot she said.”

“Or somebody being attacked,” said Makayla, “because that’s what was happening. I was being attacked. I was either drugged or passed out. That’s why I couldn’t call anybody. They heard me being attacked.”

“Or she heard somebody being murdered,” said Phil, “because that’s what the evidence shows. Not an attack, but a murder. Because we’ve got a victim at this very moment naked in bed and bludgeoned to death back there.”

Naked ? In bed ? That was the first Brent had heard that Judge Clayton was found naked and in bed. He’d seen that judge with MaKayla. He’d seen how that judge looked at his wife. And now he was naked and dead in a hotel suite, and she was found in that suite with him ? What the hell happened here?

“And the way the body was positioned,” Phil continued, “makes it that much more tragic. It was as if that mild-mannered man that nobody has ever had anything harsh to say about was asleep when he was violently attacked. But she’s claiming she didn’t know he was even in the suite.”

“I didn’t know who was in here!” Makayla fired back at Phil. Then she looked at Brent. “I didn’t know, Brent. I don’t even know who’s back there.”

That surprised Brent too. “You don’t know?”

“No! They won’t tell me anything and Phil won’t let me go back there. I’m assuming it’s Jake, my informant. But I could be wrong. Am I?”

Brent shook his head. “It’s not your informant. Whoever he is.” Then he looked at her with that hard gaze he used on suspects when he needed to memorialize their reaction. “It’s Judge Clayton, MaKayla.”

When he said that name, her entire expression changed. “It’s Alvin ? He’s dead ?”

Brent was concerned about her response. But it could have just been a human reaction. Even he was upset when he heard the news. He nodded his head. “I’m afraid so, yes. He’s the decedent.”

MaKayla was crushed. “But it can’t be. How can you say that? I was just . . . It can’t be !”

Her gorgeous face cracked before Brent’s very eyes, as if she’d aged ten years in ten seconds. And she stumbled back unsteadily, looking for a place to sit, as if she’d just been hit by a sledgehammer. Brent took her arm as he motioned for the uniformed officer near them to hurry and get her a chair.

When Brent sat her down, Phil continued to stare at her. Because he had been assessing her reaction too. He knew she and the judge were colleagues. She’d tried numerous cases in his courtroom since he’d been in town. But that reaction had more than just colleagues written all over it. That reaction didn’t bode well for her at all. Not at all.

Brent knew it too. That was why he and Phil exchanged a glance. Then he let out a harsh exhale. “Where’s the body?”

“In the room to the right,” Phil said, motioning down the hall.

But when Brent turned to head in that direction and Makayla tried to get up to follow him, Phil touched her by the arm to stop her movement. “Sir?”

Brent turned around.

“Sir, she can’t go back there.”

Brent didn’t realize she had attempted to. She knew better than that! That was why one look from him was all it took. She sat back down. Besides, she was still grieving the judge. He went into the back bedroom alone.

Some members of the forensics team were up front collecting evidence, but there were more of them in the back collecting evidence on and around the body when Brent walked in. Out of deference to him, they all backed off and let him take a look. They all knew his wife was the suspect. And had it been any other police chief, they would have expected him to order them to cover up this piece of evidence or that piece of evidence. But it wasn’t any other police chief. It was Chief Sinatra. And every one of them in that room knew he was by the book no matter what. Even when he could show compassion for a suspect, he wouldn’t. Cold as a fish like his father. Vicious as a gangster like his uncle. He was a Sinatra to his core. But he was also a lawman to the depths of his soul.

“Keep working,” Brent ordered the team when they stepped aside, and they appreciated that. They didn’t like being around somebody so violently killed either. They wanted out too. They continued their work.

When Brent stood there and saw the nature of the crime, first, and then the man, that sense of dread overtook him again. The man he knew as Judge Alvin Clayton was lying naked on his side with a gash in the back of his head that undoubtedly led to his demise. But when he saw the blood all up the walls as evidence of how severe a blow to the head it was, or blows to the head, he knew the public outcry would be enormous if those photos were ever released. Makayla wasn’t going to be able to talk her way out of this one. He wasn’t going to be able to use his muscle and clout to get her out of this one. The Sinatra name was going to hurt her, not help her. Because this was horrific. There was no other way to describe it. This was as bad as it could get.

He watched his subordinates painstakingly collect their evidence, with each one of them taking sly peeps at him every chance they got, as if they were upset and wanted him to react to the fact that his wife did such a terrible thing to that fine man. But no reaction came. He was trained since birth to keep his emotions under strict control, with the exception of rage. For some reason he nor any Sinatra or Gabrini alive could keep their rage, or more often their out rage, under wraps. But other than that emotion: Brent displayed nothing. That was how he lived his life. That was how he did his job.

Until he walked around to the opposite side of the bed, to get a better look at the back of Alvin’s head. And that was when he noticed something on the floor, nearly underneath the bed. He, at first, thought it was part of the bedding: the top sheet that was halfway off the bed. But on closer inspection, he saw that it was clothing. Women’s clothing. A pair of purple bikini underwear to be exact. A pair of MaKayla’s purple bikini underwear to be absolute precise. He’d know them anywhere. He was the one who bought them for her!

His heart was hammering. What in the world was her panties doing on the floor in a hotel room at a murder scene???

He continued to look at Alvin’s bludgeoned body rather than down where he needed to look. It was a testament to the situation that a man’s dead body was preferable to view than what was on that floor, nearly under the bed, inside that suite. He wanted to kick it further under the bed, but he knew his forensics team would eventually get to that side of the room and find them there.

He had no choice.

For MaKayla’s sake, he had no choice.

He pulled out his phone, as if to answer a text, and fumbled with it until it fell to the floor at his feet. He leaned all the way down, as if he had to get down on his knees to retrieve it, and he first picked up those panties and stuffed them into the pocket of his blazer. And then he grabbed his phone and stood back up. He could see that the guys were still hard at work without any of them paying him any attention. Which he was relieved to see because he was ashamed of his behavior.

But he’d be ashamed a million times before he allowed anybody to pin this murder on MaKayla.

He pretended to check his text message again, and then he left the room. He stood in the hall, waiting to hear if any conversation around his dropped phone would occur, or if anybody saw him pick up those underwear. But no such conversation happened. He went back up front.