Make Me Melt(26)

“Don’t say it,” Jason warned, accepting the mug.

“What were you doing upstairs?” Colton asked. “Please tell me you weren’t with her.”

Jason took a gulp of the hot liquid, ignoring the other man’s question. “Have you been in touch with the hospital?”

Colton nodded. “Yeah. There’s been no change to the judge’s condition.” He glanced at his watch. “What time do you want to leave?”

Jason walked over to the table and pretended to consider the files that were strewn across the surface. “I thought I’d let Caroline catch up on her sleep. She had a pretty rough day yesterday.”

Colton was too well trained to comment, but Jason knew the other man wasn’t fooled. The truth was, he and Caroline hadn’t gotten very much sleep after he’d returned to bed. Jason was still riding an adrenaline high, but he knew he’d be feeling the effects of the strenuous night before the day was through. He was trained to go for extended periods without sleep, but Caroline wasn’t. The emotional stress she was under, combined with the physical demands he’d made of her, meant she would be exhausted unless she got some rest.

“It’s more difficult to be objective when you’re emotionally involved with your detail,” Colton commented. “Not to mention that it’s not very professional. I know you and Caroline go way back, but I’m not sure this is the time or place to rediscover whatever it is you had together.”

Jason shot him a baleful look. “Let it go, Black.”

Colton made a sound of disgust as he pushed away from the counter and headed for the door, coffee mug in hand. “I hope you know what you’re doing. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

Jason didn’t take offense at the other man’s words. The two of them had worked together for over five years, and Colton was the closest thing he had to a friend. If their positions were reversed, he’d have expressed the same concerns. He didn’t regret last night, but he acknowledged that sleeping with Caroline might not have been the smartest idea. But now that he had, everything had changed.

She was his, in the most elemental way there was. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her. In order to protect her, he needed to find out who had shot her father. Whoever was responsible was still out there. And while the FBI had formal jurisdiction over the case and was performing its own investigation, Jason knew it couldn’t hurt for him to review the files. He had an immediate familiarity with most of the cases and a good instinct for what might have motivated such a vicious attack.

Pulling up a chair, he set his mug down and began methodically going through the files. Steve Anderson had done him a favor by segregating the worst offenders out of the pile of possible suspects. Flipping through the documents, Jason discarded one and then another file. He set two of the files to one side, believing they warranted a closer look.


The first was the Sanchez case, and while Jason knew the leader of the drug-smuggling gang was more than capable of putting a hit out on the judge, he wasn’t sure that would be his style. Sanchez would lose any hope of serving out the remainder of his prison term in Mexico if the authorities even suspected he was behind the shooting. But it was possible that one of his henchmen had acted in retaliation. He set the file aside for further investigation.

He reached for the next file, and then hesitated when he saw the name that was written across the top. He told himself that Edward Green was a common enough name, but when he opened the file, he recognized the man in the police photo. Eddie Green was one of the most notorious gang leaders in the Hunters Point region of San Francisco. He’d been charged with numerous offenses, including drug distribution, operating a prostitution ring, weapons possession and murder. Jason recognized him from his own childhood. They had grown up together in the projects, and Jason had been one of Eddie’s earliest recruits into his violent Hunters Point gang.

He closed his eyes briefly against the unwelcome memories. He’d been twelve years old to Eddie’s sixteen, and he had worshipped the older boy, for both his cunning and his reckless attitude. Eddie Green didn’t take crap from anyone, and if someone did him wrong, he meted out his own form of brutal punishment. When he was seventeen, he’d been suspected of beating his mother’s boyfriend to death, but no charges had ever been pressed.

Jason couldn’t think about those days without a degree of self-loathing. He’d had a crummy homelife, with a grandmother who worked too much to really be an influence in his life and a father who was a drug addict. His grandmother had died when he was fifteen, and after that, Daryl Cooper had been too concerned about where his next fix was coming from to worry about what illegal activities his kid might be involved in. Jason had never known his mother. She’d been gone long before he was old enough to remember her. Eddie Green and his budding gang had seemed like family to Jason, and he’d looked up to Eddie as he would have an older brother.

Even when Eddie had demanded he commit petty crimes in order to prove his loyalty and commitment to the gang, Jason hadn’t stopped hanging out with the group. He’d deluded himself into thinking that it was okay to rob a convenience store or break into someone’s home when they weren’t there and steal their jewelry and electronics. He’d told himself that society owed him something for dealing him such a lousy hand. Still, on some level, he knew it was only a matter of time before he’d be told to kill someone. But by then he was too deeply entrenched to get out. Then his grandmother had died, and Jason had realized that if he didn’t extricate himself, he was going to end up dead or a junkie like his father. He’d been arrested three days later for jacking a car and had ended up in Judge Banks’s courtroom. Looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened to him.