Taken by Storm(4)
Simone decided she didn’t like United States Deputy Marshal Raphael Madison. She didn’t like his macho attitude and superciliousness.
She narrowed her gaze at him while crossing her arms under her breasts. “Why wait until later? Let’s clear the air right now. I don’t like you and I don’t want you living with me,” she said. “I only agreed to go along with this witness protection thing because of what that monster did to my neighbor and would’ve done to me if I hadn’t pepper sprayed his ass. I am cooperating with the government because I believe he should be locked away where he can’t hurt anyone ever again. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to become a prisoner with you as my jailer. I have a business to run and that’s not going to change just because you’re here.”
Rafe struggled not to lose his temper. “Either you deal with me, or you’l find yourself in federal detention charged with obstruction. I can assure you that I won’t interfere with your personal life or your business, but I want you to remember one thing. Where you go, I go. Those are my orders.”
Simone inhaled deeply in an attempt to relieve the constriction in her chest. She felt helpless, vulnerable, but she wasn’t going to let her bodyguard know that. “Okay. But try and stay out of my way.” Turning on her heels, she headed for the staircase. “Now that you understand where I’m coming from, I’l show you to your room,” she said over her shoulder.
Pressing his lips together, Rafe swal owed his sarcastic reply. If Simone Whitfield thought she was going to set the ground rules for what he hoped would be a short-term involvement, then she was quite mistaken. There was one thing of which he was certain, and that was he was very good at what he’d been trained to do.
From the time the Witness Security Program was authorized by the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 and amended by the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, no program participant who fol owed security guidelines had ever been harmed while under the protection of the Marshals Service, and he wasn’t about to let Simone Whitfield become the first victim. Not on his watch.
His gaze was fixed on the profusion of corkscrew curls floating down her back. Simone’s face and hair reminded him of his sister’s favorite dol , which she’d refused to play with because she claimed she hadn’t wanted to ruin it. The dol sat in a chair year after year until Rachel Madison packed her away the year she’d turned sixteen. It was the same year that al hel broke loose in the Madison household when Rafe relocated his mother and sister from Kansas and California.
Fol owing Simone up the stairs and down a wide hal way, he pul ed his thoughts back to the present. “Do you have an attic or basement?”
“No. There’s just the first and second floor.”
Rafe smiled. It was the first time she’d spoken to him civil y. “I need to check al of the windows and doors to make certain the locks are in working order.”
“The house is wired and monitored by a security company.”
“I’m stil going to check everything,” he insisted.
Simone slowed her pace, stopping at a bedroom at the end of the hal . Shifting slightly, she stared up at Rafe. “I always sleep with my bedroom window open regardless of the weather.”
He shook his head. “You can’t continue to do that. What you don’t want is to make it easy for someone to get to you.”
There came a pause as a flicker of fear swept through her. “What makes you think someone is going to get to me? Isn’t Ian Benton locked up?”
There was another beat of silence before Rafe said,
“Yes, he is. And I doubt whether he’l be granted bail. But there’s also the possibility that he may have had an accomplice.”
Her eyes grew wide as she mul ed over the marshal’s words. What if Ian Benton hadn’t acted alone? What if someone had paid him to kil the judge? “Are you saying someone paid Ian Benton to murder Judge Fischer?” she asked, voicing her concerns aloud.
“I don’t know,” Rafe lied smoothly. What Simone didn’t know was that Ian Benton had been added to a domestic terrorist watch list after he’d stabbed a federal prosecutor to death in a Dal as courthouse parking lot. It’d been one of three attacks on federal officials marking the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building. Undercover agents had reported the subsequent attacks, like the bombing, was to avenge the Waco siege and Ruby Ridge kil ings.
The agents had also gathered evidence that Benton was a professional hit man for supremacist groups targeting lawyers and judges involved in the prosecution of hate crimes. However, after his l996 release fol owing the mysterious disappearance of a government witness, Benton dropped out of sight, only to resurface more than a decade later, this time in the Northeast. If convicted, he would be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.