State Of Emergency. Cassie Miles

Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

      Prologue

      July 25, Aspen, Colorado

      Jordan Shane woke with a shudder. The guest bedroom in his wife’s house was cold as a morgue. The bedsheets and comforter weighed on his legs like a blanket of snow. He always felt half-frozen in the mountains, even now in the middle of summer.

      A white sliver of light cut through the midnight dark. The bedroom door stood slightly ajar.

      “Lynette?” He whispered his wife’s name. There was no reason for her to come to him in the night. They hadn’t been intimate for eleven months. They didn’t live in the same house. Most of the time, they weren’t even in the same latitude.

      Jordan’s home and his business were in sun-baked Florida on the Gulf coast where semitropical breezes played in the lush green palm fronds. Most of the time, Lynette stayed here in Aspen, Colorado, where she owned two ski lodges and lived in the biggest damn house he’d ever seen. She called it a château. He called it a hotel because of the constant stream of friends and relatives who were usually taking up space in the sixteen extra bedrooms, not to mention Sean Madigan, a professional skier who lived in the guest house, or the housekeeper who had a good-size apartment behind the downstairs kitchen. Lynette didn’t like to be alone…not even with her husband.

      She had, however, made an effort at privacy for Jordan’s midsummer visit. There were no business associates, no guests, no cousins, no friends. The granite château-hotel was eerily vacant.

      Jordan had come to discuss the dissolution of their estranged marriage. This afternoon, when he proposed divorce, she agreed, asking only that he postpone legal action for a month to give her time to clean up a few business details. The end of their marriage would be amicable. No hard feelings. Their relationship just hadn’t worked out.

      From the very start, they shared zero common interests. But Jordan had been blinded by Lynette’s astonishing physical beauty—her long, shining black hair, sapphire eyes and perfect creamy skin. Even now—with the marriage basically over—he fondly remembered her lush curves and full breasts. The thought of her naked body warmed him, and he reached across the king-size bed, hoping against the impossible that she might have joined him. For old times’ sake.

      Groping at the pillow, he touched metal. His fingers closed around the grip of a handgun. His memory of Lynette’s perfume vanished as he caught the whiff of cordite and powder. This lightweight Glock automatic had recently been fired.

      Jordan bolted from the bed, turned on the lamp and scanned the guest bedroom. Lynette’s antique furniture contrasted his laptop, printer and global cell phone. Nothing seemed to be out of place.

      But somebody had been here. Somebody had left the gun.

      He checked the clip, making sure the pistol was still loaded. He grabbed the cell phone before he opened the bedroom door and peered into the second-floor landing. One side of the hallway was open with a cherrywood railing that overlooked an atrium foyer. On the other side were the closed doors to guest bedrooms, all vacant.

      His wife’s master bedroom suite was fifty yards away, at the south end of the house. Her double doors were wide open.

      “Lynette!”

      His voice echoed against the dark wainscoting and white walls, hung with original artwork. He didn’t call her name again. He was dead certain she wouldn’t answer.

      Wearing only his boxer shorts, Jordan raced toward her suite. He burst through the sitting area into her white bedroom, stark as a glacial landscape. Track lighting blazed reflections against a wall of mirrors. At the foot of the four-poster bed, Lynette sprawled on the plush white carpet, stained crimson with her blood. Her lacy white nightgown hiked up to her thighs. She’d been shot in the chest.

      Dropping the gun, Jordan fell to his knees beside her. At the base of her throat, he felt for a pulse. Nothing.

      “Help!” Jordan yelled. The housekeeper ought to be downstairs. “Rita, help.”

      Lynette’s blue eyes stared, blank and gelid. Her skin felt cool. She couldn’t be dead! There was color in her cheeks.

      Jordan punched 9-1-1 into his cell phone. “Ambulance! Send an ambulance!” He gave the address. “How do I do CPR? Tell me!”

      “Sir, if you will just stay on the line, I can—”

      He threw down the phone. If there was life in Lynette’s body, he had to act fast. He straightened her legs. Her bare arms were slippery with blood. When he lifted her upper body, her head tilted back and her glossy black hair tumbled over his arm. For a moment, he cradled her against him. He’d wanted to end it. “But not like this. My God, not like this.”

      Rita Ramirez, the housekeeper, appeared in the doorway, wearing a yellow chenille robe.

      “Rita,” he said, “you’ve got to help her.”

      The housekeeper took a backward step. Her hands flew to cover her mouth. “Mios Dio, Jordan. What have you done?”

      Chapter One

      September 16, Cascadia, Colorado

      “This is the wound.” With a red marker pen, Emily Foster drew two parallel dots, representing the fang marks of a rattlesnake, on the arm of a seven-year-old Brownie. The other eight girls and the troop leader stood in a tight circle around the Formica-topped table in the Cascadia Search and Rescue headquarters. “Can anybody tell me what to do next?”

      “I know,” said an angelic little redhead. “You gotta shoot the dang rattler.”

      “The snake will be gone.” Emily preferred not to discuss snakebite treatment in her first aid lectures. Given her druthers, she’d never talk about reptiles at all—those slimy, sneaky, altogether terrifying creatures. But kids always asked about worst-case scenarios. Potential encounters with rattlesnakes, cougars and grizzly bears were a lot more dramatic than learning how to identify poison ivy. “Anybody know what we do next?”

      “Suck out the poison,” said Libby Hanson, the daughter of the troop leader. “Then spit it out.”

      The red-haired cherub gave a naughty smirk. “What if somebody gets bit on the butt?”

      “Gross,” said a tall, feminine girl with a long braid that hung to her waist. “I wouldn’t ever suck anybody’s rear end.”

      “Except for Johnny Jamison,” the naughty angel said.

      “Settle down, girls.” Yvonne, the troop leader and mother of four, spoke with the voice of authority, but the Brownies weren’t listening. They’d caught an extreme case of the giggles.

      “Settle down,” Yvonne repeated. She held up her hand in the sign for quiet.

      Those who weren’t making sucking noises on their arms were wiggling their skinny little bottoms at each other.