Peggy Holloway - Judith McCain 04 - Jupiter Returns by Peggy Holloway Read Free Book Online

realtor to get in the car. They went into the house, with guns drawn, some in the back door and some in the front. I heard yelling and someone yelled, “we have another shotgun victim in here.”
    I didn’t ask anyone’s permission but ran inside. Ben was in a closet in the bedroom. He was hunched over and I could only see his back. His head was between his legs.
    I was screaming and someone grabbed me from behind and forced me outside. I broke away but then I had two men on me and I felt a needle prick in my arm. “No!” I screamed and then everything was black.
    I woke up in my own bed. It was dark but I heard Tracy say from the darkness, “How are we going to tell her, Mimi? She’s going to be devastated.”
    “No!” I screamed into the darkness, “Please don’t tell me Ben is dead.”
    I cried while both Mimi and Tracy held me. “Ben,” I cried, “My darling Ben, the one man in a million.”
    I looked wildly around the room “ Ben,” I said, “the man who had waited for me patiently for eleven years.”
    “She’s getting hysterical,” Tracy said. Should we call the doctor back?
    I screamed at her, “I don’t need a doctor. I need Ben, the man who had put up with my neurosis while I got my life together, my wonderful husband of only two years. We had just come back from our honeymoon.”
    Suddenly, I was more angry than sad, “I’m going to kill that bitch,” I said. “I’m going to catch her and I’m going to kill her, both of them.”
    “You know you’ll be taken off the case, don’t you, Judith?”
    “No, don’t do this to me, Tracy. Please.”
    After some hesitation she said, “You will be officially off the case. You won’t be sitting in on any meetings and I can’t share information with you, but you will be assigned a new bodyguard. I don’t want to know what you’re up to.”
    I nodded slowly. “That’ll work for me, ” I said slowly.
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 10
    My new bodyguard was named Bert Jamison. He was so much smaller that Hutch that I almost laughed.
    He saw me looking him up and down and he said, “I’m a black belt in karate, an expert sharpshooter and I used to be on the Swat team. You’re damned lucky to have me.”
    I took an immediate dislik ing to him. I thought he was a cocky little bastard.
    I was assigned a new case by t he FBI. She was a small girl who looked about five and had been found wandering around in the Montrose area of Houston at three o’clock in the morning a few days earlier.
    She had been wearing a pair of dirty jeans and tee shirt and was barefoot. She wasn’t talking and we didn’t know yet if she was physically unable to talk or if she had experience some sort of psychological trauma.
    I was excited to be working on a new case to get my mind off Ben’s death. I couldn’t believe he was gone.
    My whole family had loved Ben and I had wasted so much time before I had agreed to marry him. He had been only forty three years old and too young to die.
    A very good psychologist had been working with the little girl but she had failed to open up to her. A good match in therapy is so important and I had been lucky in my own therapy with Dr. Anna who was Julia’s psychiatrist and later mine when I decided to become a psychologist.
    Dr. Anna lived in Jacksonville, Florida and owned Ocean Sands Psychiatric Center where Julia had been a patient when we were sixteen.
    Since we didn’t know the name of my new client, we were calling her Jane. She was very tiny and had thin blond-white hair and light blue eyes. She had been staying in a foster home and the first thing I did was to visit the foster home. After my own experiences in foster homes I wanted to make sure she was well taken care of.
    All I saw in the foster home was a house full of happy children and a nice older couple. Jane was standing in the middle of the living room with her head down so that her hair covered her face. The couple, the Fraziers, had cleaned her up and had dressed her in