Don't Lose Her by Jonathon King Page B

bed where Sherry lay sleeping and silently kissed her good-bye on the side of the forehead. I was once told it was a cop’s kiss, knowing every time you went out on a shift, there was a chance you might not be back. Whether it gave your loved one any peace was debatable; maybe it only made you feel better. Maybe it was selfish. But if such an act is a display of selfishness, then maybe selfishness is overly maligned.
    I took the F-150 instead of the Fury. I was thinking about the incognito nature of my morning trip. Billy’s plan was for me to arrive at 6:30 a.m. at the federal courthouse’s underground parking lot, where I’d be cleared to enter by security. Then I’d meet Billy at Diane’s office, where he had been living for the past two days. From there, he had arranged for a limousine to leave the garage ahead of us. We’d soon follow in my pickup, staying in cell phone contact with the limo driver. When he got to Billy’s condo, we would slip in behind the building, where Billy would have on-site security personnel allow us up on the basement freight elevator. Maybe the whole plan was unnecessarily elaborate, but both of us had seen the media at its worst, and if the limo distracted the hounds, then Billy—the anxious and aggrieved husband of the kidnapped federal judge—wouldn’t have his ducking head and profile flashed on CNN all day.
    When I arrived at the courthouse, I took Tamarind Avenue around to the back and stopped in front of the lowered parking garage gate to give the uniformed officer my name, my private investigator’s and driver’s licenses, and the business card of the FBI agent in charge whom I’d met in Diane’s office the last time I’d been here.
    It still took ten minutes for the guard to clear me. Inside, I parked as close to the elevator as possible and noted how sparsely populated the garage and the hallways inside the building were. It was an eight-to-five kind of place; the day-to-day workers—clerks, bailiffs, secretaries, lawyers—wouldn’t start flowing in for another hour or so.
    Yet when I locked my truck and looked down past the pillars to the east end of the garage where a corridor leading to the holding cells was fenced off, a man clad in the black paramilitary uniform of a SWAT officer was standing with an MP5 automatic rifle slung over his chest. When I took the elevator to the first floor, I met a uniformed Palm Beach County officer on duty at the security and screening checkpoint.
    While I emptied my pockets of keys and change and three cell phones, I looked out through the glass-front doors and could see two news vans already parked, or perhaps still parked, out in the public lot. No one was doing any early stand-up reports for The Today Show or the many local morning newscasts, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they would.
    Even though I hadn’t tripped any signals when passing through the metal detectors, the officer on the other side still wanded me. Once cleared, I headed upstairs to Diane’s chambers. Outside her doors, I was met again by men I assumed were federal agents, who radioed my presence inside and then passed me through after obtaining clearance. Things were tight. They’re always tight after the fact, after the hijacking, the bombing, the homicide, the riot, or the abduction.
    Law enforcement is a reactive entity—often closing the gate after the horse is out. It is that way out of necessity. A free society can’t function any other way. But tell that to a father who signed a petition against those stoplight cameras and whose daughter was later run down by someone blowing the light in his neighborhood. Tell it to the guy who derides the TSA for slowing his business travel and then finds out his family was on the plane blown out of the sky by a terrorist wearing a shoe bomb. Tell it to the folks who lobbied for less regulation and then found four feet of toxic