“What? That’s not true! I told you what happened. Exactly how it happened.”
“Without a witness to back up your story, we have no other choice but to believe our witness.”
“Why does what they’re saying mean more than what I’m telling you?”
“Because of the evidence.”
Unfortunately, I couldn’t argue with that. “But I told you why he had my necklace and about the scratch.”
“And what about the pictures, Miss Noelle?
I frowned. “What pictures?”
“We found pictures in Mr. Curt’s possession... of you and Mr. Dare.”
“Ryland? But how?”
“No. Sebastian Dare.”
I sat there stunned and then shook my head at his cruel lies. “No, that’s impossible. I’ve never been with Sebastian that way. You’re wrong!”
“You said you couldn’t remember being with Sebastian that night... right?”
I tried hard to remember that night but there was nothing, but darkness. Always darkness.
“So it’s possible that you could have been with Sebastian, right?”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t.
“I think you need to get yourself a lawyer, Miss Noelle.”
Detective Richards stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.
“Is she talking?”
“No. She claims she didn’t kill him and her story...”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“I believe it. She’s not our person, Marks. She couldn’t kill anyone even if she wanted to.”
“Why? Why are you so convinced she didn’t? Because she’s blind?”
“No, because she’s not a killer. Why are you so convinced she did it?”
“Because the facts are there, Richards.”
“Sometimes the facts are wrong, Marks. And I’m telling you they’re wrong.”
“Then prove it, Richards. Let’s bring in the brother and see what he knows.”
“Do you actually think he’s going to be of any help? Let’s say I’m wrong about her. Do you really think he’s going to turn against her? No prosecutor is going to take this case with superficial evidence.”
“Fine. But first, we have to make sure we’ve explored all the facts. I want to question the brother.”
Richards sighed and ran his hand over his smooth head. “Okay. Bring him in.”
“I’ve been here for over an hour! When the hell will you tell me what’s going on?”
“Like I’ve told you for an hour, when there is something to tell, believe me when I say you will be the first to know.”
“Goddamn it, that’s not good enough!” I growled, banging my fists against the police counter.
Somewhere in the background someone had been typing on a keyboard and two other officers were discussing something. An older woman stood at a file cabinet and a man next to me was talking to another police officer. Every one of them stopped to turn toward me.
I didn’t care. Gripping the edge of the counter, I leaned forward between the gap of my arms and sucked in a deep breath.
I was going crazy out here waiting and not knowing what the hell was happening to Araya. I’d fought against the policemen that had been standing between me and Araya at the restaurant as they pulled her away from me. I felt like a caged animal, helpless to help her. I kept calling after her, telling her everything was going to be okay and that this was all a mistake, but she hadn’t even looked up at me. It scared the fuck out of me to see that blank look on her face.
I just needed to see her. Make sure she was… what? Okay? How could she be? She’d been arrested and accused of murder and pushed through the restaurant like a fucking criminal! It was ridiculous!
“Do they know she’s blind?” I asked, lifting my head toward the officer. “Do they realize how asinine accusing a blind girl of murder is? Do they at least know that?”
“Please have a seat, Mr. Dare.”
I glared at the officer, who couldn’t be much older than myself, for a full minute before I pushed away from the counter and spun around. Falling into one of the plastic seats, I dropped my head into my hands and ground my thumbs into my eyes until I saw spots.
There was an explosion of noise at the entrance a few minutes later. I wouldn’t have even bothered paying attention to it if I hadn’t recognized the voice. I jumped up from my chair as one of the detectives from tonight was being followed by three policemen and my brother.
“This is some fucked-up shit.” Sebastian’s words were slurred and I knew he’d been drinking.
“Sebastian?” I moved to follow them, but I was stopped once again. I clenched my fists and tried to ease the urge to punch the officer holding me back.
“Ryland?” He was trying to turn and twist against the officers holding his arm behind his back. “What are you doing here?” He dragged his feet and struggled as they tried to pull him to the back.
“They arrested Araya.”
He seemed to instantly sober and his face lost all of its color. I ignored the twinge of anger that flared for his protectiveness over the girl I loved.
“What? Why?”
“They’re accusing her of murder.”
His eyes thinned and hardened. “Craze,” he said with no question in his voice.
“How did you—”
“Call Jacobs. Call him now!”
“I did! He’s not—” They didn’t give Sebastian time to respond before they were pulling him through the back.
I moved to the counter and slapped my hand against the laminate.
“Why the hell is my brother here? Does this have something to do with Craze, too?”
“All I can tell you is that he is being brought in for questioning.”
“But charges haven’t been made yet?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Dare. That’s all I can say right now.”
“This is fucking ridiculous!”
I felt helpless as I stood there still with no answers to any of the millions of questions running through my head. All I knew was that I needed to see Araya. I needed to wrap my arms around her and protect her from whatever was happening right now. But I couldn’t do that if they wouldn’t let me see her.
Sitting down again, I leaned back against the chair and let my head rest on the hard surface of the wall. My mind was telling me all I could do was wait, but my body fought against the limitations of sitting here.
I pulled out my phone and went to recent calls. His number took up the top fifty spots, and I clicked on it and listened to the ring.
“Ryland?” Jacobs finally answered on the fifth ring.
I nearly fell out of my chair. “Jacobs. Holy shit, it’s about time.”
“I’m on my way, son. Is Sebastian already there?”
“Yeah… how did you know…?”
“Your father called me.”
Of course he did. “Is he coming down here?”
“I believe he is on his way.”
“How long will it take you to get here?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll see you in fifteen, then.”
I splashed my face with cold water and let it drip into the sink. I stared at the rusty scum around the drain until my eyes crossed. Looking up into the mirror, I hardly recognized myself.
I’d run my fingers through my hair so many times in the last four hours that it was sticking out everywhere. My eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot and I was sure I’d rubbed them raw. I had dark circles under them and my skin appeared clammy and pale.
I was going crazy without answers, and no one wanted to tell me what the hell was going on. It’d been two hours since Jacobs and J.D. had gone back, and they still hadn’t come out. I sat out there listening to the hands of the clock tick, the keys on a keyboard, the metal scraping every time they opened and shut that file drawer. There was only so much more I could take before I stormed back looking for Araya.
I dried my hands and pushed through the
bathroom door. I stopped short when I saw one of the detectives that had been at the restaurant leaning there, waiting.
“Are you finally going to tell me what the hell is going on?” I demanded.
“Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Dare?” He tilted his head toward the doors leading to the back.
“I want to see Araya,” I said without moving.
“Let’s talk and we’ll see what we can do, okay?”
I weighed my options. I could stand here and slowly go insane or I could go in the back and be that much closer to Araya. There was no debate. I walked past him toward the doors.
“What do you want to talk about?”
He walked past me through the dimly lit hall and pushed open a door to a small interrogating room.
“Have a seat, Mr. Dare.” He set down the folder he’d been carrying and pulled out the chair opposite me.
“Am I a suspect now?” I asked, pulling out the chair and slouching in it.
“I just want to talk to you. Figure out if you can get us any new information that might help out Miss Noelle.”
I noted that he didn’t say yes or no.
“What about Sebastian?”
“Well, it looks like big, bad Daddy Dare will be getting your brother out of here.”
“What about Araya? Has our lawyer seen her yet? I don’t understand why she’s being charged… or how…”
“There was Miss Noelle’s DNA found on Mr. Curt’s body. We also found this with her prints on it in his apartment.”
He placed a baggie on the table and pushed it at me. I stopped it before it could fall off the edge and looked at the bag long and hard. I stared at Araya’s necklace. Throwing it down in the middle of the table, I didn’t say anything.
“Does it look familiar?”
“Why was Sebastian brought in?”
“Well, he was at The Underground the night in question, and a witness said they overheard him and someone else talking about Mr. Curt, saying, and I quote, “‘Find her and find Craze and warn him. Warn him that I’m going to kill him!’”“
“He drugged Araya. Did you know that? Sebastian didn’t mean it. He was just pissed off. Hell, I wanted to kill him too for what he did to Araya.”
“But you didn’t... did you?”
“You seem to think I didn’t.”
“Well, if it wasn’t for your alibi, you would have been suspect number one.” He shifted the folder back and forth in front of him with his finger.
“My alibi?”
“We pulled your record once we found the pictures,” he said, and my eyes immediately followed the folder, “and it turns out you were stopped for speeding around the time of the murder. You told the police you had an emergency... Actually, you told him you were speeding because your brother called you for a family emergency. So what was the emergency?”
Out of everything he just said, I’d only heard one thing. “What pictures?”
His eyebrows raised and his lips tilted. “Well, I guess you probably wouldn’t have seen those.”
He leaned forward in his chair and flipped around the folder he’d been playing with and pushed it toward me. I looked at it and then back at him.
He hitched his head toward the folder. “Go on. Open it.”
I lifted my hand and flipped open the front flap. I didn’t immediately look at them, afraid of what I was going to find. When I finally did, I couldn’t breathe, and I leaned forward, picking up the first picture. I swallowed hard before moving to the second and then the third and finally the last one.
They were all basically the same picture with just a slightly different pose. Sebastian and Araya were in a bed together. Her shirt had been pushed up and Sebastian’s hand was on her. His shirt was off and his pants had been undone.
My breathing increased and I slammed the folder shut and threw it off the table. The photos flew in the air before they fell to the ground. The detective watched them, but I was so furious I couldn’t see straight.
“You seem upset by those.”
I knew the signs. He was pushing me. “If he wasn’t already dead, I would kill him myself,” I said through my teeth.
“For spying on them?”
“I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not going to work.”
“And what am I trying to do, Ryland?”
I smirked. “This was a setup. They’re unconscious, for fuck’s sake. You can’t honestly believe this is real, and if you do, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought.”
We stared each other down, playing chicken, and I refused to back down from him. His fake seriousness broke into a grin, and he just shrugged.
“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. I’d probably tell myself that too if my girl was sleeping with my brother.”
My jaw clenched and I thought my teeth were going to shatter. I balled my fist on top of the table and the detective looked at my hand and then at me.
“I don’t want to bullshit you, Ryland. If your brother walks out of here today, we have enough evidence to charge Araya fully. Unless... unless you have anything you want to say. Anything that will help protect Araya for taking the fall for this entire mess. She seems like a good girl, Ryland. She couldn’t have done this alone... She had to have had help... right?”
“You want me to tell you Sebastian helped Araya kill Craze?”
“We just want you to help us protect Araya. Can you do that, Ryland? Can you help us?”
“I’d do anything for her.”
“Good. That’s good. You can help save one or the other, Ryland. Someone is going down for Curt’s murder. It’s just a matter of whom—your girlfriend or your brother.”
I looked up at him. “I want to see them.”
I paced back and forth, waiting for the detective to come back so I could see Araya. When he left, he’d told me she was talking with one of the other detectives, and I demanded that they wait until our lawyer was with her.
That had been forty-five minutes ago, and I was still waiting. I didn’t want them talking to her without our lawyer present. I didn’t want them tricking her into confessing something I knew damn well she didn’t do.
The door opened and the light from the hall spilled into the dim room. Jacobs walked in and shut the door.
Jacobs was a few years older than my father and had been our family lawyer for as long as I could remember. He was probably the only man J.D. trusted as much as J.D. could trust another person. However, Jacobs wasn’t entirely like my father, and that made me trust Jacobs a little more than I would have had he been like the others under J.D.’s control.
“How are you holding up?” he asked, putting his briefcase on the small metal table.
“Have you been in to see Araya yet?” I didn’t want to talk about how I was feeling.
“Why did you let them question you without me in here with you, Ryland?”
“I was hoping you were in there with Araya. Where is Sebastian?”
“We’re trying to get him released, but they’re dragging their feet. They’ve got nothing, which is why they pulled you in. You didn’t tell them anything, did you?”
“What do you mean? What’s there to tell? Araya and Sebastian didn’t kill Craze. Have you been in to see Araya yet? Have they questioned her? Are you trying to get her released too?”
Jacobs hadn’t sat down and I felt like he wasn’t staying in here long so I needed to ask him everything I could before he left. He sighed and I didn’t take that as a good sign.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“Your father doesn’t want me to represent Miss Noelle, Ryland.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean he doesn’t want you to represent her? That’s the whole reason why I called you down here, damn it.”
“I’m only here to represent Sebastian and yourself. I’m sorry, Ryland.”
“What do you mean you’re sorry?” I roared. “I don’t care what J.D. said! I will pay you!”
“You know it
doesn’t work like that, Ryland. Your father and I go way back.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding right now.” I pressed my fingers into my temples, hoping to stop the pounding behind them, and stared up at the ceiling. “Get out of here, Jacobs.”
“But—”
“I said get out of here!” I yelled, knocking over the chair. I locked my fingers behind my head and turned away from him. “I’m denying your representation, so get the fuck out of here.”
His briefcase scraped against the table as he picked it up and left the room. I paced the floor while my mind raced a mile a minute. I knew what J.D. was trying to do, and I would be damned if I let him get away with it.
Walking over to the two-way glass, I stared at it and then took a step closer.
“Hello!” I yelled, pounding on the glass. “I need to see the detective, now!”
I’d lost track of how long I’d been in this tiny room, and I needed to get up and move around. My butt had fallen asleep thirty minutes ago and my back was so stiff it was killing me.
I stood up, arching my back and stretching my arms above my head. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d sat for such a long period of time. I walked in a straight line and then turned and walked back.
I didn’t want to think anymore. My head was pounding with all the thinking I’d done in the last five hours. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about Craze’s family. I couldn’t help but feel bad for them for losing a loved one. I’d like to think that Craze hadn’t always been scum and that his family was remembering the good things about him.
Of course I was upset for the things he’d done to Ryland and Sebastian and me and Mak. I didn’t think I could find it in me to forgive him for what he’d been attempting to put me through, but that didn’t mean I wanted him dead. Knowing about the pictures made me sick to my stomach, and this was one of the rare occasions I was glad I couldn’t see. I hoped Ryland never found out about them.
I wanted to think that everything up until the point of stepping into the doctor’s office yesterday morning was a really bad nightmare. I didn’t understand how so much bad could happen to one person in a matter of forty-eight hours.
The Grace In Darkness Page 19
