The shrill buzz of a phone cut him off. Brian snatched up the house phone, glanced at caller ID and felt his bones freeze.
“It’s the police.”
None of the assembled guests made a sound as he hit Talk.
“Ellis.”
He gripped the phone, his fist tight, as every muscle in his body went taut.
“Talk slower! I can’t understand...What?”
The silence in the room was thunderous. No one breathed, no one uttered a word as Brian shot Joe Russo a quick look.
“Yeah, he’s here.”
Stunned, he dropped his hand and stared at the phone in disbelief for a few second before handing it to Russo. “It’s Dawn. She’s in jail. She wants to talk to you.”
Chapter Thirteen
Brian was just handing Joe his phone when a short, sharp buzz cut through the stunned silence. Russo checked his own cell and took all of three seconds to skim a text before putting Brian’s phone to his ear.
The listeners crowded around him heard only one side of the conversation that followed. As always, Joe’s method of communication was succinct to the point of being in code.
“Russo...Right...Right...Put him on.”
After a brief pause, he identified himself again.
“It’s Joe...Yeah. Long time. What’s the charge?” His gray eyes shuttered, he listened for several moments before terminating the call with a clipped, “On my way.”
He handed back the phone and swept the small crowd with a quick glance. He knew half the people present. Brian, Travis and Carlo from Italy, along with Callie, Kate and Brian’s son, Tom. Several others he’d met at the dinner last night. The rest were strangers. As far as Joe was concerned, only one of them had any business hearing what he had to report.
“Where can we talk?” he asked Brian.
“My study.”
When the two men wheeled and started for the door, an instant chorus of protests erupted.
“Wait!”
“Why’s my daughter in jail?”
“What’s going on?”
Brian swung back and cut them off. “I’ll tell you when I know what’s going on.”
He closed the study door behind him, swept by an overwhelming sense of relief. Dawn wasn’t dead, she wasn’t in the hospital, and from the little he’d been able to gather from her first few jumbled sentences, she hadn’t skipped out on their wedding. With the big three not in play, he could handle anything else.
“Okay, tell me.”
“My folks tracked her to the Bethesda District Police Station on Wisconsin Avenue. They talked to the detective working her case, got him to let her make a call.”
“What case? What do they think she’s done?”
“They’re holding her on a possible charge of kidnapping.”
“What?” Brian’s jaw sagged, snapped back. “Who’s she supposed to have kidnapped?”
“A four-year-old child.”
“No way!” The counter was flat, fast and unequivocal. “Anyone who thinks Dawn would snatch a child has their head up their ass.”
“Chico—the detective I just talked to—is an old buddy,” Joe said mildly. “We used to carry the same badge.”
“You were a cop?”
As much time as Brian and Travis and Carlo had spent with Joe in Italy, they knew little about him. Only that he was a hired gun who’d gone into places the conventional forces couldn’t, and now headed one of the world’s top private security services.
“A military cop,” Russo clarified. “For a while. Chico’s a good man. He’ll sort through the conflicting stories.”
“Whose conflicting stories?”
“I didn’t get all the details. Only that Dawn claims to have found the little girl wandering by herself and wanted to help her. The mother, who’s evidently still pretty hysterical, claims Dawn lured the girl away with candy, intending to take her.”
He paused, eyed Brian carefully. “Doesn’t help that when the responding officers got all parties involved to the precinct and discovered Dawn has an arrest record.”
The news sent Brian back a step. A dozen wild possibilities rocketed through his head. None of them tracked to the woman he knew.
“My folks should have turned up the arrest when they ran the background check for you,” Joe said, clearly not happy. “I’ll talk to them about that. In the meantime, I need you to tell me what got her arrested. Cops, especially tough cops like Chico, tend to take a less than sympathetic view of perps with records.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“Who does?”
“Kate,” Brian answered instantly, “and Callie.”
“Better get them in here.”
Separating the two women from the rest of the herd proved impossible. Brian was forced to return with them plus Travis, Carlo and Dawn’s brother, mother and father.
Joe didn’t waste time protesting. “Okay, fill in the blanks and do it quick. Dawn left the house at...?”
“Eleven fifteen,” Kate supplied, recalling his previous admonition to stick to facts and not suppositions. “I saw her car going around the corner when I drove up and glanced at the clock, wondering where she was going.”
“Which was...?”
“To the pet store in the mall,” Callie answered. “To buy a brush for the dog?”
Joe’s brows snapped together. “What dog?”
“We got Tommy a puppy,” Brian explained. “It’s a wedding present from Dawn and me. Our neighbors are keeping it until we can spring it on him.”
“Okay, so that tracks. Chico—the detective working her case—confirms she was picked up at the mall.”
“Why?” Maureen snapped. “What did my daughter do?”
Joe shot Brian a glance, got his reluctant nod and relayed the bare bones of the situation. As expected, protests and exclamations and denials pelted him from all sides. He cut them off with a brusque chop of one hand.
“We all know the charge is bogus. Problem is the police have a hysterical mother who says otherwise. They’ve also dug up Dawn’s previous record. Someone tell me, and tell me quick, what she was arrested for.”
The McGills’ thunderstruck expressions told Joe they had no idea. Same with the blank looks on Travis’s and Carlo’s faces. He didn’t miss the quick glance Callie and Kate exchanged, however.
“Talk to me, dammit!”
The barked command brought Kate’s chin up. Even Callie’s eyes frosted.
“What did she do,” he fired at them, “and when?”
“What she did,” Kate bit out, “was agree to reimburse her last fiancé for all expenses related to the extravagant wedding he’d insisted on. The nonrefundable catering deposits, the tuxedo rentals, the airline tickets and even the cancellation fees for the thousand-dollar-a night, over-water bungalow he’d reserved for a surprise honeymoon in Tahiti. Some surprise! It took her more than a year to pay off all the sunk costs.”
“But that wasn’t good enough for the bastard,” Callie interjected with uncharacteristic ferocity. “He wanted revenge. Complete humiliation.”
“So he filed a complaint in small-claims court alleging Dawn had run up all those thousands of dollars on his American Express card without his permission,” Kate continued savagely. “She didn’t even know about the complaint! Some clerk supposedly sent a notice directing her to appear and respond to the charge. If so, Dawn didn’t get it. Her first clue about the whole mess was when two police officers showed up at her door with a bench warrant for her ‘failure to appear’ and hauled her off in handcuffs.”
Still breathing fire, Callie picked up the saga again. “It cost her big bucks in attorney’s fees, but her lawyer was able to produce credit card receipts and contract signatures that pr
oved Dawn had never charged anything to that jerk’s American Express. The judge dismissed the complaint. The arrest should have been amended to show that.”
“Should being the operative word,” Joe said. “Give me the name of the attorney and the date this all happened, and I’ll get my people on it.”
He texted the information as Kate and Callie supplied it, then nodded to Brian. “Okay, let’s get down there and see what we can do to straighten out this obvious misunderstanding.”
“I’ll go with you.” Callie spun on her heel and joined the two men as they made for the door. When Joe started to protest, she cut him off with an icy stare. “I’ve spent more hours with hysterical parents and officials from Child Protective Services than I can count. I’m coming with you.”
“Me, too.” Kate was right beside her. “Don’t even try to stop me. Dawn’s always been there when Callie or I needed her. Always!”
When the McGills started for the door as well, Brian stopped the stampede with a terse command.
“Hold it right there, folks. Joe and I and Callie are going down to the precinct. Maureen, you and Aaron and Phil can help my folks keep an eye on Tommy. Kate, I need you and Travis and Carlo to keep the other guests entertained. Stuff ’em to their ears with shrimp and champagne if you have to, but hold them here. This is one wedding that’s not being called off.”
He said essentially the same thing in much milder terms to the small crowd milling in the den.
“The good news is Dawn’s gotten mixed up in what sounds like a complete misunderstanding,” he told them. “No one’s been injured, no one’s run off. The bad news is it may take an hour or two to straighten it out. If you can, please stay until we get back. The show will be a little late, but it’ll go on.”
Although impatience bit at him like fire ants on the march, Brian took another few moments to reassure his obviously worried son.
“We’ll only be a little while, bud. Why don’t you and Cindy challenge Addy to a battle of Garden Zombies?”
“Okay.” Tommy’s chin quivered above the neon-bright dinosaur tie. “Dawn’s coming back, isn’t she?”
“You bet.”
“How...?” His voice wobbled. “How do you know?”
“Because she and I have a very special present for you. No way she’s going to miss being here when you open it.”
“Really? What is it?”
“You’ll find out when we get back. I gotta go. Be good.”
* * *
Dawn felt as if she was reliving her worst nightmare.
Calling off her first wedding had been rough enough. The second still ranked as a natural disaster of epic proportions. But Brian... Tommy...
She paced the small interview room like a caged cat. The gray, windowless room smelled of old sweat and desperation. She’d contributed to the tang these past hours but barely noticed the less than subtle scent that now clung to her. All she could think of, all that mattered was the hurt and embarrassment she was putting Brian and Tommy through. Just because she’d let her mother play on her skittering nerves and drive her out of the house.
No!
She stopped pacing and grabbed the back of the gray metal chair that sat facing two others across a scarred table.
She couldn’t blame those jumpy nerves on her mother. She was the one who’d dived into two previous engagements. She’d wiggled out of them, wounding two unsuspecting men in the process. And she’d been so damned determined not to do the same to Brian and Tommy that she’d worked herself into a state of near panic. Furious with herself, she banged a clenched fist on the top of the chair.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
The door to the interview room opened midway through her verbal self-flagellation. The tall, square-shouldered Latino detective who’d been questioning her for what now felt like days lifted one inky eyebrow.
“You referring to me?”
“To myself. I can’t believe I...” She caught sight of the man behind him and let out a squeal. “Joe! Thank God! Will you please tell Detective Ramirez I’m not a child molester or kidnapper?”
“Already have.”
Her glance locked on the curly-haired detective. “You believe him, right? And me?”
“I’m getting there.”
That wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “Oh, for...! Joe, you have to convince him I’m not a felon. Okay, I was arrested, but the charges were...”
“Bogus. He knows.”
“I know now,” Ramirez drawled, scraping a palm across his thickening five o’clock shadow. “Needed confirmation, though.”
“Took you long enough,” Dawn retorted.
He shrugged off the sarcasm. “It was your word against the little girl’s mother. She claimed her ex had hired someone else to try and snatch his daughter. We had to run her statements against yours. It didn’t help that you had an arrest record. Or that she kept changing her story.”
“With good reason,” Joe said before Dawn could fire up again. “Per Callie’s suggestion, Chico—Detective Ramirez—contacted the child advocate assigned to protect the little girl’s interests during her parents’ divorce hearing.”
Callie! Bless you, girlfriend!
Dawn sent the fervent benediction winging through the air as Ramirez picked up the thread.
“What took so long,” he said with a mocking smile, “was that the advocate had to get permission to discuss the case with me.”
Okay, Dawn would give him that one. Callie rarely talked about her work. Those damned emails being a case in point. The little she had shared, though, underscored her absolute commitment to protecting the privacy of her young clients.
Still, Dawn would be a long time forgetting her hours in this stuffy, windowless room. “Go on,” she instructed Ramirez with something less than graciousness.
“The advocate pretty well confirmed that the mother is the problem, not the father. Turns out she’s been reported for leaving her daughter in a car with the engine running. Also for failing to pick the girl up at the babysitter’s for three days running.”
“And she still retains custody?” Dawn asked incredulously.
“Not for long, I suspect. Especially after your friend, Ms. Langston, suggested the mother may have brought these wild accusations against you to divert attention from the fact that she let her daughter wander off.”
He scraped his chin again, looking as disgusted by the situation as Dawn felt.
“We posed that theory to the mother a few moments ago. She ranted and raved and got all hysterical again but finally admitted she’d been flirting with a shoe salesman. She never even thought about her daughter until she walked out of the store and saw the girl with you. Then she just...”
“Panicked,” Dawn finished.
Sighing, she felt her rancor seep away. She couldn’t help feeling a grudging kinship with the little girl’s mom. They’d both given in to an irrational impulse.
Dawn’s didn’t carry the same serious consequences as an accusation of kidnapping. All she’d wanted was a brief escape. A chance to catch her breath and calm her jittery nerves. Yet that dash to the mall had destroyed the joy she’d planned to share with Brian and Tommy, her friends, her family.
Suddenly achingly tired, she drew in a ragged breath. All she wanted now was out of this airless room. “Can I go now?”
“You can,” Ramirez confirmed. “We’ve got your address and telephone number. We’ll contact you if we need any further details.”
Joe tipped him a two-fingered salute. “Thanks, compadre.”
Ramirez followed that with a brief exchange in Spanish. Joe’s response was equally brief but put a wide grin on both men’s faces.
By this point Dawn was too wiped to care about anything but moving her excursion to the mall, the Bethesda
police station and Detective Ramirez to a mental “delete” box. She wanted out, and now!
She had to wait for the detective to hit the keypad, then shoved the door open the moment the lock clicked. The hallway outside was as gray and dingy as the interview room, but its strong odor of pine-scented floor cleaner smelled like an Alpine meadow to Dawn. She sniffed the heady scent of freedom repeatedly as Joe steered her to a small waiting area and found Callie waiting for her. Dawn rushed across the linoleum-floored lounge and wrapped her in a fierce hug.
“Joe told me what you did.”
Hot tears stung Dawn’s eyes. Emotion clogged her throat. Callie’s, too, judging by her ragged response.
“All I did was make a few suggestions. Joe was the one who convinced Detective Ramirez to follow up on them.”
The watery smile Dawn intended to aim in Russo’s direction never quite made it to her lips. Every part of her froze, lips included, when she spotted the unmoving figure off to Callie’s left.
“Brian...”
She stopped, dragged in a shuddering breath and stepped out of her friend’s sheltering embrace. Aching clear down to her soul, she met his unwavering stare.
“I’m so, so sorry. I never meant... I didn’t intend...” She blew out another long breath and repeated softly. “I’m sorry I ruined this day for you and Tommy.”
He crossed the dingy linoleum, his face giving no clue to his thoughts. Dawn felt her stomach drop three or four floors and braced herself for the worst.
“Just tell me one thing.”
His voice was flat, his blue eyes unreadable. She had to force a response through her raw, aching throat.
“What?”
“Did you get the brush?”
“Huh?”
“The grooming brush. Did you buy one before you got hauled off to jail?”
“I... Uh...”
Sure she’d misunderstood him, Dawn looked at Callie. At Joe. Back at Brian. The smile that crept into his eyes had her heart turning somersaults every bit as joyful as the ones she’d taught Tommy.
“No,” she breathed, “I didn’t.”
“Then we’d better pick one up on the way home.” He lifted a hand and cupped her cheek. “I dropped some heavy hints before I left. I don’t think we can delay giving Tommy his wedding present until tomorrow. And if the pup’s going to sleep with him tonight, as I suspect he will, we’d better give him a good brushing first.”
Third Time's the Bride! Page 16
