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Owens tried to get involved but I shoved the police officer back.
I lifted Ramon by the neck of his shirt, his head listing sideways, covered in old and fresh blood. “You don’t deserve those kids. You don’t—”
Owens’s fist came out of nowhere, catching me in the eye and I toppled sideways before being yanked to my knees by my own neck, which Owens had wrapped his arm around.
“You just don’t know when to quit, do you?” Owens asked, squeezing even harder until I saw stars. “Now I gotta take you down to the station.”
Owens called in help to take Ramon to the clinic and I waited in the back of the squad car. I hoped, prayed that with me in custody, Owens would lose interest in the kids.
“I’m going to check the house,” Owens told the other officer, “see if those kids are here.”
Crap.
With nothing else at my disposal, I went ape shit. Screaming, spitting, kicking at the window, anything to get Owens back to the car and away from the house.
I didn’t want those kids taken away in a squad car. I didn’t want them held in a cell when their night had been horrific enough. I wanted them at The Manor until someone who loved them could find them.
“Don’t make me taze you!” Owens said, sliding into the front seat.
He started up the car and I watched the window of my upstairs bedroom, where Miguel stood.
“Stay,” I mouthed to Miguel. “Stay right there.”
JULIETTE
I stood in my dark living room, surrounded by the glow of my television, and felt the world go sideways. It took five minutes for the story to come back around, but there it was. Richard Bonavie being led away from the Los Angeles airport in cuffs, illuminated by a hundred flashbulbs.
“Richard Bonavie was found with the thirty-karat Pacific Diamond that was stolen from the Bellagio Ancient Treasures Exhibit seven years ago. Bonavie was initially a person of interest in the crime but was released due to insufficient evidence. Bonavie is now being transferred to Nevada for questioning.”
“Tyler was in Las Vegas at that time, wasn’t he?” Dad asked.
“He doesn’t know anything about it,” I snapped, though as the words came out of my mouth I knew I was lying. He might not have known about the gems seven years ago, but he sure as hell knew about them now.
It was just too much of a coincidence that Richard left The Manor a week ago, and now he gets arrested with a gem that had been missing for years.
Maybe Tyler didn’t know Richard found the gem, I told myself, trying to put the brakes on my anger.
He said he didn’t.
If you love him, you’ll go with that. At least until proven otherwise.
But I had a bad feeling.
I reached into my pocket and turned on my phone, which immediately began ringing.
I didn’t check the caller ID, sure of who it was.
“Tyler,” I said, “what the hell is going on?”
“This isn’t Tyler,” Officer Kavanaugh said, and something in his voice turned my blood to ice.
“What’s wrong?”
“Well,” he said, huffing a deep sigh. “I figured you’d want to know, we’ve got Tyler O’Neill in a holding cell with a black eye and Owens is filling out paperwork charging Tyler with assaulting an officer.”
Holy. Shit.
“That’s not all. Ramon Pastor is at the clinic, with a broken nose and about twenty stitches in his head.”
“Where’s Miguel?”
“No one knows.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said. I hung up and headed for the door.
“Everything okay?” Dad asked.
“No,” I said bluntly, standing at the door. My whole world was falling down around me and I didn’t know where to begin. Find Miguel? Talk to Tyler? Deal with Owens?
I put my hand against the wall for just a moment, feeling as though my knees might buckle under the weight of everything that was going wrong.
“I’ll come with you,” Dad said, turning off the TV.
“Dad, you can’t get involved.”
“I won’t.”
I snorted.
“I know I’ve screwed up and I’m more sorry than I can say. But I just want to be moral support. You don’t have to do this alone.”
Not doing it alone sounded good, and maybe I was being a coward, and quite possibly making the wrong decision, but my Dad was there. Sturdy and solid in a world gone liquid.
I nodded and he followed me out the door.
A few minutes later, the door into the squad room opened with a bang and I stomped into the room, ready to breathe fire over my entire staff, over the entire town, for that matter. “What the hell is going on here?” I barked.
Owens, who’d clearly disobeyed my orders to stay on dispatch, made no attempt to disguise his smirk.
“Answers, Owens,” I said, coming to stand right in front of him, a hairbreadth away from his sweaty face. “And I better like them, or it’s your badge.”
