Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Since I’d been a minor at the time the records had been sealed. If one looked up my record, they’d only see an arrest.
The charges against me had been dismissed, and I’d been acquitted of everything, including the murder of Jay Shaw.
Though, everyone in the town that I lived in at the time likely knew me and everything about me and my entire family.
Hence the reason for moving two states away.
Though, I didn’t think that Jay’s parents would’ve followed me.
But they did.
And so had one of my brothers and Amy.
Now the Shaws were here in Mooresville doing their level best to ruin my life and dishing out the same treatment to my brothers, Finley and Reed.
Reed didn’t actually live here, though. Since he was in the Army working as a doctor with the reserves, he bounced around a lot. Sometimes he’d stay in Alabama, and other times he’d stay in Texas.
They targeted Finley just for fun, but when Reed was here, they went after Reed out of pure hate. Although I assumed that had more to do with the fact that Jay’s sister had been dating my brother, Reed, at the time that I caught Jay raping our sister.
In the aftermath of all that happened, their youthful relationship had gone off the rails when Reed broke up with her as soon as he learned what had happened.
Krisney Shaw was a sweetheart, though, and it was unfortunate that she was painted with the same brush as her two awful parents and her rapist brother.
Not that Reed cared.
But it was obvious, even to me, that those two still had strong feelings for each other.
“I…I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Officer Bakersfield apologized.
I shrugged. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” I asked. “I have a lunch date with my soon to be fiancée, and I don’t want her thinking I stood her up.”
She looked at her watch.
“Yes,” she sighed. “I’m done.”
I stood up.
“Officer Hail?”
I paused on my way to the door and looked back at her.
“I’m not a bad person. I try to be fair. I try to be thorough and careful in my work,” she hesitated. “I can tell you’re one of the good ones…but there are some bad ones, and it’s not always easy to tell the good ones from the bad ones. Do you know what I’m saying?”
The sad thing was that I did.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I do.” I stopped. “But there are other ways of going about doing your job without going straight for the jugular.”
Her lips twitched. “When you’re a woman in a man’s world, then you can lecture me on how I should do my job. Until then, I have the vagina and you have the penis. You have the advantage. Always.”
I looked at her and read the sincerity on her face.
“I wish that wasn’t true, Officer Bakersfield.”
She shrugged, and then started packing up her things.
“It is what it is; maybe one day that might change. But, for now, it is. Have a good day, Officer. Thank you for protecting us.”
Knowing a dismissal when I heard one, I left the room and didn’t look back.
***
“So they just dropped the case?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
I was startled to hear that come from not Audrey, but Mina, Audrey’s sister-in-law and Ghost’s wife and old lady.
I didn’t know why she was here. I just knew that she was and that I was holding both of her kids, the infant in the crook of my arm who was sleeping and the older one sitting in my lap and talking to me a mile a minute in between the questions I was answering from the two women across the table.
“Honestly?” I said. “I don’t know. It seems so surreal when yesterday everything looked so dire.” I paused. “Though, from what Captain Mickey said to me as I was leaving to meet with IA—Internal Affairs,” I said when Audrey started to look confused. “He told me that we had three officers out with the flu and that he’d given IA a ten-day window to work under.”
“That, and they got some help from a third party,” Ghost said as he walked into the restaurant and sat down, dragging a chair over from another table. We just watched him in surprise at that statement as he did.
Once he was seated, he plopped a thick file folder down in front of me.
“I was able to get some new information to them on these girls, or more specifically, the con that the parents of these two girls have been running all over the country using the girls. At least eleven separate incidents—that we know of—all very similar to the one involving you. Although, this was the first time they’d taken drugs—that was obviously the girls’ spin on this fucking scheme.”
“Language,” Mina said almost casually as she gestured for a kiss.