But Ricki wasn’t waiting for any chief. She took off running down that hall toward that cell. Vince, terrified that one of those trigger-happy cops would take her concern for her sister as aggression against them and shoot her, took off running after her.
“Rasheda, wait!” he yelled at her as he ran.
But Ricki wasn’t thinking about waiting. She was worried about her sister! She saw how white that sergeant went when she mentioned that name. She remembered how Vince believed that truck driver was trying to send her a message by running them off the road. She couldn’t get to that cell fast enough.
But when she got there, she stopped in her tracks. Because in that jail cell that everybody were standing around and looking into was her sister. Erica Richardson. And she was hanging from the ceiling in that cell.
Police officers were frantically attempting to cut that thick rope with a knife to try to bring her down, but there was no doubt to anyone that she was already dead. When Vince slid up to that cell and saw it too, even his heart grew faint. Because he could see there was no hope at all. Erica Richardson had hung herself. And because he knew Ricki was going to be devastated.
She already was. As soon as she realized that it was her sister in that cell, she cried out with a guttural scream and began bending over and dropping to her knees. She would have fallen all the way over had Vince not gotten there and grabbed her.
When George ran back there to protect his best friend and saw it too, it took his breath away. “Good Lord!” he said.
Then he looked at Vince. “Is that her sister?” George asked, although, given Ricki’s reaction, it went without asking.
But Vince was too worried about Ricki to answer him. He had to push away several cops who tried to manhandle her to get her to leave the area, and George had to frantically tell those officers that that was Ricki’s sister, and his client, who had hung herself.
But as Ricki was forced back up front, still being held up by Vince, they could say it all day long. They could declare her baby sister killed Dr. Proctor and committed suicide out of guilt until they were blue in the face. But she wasn’t ever going to believe that either.
She collapsed against Vince before she could get back up front.
She didn’t know what she would have done without him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The ride back to the hotel was eerily quiet. Ricki had gone from hysterical to nearly catatonic by the time they were pulling up into the hotel’s parking lot. But when the limo stopped, nobody moved.
George was as floored as Vince was. He’d never seen anything like it before in all of his years of practicing law. That poor girl! She looked so young in that cell. And as he looked over at Ricki, he could not imagine what was going through her head. When he first met her, he didn’t get it. She was nothing like the sophisticated women Vince always went for. And she was young too. She couldn’t be thirty yet! He wondered what on earth did Vince see in this kid? And why would he call him all the way from D.C. to help her sister out? It made no sense. He had three wives he didn’t treat this well while he was married to them, nor did he pay this amount of attention to any of them ever. What was it about this girl???
But when George saw the way Vince grabbed hold of Ricki at that jail cell, and the way he looked at her with anguish in his eyes, as if he could feel her pain, he knew then this was no ordinary hookup. And the way Vince was still holding her in that limousine as if she was the most precious thing in this world to him, made George all the more certain that there was something deeper going on. Something he would have called perhaps even love, but he knew Vince didn’t know the meaning of the word.
“What’s next?” George asked his boss and best friend.
“Get a team of investigators here,” Vince said.
“Milo in charge?”
“Absolutely,” said Vince. “And you use your law license to get inside the legal community around here. I’m sure they’ve heard of your cases even if they may not know your face. Find out all you can about Erica Richardson’s case.”
Both George and Ricki were surprised for different reasons. They both looked at Vince. “And what are we investigating exactly?” George asked.
Vince didn’t want to get Ricki’s hopes up, but there was no way he was going to let that stand. “You’ll be investigating the murder of Erica Richardson.”
George was shocked. “Murder? But they were saying she hung herself.”
Ricki was relieved. “You know it too, don’t you, Vince? You know my sister didn’t commit suicide like they’re saying. Don’t you, Vince?”
Vince shook his head. “Yes, Ricki,” he said. “She didn’t kill herself.”
Ricki was so hyperaware of Vince that she even realized that was the first time he had called her by her nickname. Something was changing. “Thank you for believing in my sister,” she said. “She wasn’t a bad person like they’re trying to claim.”
Vince pulled her closer against him. He didn’t know about all of that, but he knew her sudden “suicide” was just a little too coincidental for his taste.
But George didn’t know the backstory. He only knew what he saw. “May I ask why do you believe it wasn’t a suicide?” he asked Vince.
“Vince told him the story of Erica and the man she was alleged to have killed. And that so-called drunk pickup truck driver. “Only I don’t believe for a second he was drunk.”
“I see,” said George. “Something’s amiss in Mayberry USA.”
