“Where?” Vero demanded.
“I don’t know.”
Vero got in his face. “Think harder, Ben. I have all day.”
But Verodidn’thave all day. She’d had only an hour when we’d left her house more than forty-five minutes ago. I checked my phone for the time and nearly choked. “Vero, your curfew! We need to—”
An alarm ripped through the conference room, the piercing wail ricocheting off the walls. The light on her ankle monitor began blinking red, and we all covered our ears as a robotic voice boomed from the vicinity of Vero’s sneakers. “Curfew violation. Contact your monitoring officer immediately.”
Vero was the picture of cool as she patted Bennett on the shoulder. “See? Telling the truth wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” she asked over the shriek of the alarm.
Bennett’s face flushed as his curious colleagues began gathering in the hall. They covered their ears and stared through the glass. “If you come here again, I’ll report you to the cops,” he warned her.
“You value that sterling reputation of yours too much to do it!” Vero dared him.
Ramón and Javi grabbed her under her arms and carried her backward out of the conference room, her alarm blaring in our wake.
“Weren’t you watching the time?” Ramón shouted over Vero’s alarm as we clambered into the van.
She hiked up her pant leg and attempted to stifle it. “I was a little busy, Ramón!”
“What do we do?” I asked as I sped out of the parking lot. “It says you’re supposed to call your monitoring officer.”
“That’s a little difficult when you don’t have a phone!”
Javi leaned forward, clutching the back of my seat. “We should just keep driving. If we hurry, we can cross the bridge back to Virginia before anyone finds her.”
“We arenotdoing that.” There was no way I was going to be implicated for transporting a runaway felon across state lines. Definitely not to the jurisdiction where my boyfriend and my sister were serving as cops. “If we’re proactive and follow the monitor’s instructions, she’s less likely to get in any more trouble. We’ll just call her monitoring service and tell them we got stuck in traffic or something.” Traffic was synonymous with living near the Beltway. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation for being late. “Tell them you were on your way home from your errands, but you got stuck behind an accident.”
Vero reached for my phone.
“Not that one,” Ramón said. There was a warning in his eyes when they caught mine in the rearview mirror. He passed his own cell phone to Vero instead. He was right. If Vero’s monitoringofficer knew she had violated her curfew with me, that might raise some eyebrows.
Vero tilted her head to read the phone number printed on the side of her ankle monitor. She tapped it into Ramón’s cell and put it on speaker, holding up a hand to silence us when the call connected. Considering all the noise coming from her alarm, there hardly seemed any point.
“Officer Oates? Hi, this is Veronica Ramirez,” she said, a little too cheerfully. “I’m having a small problem with my ankle monitor, as you can probably hear.”
The officer’s tone was disconcertingly serious. “The problem wouldn’t be a problem if you had been home ten minutes ago. Where are you?”
“I’m almost there. See, I was running my essential errands, but there was an accident on my way home, and we got stuck in traffic. But we’re on our way! We should be back at my mother’s house any minute. Do you think there’s some way you could turn off the alarm? It’s very hard to concentrate on the road with all the—”
The alarm cut off abruptly, plunging the van into silence until all I could hear was the ringing in my ears and the rattle of my muffler.
“Who iswe?” Officer Oates asked.
“I’m… not sure what you mean,” Vero stammered.
“You saidwe’reon our way. Who’s with you?”
Vero looked sideways at me as I furiously shook my head. “I’m… with my cousin,” she said, picking the only saint among us.
“Really? Because I could have sworn I parked right behind Ramón’s work van when I pulled into your driveway two minutes ago.”
“You did?” Vero paled.
“I did,” the officer said. “I was on my way home from workwhen your monitoring unit alerted me about your curfew violation, so I took a little detour to see for myself. It’s a very,verygood thing you called me before I called you, Ms. Ramirez.”
Vero’s laugh was brittle. “I bet.”
