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.”
“It would appear,” said Vince.
“And why,” asked Ricki, “would they allow a prisoner to have a rope that thick in her cell? They couldn’t hardly cut that thing it was so thick.”
Neither Vince nor George had even noticed that. “That’s true,” George said. Then he looked at Vince. “While we’re investigating, what are you going to be doing in the meantime?”
“I’m getting her out of this town until you can get me some information. I don’t want whomever is behind this to try to do to her what they did to her sister.”
“I’ll get a security detail up here too,” said George. “I told you about roaming this countryside without security.”
“Don’t worry about me. Nor Ricki. I’ll take care of her. You just find out everything you can.”
George nodded. “Will do. Where will you be?”
“At my estate.”
“And which estate is that, Mr. Fontaine? Is it the one here in Connecticut, or the one in Chicago, or the one in L.A., or the one in Paris, or the one in Rome, or the one back in D.C.?”
He had that many estates? Ricki was floored. She knew he was rich. But that sounded like a different level of rich. Not that it mattered. It didn’t. Facing the fire did. “I have to go tell our parents,” she said.
Vince looked at her. He had forgotten about her folks. But he hadn’t forgotten how much she wanted to avoid her folks. “I’m sure the police will notify them eventually.”
But she was shaking her head. “I have to tell them. I can’t let the police do it. They don’t care about Erica. They’ll try to make like everything was Erica’s fault when that’s not true.”
Still championing her sister to the end. How could he disapprove of that kind of loyalty? “Okay,” he said as he tapped on the window and the limo driver, who was standing at the back passenger door, opened the door for him. “Keep me in the loop,” he said to George.
“Do they have any five-star hotels in this God forsaken town?” George asked.
“You’ll have to go to Hartford,” said Vince. “But don’t go too far afield. I want answers.”
“And you’ll get them,” said George. “Don’t you worry about that.”
And then Vince and Ricki got out of the limousine.
But instead of going up to their room, they walked over to the Bentley.
Vince could see a few scratches on the front grill from that incident with that pickup truck, but nothing that noticeable.
Considering the way he went off of that road, he was pleased that was all there was.
But it did remind him that all still wasn’t resolved.
He put Ricki on the front passenger seat, got in under the steering wheel, and they made the slow drive to her parents’ home.