“I want to see her.”
“Marco, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“I don’t care. Whatever you have to do, I have to meet with her, talk to her.”
Ricky shook his head, but then said, “Let me go rattle some cages.”
The police moved me to a holding cell where I waited for two additional hours. When someone approached, I looked up, only to find David Carr standing outside the bars, looking as smug as I’d ever seen him.
“You’re going down, bucko.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “That so?” I asked coolly.
“You think you’re all that and a bag of chips, hitting on my little sister. Defiling her. She was innocent, you asshole, and you ruined her.”
My temper, already near boiling just at the sight of him, boiled over. “I’m not the one setting her up as my own personal spy.”
“It’s better than letting her launder money without her knowledge. She’s trusting to a fault, always has been.”
“And you took advantage of that trust.” I grabbed a hold of the bars, shaking them until they jangled.
“It’s for her own good. I had to do it. To show her who you truly were. I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t believe me. She does now, though. She knows exactly what you are now.”
He left and I considered punching my hand through the cement wall. I felt desperate to speak to Kelly, to make sure she was okay. I wanted to explain, to see if I could make this right. I didn’t know how, but I had to see her again.
An officer approached, keeping his back to me as he quickly unlocked my door. At first, I watched him, wondering if I should anticipate a problem, but when he pivoted around I recognized him as one of ours. Thank Christ.
“I’m here to escort you to a meeting with your attorney,” he said, at a normal speaking level, just in case anyone else were to listen in. The hour had grown late, so there were far fewer police officers milling around.
He brought me to a conference room where someone stood staring out the window at the mostly empty parking lot. It wasn’t my attorney, though.
It was Kelly.
At nearly a foot shorter than me, I’d always thought of her as petite. Now, with her arms crossed and her back turned, she looked more than petite. She looked tiny and fragile. Like a china doll.
“Kelly,” I said, to get her attention, the tone of my voice an entreaty.
She twisted around, and the look in her vivid starburst eyes halted me in my tracks. She didn’t look fragile like I’d originally believed. No. The hard lines of her face spoke of nothing more than fury.
“You lied to me,” she accused.
“I didn’t.”
“You did. You didn’t tell me the truth. My brother kept telling me you and your family were part of the mob, and I denied it. I told him he was wrong and that you couldn’t be a criminal. No, not my Marco. But he was right. He was right about you.”
“I…” I wanted to tell her I was still her Marco, but I could see that would get me nowhere. “I never meant to lie to you. Even through omission. I just didn’t want you involved, didn’t want you sullied by all that.”
“But you did involve me, Marco. You let me work for you, count all that money and do all your bookkeeping knowing that you were creating false trails for those funds to go through.” She rubbed her arms over her sweater as if cold.
“You’re right. I was being selfish. I liked having you so close to me both at work and at home.”
“That cottage suite isn’t really your home, though, is it?”
“I couldn’t take you to my real home,” I said, my hands raising automatically to gesticulate but were hampered by my restraints.
“Why not?”
“Because the mansion is where we run our operations. Our headquarters are right there on the third floor. I didn’t want you to become entangled in that l