Chapter 26
David
Bobby let me off at the main doors of the office building. I saw the guard lying unconscious on the floor, thinking Donovan must have pushed him awfully hard to make him blackout like that. I’d seen Donovan pull that move before, but never with this amount of damage.
I pushed the button on the elevator even as I heard the sirens approaching. Just like the cops to arrive minutes too late. I didn’t bother to wait. Let them find their own way to the executive floor.
Donovan was standing over a young, pretty blond I instantly recognized as Ricki’s assistant.
“Where is she?”
Donovan pointed.
I rolled my chair around the bleeding woman and that’s when I saw her, lying on the floor in a puddle of her own blood. I rolled to a stop just a few feet away and leaned forward, spilling myself out of my chair so that I could touch her.
“Ricki?”
I ran my hand over her head, her scalp, trying to find the source of the blood. Then I turned her head and found a rather large gash on the side of her head. I tore at my own shirt, using the scrap to put pressure on the wound.
“Ricki?”
She moaned, and it was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard.
“She okay?” Donovan called to me, still standing over the other woman with his gun trained on her.
“I think so.”
“I called for an ambulance, but I’m not sure this one will need it.”
“Should probably call Detective Warren. They’re plainclothes downstairs.”
Donovan pulled his phone out as Ricki moaned again. I ran my hand over the top of her head and whispered, “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
But I really didn’t know that, did I? I should have been here. I should have protected her.
The cops arrived seconds after the ambulance, flooding the floor with their presence, with their questions. Ash arrived just as they were taking Ricki away on the gurney. I wanted to go with her, but the uniforms were making me wait so that I could answer questions. Donovan was in cuffs. It would all be worked out when Emily arrived, but she wasn’t getting here fast enough.
“I need to be with Ricki.”
“I know,” Ash said, “but we have to cooperate with the cops first.”
I shook my head, frustration burning in my chest. I watched them disappear onto the elevator with Ricki and could hear her moans still slipping from her lips. I needed to be with her. It was a burning thing that lived in my chest. It was like the need to breathe when you were ten feet under water.
I paced, if you could call rolling a wheelchair up and down a hallway pacing. The cops kept telling me to be still, to wait patiently, but I couldn’t. I needed to go.
I’d let her down. I wasn’t going to let her wake in the hospital alone.
I was seriously thinking about grabbing one of the cops’ guns when Emily walked off of the elevator. You could feel the respect these cops had for her. The entire attitude of the cops changed the moment they saw her.
Emily had things smoothed over in a matter of minutes. Just a few words with Donovan and the first cop to arrive and it was all done.
Ash drove me to the hospital. The doctors were with Ricki, but they let me back the moment they were done.
A concussion, seven stitches in her temple, and a bruised jaw.
She was lucky.
“Don’t ever do that again,” I whispered, as I rolled up to her bedside.
But I’m not sure whom I was really talking to, her or me.
Chapter 27
Ricki
“We ran her fingerprints and discovered her name isn’t actually Jacy. It’s Jennifer Conworth. She’s a college student from Chicago.”
I nodded. It made sense.
“She’s a computer science major. Her family is…dysfunctional is a kind word,” Detective Warren said. “Her mother has been in prison since 2004 for manslaughter, and her father has moved around more often than he’s stayed in one place, moving from job to job, woman to woman, often leaving his children behind for months at a time under the premise of searching for adequate housing. In truth, he has a drug problem and keeping the kids is a hindrance.”
“She was a loner,” I said, “the girl in school that everyone picked on and bullied.”
Detective Warren nodded. “She made several police reports when the bullying went too far, but then her family would move and there was no follow up.”
I nodded again. “And then she found the hacker network and others like her.”
“She found Arabelle Murphy.”
It all made so much sense to me because Jacy was me. I was Jacy.
“We found notebooks in her apartment filled with rhetoric about you,” Detective Warren said, looking right at me. “She was determined to kill you because she believed your actions caused Arabelle Murphy’s death.”