Chapter Nineteen
The police station was buzzing with activity. Officers and clerks were running up and down the hallways, charging side to side in different directions with piles and piles of papers and files in their hands as they hurried along.
I looked around, overwhelmed.
I wasn’t sure what I was doing there. I’d told myself I was going to visit my father at the hospital but had ended up here instead. What I was looking for I couldn’t put my finger on exactly but I knew it had something to do with Paul Ryan and his son.
I had to know that they had the right person.
The sheriff hurried past me, his head buried into a small notepad as he flipped rapidly through the pages. He looked frazzled, heavy bags lined the bottoms of his lids like he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before.
That made two of us.
Although, I was sure my reasons were dirtier than his.
Speaking of dirty I was pretty sure if Asher knew I was here he wouldn’t be too happy about it. I had promised I would leave this part up to him, letting him use one of his security guys to dig into this issue and find out what kind of evidence they had on Paul Ryan’s boy.
I’d had every intention of following through, yet, here I was.
I couldn’t help it, it was like my legs had a mind of their own, making me show up here. I just kept picturing Trevor’s face in my mind as he was carried out of his house and shoved into the back of a police car. He didn’t look guilty, he just looked terrified.
I hated myself for even thinking it, for even having these doubts, but could the police possibly have the wrong man? Was that possible? You read about in the paper or heard about it on the news more times than you should. An innocent man sitting in jail for years only to be proven innocent years later after wasting his life away behind bars.
The thought terrified me.
I knew I was being paranoid but I just couldn’t shake this feeling that something was off… nothing about this felt right. And if I didn’t get the closure I would spend the rest of my life feeling unsure.
“Sheriff,” I called out, rushing toward him.
He looked up, confusion on his face at the sight of me. “Bella? What… what are you doing here?” He slipped the small pad of paper into his upper shirt pocket quickly.
Like I could see anything from down here.
“I came for an update on the case.” I moved closer to him, keeping my voice low. “You guys just rushed out of there after you loaded Trevor up yesterday… I didn’t even get a chance to talk to anybody about what was happening.”
The sheriff frowned. “Bella, you know I can’t discuss the details of an ongoing investigation with anyone who isn’t law enforcement.” He padded me on the shoulder and started pushing me toward the door of the station. “Tell you what, why don’t you hurry home and I’ll be in touch when I have some information I can pass on, okay?”
“The hell you can’t!” I hissed. “It’s my father were talking about here!”
“And I understand you’re upset, Bell, trust me, but the law is the law.”
“The hell with the law, Sheriff!” I pushed my teeth together angrily. “This is my father we’re talking about! MY FATHER!” I knew I sounded crazy but I didn’t care, I deserved some answers.
The sheriff sighed and lowered his voice, putting his arm on my shoulder and guiding me toward the corner of the room. “Bella, I can’t understand what you must be feeling right now but you need to let me do my job and I can’t do that if you’re poking around interfering every two seconds. We made an arrest and we have evidence to back that arrest up, that’s all you need to know right now.”
I shook my head, that wasn’t enough for me. “I want to know why you arrested Trevor! I want to know exactly what you have on him!” I felt my legs starting to tremble under me. “Something doesn’t feel right here, Sheriff!”
The sheriff frowned, a mix of sympathy and annoyance playing across his face. “You should really go home now, Bella, you don’t look well.” He gave my shoulder a pat and turned away.
I wanted to go after him, to tell him he hadn’t seen well yet! But before I had a chance to move Paul Ryan was rushing toward me, waving his hands in my face. “You see? You see what you did now!”
I shot my body backward, startled.
“You just had to keep poking around, didn’t you? Causing trouble!” He was pointing his thick fingers right in my face, shaking them back and forth. “Now my boy is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit! And who do you think is going to get him out? Not all of us have rich boyfriends who can come to our rescue!”
I moved backward, tripping over someone behind me. “Mr. Ryan, I…”
The sheriff got between us just before a few officers in uniform came over and started to pull Mr. Ryan backward. Paul’s eyes filled with tears as he was being dragged away from me. “You think I can afford this? My poor boy! You’ll pay for this, Bella! Just wait and see! You’ll pay!”
The sheriff turned to me and sighed. “Tensions are high enough around here already, Bella, I beg of you… go home.” He shook his head and moved away from me right before a few officers started to push me out the front of the station.
I freed myself from their grip. “I got it, I got it.”
I panted deeply on the front steps of the building, Asher was right; me going there had only made me feel worse. I was beginning to think he could predict the future. I had come there for closure but all I had gained was a deeper sense of emptiness.
“Well, that looked ugly.”
I jumped about ten feet off the ground and looked down the front steps. Josh stood at the bottom, a pile of thick folders in his hands combined with a lopsided cocky grin.
Jesus, did he always have to pop up everywhere I was?
“It’s none of your business,” I snapped, taking the steps down two at a time and hurrying past him toward the back of the parking lot where I had parked Asher’s truck.
“I didn’t say it was.” Josh followed me effortlessly, barely having to stretch his long legs to catch up with me. “It just looked like you could use a friend right now, that’s all.”
I turned around, stopping him in his tracks. “Back off Josh or I swear to God I’ll scream so loud that every cop in the place will hear me and come running.”
Josh glanced behind me toward Asher’s truck and raised his eyebrows. “I see Asher sent you to deal with this all alone, he must care about you a whole lot.” He shot me a sympathetic look but it was laced with fakeness. “I mean… don’t tell me you guys are an item now?”
I rolled my eyes. “Jesus, it’s always Asher, Asher, Asher with you. You’re clearly obsessed with him or something.” I gestured toward the station in the back of him. “Maybe I should take out a restraining order for him while I’m here.”
Josh’s face clouded with anger. “You’re a bitch, you know that?”
“Ouch.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Did I touch a nerve?”
“Forget it,” Josh shook his face back and forth fiercely. “I was just trying to show you something, get you some closure about the shit that went down with your dad, but you don’t deserve anything from me.”
I watched him walk away for a few steps before I started to chase him down. The fact that I was going anywhere near him made me sick but the idea that I could find out anything about my dad’s case was too much for me to ignore. Josh was probably full of shit but I owed it to my father to at least know for sure.
“Wait, please, wait!” I set my hands on his shoulders, slipping my body in front of his so he couldn’t go any further. “I’m sorry, okay? I just… I’m having a bad day.”
“Clearly,” Josh huffed like a five-year-old.
It felt like eating rocks making myself apologize to him when every part of my body was screaming that he was a piece of crap. “I just… if you know anything about what happened with my dad then I need to know, Josh, I need to feel okay again.”
I didn’t realize just how true the words were until they left my mouth. The only time I felt okay lately was when I was with Asher or looking at all the progress that had been down on the barn. The rest of the time I felt like a zombie.
“Well,” Josh said, his face turning from angry to smug. “I have a lot of friends, you know? Very important friends.” He paused and let his words hang in the air so they would set in.
I guess I was supposed to be impressed.
“And sometimes,” he continued. “My important friends ask me to do certain jobs for them, they need help with things.” He picked up one of the files in his hands and waved it back and forth a few times. “Like, for example, my friend who works for the District Attorney’s office asked me to bring some of these case files to the sheriff for him, he’s had a busy day, and do you want to know who’s file just happens to be at the top of the pile?” He nudged it closer to my eyes a little bit.
“My father’s?” I gulped.
Josh nodded. “Well, Trevor Ryan’s to be exact, but aren’t they the same thing?” He ran one of his fingers back and forth over the corners of the file. “Now I guess I could give you a little look…”
I grabbed for the file but he pulled it back quickly. “Ah, ah, I can’t just let you look at an ongoing investigation file, Bella, my friend could lose his job over it.”
“What do you want?” I narrowed my eyes.
“It’s a complicated question.” He smirked for a second before continuing. “All I want, Bella, is for you to remember I did this for you… and that you owe me.”
“I owe you?” I asked slowly.
“Yup.”
“I owe you what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know yet. You owe me a favor when I need it someday, just like I’m doing you a favor right now.” He ran his hands back and forth over the folder again. “The call is yours.”
A favor? I didn’t like the sound of that and I knew Asher would hate the sound of it. But what choice did I have really? It would be wrong to look at the file but it would probably put my anxiety about the night my father got hit to bed once and for all and that would be worth it: even if it did mean striking a deal with the devil to get there.
“Fine,” I ground my teeth together. “I owe you one, Josh.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” He smirked and opened the file slowly. “Behold, the truth about what happened to your father that night, Bella, I think you’ll be surprised at how good it feels to not have to worry about this anymore.”
I let my eyes scan up and down the pages, taking in the pictures, reports, and statements they had pushed together with a few paperclips. The first thing I saw was the red truck Asher and I had seen at the garage. There were photos of it from every angle, close ups of the chipped paint from my father’s truck, and interior shots of the seats and dashboard speckled with blood.
I felt my heart drop at the photos. “Is that?”
“Yep,” Josh told me eagerly. “The blood splatter in the car was traced back to the sample the doctors took from your father when he was brought in. Trevor probably got out to check on your father and then got back in his car with some of his blood on his hands when he took off.”
“So, he just… he just left him there after he checked on him?” Tears welled up in my eyes and started to slowly drip down my cheeks. “Why didn’t he call anyone? Maybe if someone had found him sooner…”
“He wouldn’t be in a coma,” Josh filled in the blanks again. “You haven’t even seen the witness statement yet.” He flicked through a few more pages and pulled out a white piece of paper with hand written letters up and down the page. “The kid who was out with Trevor that night confessed to the whole thing, gave the cops all the details they needed.”
I went to reach for the paper but Josh flipped the folder shut quickly as a group of officers passed by us. “You should be glad that he’s off the streets, Trevor’s a really troubled kid, Bella, it’s good he’s locked up. I mean, do you see how those people live? In squalor? You know what they say about people who live with the trash… they act like it.”
I looked at him in disbelief. My father was in a coma, a kid’s life was ruined, and those were the kinds of comments he was making? “You’re an ignorant son of a bitch, you know that?” I turned around and took off in a run toward the truck, desperate to get away from him.
“Don’t forget, you owe me, Bella,” Josh called out after me, smirking. “And you better believe I’ll be making good on that debt, sweetheart. You take care now.”
My only response was the slam of my door and the roar of the engine.