Page 112 of Fighting Conviction
Ellie felt her eyes prick. It’d been a year. A whole year and nothing had been done at all. She knew BlackStone had been working on finding the true culprits of the trafficking, understood that a bigger picture was at stake, that justice takes time, but the silence had been deafening. She was glad they were finally on track.
“The other two were also served warrants and are currently in jail without bail. I’ll be doing my damnedest to make sure that’s the case for all thesecabrónes.” ADA Aguilar’s voice hardened at the end.
“Ellie, what we want to know is how you got mixed up with Burgess.” Hawk propped his elbow on his crossed arm and tapped his lip
“Yeah, what the actual fuck happened?” Jason looked as if he was going to ask more but Dev’s chest rumbled.
“Show her some respect. Ellie didn’t just save her own life, she also saved Virginia’s. She deserves to be treated like a hero, not a child.”
Ellie’s heart fluttered that Dev came to her defense and she was sure the moisture stinging her eyes was going to escape at any moment. But she rolled her shoulders back and cleared her throat, intent on telling them the whole story. How the investigator, or Burgess as they called him, had kidnapped her by shooting and using Virginia as leverage. How he’d seemed sick and was talking to his dead wife.
“Sheriff Motts thinks Burgess had early onset dementia. He wasn’t even supposed to be at the party yesterday, apparently,” ADA Aguilar offered.
Ellie noticed Snake’s brow raise, but she wasn’t sure of the reason, only that she disagreed with the prosecutor. “I don’t think it was dementia,” Ellie explained. “Investigator Burgess was gonna let me and V go, but he got a visitor.”
“A visitor? Who?” Hawk straightened and crossed both arms.
“A Russian guy named Vlad. H-He’s the same one who kidnapped me. Probably you too, Nora.”
Everyone looked to Nora and she paled before she swallowed and spoke in hushed tones. “Then he’s the same one who shot Drake… Wh—What happened?”
“He gave Investigator Burgess drugs, I’m very sure they were drugs. I watched him shoot them up in his arm.” Everyone in the room swore. “Then Vlad took pictures of Burgess’s board he had in his living room and set everything on fire.”
“What the fuck, that’s messed up,” Officer Brown said. “I-I thought he’d overdosed and accidentally set his house on fire with that damn lighter he’s always flickin’.”
“Was he alive?” Jules asked.
“He’s not now,” ADA Aguilar muttered and Ellie’s heart cracked at the heavy blunt finality in the statement. Investigator Burgess was sick, not evil. Or at least she hoped.
She swallowed before speaking again. “I don’t think he was alive when the fire happened. It seemed like whatever he shot himself up with either put him out, or was… bad. I’m pretty sure he was gone before the fire was started.”
“How did you get out?” Jason asked in a quiet voice, as if he wasn’t ready to hear what she had to say.
Ellie recounted how she got out of handcuffs, duct tape, and got Virginia out of the pantry and into the root cellar, and how Dev found her after she’d fought her way to the surface. When she finished, everyone in the room but Dev had varying expressions of shock. His hand rested on her shoulder and he drew small circles on the back of her neck with his thumb.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Phoenix said. “Hawk, we got any openin’s? Might could use a pretty face around here other than just mine and Devil’s. Oh, and sweet baby Nora’s, of course.” He shot a teasing grin at Nora.
Jason smacked him in the chest and the jokester shot his arm out and grabbed the table to catch himself from falling from his two chair legs.
“Nope, no siree, absolutely not,” Nora laughed and crossed her arms. “I’ve retired from the game, boys. You’ll have to drag me back in, kickin’ and screamin’.”
“I am curious, Devil,” Hawk began. “How did you know she was in there? I didn’t even notice the root cellar door, but you were right there seconds before she escaped. It was flat to the ground and covered with dirt. Did you hear her?”
“Yeah, how did you know?” Ellie looked back at him to see confusion written on his face.
He scrubbed his beard and tilted his head at his teammates. “I heard you screaming, ‘in here, in here.’ I’m surprised you guys didn’t hear her, she was loud as hell.”
Hawk and Phoenix both shrugged but Ellie shivered and turned around to look up at Dev.
“You heard me screaming ‘in here’?”
Dev nodded and laughed. “Yeah, it was hard to hear over the fire but when I saw the cellar door, I realized I wasn’t just hearing what I wanted to hear. Then I saw you pushing your way through the doors to get out.”
Ellie pursed her lips in thought and turned back around. She didn’t recall screaming anything, except when she was exerting all her strength on pushing up the door. But maybe she wasn’t remembering it right. It all seemed to be a blur.
“Can we circle back to something?” ADA Aguilar asked.
“Sure, take the floor,” Hawk offered.
