Page 106 of Bling

“Is that all you’re going to tell me? I need more than that, don’t you think?”

He sighed. “I promise I’ll tell you everything soon. I want to have Jax and some of the other investigators I have working on this verify her information first.”

She scowled. “Now I wish I’d gone with you.”

“Come on. Sit in my office and tell me how your morning meetings went.”

She didn’t really want to, but she gathered her stack of folders and the bag of food and followed him into his office.

When she was settled on his sofa with the folders on the coffee table in front of her, she gave him a rundown of her experience playing the role of supervisor for a day.

“I’m just fascinated by how disjointed all of the departments seem,” she said. “It seems like it would be better if each department knew what the other department was doing. But, for example, I had no idea what the inside of the storage bays even looked like until I talked to Jake in sorting this morning, and I’ve been here for five years.”

“That seems like something easy to fix. Training everyone in every department is a little cost prohibitive, but it wouldn’t be difficult to give everyone a basic understanding of each department as part of their orientation. Something beyond the basic summaries in the handbooks.”

“The problem is, not even your department heads seem to know what’s happening in other departments.”

Garrett scratched his chin and pulled out his phone to type something. “I’ll have to see why that is.”

“Thank you, Isabelle. It sounds like you did a wonderful job.”

She smiled and bit into a French fry. “I tried my best. Now will you tell me more about what my sister said? I don’t care if you wind up not being able to verify it, I just want to know what she told you.”

He growled and ran a hand through his hair. “OK. You’re right. You deserve to hear everything. A few weeks after she was fired, she received a phone call from Darren Gunn asking her to come in after hours one night. He told her they had been watching her and her daughters and that she had seventy-two hours to complete a task for them or she would wind up like Helen Peters. At the time, she didn’t know what had happened to Helen, so she went home and looked her up and discovered she was dead. She ignored Darren’s demands at first and she received surveillance style photos of her girls in the mail with the same demand a few days later.”

Isabelle’s eyes grew wide with horror. “Who is ‘they’?” she asked.

Garrett shook his head. “She either doesn’t know or she wouldn’t tell me.”

“So how does credit card fraud fit into all of this?”

“Again, not something she would fully tell me. The answer she gave was that she tried to escape Darren’s hold and got caught.”

Isabelle felt herself trembling with rage as she thought of what her sister must have gone through. “I feel like such an awful sister for not fighting harder to keep her out of jail.”

Garrett moved to sit next to her on the couch. “Don’t do that to yourself, Doll. It will lead to madness, believe me. Right now, she’s probably safer in jail just like you said last week. Had you kept her from going to prison, she might well have met the same fate as Helen Peters.”

“Fuck,” Isabelle bit out. “I just want this to be over.”

“Me too, baby. Me too. You’ve done really well today, and I know you have to work at the hotel tonight. Why don’t you do me a favor and go home? Be with your family, get some rest. I wore you out this weekend,” he said with a wink. “We’ll talk more tomorrow—tonight if you come to my room after you get off.”

She gave a resigned sigh and nodded. “OK. You sure you don’t want to come with me?”

He caressed her face. “I’ve got some things to take care of that I’ve been neglecting for far too long.”

“Sorry,” she murmured. “I’m sure that’s because of me.”

He tucked stray hairs behind her ears. “Don’t. I love being with you. Go get some rest and I’ll get some work done. We’ve got your family reunion this weekend to look forward to.”

She gave him a sad smile and let him kiss her on the cheek.

The next two days were stressful, and Isabelle found herself irritated by everything. Despite the relaxed schedule she had switched to at both places, having two jobs was taking its toll and she was ready to be done with it. Being near Garrett soothed her, but she spent most of her time feeling bad for her sister. He chided her multiple times, telling her it would do no good to dwell on the past. They would do their best to help her when the danger was gone.

Wednesday evening, she sat at home while Garrett worked late, but he promised her a phone call when he was done. At nine, her phone rang, and she grabbed it without looking at the number. Instead of Garrett’s velvet smooth voice, she was met with a robotic voice asking her to accept the charges. Heaving a sigh, she hit the appropriate number on her keypad and waited to be connected to Carmen.

“Izzy, I’m glad you answered. Are the girls up?”

“Yeah. Give me a sec, I’ll get them.”

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