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Elliette stiffened. “I didn’t knock.”
Zimmerman drew a deep breath before saying, “Okay, well start from when you exited the car.”
Elliette’s brows went up. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, tell me what happened during the no knock warrant today,” he ordered. “Tell me from start to finish.”
She was stalling, and it was obvious.
“Okay, so I got out of the car.” Elliette smirked.
Zimmerman didn’t reply, and I could tell that his calm façade was getting to Elliette.
He wasn’t bothered by her slow process, and obvious attempt to stall.
“And so I’m heading up the walk, and I see the suspect trying to flee with a bag,” Elliette babbled. “So after the battering ram was used, I immediately made my move to intercept her escape attempt.”
The lying sack of shit.
I wasn’t trying to escape anyone.
“I was leaving with a bag,” I said to Quinn. “But I’d just told my brother that I wasn’t coming back. I was going to stay at a hotel until I could find something more permanent.”
He grunted, tensing with each word that came out of Elliette’s mouth on the screen.
“So you admit that you saw her before the door was rammed in, and didn’t alert the entry team of this?” he asked. “You realize, correct, that is against department protocol?”
Elliette gave a careless shrug. “I didn’t realize it was against protocol.”
“That’s a lie, too,” Quinn murmured. “We went over everything before they even left the office. Everything. I mean, down to the T. What to do if you were in the house. What to do if you were in the yard leaving. What to do if Costas didn’t give himself up. What to do if he ran. What to do if there were other people in the house.” He shook his head as he reached forward and pressed pause on the phone before reaching both of his arms up to rest the heels of his hands against his eyes. “The number one rule in serving warrants like this is no collateral damage. And you, baby, were collateral damage. She knew that wasn’t allowed.”
I pressed play again, more interested in the rest of the interview than talking about what Elliette did and didn’t know.
Detective Zimmerman continued to ask his questions, and Elliette continued to bald-faced lie to the investigator.
Once the interview was over and the phone went black, I said, “Did you watch the bodycam footage?”
His stomach tensed hard. “Yeah.”
“And what did you think of it?” I asked.
“I think that if I ever have to watch something like that again, I might very well die,” he admitted. “You may not feel pain, baby, but I felt enough watching that to last twenty lifetimes.”
Just thinking about watching the same thing happen to him that happened to me sent shivers down my spine.
No, I may not feel actual pain, but mental pain was thriving well and good inside of me.
“No,” I agreed. “I don’t think I’d like that very much at all, either.”
I may be a handful, but so are my tits. And I think that cancels it out.
—Ande to Shayne
QUINN
“Where are we going?” Shayne asked the next morning.
I pulled up outside the bakery that was on the way to her job—which she agreed to go back to late last night with a text to Silas Mackenzie—and flashed her a grin. “Sustenance for a long day.”
