Man of Honor (Passion in Paradise Book 4) (59 page)

“You bring in a
lawyer, there’ll be no deal to make with me, Sherry,” Zeke warned ominously. 
“I will throw the fucking book at you and I will make it my life’s mission to
make every single charge stick.  You were a part of wrecking a young girl’s
life.  A woman that I grew to adore.  A woman with whom I fell in love.  A
woman that I’d kill and die for, Sherry.  So, I’ll ask you… you really wanna
call a lawyer in here with the evidence you know I’ve already got?”

Turning her head to
look at him with tearful eyes, she whispered, “Zeke, I didn’t know you were in
love with her then.”

“That’s because I
wasn’t in love with her then, Sherry.  She was a
child
.  You and I were
adults.  My feelings for Honor changed later and none of that is ANY of your
business.  Now, do you want to call your lawyer or not?”

“You’re saying you’ll
offer me a deal if I tell you everything I know?”

“What I’m saying is
that I won’t pull the idea of a deal off the table, but my cooperation is
contingent on your willingness to assist me in identifying the two remaining
men that raped, stabbed, and left Honor in a sinkhole to die,” he declared
firmly.

“Then I’m already
doomed, Zeke.  I don’t know who those men were.  Well, other than Tanner,”
Sherry replied, hanging her head in defeat.

Zeke heard Deputy
Hightower’s low curse in his ear and momentarily thought about calling a halt
to the questioning so that he could check on Honor and how he felt must have
shown on his face because in the next moment he heard Honor’s soft voice
reassure him through his mic.  “I’m fine, Zeke.  Keep going,” she urged him
evenly.

The gentle strength
in his words gave him the incentive he needed to keep his ass in his chair. 
“Maybe you don’t know their names, Sherry, but you
might
know something
useful and not realize it.  Angie might have said something to you that could
give us a clue.  Bottom line, you have nothing to lose now by going over that
night with me and everything to gain if we can find something valuable in your
recollections.”

Biting her lip,
Sherry looked up at him with desperation shining in her eyes.  “Please, Zeke,
for the sake of what we once were…”

“Enough,” Zeke clipped
cruelly, leaning forward in his chair.  “The one thing I’ve learned in the past
several years and especially the last 24 hours, Sherry, is that we were
nothing
. 
I didn’t even know you, and I wish like hell that I’d never touched you.  It
sickens me to know that I’ve been with a woman whose act of cruelty condemned a
child to the kind of torture that’s detailed on that video.  It makes my
fuckin’ skin crawl.”

“I have a son,” she
whimpered.  “A husband.  A family.  I know I did something horrible, Zeke, but
I’ve changed.  I’m a good wife and mother, and my boys need me.”

“You’re also the
bitch that left the woman I love and am going to marry in the woods to be
raped, tortured, and nearly murdered.  She
needed
you, too.  I think
that sin trumps whatever so-called good that you’ve done for your family,” he
returned, his voice soft and dangerous.  “Did you know that she doesn’t sleep
through the night for the nightmares, Sherry?  Every single time she closes her
eyes, she takes a trip back to those woods and is forced to relive what
happened.  She wakes up screaming, terrified.  For that alone, I’ll go to my
grave hating you.  So, you need to get that I don’t care WHAT you have waiting
for you at home.  I only care about finding some justice for a woman that was
wronged in so many ways by so many people.”

“It wasn’t my idea!”
Sherry cried. 

“Probably not, but
you were there,” Zeke growled.  “Now, are you going to finally do what you
should have done then and tell me what happened, or am I going to arrest you?”
he asked, unclipping his cuffs from his belt and dangling the shackles between
them over the table.  “It’s up to you, but I really don’t think you’d look all
that great in orange.”

“Talk.  I’ll talk,”
Sherry responded quickly.

Zeke nodded.  “Good
decision; I knew you weren’t stupid, Sherry.  Take me through it.  How did you
even end up in those woods with Angela Hastings that night eight years ago?  As
I recollect, when we parted company for the evening, you told me you were going
to bed.”

Studying her carefully,
Zeke watched as the guilty woman stared at the wall, her choppy breathing the
only sound in the otherwise silent room.  “Sherry, I’m going to need you to
start talking or I’m going to have to assume this interview is over and arrest
you.”

“Give me just a sec
to get my head straight, Zeke.  Could I have some coffee or water, please?”
Sherry whispered, reaching for a tissue from the box in the center of the
conference table.

Zeke fought the urge
to howl?  Did this look like a restaurant?  Was she stupid enough to think that
they could sip coffee and chat like old friends?  On the other hand, maybe the
caffeine would help her focus.  Frowning, Zeke turned to nod toward the one way
mirror behind him, giving the signal to Jeb to comply with her request.

Seeing his movement,
Sherry paled even more.  “Are we being
watched
?” she squeaked, her hands
gripping the edge of the table so tightly that it turned her knuckles white.

“You’re in a police
interrogation room, Sherry,” Zeke answered.  “You’re being watched
and
recorded.”

“Oh, God,” she
whimpered as someone tapped on the door from outside.

Shooting her a hard
look, Zeke rose and crossed to the door, opening it to find Carline waiting
with two steaming cups of black coffee in disposable cups.  “Thanks, Care
Bear,” he told the younger no-nonsense woman softly.  The raven haired lady had
worked for him for two years and she was nothing if not reliable.

“You don’t know how
badly I wanted to spit in that witch’s brew,” she grumbled as she passed the
cups over to him carefully. 

“Oh, I bet I do.” 
Zeke’s lips twitched.  One of Carline’s many job duties was transcription of
any evidence that required it, and the poor woman had been forced to listen to
an audio of what had happened to Honor.  So his secretary knew exactly how
large a role Sherry had played in the events of eight years ago.  That said,
Carline now carried a noticeable grudge against the woman inside the room with
him.

Taking a step back so
his assistant could close the door for him, he quickly carried the coffees back
to the table.  “Alright, Sherry.  You’ve got your damn coffee,” he said,
pushing her paper cup toward her across the surface of the table.  “Enough stalling,”
he ordered, watching her take a sip of the scalding coffee.

“That night… I was
angry when you left.  If you remember, we argued about it.  I wanted you to
stay with me, but you said it was your job to make sure that girl got home
safe,” she began, her voice tinged slightly by bitterness as she stared into
her coffee like it held the secret to the universe. 

Grinding his teeth,
Zeke’s muscles tightened.  He remembered, alright.  She’d been pissed as hell,
but he hadn’t been able to get his mind off Honor.  He’d had a bad feeling ever
since leaving her to wait for her family on the side of the road, and he’d
wanted to make sure she got home.  He could still kick himself for letting her
convince him that she’d be fine waiting on her own.  At the very least, he
should have stayed there until somebody had arrived to fetch her.

But, he hadn’t.  And
he couldn’t change that now.

Instead, he had to
concentrate on finding and punishing the men that had tortured her.  Fuck, the
men that were
still
torturing her.

“I remember, Sherry,”
he acknowledged softly.

“Yes, well, after you
left, Angie called.  We were close friends back then, and since she’d dated you
once upon a time, I asked her if you’d ever made
her
feel like an
afterthought because of your job.”

Zeke’s jaw flexed. 
Leave it to Sherry to make things all about her, he thought angrily.

“Angie went on to ask
what had happened, and I told her about seeing Honor on the side of the road
and how you rushed our evening together to race off and make sure she’d gotten
home safe.  Angie laughed and told me she had an errand to run and asked me to
go with her.  I asked her where she needed to go, but she wouldn’t tell me. 
All she would say was that I’d enjoy what she had to show me,” Sherry
whispered.

So far, this stupid
bitch wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t already pieced together for himself
from the transcripts of the video Honor had been sent.  Impatient, Zeke barked,
“Then what?”

“She picked me up and
we started driving way out in the country.  Before I realized it, we were on
some dirt road that didn’t look like it had been driven on in years.  I asked
her again what we were doing and about that time, we pulled off behind two cars
that had been parked on the side of the lane.

“What kind of cars
were they?” Zeke questioned, his ears perking up.  He knew that Tanner had
driven a black Mustang back then, but he’d always assumed that the men had all
been in the same car since when they’d kidnapped Honor, they’d put her in the
trunk rather than the backseat.

“I… I’m not sure.  I
can’t remember,” Sherry babbled.

“Which is it,
Sherry.  You’re not sure or you can’t remember?  Or are you still trying to
cover up your crimes for an accomplice?”

“I didn’t have an
accomplice!” Sherry objected.

“Really?  Because by
my count, you had at least six of them.”

“I wasn’t a part of
orchestrating that crime, Zeke.  That was all Sherry and Tanner’s doing!”

“The cars, Sherry. 
What kind were they?  Make?  Model?  Year?” Zeke bit the questions out.

“I don’t know
anything
about
cars, Zeke.  I think one was a Mustang.  That’s the one
with the emblem of a horse on it, right?  It was black.”

“And the other
vehicle?”

Running a nervous
hand through her hair, Sherry squeezed her eyes shut.  “It was red and I think
it was an Impala.  My aunt had a car similar to it and hers was an Impala, I
think.  And it had a Tennessee Titans bumper sticker on it.”

Zeke made a note in
the file.  “Any other vehicles there?”

“Not where we parked,
but pulled further off in the woods, there was a motorcycle.  I’m pretty sure
it was a Harley.”

That tracked, Zeke
thought.  The Hell Hound prospect would have had a bike.  “Okay, then what
happened?”

“I followed Angie
through the brush.  It was dark, but I had my Nokia phone and had pulled a
flashlight from the car so we could see.   I was asking her question after
question about why we were there, but she just hissed at me to be quiet and
keep my eyes open.  We could hear men laughing and we just followed the sound. 
When we got to the clearing…”  Sherry’s breath caught in her throat as her eyes
darkened and filled with tears.  “God, when we got to the clearing, the first
thing I heard was her scream.  She was begging them to let her go,” Sherry
whispered, shuddering.  “I still dream about it, too, Zeke.”

“Hard to feel sorry
for a woman that’s partially responsible for the victim’s pain,” Zeke informed
her starkly, his eyes unforgiving as they glared across the table at her.

“I know,” Sherry
breathed.  “But, I wasn’t a
willing
participant.  When Angie pointed at
my phone and told me to start recording what was happening to Honor, I assumed
we were going to help her!  I presumed we’d hightail it out of there and take
it to the police.  It wasn’t until I saw that satisfied smirk on her face that
I knew she was up to something… that somehow she was part of what was
happening.  I’d known she was having an affair on Abel Turner with Harmony’s
husband,” she explained guiltily, “But when one of those men peeled back his
mask and I caught sight of Tanner Suarez, you could have knocked me over with a
feather.  I took one look over at Angela and just KNEW my suspicion about her
bein’ involved was now a FACT.  So, then I asked her why, you know?  As you
said, Honor was just a kid and while I was aggravated that you’d run off to see
if she’d made it home that night, I didn’t hold it against
her
.  Not
really.  I was just pissed that you’d put your stupid duty above our
relationship again.”

“Stay on topic,
Sherry.  We’re not talking about us.  Tell me about that night,” Zeke growled. 
“Why did Angela Hastings say she wanted Honor’s violation recorded?”

“Blackmail.  Honor
knew about her affair with Tanner.  She said that Honor had barged in on them
the previous week.  Evidently, Angie had tried to talk to Honor about it, but
the girl was avoiding her.  Angie was scared that Honor was going to ruin the
meal ticket she had in Abel so she told Tanner to take care of her.”

“And by ‘take care
of’, you mean…”

“Dead girls tell no
tales,” Sherry whispered.  “That’s what she told me that night.  According to
her, Tanner enlisted some help and they decided to…”

“To what?” Zeke
prodded, his jaw clenching as he spoke.

“These were her
words, Zeke.  Not mine,” Sherry clarified before continuing.  “She said that
Tanner and his boys decided to have some fun before they got down to business. 
She wanted the video to use as blackmail if Tanner ever ran his mouth to Abel. 
After…after we left, she had me email a few pics from the video as a reminder
that she still had leverage if his lips ever got overly loose.”