Page 36 of Secrets Beneath the Waves

Ramon heard the girl’s sharp intake of breath and shook his head. “I’m good. At least until the ambulance gets here.”

Zeyla turned on the front walk, her hands on her hips. “Do you know who she is?” She jerked her chin in the direction of the girl. “Because we can find out how to get her parents here if you don’t. Or they can meet us at the hospital.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” The detective eyed them both with more than a small amount of suspicion.

Ramon wasn’t exactly unaccustomed to being looked at that way. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

The other detective stepped out of the house. “I called in and asked for the medical examiner and crime scene investigators. An ambulance will be here in a second. They were just around the corner, wrapping something up.”

Ramon could already hear the sirens, and a second later, the ambulance pulled onto the street.

The detective started to say something, but Ramon stepped off the concrete porch onto the path and passed Zeyla on the way to the curb. As soon as the ambulance pulled up, the EMTs got out, and he walked with them to the back door of the vehicle.

He quietly explained her state of dress and what had happened to her.

“We can take it from here. Just set her down.” The EMT had dark brown hair pulled back into a bun. She patted the gurney. “Nice and easy.”

Ramon did as she instructed. The girl clasped a handful of his shirt. He dipped his head and looked in her eyes. “Everything is going to be okay now. You’re safe.”

The EMT touched her shoulder with a gloved hand. “Let’s get you taken care of.”

The girl’s fingers let go of his shirt, and he stepped back, turning to find one of the detectives immediately in front of him.

“You know her?” The detective nodded in the direction of the ambulance.

Ramon shook his head. “I’ve never met her in my life. What’s her name?”

Maizie had told him, but right now, he didn’t need them to know that. Hopefully, that would be enough to convince the detective that he wasn’t mixed up in this somehow. Apart from being the one who’d rescued the girl.

“Her name is Bella Sanchez.” The detective held his gaze with a steady stare.

“Who are these guys?”

“How about you tell me how you knew where to find her when she’s only been missing a matter of hours? That seems like a more pertinent question right now.”

“I’m a private investigator, and I’ve been on this case barely three days. How long have you been working it, and you haven’t been able to stop these young women from being taken?”

The detective didn’t back down. “That’s the kind of accusation that will get you put in a jail cell overnight. Just until we make sure that everything you say is true, and all your credentials are intact.”

Okay, so that might cause him some problems unless Maizie could do some magic before they ran his private investigator’slicense. Maybe he shouldn’t have told them that he was a licensed investigator. But the fact was that one of the men who had kidnapped this girl was now in custody, and the other was dead. Which meant plenty of forensic evidence, and if they could get Drew to flip, they would also have testimony that could lead them to the suspect.

“You wouldn’t know where she was if it wasn’t for us,” he pointed out. “And Bella would still be in that house, naked and scared out of her mind.”

“That’s why we’re going to talk about everything.”

Ramon glanced at Zeyla, who was talking to the other detective. He had no clue what she was saying. Hopefully, she was handling the conversation better than he was handling this one. “I’m happy to tell you whatever you need to know. We’ve been working with Pioneer Forensics, and I believe you’ve been given every report that they produced from what we gave them.”

“I’ll be sure to follow up on that.”

Ramon said, “You do that. Because there’s a firefighter in police custody who is one of this girl’s kidnappers, and he should be able to tell you even more than I can.”

Not for the first time, he hoped that justice would be done in a situation where otherwise it might not be. After all, things hadn’t been going on for this long without someone in the police department covering up evidence or testimony.

“Maybe he can even take you to who he was working for when he took her.”

But Ramon still wasn’t going to leave it alone, even when the police had everything they needed to solve the case.

He was also going to do everything he could to ensure that justice was done.