Date With Destiny Page 23

  DaShawn ducked as an officer placed her in the back of a squad car. She told herself not to look at Rashida, but she couldn’t resist taking one last glance. She had to see Rashida’s face one more time. She was looking her dead in the eye when Rashida said, “I’m sorry, too.”

  DaShawn watched Rashida walk away. She watched Rashida walk out of her life for good.

  Shearouse sat in the front seat of the squad car and turned to look through the steel mesh that separated him from her. Behind them, Rashida was climbing into Chief Wilson’s car. “This isn’t good-bye,” he said. “You’ll see her again.”

  “Really?” DaShawn perked up, thinking Chief Wilson had brokered a deal with the DA’s office on her behalf even though he had said it wasn’t his job to do so.

  “Yeah, you’ll see her when she testifies at your trial.”

  “There isn’t going to be a trial.”

  Shearouse lit a cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “Yeah, I’m going to save the tax payers some money and plead guilty. I did the crime, right? Why pretend I didn’t?”

  “Call me crazy, but I think your lawyer will convince you to change your mind.” He stretched his arm across the back of the seat. “It’s too bad. You did a good job in there. You kept the hostage calm and made sure no one was harmed. I don’t know if it will mean anything to the DA, but it certainly can’t hurt.” He turned to look at her. “You could have had a future in this business if things had been different.”

  “What, as a hostage negotiator? I don’t think so.”

  “You’re smart, Jenkins. Too smart to keep doing what you’re doing. But where you’re going, you’ll have plenty of time to find something else to do with your life.” Shearouse took another deep drag on his cigarette. “You and the hostage seem to have some kind of relationship.”

  DaShawn knew she probably shouldn’t say anything else without a lawyer present, but fuck it. She didn’t care what Shearouse thought about her. She had to keep him from getting the wrong idea about Rashida.

  “She’s an innocent victim. She isn’t a part of this. She wasn’t even supposed to be here today.”

  “I’ll verify that for myself if you don’t mind.” He looked at her through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Whatever you had seems to be over now. Did you honestly think you could have a future with her?”

  “No,” she admitted, “but it was nice thinking I could.”

  DaShawn rested the back of her head against the squad car’s stained fabric seat. Her hands were cuffed behind her back. Her shoulders and arms ached as they began to lose circulation. She felt like crying. Not from the pain in her body but the ache in her heart. She had fucked up. And she had no one to blame but herself.

  “The hostage—”

  “Would you please stop calling her that?” DaShawn rubbed her face against her shoulder to dry her tears. “She has a name.”

  Shearouse flicked his cigarette out the open window. “You should have started by telling her yours.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Friday, March 17

  11:30 a.m.

  Savannah, GA

  Rashida was so tired she couldn’t think. Outside the bank, Chief Wilson had treated her like a colleague. Once they arrived at the police station, he began to treat her more like a suspect as he tried to determine what role if any she had played in the attempted theft.

  Jackie had been dragged off the parade route and subjected to the same treatment. Rashida could hear her voice rising in anger in one of the other interview rooms as she undoubtedly tried to explain how Destiny managed to pass all the background checks Jackie had allegedly subjected her to. Rashida wondered the same thing, but she was too busy trying to save her own ass at the moment to worry about someone else’s.

  She had been answering questions for hours. She had told her story so many times she could recite it by heart, yet she was no closer to understanding what had happened. Had she been so blinded by her feelings for Destiny it had affected her ability to see the truth? She should have trusted her instincts. She had told herself they were moving too fast. She had told herself she didn’t know enough about Destiny to fall for her, but she had tumbled anyway.

  Destiny, who had seemed too good to be true, had turned out to be exactly that. She wasn’t an out-of-work security guard. She wasn’t a former soldier. She wasn’t the sensitive woman who had sparked Rashida’s interest and found her way into her heart. She was a liar and a thief who had been using her from the day they met. She had been recruited by Harry and paid to feed her lies.

  And I swallowed every one of them.

  Rashida shook her head disconsolately. She had been fooled by not one woman she thought she could trust but two. Was she really that naïve?

  Chief Wilson showed her Destiny’s rap sheet. Thumbing through it, Rashida could hardly believe what she was reading. Check fraud, deception, identity theft, breaking and entering. The charges went on and on. The Destiny she knew wasn’t capable of such things. The Destiny she knew didn’t cross the line between right and wrong. But the Destiny she knew didn’t exist. Destiny Jackson wasn’t real. She was someone DaShawn Jenkins and Harry Collins had created.

  Rashida pushed the file away. The answers she needed weren’t inside a manila folder. They were in DaShawn Jenkins’s head. And, perhaps, her heart.

  Rashida knew little about Destiny, but what she did know she loved. She knew far too much about DaShawn. None of it good.

  She wanted to know why DaShawn had done what she did. She wanted to know how DaShawn could seem to care about her yet use her so cruelly. She wanted an explanation. But not from DaShawn’s lips. DaShawn was the most skilled liar she had ever met. She wouldn’t give her another chance to weave her spell.

  She rubbed her eyes, which itched from unshed tears. The answers she sought would have to wait. Today she just wanted to get away from it all. Let someone else deal with the fallout for once. She was done.

  “You’re free to go,” Chief Wilson said after nearly three hours of questioning.

  Rashida stepped out of the interview room like a punch-drunk boxer. She stared at her cell phone, but she didn’t know who to call. She was the person everyone reached out to in such situations, not the one who did the reaching. Who could she count on to have her back? Jackie was still being put through the wringer, Dennis and the members of executive management were partying on the sidelines, and Ted had taken his wife and kids out of town for a weekend getaway. Who was left?

  “There you are.”

  Relief flooded through Rashida’s body when she saw Daniel striding across the lobby. She could always count on him to be calm even in the midst of a storm. She listened to him detail how he had explained the attempted robbery to the rest of the employees and informed them she was okay. He had also drafted a press release he would issue as soon as he and the police department’s public spokesperson conducted a joint press conference scheduled to take place within the hour.

  “What do you need me to do?” she asked.

  He gave her a much needed hug.

  “Go home and get some rest. You’ve done enough for one day.”

  “Should I tender my resignation now or later?”

  Daniel placed a hand on her shoulder and fixed her with an earnest look. “Your job is safe. So is Jackie’s. What happened wasn’t your fault. It was Harry’s and Destiny’s. DaShawn’s.” He waved his hand. “Whatever her name is. This unfortunate incident has illustrated there are some obvious flaws in our screening and selection process for new employees, but those can be addressed at a later date.”

  Rashida lifted her shoulders in an awkward shrug. “I have to tell you I’m at a loss. A crime was being planned right under my nose and I didn’t see it happening. I’m personally and professionally embarrassed for allowing this to transpire on my watch. Please accept my deepest apologies.”

  “Rashida, you didn’t do—”

  She raise
d her hands to prevent the expected show of sympathy. She didn’t want forgiveness. She didn’t want understanding. Because she didn’t feel worthy of either. She felt empty inside. Like she’d given everything she had to give and then some. She had spent every minute of every day trying to prove her worth. In two short weeks, all the hard work she had put in establishing her personal and professional reputations had been erased. Nearly twenty years gone. Just like that. She didn’t have the energy to start over.

  “I’ve told my story to the police and you’ve already notified the staff,” she said with a weary sigh. “I’ll write a detailed memo for the board as soon as I get home, but I don’t know what else I can add that won’t appear in the official police report or be reported on the news. Obviously, I’ll make myself available to testify when the case comes to trial.”

  “There isn’t going to be a trial. DaShawn confessed to everything and the rest of her cohorts are tripping over themselves trying to cut deals of their own. Even Harry’s spilling her guts. Her parents are on their way to the station with a prominent attorney in tow, but she must not be too confident in his ability to get her off because from what I hear, she’s telling everything she knows.”

  Rashida felt her heart begin to race. She didn’t care about Harry’s admission of guilt or the others’ attempts to make life easier for themselves. Despite everything that had happened, she cared about DaShawn. Still.

  “DaShawn confessed?” She felt a silver lining begin to form on the dark clouds hovering over her head. “So she was working with the police.”

  Daniel’s skeptical look blunted her burst of happiness.

  “She’s working to reduce her sentence. I don’t think becoming an informant at the last minute is the same as working undercover. It will get her out of prison faster, but it won’t make her any less guilty.” He led Rashida out of the police station to his waiting BMW. “How did you manage to see through her?” he asked after he deposited her in the passenger’s seat and slid behind the walnut-accented steering wheel.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, fastening her seat belt.

  Daniel drove toward the bank’s parking lot, taking Rashida to her car. “You were scheduled to be in Springfield today, not downtown. Did you sense something was wrong?”

  Rashida pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. She could have lied to make herself look good in Daniel’s eyes, but she chose to go with her favorite mainstay, the truth.

  “I didn’t sense anything. She had me completely fooled.”

  She remembered how stupid, how gullible, how deluded she had felt when Destiny—DaShawn―had revealed herself to be a common criminal. A product of the life Rashida had escaped not the one she had built.

  Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

  DaShawn had pulled the wool over her eyes once, but Rashida would make sure neither DaShawn nor anyone else would ever get a chance to repeat the feat because she would never allow anyone to get that close to her again.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Eighteen Months Later

  8:00 a.m.

  Alto, Georgia

  DaShawn squinted as she walked through the front door of Arrendale State Prison. The sun seemed brighter, the air tasted cleaner on this side of the razor wire-topped fence than they did in the prison yard.

  “See you soon,” the guard said as he began to pull the reinforced steel door shut.

  “Not if I can help it.”

  The guard snorted laughter. “That’s what they all say.”

  DaShawn flinched when the door closed with a heavy metallic clang. She had been dreaming about this day for well over a year. Now that it had arrived, she didn’t know what to do first.

  To her left, another now former inmate was running toward the husband and child she’d been separated from for five years. To her right, another ex-con was passing around a forty of malt liquor with a group of friends. The woman hadn’t been outside for more than five minutes and she was already getting the party started. At this rate, she’d be making a return appearance in no time flat. DaShawn didn’t intend to follow her example.

  She wondered which direction she should go, left or right? What did it matter? No one was waiting for her no matter which way she turned.

  She tossed her duffel bag over her shoulder. The bag weighed next to nothing. It didn’t contain much more than a change of clothes, a dog-eared copy of this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and a stack of letters stamped Return to Sender.

  She had written Rashida once a week for the eighteen months she had been inside. Every week, without fail, she had tried to make Rashida see her side of things. She had apologized for all the things she had done wrong and told Rashida how much she loved her. She had told her she was a changed woman and begged her for the chance to prove it. But each week, the letters had come back unopened. Even the one that contained the business plan she had spent nearly a month trying to draft. The plan for the hair salon she hoped to own and operate as soon as she got her feet under her on the outside.

  Alto, a tiny town in north Georgia, had a population of less than a thousand permanent residents. The inmates in Arrendale often exceeded that number. DaShawn couldn’t wait for the city and the prison to become nothing more than blips in a rearview mirror. She couldn’t wait to get back to Savannah. She couldn’t wait to get back to Rashida.

  She needed to see Rashida face to face. It was the only way she’d ever get her to listen.

  The closest bus station was in Gainesville, nearly twenty miles away. The fare for a ticket would put a substantial dent in her meager stash. The cash she had amassed in Savannah was probably locked in an evidence locker if some crooked cop hadn’t pocketed it for himself. She’d left some money behind in Florida, but the IRS had probably seized it while she was behind bars. Until she got a look at her accounts, the only green she could count on was what was in her pockets. She’d made enough money working various jobs around the prison to afford a ticket on the first thing smoking. She just needed to figure out how to get there. The prison van was headed that way, but she’d rather walk than spend another second surrounded by armed guards.

  She strode across the parking lot, ready to begin the long trek to Gainesville. She had barely made it to the road when a dented Mustang pulled up beside her. The Mustang needed some TLC, but it still looked like a sweet ride. She bent to see who was inside. She didn’t recognize the driver, but the grinning passenger was one of her former cell mates.

  “Going my way?” Patty Stewart asked. She had the face of an angel but the mouth of a sailor. Her quick temper and willingness to use her fists when she lost it were the reasons she’d ended up in Arrendale.

  “I’m headed to the bus station. Do you think I could get a ride?”

  “Hop in.”

  After Patty opened the door, DaShawn tossed her duffel bag in the backseat and climbed in the car. She nodded at the stone butch behind the wheel, giving her the respect she deserved.

  “Where are you headed?” Patty lowered the volume on the Carrie Underwood song blaring on the radio. “Are you going to try to win back the woman you told me about, the banker you fell for?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. I think I might need it.”

  *

  The Next Day

  8:46 a.m.

  Savannah, Georgia

  DaShawn heard the gasps after she pushed the door open and stepped into the lobby of Low Country Savings Bank. Winter, Seaton, and the tellers openly gaped at her. They were probably wondering how she had the balls to show her face here again. She was wondering the same thing. The security guard—she couldn’t help but think of him as her replacement—eyed her warily as she walked toward Winter’s desk.

  Winter blanched and looked around as if being seen with her would sully her reputation.

  “Relax. I won’t stay long,” DaShawn whispered to keep from being overheard. “I need
to talk to Rashida. Just tell me where she’s working today, and I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “I—I can’t—”

  Winter’s eyes looked as panicked as they had the day the elevator almost caught fire. The day three people nearly succumbed to the fumes. Seaton rode to her rescue. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  DaShawn repeated her request. She could feel everyone’s eyes on her. For one of the few times in her life, she shrank from the attention. “Please, Seaton. I just want to talk to her.”

  He drew her aside. “It isn’t the bank’s policy to divulge personal employee information to customers or, in your case, a noncustomer. Your request seems to be of a personal nature. Even if Miss Ivey were still working for the bank, I couldn’t tell you in which location.”

  “What do you mean if? She doesn’t work for Low Country Savings anymore?”

  According to the headlines she had read during her imprisonment, Rashida had been named executive vice president, which meant she had been promoted not fired. How could she go from being one step away from the top to being shown the door? It didn’t add up.

  Seaton stood firm. “I’ve said all I plan to say. Unless you intend to open an account or apply for a loan, please allow me to walk you out.”

  For eighteen months, DaShawn had dreamed of being reunited with Rashida. She had gone to sleep each night dreaming of the day the prison’s doors would open and she would be free to return to Rashida’s side. She had thought the day had finally arrived. But her dream had quickly turned into a nightmare.

  Numb, she trudged down the street not caring where she might end up. She stopped her mindless walking when she heard someone calling her name. She turned to find a familiar face bearing down on her.