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car was more unnerving than the arrest. The anticipation was killing her. “Did she really steal the car?” She nestled the bags and coat between her feet.
    “Probably better we don’t talk about that.” He picked up the radio to call the station.

 
     
    10 .
     
    The security cameras followed the cruisers through the razor wire gate into the well-lit lot of the county lock-up and police station.
    Pat waited for Mike to get Harmony past the metal detector, the preliminary searches, and into the holding room before bringing Brea in. Harmony was silent, unshaken, cuffed and defiant. Brea wondered how she could be so strong when she, the innocent one, was scared shitless.
    The police station was one big room with several plainly furnished offices on the outskirts; one of which belonged to her Uncle Jim. The main room was full of enough late-night drunks, addicts, and domestic abuse victims to keep the several armed officers transporting combatant collars busy.
    Brea covered her nose when she got a whiff of the homeless man being brought in behind her.
    Pat did, too.
    “God, you’re ripe,” said the arresting officer, a newbie whose name she didn’t know.
    The homeless man spat at the officer and the young man, lacking experience and patience, yoked him up.
    The smelly man broke free, swinging. “Keep your hands off of me you goddamned pig.”
    Uncle Jim came from out of nowhere and wrestled the man to the ground.
    “Uncle Jim…”
    He looked up at Brea, bright red with exertion as he bore down on the struggling vagrant. “Get her out of here, Pat.”
    Pat’s look of, Where would you like me to take her? only made him angrier.
    “My office, Pat. Can you handle that?”
    “Let’s go, Brea. You heard the man.”
    Pat took Harmony’s things and handed them to Gina, the clerk, through the door in the bulletproof window. “You know which one is his, right?” Brea nodded. “Your mom’s on her way.”
    “I figured. Uncle Jim call her?”
    “Yep.”
    “She seem mad?”
    “He didn’t say, but…”
    “Brea Miller,” her mother shouted over the melee.
    Joan Miller wasn’t the type to be caught ugly. She was one of those “you never know who you’ll run into” types and tonight—this morning—was no exception. She looked like a centerfold from Better Homes and Gardens, if there was such a thing, in her pressed Banana Republic blouse and nicest dark blue jeans. Her red hair was styled in a loose French twist with curly tendrils framing her delicate and freshly made-up face. A gold cross dangled from the chain around her neck.
    Pat opened his arms in greeting and headed in her direction. “You go to your uncle’s office,” he said to Brea out of the corner of his mouth. “I’ll try to calm down your mother.”
    Brea held her portfolio behind her back and stayed close to the wall as she walked. Her mother didn’t approve of hanging out in cemeteries.
    Lance plowed through the front door, raging.
    “Now it’s a party,” Brea said.
    Pat hugged Joan and spoke loud enough that Brea heard him trying to get her out of trouble. There was no way that was happening. Her mother was still screaming.
    “No bull, Pat. Let me at her.”
    “Joan, she really wasn’t the one…”
    Harmony kicked and thrashed loudly in the holding cell, pounding the glass with her fists. Lance was on the other side of the window shouting something about the fact that she drugged him.
    Funny, Brea thought he only drugged himself.
    “Mike, get him out of here.”
    Mike pulled Lance away and directed Joan into Jim’s office where she and everyone else within earshot overheard Lance’s yarn about how Harmony stole his car—leaving out that he screwed and tattooed her first.
    Jim’s office hadn’t changed in over twenty years and was a testament to his single, focused life. His unadorned metal desk was centered in the room, two chairs in front of it—his, behind. The walls were covered in various plaques of commendation and the