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She was such a pretty girl, soft-featured and full-bodied, and as a woman, it was hard to watch her keep her head down like that. Fabrizio had said she deserved better, and I agreed.
Tobias had a drink while talking, then ordered another for him and one for Claire. She took it and sipped it slowly, sitting at the booth with Tobias and some of his apparent friends. He was sitting on the end of the booth, so his body blocked her in. He finished his drink in fifteen minutes while Claire sipped hers for almost forty minutes. Then, he spent the rest of that time nursing a water. Okay, so he wasn’t drunk, at least not at this point in the night.
The drink was probably meant to help Claire relax a little, but it seemed to do the opposite. She sat more still, less fidgety, but she also startled much easier and leaned away from other people. Once, Tobias threw an arm around her and then had to pull her tightly to his side to mask her instinctive pull-away.
At 10:01, Tobias jumped up and yanked Claire out of the booth so hard that she tripped. He shrugged it off, and she chuckled awkwardly as if she was afraid of causing a commotion. Then he started tugging her towards the dance floor. Claire resisted for the first time that night, however briefly. Her feet froze, prompting Tobias to turn around. The camera didn't capture his face, but he leaned in close to her and murmured something. She looked terrified. When he returned to the dance floor, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her to keep up, and she seemed to wince.
It became obvious why Claire was so hesitant to join the dancers; clearly, Tobias was using it as a cover to feel her up. Jen and I both wrinkled our noses as he pulled her close, hands wandering all over her, even though she was clearly trying to keep them off of certain areas. She was becoming more and more agitated, and the more she denied him, the angrier Tobias got. It made me sick watching, knowing what was going to happen next.
Sure enough, realizing he wasn’t going to get his way like that, he shoved her off of him hard enough for her to fall to the floor. He didn’t watch her tumble or turn around to help when she appeared to call out to him, scrambling to her feet to follow him to the bar. It made my chest hurt to watch her trail after him like that. Other people would say it was proof she wasn’t being abused because who would follow their abuser like an anxious puppy? But I had followed my mother the exact same way, so I knew better.
Tobias marched over to the bar and had already ordered more drinks by the time Claire caught up with him. He grabbed her upper arm hard, pulling her into him and leaning down to talk right into her face, and when he let her go, she nodded quickly and kept her eyes on the ground. She was terrified. I felt rage boil up inside me.
Tobias turned to the bar, reached into his pocket, and then grabbed one of the drinks with his free hand. His other hand, the one in his pocket, came out holding something, and he dropped it into the cup, completely uncaring whether Claire was watching him do it or not. She wasn’t, too busy keeping her head down and trembling, but he acted like it wouldn’t have mattered either way. He’d pour it down her throat if he had to.
He swished the drink in his hand for a second, likely to dissolve the pill, then handed it to her with a stern look. She reached for it, and that’s when Fabrizio stepped in.
He’d gotten there around 9:30 and had just sat nursing a drink and some cheese fries, keeping his eyes on Claire and moving tables when he had to in order to keep her in his line of sight. He clearly couldn’t see very well through the bodies on the dance floor, not realizing how hard Claire was struggling, but he saw when she fell backwards. Instantly, he was on his feet and crossing the bar. He got there just in time.
Just like he said, he faked a stumble and went careening right between Tobias and Claire, knocking both drinks out of Tobias’ hands and onto the floor. He caught himself on the bar just past them and made a gesture like he was apologizing profusely, turning to the bartender to order them new drinks. He said something to Claire, who glanced down at her skirt, then left for the bathroom at a too-measured pace. She was obviously taking the chance to get away from Tobias, who was seething. The hallway camera caught her going into the bathroom.
Meanwhile, Fabrizio turned back to Tobias, and even on camera, it was obvious his whole physical being changed. The clumsy doofus act was gone, leaving just a cold and angry man. Tobias stiffened, but when Fabrizio started walking him to the front, he didn’t really fight.
Then it went down just as we saw. The fight, the throw, the car, the crash. Fabrizio’s futile attempts to help a man who couldn’t have possibly survived his injuries. Exactly what we already knew.
No one came outside to discover the body until almost twenty minutes later, at which point Claire hadn’t even left the bathroom yet. The group of partygoers screamed, two rushing back inside while one vomited, another standing shocked, and the last going to check Tobias’ pulse. From that point, it was chaos, the bar closing its doors and making an announcement that there had been an accident out front and people couldn’t go out that way. It didn’t seem to mean much to the crowd, not until the police showed up out front.
This was right about when Claire emerged, mascara running down her cheeks and clearly very wary. She looked around the hallway like she was waiting for Tobias to pop up out of nowhere, and when he didn’t, she made a rush for the back door. It let out into a different street, so she saw the flashing lights but not the crime scene itself.
The paramedics covered the body while the police tried to calm the witnesses down enough to question them. They got shock blankets, one got what appeared to be a mild sedative. Crime scene investigators started taking pictures of the body. All standard, nothing out of the ordinary. We watched until after the police trickled out, after the cleanup crew arrived, after the bar closed, and all the drunk partiers were herded out the back doors. The sun came up, and we stopped the video.
I leaned back, groaning and rubbing my eyes. It took three days, with short nights, for the two of us to slog through all that, but I had a definitive timeline that was accurate down to the second. I thanked all the stars that the bar owner invested in state-of-the-art security.
Especially because it proved the case I was going to make.
Then Jen pointed out something I hadn’t noticed; all night long, no other cars were on the road. In nine hours, just one car passed by, and it was the car that hit and killed Tobias Cole. I frowned.
“Hold on, let me check…” I trailed off, fighting through the growing migraine to type a question into the search bar. “There it is! There was construction on a plumbing main on the other side of the hill, so that road was shut down. Nobody should have been there in the first place.”
“Is that useful?” Jen asked.
“Maybe,” I said, biting my thumb. “If we can prove that car had no relation to the Marinos or any of their holdings, then this really will be a truly freak accident.”
“I’ll try to identify the car,” Jen said, already pulling her laptop closer.
“Great,” I said. “Based on the news coverage this is already getting, I think I’ll have to convince a whole jury. I’ll need everything you can give me.”
Chapter Thirty-One
RICHARD
Five weeks. Five weeks my little brother sat in prison while some bozos pulled together a half-assed jury. I was falling apart, and everyone could tell. I was almost never home, throwing myself entirely into my hunt for Declan Baron, the Irish Mob boss. When I was home, I avoided my family, if they weren’t avoiding me. Clearly, they were still upset with me, Selene especially. If I walked into a room, she walked out of it.
Mom was trying. Dad was clearly worried, even though he didn’t know what to do about it. I pushed it all to the side. I had to find Declan Baron.
At the end of the day, Baron was the one behind all of this—he was the puppet master behind Dad’s arrest, and now I was certain he’d framed my brother too. Worse, it looked like he was going to get away with it.
I had no contact with Lauren, even though a part of me yearned for it, because the news channels were scavenging for any scrap of information they could find. A gag order was issued very quickly, so the film was not aired and no one knew what evidence had been gathered, but that didn't discourage anyone. Speculation abounded, and nearly all of them placedFabrizio at the center.
