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1
HALLIE
“Can you tell me a little more about Kaylin La Rocca?” I asked.
A year ago, the thought of speaking with a billionaire would have freaked me the hell out, but so much had changed in the past twelve months. I’d been rescued from the pits of hell, otherwise known as a sex trafficker’s mansion in Florida, I’d met the man of my dreams, and I’d also found that I had a knack for asking questions.
All of which had led me here on this grey day in late February—here being the Peninsula Resort and Spa in Baldwin’s Shore, Oregon—for a chat with Nico Belinsky. The purpose of our conversation was twofold: firstly, I needed to glean as many details as I could about Kaylin La Rocca, the woman I’d been hired to find. Well, not hired, exactly. Emmy, one of the big bosses at Blackwood Security, had traded my services in return for Nico’s help to cover up a small national-security-related incident that had happened here a month ago.
In truth, that case had shaken me. Most people managed to get through a lifetime without being abducted, but I’d had the dubious honour three times now, and the last incident had been the most terrifying, the rescue swift and dramatic. I still suffered nightmares about drowning alone in the middle of the ocean. But I’d taken a short vacation, spent some time with my not-quite-fiancé, and now I was ready to work again. A job researching a cold missing persons case was just what I needed, nothing too strenuous. Yes, Kaylin had an outstanding arrest warrant, and yes, it was for murder, but Nico assured me it was all a big mistake.
And at least there were no crazy Russian assassins involved in Kaylin’s case. I’d had enough of Russian freaking assassins.
The second reason for tonight’s visit? I’d been tasked with keeping Nico occupied while Emmy did a little breaking and entering, which sounds so much worse than it really was. She didn’t plan to steal anything. All she needed to do was leave a note on behalf of an acquaintance, and so far, I’d managed to fulfil my role. Nico and I were hanging out together in his luxuriously appointed office, ready for a cosy chat out of the public eye. Rather than sitting behind the massive desk at the far end, he’d led me over to a quartet of leather chairs grouped around a glass coffee table in the corner and settled onto the one nearest the wall, legs crossed at the ankles. I’d taken a seat opposite as I tried to fathom him out. Emmy said he was an incorrigible flirt, but so far, he’d been nothing but professional with me.
Nico took a sip of his drink. Vodka, neat. He’d filled a shot glass for each of us without asking, but I hadn’t touched mine.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Let’s start with some background. The basics. Details of Kaylin’s family, her friends, any known addresses. Do you have a picture?”
Nico’s phone had been sitting face-down on the table, but now he unlocked it and scrolled until he found what he was looking for. Not just one photo but a whole album of them. The first few were poorer in quality, as if Nico had zoomed in and cropped them from larger images, and they’d been taken when Kaylin was still a child. She’d worn her blonde hair in pigtails and favoured pink dresses. In one picture, a teenage Nico was standing next to her, an arm around her shoulders as he looked sullenly at the camera.
“How old were the two of you here?”
“I was sixteen; Kaylin was eight.”
“It wasn’t a happy occasion?”
“Happiness was rare in those days.” He took the phone from me and studied the screen. “I think that was taken at my father’s birthday celebration.”
His father. Lev Belinsky had been a Moscow-based oligarch and all-around asshole who’d made a fortune in the commodities industry before his untimely death when Nico was twenty years old. Untimely because he’d been assassinated by a fake hooker who’d slipped a knife between his ribs. How did I know about the fake hooker when that detail had never been made public? Because she was one of my new colleagues, also known as Nine, former member of a Russian hit squad, aka the Bad Samaritan, Baldwin’s Shore’s very own deliverer of vigilante justice.
And, quite frankly, she scared the crap out of me.
Nico handed the phone back, and I scrolled through the rest of the pictures, several dozen of them in total. Kaylin had followed her mom into modelling, and these were all from professional shoots. Kaylin smiling, Kaylin pouting, Kaylin staring into the distance. Her hair was a few shades lighter compared to the earlier photos, and it bounced around her shoulders, glossy and perfect. She had a figure to die for, and her make-up was flawless. But she’d lost her smile. Young Kaylin’s eyes had sparkled, while grown-up Kaylin looked polished but jaded.
Her mom had passed away by then, which must have had an impact. Was Renée La Rocca’s death an accident? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly no one had ever been arrested after she tumbled out of a window. Last month, Nico had admitted to Emmy that he didn’t know whether his father had been involved in Renée’s unfortunate demise, but it was possible.
Following her mom’s death, Kaylin had spent her high-school years with her grandmother in Virginia. Speaking with Chelle La Rocca was at the top of my list of things to do when I returned home. I’d already tracked down her address, and it was only an hour from Blackwood’s headquarters.
“Did Kaylin spend long in Russia?” I asked Nico.
“Roughly a year and a half—Renée came to Moscow for a modelling job, then stuck around after she started screwing my father.”
I made a note of that. While Nico spoke fondly of Kaylin, his voice held no such affection when it came to her mom.
“What kind of relationship did Renée and Kaylin have?”
“Not a great one. Motherhood didn’t suit Renée, and I’m not certain Kaylin even knew who her father was. He isn’t named on her birth certificate. Whenever the two of them visited our place, Renée would bring a bag full of colouring books and pens and toys, and Kaylin was expected to amuse herself while her mother entertained my father.” Nico smiled at a memory. “Penguins. She loved to draw penguins.”
“Did you spend much time with Kaylin?”
“Not if I could help it.” Nico sighed. “How many teenage boys want to hang out with a child half their age? But she’d follow me around to show me her drawings and the things she used to make out of beads.” He hesitated for a moment, then rose to fetch something from his desk drawer. A keyring. A yellow-and-pink beaded keyring. He placed it on the coffee table and took his seat again. “This was one of her efforts. She gifted it to me on my sixteenth birthday.”
And he’d kept it for all these years.
“She made an impression on you.”
