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“I didn’t have much to be cheerful about in those days. She made me smile, no matter how hard I tried to pretend that she didn’t. She won everyone’s hearts. The members of my father’s security team weren’t hired for their winning personalities, and even their masks cracked when she was around.”
“What were the circumstances of her leaving?”
“I wasn’t privy to that information. One day, Renée and Kaylin were there, and the next, they were gone. A few months later, I overheard the staff talking about an accident and searched the internet. That’s how I knew that Renée’s life had come to a premature end.”
“You don’t think it was an accident?”
“She was naive, but she wasn’t careless. Suicidal? Possibly. She always seemed highly strung, but I’m not in a position to assess her mental state.”
“Was Kaylin there at the time her mother fell?”
“Renée fell from the building she worked in, so I doubt it. But I don’t know for sure. That isn’t the type of thing two people discuss when they haven’t seen each other for a decade.”
Which brought us to the one and only time Nico had seen Kaylin after she left Russia. Emmy had given me a rundown of the details—they’d bumped into each other by chance five or six years ago and eaten lunch together.
“Tell me what happened in New York.”
“There’s not much to tell. I was leaving my lawyer’s office, and there she was on the sidewalk.”
“You recognised her right away?”
“Yes and no. At first, I was struck by the resemblance to her mother, and then she recognised me. If she hadn’t smiled, I’d probably have carried on walking. I mean, she was beautiful—head-turningly beautiful—but I don’t make a habit of approaching people on the street.”
“Are you certain it was a chance meeting? She couldn’t have known you were there?”
“Kaylin was lost, and I was behind schedule that day. If somebody hadn’t jumped in front of a subway train at West 86th and Broadway, my meeting would have run to time, and I’d have missed her by ten minutes. Instead of having lunch with me, she’d have gone home after she gave up trying to find the address for her casting call.”
“What did you discuss during lunch? Did she mention her personal life?”
“We studiously avoided that subject. She showed me her modelling portfolio and told me about the campaigns she’d worked on—nothing major, but she was certain she’d get her big break soon. In hindsight, I wish I’d done more. Hired her to front an ad campaign for one of my resorts or spoken to my contacts and found her more work. But seeing her was…difficult. Kaylin was the closest thing I had to a sister at one point, but she also reminded me of a past I’d rather forget.”
I could understand that sentiment. There were so many events I wished I could erase from my memory—being framed for murder, being trafficked, being trapped in a basement with a serial killer, for example—but my past had made me who I was today. Instead of being almost engaged to a wonderful man and working a job I loved, I could have been waiting tables sixty hours a week at a diner in Kentucky. Over the past few years, I’d learned to take the rough with the smooth.
“Emmy said Kaylin called you again a couple of years later?”
“A little over three years ago, yes. We exchanged numbers in New York and promised we’d keep in touch. Of course, we never did. It’s just what people say, isn’t it?”
But Kaylin had tried to speak with him, and Nico had missed the call. He didn’t pick up the voicemail she left until half a day later.
“And she asked you to meet her at a hotel on the outskirts of Manassas?”
“She sounded terrified. It took me another twelve hours to get there, but all I found was a crime scene.”
“I’ve read the police file on the case.”
“They gave you that?”
“Not exactly.” And Ford, my boyfriend, who also happened to be a detective in the Richmond PD, didn’t know I had it either. “Somehow, it just appeared on my desk.”
Nico laughed. Emmy said he didn’t strike her as the type of man who worried about a little law-bending, and I didn’t know whether to be thankful for that or very, very nervous. According to the notes in the file, Kaylin had left her room—the Bluebird Inn was actually a motel rather than a hotel—late one evening and run down an off-duty cop who’d been walking home from a family dinner. Officer Mike Downie might have survived if he’d gotten to a hospital fast, but he’d been left to die in the gutter. Then Kaylin had disappeared, never to be seen again. Her car was found two days later on a side street in Reston, wiped clean of prints and empty of personal effects. She’d left most of her belongings in the motel, as if she’d expected to return soon. Or as if she’d never expected to leave. A small smear of blood had been found in the back seat of the vehicle, but DNA testing showed it belonged to a male other than the victim, and the database failed to throw up any hits. It could have come from the previous owner of the car—nobody had ever managed to find him—or someone else entirely.
A security camera had recorded Kaylin’s Toyota leaving the motel parking lot just before the incident occurred, but the camera was old, the footage too grainy to see who was behind the wheel. But the right front tyre matched the track across the dead guy’s chest, and although it was a common pattern, a minor defect in the tread removed any possibility that another vehicle had been involved.
“What are your thoughts on the incident?” Nico asked.
“The way I see it, there are two possibilities. Either Kaylin drove out of the motel parking lot with her mind on other things, hit a man, and ran, or somebody else was in the car that night.”
“Yes. That was my thought process too.” A long pause. “It was the second option.”
