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That didn’t mean much. “Yeah, well, Ana’s also terrifying.”
Ana was a former colleague of Dasha’s. And a current colleague now that Emmy had given Dasha a job. Only part-time, but even an hour a week with her was enough to set me on edge. She was just so damn competent. At least we’d left her behind in Baldwin’s Shore this week. She was probably sitting in her craft store, working out a hundred ways to kill a man with a ball of yarn and a crochet hook.
“Yeah, but Ana’s on our side, so terrifying is a good thing.” Dan tapped the papers I’d printed out. “What have you found so far?”
“Honestly? Not much. Crumb—the other investigator—seems to have spoken to everyone in Manassas, plus nearly all of the guests who were staying in the motel at the same time as Kaylin.”
“Nearly all?”
“There were four he couldn’t track down, and the cops couldn’t find them either.” I checked my notes. “A young couple with a baby—their accents suggested they were from Alabama, and they gave their names as Joe and Rachel Smith. Plus a guy with a large backpack and a foreign accent, possibly Italian or French, who was logged in the system as ‘Alan Thingy.’ Reading between the lines, the kid on the desk wasn’t the brightest or the most conscientious, and the notes say he asked Alan for his name three times, and when he still couldn’t understand him, he just guessed.”
“This wasn’t the kind of place that asked for ID?”
“At the Bluebird Inn, cash is king. They also rented rooms by the hour on occasion—our fourth missing guest is a woman named Beatrix, who Crumb believes was in the sex trade. Short skirt, twitchy, kept looking toward the parking lot. Which meant she probably had a client with her, but nobody saw him.”
Beatrix had been a semi-regular at the motel, showing up for a night or two at a time and then disappearing again. Either she moved around, or she took time off. She wasn’t known to the police, not under the name she gave the desk clerk, and none of the cops had recognised her from the description. Petite, blonde, great rack, not quite a ten because her nose was too big. Yes, the desk clerk was a pig.
“Why was Kaylin even in a place like that?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?”
“Crumb didn’t find out?”
“He seemed more concerned with finding out where she went than where she’d been.”
“It’s an interesting case.” Dan took another bite of donut and wiped sugar off her lips. “Is she dead, or isn’t she?”
I hadn’t wanted to voice my concerns in front of Nico, but I thought the chances of her being alive were slim. Disappearing without a trace wasn’t easy, not in the digital age. Not if you were still breathing. Blackwood had a small team that specialised in pseudocide, and the perpetrators nearly always slipped up. They called an old friend, or accessed their money, or snuck onto social media, or got caught out by discrepancies in documentation. Kaylin’s first attempt at running—and I was certain that’s what she’d done, she’d been running from someone or something—had been sloppy. She’d checked into the Bluebird Inn under a false name, parked her car in the darkest corner of the lot, paid cash, and more or less hidden in her room. A couple of people noticed her using the vending machines in the lobby, but nobody saw her leave the property.
When she finally did take off, she left half of her belongings in her room, including her passport. Nobody went from panicked amateur to pro-level disappearance in a week, not unless they were cold in a grave.
“The evidence so far suggests she’s dead.”
“Right. So, who killed her? Did she stumble across a madman in Manassas? Or did somebody from her past catch up with her?”
“By all accounts, she didn’t go out anywhere in Manassas.”
“So…”
It was about her past, wasn’t it? I thumbed to the notes Crumb had made on Kaylin’s life in New York, but that section was thin. Real thin. She’d shared an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with two other women, and she’d left without giving notice or even cleaning out her room. The modelling agency she’d been signed with had been equal parts irritated and clueless at her disappearing act. And her former boss at the events company she used to waitress for whenever she didn’t have modelling work had no idea where she’d gone either. Nobody had mentioned any sort of trouble, and there was no evidence of a boyfriend. Neither of her former roommates had been forthcoming with information. It seemed that Crumb had still been working on the New York angle at the time of his stroke, albeit half-heartedly—there was a world of difference between his comprehensive notes from Manassas and the write-up of his visit to the Big Apple. It was clear where his comfort zone lay.
What about my comfort zone?
Some days, I thought there was no such thing. I’d gone from waiting tables in Kentucky to being kidnapped and forced into the sex industry, only to be rescued and thrust into a whole new world. I was still feeling my way at Blackwood. But I loved the work, and I trusted the team to back me up. Plus I had a boyfriend now. Falling in love with a cop was the last thing I’d expected to happen in the middle of an investigation, but then Detective Ford Prestia had shown up with a dirty smile and a banana, and now we were practically hitched. The ball was in my court, he said. When you want a ring, just let me know.
But for the moment, I had a case to focus on.
“So… We need to follow the trail in New York. Before we can go forward in time, we have to go back.”
Dan grinned at me. “Exactly. Book yourself a flight, sweetie.”
“I want to speak with Chelle La Rocca first. Plus there are four guests from the Bluebird Inn who’ve never been traced. Are you coming to New York?”
“Wish I could. Pay a visit to La Bella Farina for me, okay? That place makes the best cookies. I’ll speak with the New York office, find you a partner who knows the city. Make sure you take things slow and steady.”
“I will.”
“And try not to get kidnapped again.”
