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My father nodded. “You can’t see it as easily in the other photo because the back of her jacket is more obscured, but you can see that both jackets have matching symbols that have the president’s moniker on it.”
Well, fuck.
“All this time, she’s been pretending to be Bailey’s best friend,” I hissed darkly. “Her mentor. But really, she was just keeping an eye on her investment.”
“So who works for who?” Kiernan asked, puzzled. “I thought it was Lina who worked for Sarah, but now I’m beginning to think Sarah works for Lina.”
“She does.” Ava’s quiet voice snuck up behind us. She was stealthy that way. Years of being invisible and having to sneak around gave her some pretty neat ninja skills. “So does her ex-fiancé, Drew.”
“And you know this because…?” Kiernan let the question hang in the air. Ava smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Well, we know Drew works for Christian. His logo was on the side of the containers he was using to ship his cargo. Bailey confirmed that.”
“All right, that was a gimme,” I joked. Ava chuckled, the sound full of sorrow. She’d be hurting for a while. Two weeks was just a drop in a pond when you compared it to an eternity of grieving. But she’d never be alone. We’d always be right beside her. We were family.
“That woman,” Ava pointed at the picture of Lina, “is the one Elias placed in charge of the strip clubs and brothels.” She moved her finger to point it at the photo of Sarah Crowe. “She was an investor. One of his top investors, in fact. They were the only two women he let in on his business dealings.”
“How progressive of him,” Kiernan drawled sarcastically.
“Elias believed that he’d have less trouble with a woman in charge than a man,” Ava elaborated. “Said that men think with their dicks, but a woman thinks with her bank account.”
Our father laughed. “I’m putting that on a T-shirt.”
“But why Bailey?” I wondered. “We know she wasn’t supposed to be in that alley, but everything points to the fact that she was meant to see Drew cheating on her, and she was meant to break down. They wanted to grab her.”
“I have a theory about that,” our father said. “I’ve gone over everything Bridgett compiled on Bailey. She had to do some further digging, but once she caught a thread, she followed it.” He sat in one of the chairs at the table and took a gulp of his beer.
“Let’s start with what we do know, or at least what Bailey knew and told us,” he continued. “She was born to a crack addict who died of an overdose. Crowe somehow found her, but no one is sure how. He took her in and pretended that they’d adopted her but told Bailey she was his illegitimate daughter.”
“Yeah,” Kiernan sneered as we took seats across from him. Ava slid in next to our father, her head resting against his shoulder. “That about sums it up. But I doubt that crack whore was her real mother.”
“That’s right,” our father confirmed. “The woman Bailey thought to be her mother was, in fact, nothing more than a jealous biker bunny who had at some point most likely kidnapped Bailey. When I suspected this, I had Declan down at the crime lab run Bailey’s hair through CODIS, and it popped up with a match for a woman named Elizabeth Winters.”
Kiernan and I glanced at one another. “That’s Bailey’s mother, right? Bridgett mentioned her name when I had her searching for Eriksen’s daughter. Before we knew who it was.”
“Elizabeth Winters was the president of the Vixens MC. Her father was the president of the Iron Horsemen out in San Diego.”
I gave a low whistle. That was a piece of information I hadn’t expected. The Vixens Motorcycle Club was well known for their sudden and gruesome deaths nearly—
“Well, fuck,” Kiernan and I breathed at the same time.
“Their deaths are still an open case,” my father told us. “But knowing that Lina is most likely the one pulling the strings from behind the curtains, it makes me wonder if she had a hand in their deaths.”
“Did we ever get a name for the woman Bailey knows as her mother?” I questioned. “I can’t remember her ever mentioning it.”
“Fuck, I wonder if she actually ever knew the bitch’s name,” Kiernan spat. “It always seemed to me like she just blocked it out.”
“Or forgot,” Ava chimed in. “If the woman wasn’t Bailey’s real mother, she’d have no distinct, memories of her. There wouldn’t have been a bond strong enough for her to remember.”
“What did the birth certificate say?” I asked. “The one that Crowe submitted to the adoption agency.” Kiernan shuffled through a small stack of papers we’d kept on Bailey.
“Riley Jameson,” Kiernan read out. My fingers flew across the keyboard. Bingo. “Riley Jameson, twenty-one, died of an overdose in her apartment in First Hill on May 2, 2000. Police were seen carrying a crying toddler from the scene.”
“Sounds like who we were looking for.”
“Jesus, her LiveJournal is still active.” I clicked on the link. “Fuck, this is old.” Riley Jameson’s page popped up on my screen, and I scrolled through the old posts and photos. It was a mess. LiveJournal had been around since 1999 and predated sites such as MySpace and Friendster.
“There.” My father pointed to one of the photos. “That looks like Lina hanging off Eriksen’s arm and that,” his finger shifted to another woman I didn’t recognize, “must be Riley Jameson.”
“They were club girls.”
