I raised my eyebrows. “The Russian oligarch?” Hawk looked at me in surprise and I shrugged. “His fingerprints are all over international money, the transparent kind and otherwise.”
“That’s the one,” Jones said. He looked at Hawk. “I couldn’t confirm it but you know how investigations go. They leak like fucking sieves, internally at least. Especially the long ones.”
Hawk rubbed at his cheek with his thumb, a dark scowl playing across his face while Jones eyed a new customer at the Last Stop, a guy in his twenties wearing a camo vest who’d just slid onto a seat at the counter.
“Why would a Russian oligarch I’ve never fucking heard of run a local woman off the road?” Hawk asked.
Cassie,I thought. Not just any local woman.
Our woman.
“I don’t know shit except what I told you,” Jones said, pulling his baseball hat lower on his face. “That fucking card is linked to a shell company being investigated as a front for sex trafficking. Word is Kaprolov is one of the sick bastards who might be implicated. That’s all I got.” He stood. “Don’t call me again about this shit.”
Hawk and I sat in silence until the bell on the door dinged behind us announcing Jones’ exit.
“How the fuck would a Russian oligarch be connected to the missing girls in Blackwell Falls?” Hawk asked.
“I don’t know.” I thought back over the last two months, all the pieces of the puzzle that didn’t seem to fit anywhere. Except now I was starting to see it: the outline of an image, the corner pieces that might anchor the others, the border filling in. “But I know someone who might.”
32
CASSIE
Vigo borrowedJagger’s Aston Martin for the award ceremony and we arrived at the Four Seasons in style.
I felt pretty in my new dress, to say nothing of the black Louboutins the Hawks had insisted on buying as a nod to the unhinged sex we’d had in the dressing room.
Poor Meredith.
She hadn’t even been able to look me in the eye after she’d walked in on us.
The valet in front of the hotel opened my door and I started to get out, then took Vigo’s extended hand when he appeared next to the car.
He was devastatingly handsome in a tailored black suit, his blond hair, usually spiky, combed into some semblance of submission (a tuft at the back stuck up, but in my opinion it only made him hotter), and a familiar rush of lust moved though my body at the touch of his hand.
I clutched his arm on the way in and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so feminine as we made our way through the lobby. I’d even had Daisy come to the house to help me get ready. She’d encouraged me to wear more makeup (“It’s a fancyevent! Have fun with it!”) and had looked up videos on how to twist my hair into a complicated chignon at the back of my neck. The hairstyle highlighted my bare shoulders and the deep plum-colored lace dress, and the heavier eye makeup worked with the dress to accentuate the green in my eyes.
The hotel was filled with well-dressed guests, some of them heading out for a night on the town, some heading for the other banquet rooms, and we passed signs for two wedding receptions and some kind of corporate party before spotting the sign pointing to the university’s award ceremony for Professor Harrison Keaton.
“I’m nervous,” I said, holding tighter to Vigo’s arm.
He looked down at me with a sympathetic smile. “Don’t be. They’ll love you. Besides, they’ll be too wrapped up in the ceremony and their boring friends to pay us much attention.”
Another sign for the ceremony stood outside the banquet room. Music drifted into the hall from inside along with the murmur of many voices engaged in conversation.
I didn’t even have time to catch my breath before we entered the cavernous room filled with people.
Vigo was instantly waylaid by people stopping to say hello and telling him congratulations on his father’s award, and it was obvious he’d known a lot of them for a long time. They greeted him as a friend, and he introduced me to each one, spent a few minutes making small talk, and pulled me through the rest of the room to look for his parents.
There was no sign of the mischievous troublemaker I’d gotten to know over the past two and a half months. Vigo moved confidently through the crowd, speaking formally and articulately to each person who stopped us, thanking them for their congratulations and referring to his father’s published papers like he was still part of this world.
Trying to reconcile the Vigo I’d come to know — the one armed with a baseball bat and a sleeve of Oreos who conquered every room like a playful provocateur — with the polished, restrained man on my arm gave me a kind of whiplash. I focused on smiling and shaking hands, nodding sympathetically or in agreement (depending on the circumstances), and letting everyone else do the talking.
We were almost to the platform at the front of the room, a dais set with place settings and name cards I couldn’t read, when a man in his fifties caught sight of us.
I knew immediately he was Vigo’s father. His hair was brown, but he had the same tilt of the head, the same chiseled jawline and posture.
Vigo led me through the crowd and the older man extricated himself from the couple he’d been talking to and walked to meet us.
