Chapter 21
CASSIE
I told her everything: how I’d left early for her place, how I’d missed my parents and decided to drive up the mountain.
The black SUV.
The guardrail.
I could almost tell it without breaking into a sweat.
“Jesus,” Daisy said when I was done. “You must have been so scared. Why would someone do that to you?”
“That’s part of why I asked you to lunch actually.”
I imagined her pretty face scrunching in surprise, her violet eyes curious.
“What do you mean?”
“You know how my parents were driven off the road by that guy, Travis Dorsey?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it turns out, someone paid him to do it.”
Daisy’s glass hit the table hard enough to make me jump. “Someone paid him? Who?”
“I don’t know. The Hawks… um, Hawk, Jagger, and Vigo kind of beat it out of him, but all he could tell them was that the guy who’d paid him off was Russian.”
“Wow,” Daisy said. “That’s huge. Did you call that loser detective?”
Daisy knew all about my many attempts to get Detective Grabowski to invest more time in my parents’ case.
“Not yet. I don’t want to bring anything to him until I have something solid.”
“But aren’t the police investigating what happened to you?” Daisy asked. “Someone ran you off the road!”
“I didn’t remember that until recently. They thought maybe I’d gotten distracted on my way up the mountain.”
Daisy frowned. “What a bunch of assholes.”
“I can’t really blame them. I couldn’t remember anything and all they had to go on was a broken guardrail. Distraction is probably a more common reason for accidents than attempted murder.”
Now that I’d put words to it, I felt the weight of it in my chest.
Someone had tried to kill me.
I thought about the security audit and the man named Rafe stalking the property with Vigo. Is that why the Hawks were revamping their security system? Because they were worried someone might come back to finish the job?
“Jesus, Cass…” Daisy said. “Does Bram know?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. I just… I don’t want to bring it all back for him, you know?”
“I get that, but you can’t carry this alone.”
“I’m not alone.” For the first time, I realized it was true.
I had the Hawks.
They’d gone to the Sunoco at the bottom of the mountain and had seen a black SUV getting gas on the day of my accident, but they hadn’t been able to read the plate on the security footage.
I don’t know how they’d gotten the transaction records from the station — I wasn’t sure I wanted to know — but Hawk was running down the credit cards that had been used right before my accident to try and identify who’d been in the car that had run me off the road.
“Still,” Cassie said, “Bram’s your brother. He’d want to know.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right. I’ll tell him, I promise. I just want to figure this out first. I’m hoping you can help me do that.”
“What can I do?”
“I’ve just been thinking… my parents were investigating some big wire transfers to Aventine right before their accident.”
I told her about the transfers my parents had highlighted from Kensington Trust to Aventine University and explained how private banking worked: the opacity, the discretion, the shadowy international figures who used it to transfer money.
“You think your parents were killed because of the money transfers?” Daisy asked.
“I think maybe they were killed because of what the money transfers were buying.”
“I don’t get it,” Daisy said.
“Well, the money transfers got me thinking about the sex trafficking thing, all those missing girls.”
I heard Daisy’s intake of breath, knew I was touching on a sore subject for her too.
Because Daisy’s sister Ruth? She’d almost been a victim, a target of Piers Cantwell, the powerful man Daisy had worked for, and his son when she'd discovered the resort they were building was going to be a destination for wealthy men looking to victimize young women.
“You think the wire transfers were paying for the girls,” Daisy said. “That your parents were killed because they found out.”
“It’s not crazy when you think about it, especially after what happened at Aventine.”
Aventine had been the first domino to fall in the sex trafficking ring. At the time, everyone in Blackwell Falls had breathed a sigh of relief: there would be no more missing girls, the perpetrators had been caught.
Except now I realized there had been more missing girls, that whatever had been going on when the trafficking ring at Aventine had been exposed was just the first strand in a web that was darker and more tangled than anyone could have imagined.
“I see your point,” Daisy said. “But what does that have to do with your accident? With the Cantwells?”
“I don’t know if it has anything to do with the Cantwells,” I said, “but I wanted to ask what you remembered, see if I can piece it all together.”
I’d been on the outside of it at the time. Now I wondered if there were details that might have been important, details that might connect what the Cantwells had been doing with what had happened at Aventine and the story my parents had been investigating.
Details that might connect to what had happened to me on the mountain.
“It was really just what was in the news,” Daisy said.
She ran me through what she knew: the Cantwells, the resort for VIPs, the surprising connection to Jace’s dad.
I tried to see all the pieces, tried to find something that connected them.
My parents and the wire transfers.
Missing girls.
The sex trafficking ring at Aventine.
More missing girls.
The Cantwell Resort and Spa, built as a destination for powerful men who wanted to buy and use kidnapped women.
Missing girls.
Then, Maeve’s kidnapping last winter, the podcast incel who’d taken her to Romania, who’d told her he was going to sell her off once he had his fun.
Unfortunately for him, he’d underestimated Maeve, to say nothing of Bram, Poe, and Remy.
And there had been another story teasing my memory, one I only vaguely remembered from the news: some kind of cult up north that had been raided by the FBI. I thought maybe some girls had been rescued, girls who’d been kidnapped, at least one of them local.
I couldn’t help feeling it was all connected. I was missing some pieces — I was just as sure of that — but everything that had happened tied together somehow.
Because the pieces I did have had one thing in common.
Blackwell Falls.
There was something rotten at the core of the town I called home.
“I still don’t get what this has to do with you,” Daisy said. “Why would someone try to kill you because of all this stuff that happened so long ago?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
I didn’t want to give voice to the possibilities swirling in my head. Daisy had been through enough. But I was beginning to think the sex trafficking ring — and the people responsible for it — weren’t in the past after all.
That they were very much in the present, and because of the Hawks’ visit to Travis Dorsey, I was a target now too.