25. Cassie
CASSIE
The storage unit was at the back of the facility, an empty field leading to the woods behind it.
We walked between the rows of rectangular buildings that housed the storage units, and I caught glimpses of Miriam Prescott in the empty lot next door, walking in her heels, a large suited men who might have been her driver following behind her as she spoke to a guy in jeans and a flannel shirt.
“I’ve had to move everything around a few times.” Daniel Feldman was clearly nervous. He eyed Vigo — swinging his bat — warily as he led us past rows of steel roll-up doors. “I was careful, tried to make sure I didn’t lose anything along the way.”
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, my parents haven’t been around to pay the bill. Why would you keep their stuff all this time?”
I was still reeling. I didn’t have the whole story, but Daniel Feldman had known who I was from the beginning because he’d known my parents.
“First of all,” he said, stopping at one of the roll-up doors, “they paid years in advance. By now, you probably know why.”
If you’ve found this, something has gone wrong.
“Second?” Jagger asked.
Daniel peered up at him from behind his glasses. “Pardon me?”
“You said ‘first of all,’” Jagger said. “There has to be at least a second of all.”
“Right.” Daniel turned his attention on me. “Second, your parents did important work, and they weren’t alone.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Let’s just say you don’t get as far as they did without information.
” He hesitated, looked around like he half expected someone to be watching, then continued.
“They weren’t the only ones who thought something was wrong, okay?
Something big. There were a lot of people with pieces of the puzzle.
They all wanted — want — to see someone held accountable. ”
This was new. All this time I’d seen my parents as alone, risking everything, fighting for information without help.
But Daniel Feldman was right: my parents had gotten close enough to scare someone — someone powerful — and that meant someone had talked.
Someone who’d seen things. Who’d known things.
Like Anna Reed.
Daniel indicated the padlock hanging from the steel door. “Give it a shot.”
I removed the key from my pocket and inserted it in the lock.
The padlock popped open.
“There you go,” he said.
I drew in a breath, the magnitude of the discovery hitting me full force now that I knew the key fit.
My parents had left behind more than a tape recorder and a key.
And they’d taken extraordinary measures to hide it.
I removed the padlock and started to open the roll-up door.
“Wait,” Daniel said.
I froze. “What’s wrong?”
“This was my part: keeping this stuff for Catherine and Braden, making sure it was still here if the right people came looking for it — and hiding it if the wrong people came looking for it.” He hesitated. “There were lots of us out there, doing our part. But this is where I exit stage left.”
“You don’t want to know.” Hawk sounded angry.
I shot him a warning glance. Daniel Feldman had helped us.
Had helped my parents.
We didn’t have a right to be mad if he didn’t want to take it further than he already had.
“It’s okay,” I told Daniel. “I get it.”
My parents had died because of their investigation into Imperium Fratrum.
I’d almost died because I’d gotten too close. The Hawks too.
I couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to keep their distance.
“I have a family.” There was an unspoken apology in Daniel Feldman’s words.
“I understand,” I said. “Thank you… for helping them back then and for helping me now.”
“I’ve been watching. All these years… the missing girls. I thought it would have stopped by now.”
“Some things don’t stop until someone stops them,” Jagger said.
Daniel nodded, then turned his gaze on me. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks.”
We waited for him to round the corner, then Vigo reached for the handle on the pull-up door.
We stared into a dim space, boxes and plastic bins lurking like crouched animals in the shadows.
Hawk felt around the frame of the steel door for a light switch and a moment later the storage space was illuminated with thin fluorescent lighting.
The space was small, no bigger than the living room of my old apartment, or what I’d started thinking of as my old apartment anyway (I still owned it and my stuff was still there but home was with the Hawks now).
It wasn’t even half full, and the boxes and bins had been pushed up against the walls, leaving an empty space in the middle.
Jagger took my hand. “You ready to do this?”
There wasn’t even a question that it would happen. We’d come this far.
Had risked this much.
I nodded and moved into the room, scanning the labels on the boxes and bins.
brAM BIRTH - 5
brAM AND CASSIE
brADEN - MEMENTOS
CATHERINE - MEMENTOS
And then a series of boxes pushed into the corner: KENSINGTON, AVENTINE, KAPROLOV.
IF.
I stared at the box marked IF.
“Imperium Fratrum,” I said.
“They were close,” Hawk said.
“At least as close as we are,” Vigo added.
Jagger kissed my forehead. “You take the family stuff. We’ll start with everything else.”
“Bram looks so small in these,” I said, flipping through the pictures in the brAM BIRTH - 5 box.
We’d been working for about a half hour, the Hawks going through my parents’ investigative records on one side of the room while I went through the personal stuff on the other.
It was like being transported back in time but also like being transported to a time I’d never been in at all, a time when it had been just my parents and Bram, before I’d been born.
My parents looked so young and happy.
So carefree.
And Bram looked like any other kid: just a dark-haired boy with a serious expression and a shy smile.
“I can’t believe they kept all this stuff,” I said.
Jagger came to look over my shoulder. “They obviously loved you and Bram a lot.”
I looked up at him. “Did your parents keep stuff like this?”
“Totally.” He didn’t sound happy about it. “If you walked into my parents’ house you’d think we were the happiest family on earth.”
I frowned and looked at Hawk and Vigo, still digging through stuff on the other side of the storage unit. “What about you?”
“My mom had a few photo albums,” Hawk said. “My dad’s not really sentimental.”
“I’m an only child,” Vigo said. “My mom still has my first-grade macaroni turkey from Thanksgiving, and I’m pretty sure my dad still drinks out of the #1 Dad coffee mug I gave him for Father’s Day when I was ten.”
Jagger squeezed my shoulder and returned to the other side of the room.
I watched my parents’ story unfold through photographs and crayon drawings and report cards and dried flowers, watched them go from a young couple out with friends, their eyes lit with youth and promise, to parents of a newborn.
And then they were a family of three, Bram balanced on my father’s hip while my mom showed a positive pregnancy test to the camera.
I opened the box marked brAM AND CASSIE and found pictures of Bram holding me in the hospital, a grin lighting up his eyes while I squinted up at him from a squished and bruised face.
And then pictures of us at home — in the old house Bram had had to sell — and pictures of us at the park and pictures of us in the bedroom we’d shared when we’d been small.
I was so lost to the past it took me a second to realize Jagger had spoken to me.
“What was that?” I asked, trying to clear the fog of memory from my brain.
“Look at this,” he held up a foam board, the kind I’d used to display my third-grade science project on density (I’d layered various objects in glass jars, then dropped a coin into each one to see how far it sunk).
Except this one was bigger and sturdier, like something someone would use for a business presentation before everyone used computers.
I set down the pictures in my hand and crossed the room to take a closer look, then blinked in surprise.
“Is that…”
“Yeah,” Jagger said. “Looks like your parents were a lot further along than we thought.”
The board was covered with pictures and documents, red string traveling between places and people, a passport photo, and several documents stamped FOIA.
“They used the Freedom of Information Act to get some of this shit,” Vigo said, staring at the board.
I took it from Jagger’s hands and looked for a spot with better light, then balanced the foam board on a stack of boxes next to the wall.
I stood back to study it and felt the Hawks fall in next to me.
“They’d definitely discovered the Dimitri connection,” Hawk said, his gaze on a black & white picture of Dimitri Kaprolov exiting a stone building.
He was younger — and he had more hair — but it was definitely him, and on the building behind him I could just make out the Kensington Trust sign.
“Who’s that guy?” Vigo asked, pointing to a picture of a slightly younger guy on a yacht.
The photo had obviously been taken from far away with a telephoto lens.
“No idea,” Jagger said. “We can reverse image search it when we have WiFi. Signal sucks out here.”
I took a picture of the guy on the yacht with my phone.
“It’s getting late,” Jagger said. “We should call it for today.”
“Agreed,” Vigo said. “I’ll get the car so we can load everything up.”
Hawk and Jagger started carrying boxes and bins to the front of the storage unit for easy loading while Vigo went to get the car.
I stared at the board in the fading light, trying to imagine my parents pinning things to it, pulling red string from pin to pin, connecting the dark tendrils of a sex-trafficking ring that went back decades.
It was almost impossible, but the evidence was staring me in the face that that was exactly what they’d done.
While I’d been going to school, arguing with Bram, skinning my knees, my parents had been working overtime, trying to figure out who was behind the disappearance of girls around Blackwell Falls for decades.
Their lives must have looked ordinary from the outside, but they’d been doing something extraordinary, and my heart swelled with pride when I thought of all they’d risked — all they’d lost — to help people they hadn’t even known.
It put my own risk — my own possible loss — in perspective. I understood why Bram had wanted to protect me, why he’d avoided talking about what our parents had been up to, but I couldn’t go about my life knowing there was an organization like Imperium Fratrum kidnapping women, stealing their lives.
I just wasn’t built that way.
And deep down, I didn’t think Bram was built that way either.
He’d proven that when he’d put everything on the line for Maeve.
I thought about the phone Aloha had hacked from the dead guy at the paper mill. How did it connect to what I was seeing on the board? Did it connect?
But it had to. Somehow everything that had happened — Aventine and the Cantwells and the school Lilah told me about and Dimitri Kaprolov and the missing girls like Rain, Jasmine and Nia — was connected.
I just couldn’t see the red string between them yet.
And what about princessA? Who was she and what part did she play in the dark tragedy playing out around us?
I had more information than ever.
So why did I feel like I was getting further away from the truth?