Page 79 of A Favor Owed

“Guilt?” she says, and the door clicks shut again as she leans against it and glares at me. “Guilt would imply I’ve done something wrong. No, Agent Rivera, I don’t feel guilt. I feel this other thing called responsibility. My family has a debt to pay to society, and this is my small contribution.”

That’s interesting. She’s an interesting girl. I hadn’t really expected that. I had also not expected her to tell the truth, but the only lie I see in her eyes is their fake color. Okay, so daddy’s little girl is a goody-two-shoes. I can work with that. “You can make it a bigger contribution.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know anything. I can’t help you.”

“Now that I know isn’t true.”

“I’m his daughter. He didn’t tell me anything. Like you said, he’s got his sidekicks. They’re the ones he trusts—”

“Club Tesoro and The Gilded Cage.” They’re the names of the “strip clubs” her father owns that are actually fronts for the prostitution of trafficked women. The strip clubs she tipped us off about.

She pales again. I indicate the chair she recently vacated. This time, she sits down.

“You were smart to use a burner phone,” I say. “I couldn’t trace it to you. But we used voice recognition.”

“And how exactly do you legally have my voice on tape?” she says, her eyes and voice ice cold.

“Routine surveillance on your parents’ house. Perfectly legal. Don’t worry, it’ll all make sense when you get to Evidence and Constitutional Law next year.” I smile. She doesn’t.

“Does my father know where I am?” For the first time, I hear real fear in her voice.

“I sincerely doubt it. Your father, or whoever he may have hired to look for you, doesn’t have my resources. Are you afraid of him?”

She narrows her eyes and regards me like I’m an idiot. “Of course I’m afraid of him. He’s Angelo Pini.”

“He’s an asshole, but he’s not a psychopath. He wouldn’t put a hit out on his own daughter.” Actually, I’m not so sure about that, but first things first.

“There are other ways he can hurt me,” she says. “Other people he can hurt to punish me. I can’t live my life like that.”

“So you’re going to live life on the run? Look, I can bring your father down so that he can’t hurt you or anyone else. But I can’t do it without you.”

“You have his managers!” she says. “They know a lot more than I do.”

I shake my head. “If they do, they’re not talking. And I think your dad was smart about them. My gut tells me they don’t know the things that would tie him to the shadier aspects of his clubs. We can’t get to his lawyer, either. Lawyer-client privilege and all that crap.”

“It’s too risky,” she says.

Finally. An acknowledgment that she knows something. “We’ll protect you. Your safety is paramount to the Bureau.” I pause, realizing she doesn’t believe me. I try a different tack. “I have a daughter your age.”

The look of pure “Yeah, right” she gives me could make hell freeze over. I sigh and pull a picture up on my phone. Me with my daughter Giselle. I slide it across the table. She leaves it there but stares at it for a long time, touching the screen once to zoom in on my neck for some reason and staring some more before zooming back out. She sits back in her chair and crosses her arms.

“How did you find me?” she asks. Something in her tone suddenly seems off, so I tread carefully.

“Your name came up on a lead I got before you called in the tip. The name Angela Pines was too similar to Angelina Pini for me to let it go. Pini is Pines in Italian, right? Anyway, I did a little digging and there you were.”

A couple of weeks before Angelina Pini disappeared, she’d been in the Bronx with her driver, a twenty-year-old kid named Paul Centanni. I know this only because, as a low-level Pini associate, Paulie was under surveillance. They visited Connor Quinn, known to us as a producer of fraudulent documents for undocumented immigrants. We’d never moved on the guy, mostly because he’s small-time and strictly not for profit. He only helps out a few families from his church now and then, good people who clean houses and work in school cafeterias. Also, he’s a friend of mine from back in the day. But this time, we made a move. That’s how I found out about Angelina Pini becoming Angela Pines.

It was a little harder to figure out where she’d gone with her new name. A few weeks later, our surveillance of the Pini house picked up the daughter leaving with a single suitcase in the middle of the night, and some furor inside the house when Ma and Pop woke up and learned she’d supposedly headed to India. A few hours later, we received an untraceable phoned-in tip about a couple of clubs we’d been watching but hadn’t been able to tie to Angelo Pini.

No one named Angelina Pini or Angela Pines traveled abroad that day or the next. Then I got word that a woman traveling on a California ID in the name of Angela Pines had paid cash for a same-day flight to California. At some point we learned that Angelo Pini had paid an initial tuition deposit to Columbia Law School. On a hunch, I checked out California law schools, and the rest of the “where” pieces kind of just fell into place.

I just didn’t know why. Why would the mafia princess jump ship and head out to California under an assumed name? Then the forensics report came in. The tipster’s voice was a 90 percent match to that of Angelina Pini.

“You did a good job covering your tracks,” I say, retrieving my phone. “A great job, actually. You’re way off the grid.”

“Yes,” she says faintly, her eyes staring beyond me and looking like her dog just died. “I’ve been doing everything right, not telling anyone anything about me. Except for one person.”

She focuses her gaze on me and regards me for a moment with unimaginably sad eyes, and I sit there, wondering where she’s going with this, wondering what changed. Because ever since she zoomed in on that picture, there was a shift in the air that I can’t put my finger on.

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