Page 57 of Tangled
Andrea tipped her head. “I have no idea, but I think we may be surprised when HICC figures it out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Do you recognize her from any of the pictures left on Gracie’s phone?” Brad askedScarlett. She was sitting beside him on the couch, watching the CCTV feeds of Kimmie Garza at the bar on his laptop.
She studied the woman whom Ryan’s team had decided to hold off on arresting for the moment. She was beautiful. But from what she’d seen of the Sussurri site—and yes, she’d looked after Sabina had shown her where and how to find it—all the women were gorgeous. The kind of women that men—or boys masquerading as men—fantasized about.
“Not that I recall. It’s been a while since I looked, though,” Scarlett answered. “And I turned the phone over to Ryan last week, so the police or HICC would be better to ask. Aren’t his kids going to be off the slopes soon?” she asked, pointing to the man chatting with Kimmie.
“The lifts close at five. After that, it’s too dark to ski anything but the bunny slopes,” he replied.
“So it’s unlikely she’ll be invited to spend time with him tonight,” Scarlett said.
Brad shook his head. “Not unless he’s the worst sort of dad. He has one room with two queen beds and a pullout couch.”
They continued watching in silence. As Kimmie flirted and plied her trade, Scarlett couldn’t help but think of Gracie and the life she’d led. The thought of selling her body to anyone made Scarlett physically ill. But so did the reality that for people like Gracie, people who had no support and knew nothing else, it wasoften the only way to make the most out of the conditions they’d been born into.
On the surface, she and Gracie weren’t that different. They’d grown up in the same neighborhood, gone to the same schools, lived at the same near-poverty level. The world saw them as girls with not much of a future. But unlike Gracie, Scarlett had had a support system. She’d had parents who’d protected her, who’d given her as safe a haven as they could, and who had taught her the value of education. As a child, she hadn’t seen it, but as an adult, she recognized how hard her parents worked to make their apartment a safe place amid all the violence. How hard they’d worked to make their home a place where she could thrive and dream while living in a neighborhood where dreams rarely took root, much less flourished.
Scarlett had won the lottery with her parents, while Gracie had none of that. And what a difference it had made.
“HICC is tracking down who runs Sussurri, right?” she asked.
“They are. They never stopped, but with Kimmie’s reappearance, they are doubling down.”
“Any ideas?”
Brad lifted a shoulder. “Officially? No. Unofficially, they think it’s either someone with a very clean reputation or someone on the opposite end of the spectrum.”
“Someone who’d want to silence Gracie in order to preserve their reputation—whether that’s as a respected member of society or someone who wants to stay off the radar.”
“That is what they think,” Brad confirmed as he brushed a kiss on the top of her head. “Are you ready for Jessica to get here tomorrow?”
“I’m ready for this to be over,” she replied. “If she helps bring that about, then I’m more than happy to have her join the party.” She hesitated, then continued. “When I first started looking intoGracie’s death, it was sort of abstract. I didn’t believe she’d killed herself, but I also didn’t really think of myself as looking for a killer. I guess I thought I’d find some evidence and hand it over and then maybe the police would reopen her case. How they closed it in the first place makes no sense to me. The file is only a few pages. Anyway, now that we have Maria Abel’s murder, Petrov’s murder, Kimmie’s activities, and the Wolf weaving a trail through it all, it’s far from abstract. And while I’ve been in some hairy situations in my career, this one feels complicated in a way I don’t understand. When Kara and I were taken hostage with the rest of the hospital staff, we knew why. Or when the band of rebels took over our medical camp in East Africa, we knew why. This? I don’t understand.”
Brad ran his fingers through her hair as the light outside began to dim. “I think all we have here is a woman who wanted a new life and knew only one way to get it,” he said. “It’s possible they are all connected. Maybe Simms used Sussurri. Maybe Rathwell did as well. Maybe the Wolf owns it. There could be any number of ways the shady people in Gracie’s life intertwined. But for our purposes, they were each a means to an end for Gracie. Assuming she planned to blackmail Sussurri, too, then each of them was only important to the extent that they could contribute to her freedom. To her exit from her old life.”
“You don’t think the connection between them, assuming we find one, is relevant?” she asked, tipping her head up.
His shoulder lifted under her cheek. “It might be relevant in explaining why this is so hard to unravel. Or why so many people are putting so much effort into silencing you. But are those interconnections relevant to Gracie’s death? My guess is probably not.”
She pondered this for a moment before realizing the truth of it. By looking into her death, they may uncover more than Gracie ever intended. Maybe even more than she ever knew. At thecore of it, though, each of the three, possibly four, threads had likely been nothing more than an exit ramp for Gracie, not part of a bigger plan. Which brought her thoughts back to the police and autopsy reports. Kara had gone over the autopsy, so Scarlett doubted they’d missed anything. It had been months since she’d reviewed the police report, though. Knowing what she knew now, would she see something different?
“Hold on a second,” she said. He shifted the computer off his lap as she slipped from under his arm and exited the room. When she returned a few minutes later, it was closed on the coffee table.
“The boys came into the bar and left with their dad,” he said. “Teague’s following Kimmie now. What’s that?” he asked, nodding to the envelope she held.
“The pathetic police report. I figured if we want to bring it back to the basics, we should have another look,” she replied, retaking her seat. Bending the metal clasp holding the envelope closed, she lifted the flap and pulled out a stack of papers. “The report is only a few pages,” she said. “The rest are photocopies of the pictures they took at the scene.” She hesitated. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a dead body, but if you haven’t…”
“I appreciate the warning, but I’ll be fine,” Brad said, holding out a hand.
She nodded, taking him at his word. “You start with the report. I’ll go over the pictures again. The copy quality isn’t great, but we take what we can get.”
They sat in silence, each going through their tasks. Occasionally, she’d show him something interesting in the photos and vice versa. At one point, he brought out his phone and pulled up a calendar, as if checking the timeline of events. As for her, she scoured the pictures looking for anything she might notice now that she hadn’t before.
The images were second-rate, B-team efforts of the evidence collection team. Even she could tell that. A random picture of Gracie’s living room, but only part of it. One depicting the corner of her bed and the wood floor below, as if the photographer had accidentally taken it while holding the camera by his side. There were several of Gracie, though, including close-ups of her face—showing her blue lips—and her hands—highlighting her discolored nail beds.
“Anything?” she asked Brad when she finished going through the photos.
