“No worries, princess,” Val said, leaning down to brush a kiss on her lips. “No one is getting close to Brielle and she isn’t getting close to the shadows. We gave our word to Elie.”
“She’s ours,” Dario echoed. “Family. No one gets her.”
Emmanuelle nodded, stepped into a shadow and was gone. For just one moment, Brielle had the urge to follow her, to find out in person just what Constantine Babell was up to. How was he going to try to kill her? Val was right; he couldn’t just take the elevator to the upper floor to their private suite and expect to get past the multitude of security guards and then Valentino and Dario on top of them. Fortunately, her fingers kept typing even as her thoughts went a little chaotic.
Constantine had gone to Barcelona on holiday with two other students, Otto and Rupert Winslow, brothers he’d grown up next door to in Chicago who had gone to Spain on vacation and met him there. Otto and Rupert owned a thriving high-rise window-cleaning business together. Stefano used their company to keep the windows immaculate at his hotel, which their employees did.
Constantine was now forty-three years old. Otto, the older of the Winslow brothers, was the same age, with Rupert only eighteen months behind. Constantine had been in Barcelona when he was twenty-three, so twenty years earlier. Finding out what three men did during a short vacation twenty years ago was going to be extremely difficult. She needed to find something that would connect one of them with the Toselli family.
She sat back in her chair and tapped her finger on the desktop as she ran through the possibilities in her mind. Three young men set free in a foreign country looking to have really good times. No one was around to be the word of caution. What would they do? Where would they go? Party hard. Drinking for sure. Women. Gambling maybe. Trying drugs?
What were the hotspots in the city back then? What were the names of the clubs where everyone partied? If you wanted to catch three young men in your web, where did you have a local woman bring them? One lead led to another. Even twenty years earlier, the Tosellis had had their hands in everything. Law enforcement looked the other way if tourists got robbed and went crying to the police.
“It appears that Constantine and two of his friends, Otto and Rupert Winslow, took a holiday together in Barcelona twenty years ago and partied hard in one of the Tosellis’ many clubs. As young men do, they drank, danced and hooked up with women who took them to the back rooms and had their wicked way with them. They woke up in the street with no money and no passports. They went to the local police, but they were thrown in jail. It seems that one of the women they partied with was found dead, beaten to death. The youngest boy, Rupert, was covered in her blood, under his shirt and pants. She had his skin under her fingernails.”
Again, Brielle sat back in her chair and studied the laptop screen, shaking her head slightly. “That is one big bunch of bull.”
“Why would you say that?” Valentino asked, coming up behind her.
“First, there’s no mention of it in the press. It would have been big news. This woman isn’t dead. Unless the tourist demanded to see her body, the Tosellis wouldn’t have to produce her. They just make her look good for photographs and the report is written up over and over the same way. Here, I’ll show you.”
She got into the police files and found three photographs. Two were exactly the same, one appeared similar. She pulled up the police report. It was written up the same and signed by the same officer. “They didn’t even bother to use new material. The tourist is terrified, and as soon as the rescuer comes to help them, they take whatever they can get in order to get out of the country and go home. The Tosellis ‘clean up the mess’ for them and in return ask for money or favors. The favor might be right away or come twenty years later. In this case, it appears, the favor has been called in.”
“Why Constantine and not Rupert?”
“Rupert can’t get to her,” Dario said.
“How does Constantine think he’s going to get to her?” Valentino asked. “Bring her a birthday cake when it isn’t her birthday?”
“It would be the last thing he ever does,” Dario said.
“This is so sad,” Brielle said. “I feel sorry for the people the Toselli family traps and then uses. Everyone makes mistakes. Anyone can get drunk and do something dumb.”
“That’s why you have a sober friend looking out,” Val pointed out.
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you never did anything stupid, Val.”
He laughed. “Sure I did. I lost Emme for a very long time. I never want to go through something like that again, but as for getting drunk and being dumb, no, can’t say I ever did. I had Dario watching my back and I watched his.”
Her insides ached. She thought maybe she could take a break and stretch out on the couch just for a minute and no one would make any cracks about it. She didn’t stretch when she stood up, although ordinarily she did. Her belly felt too tight.
“I didn’t have that growing up,” she admitted. “In some ways, it was good. I learned to rely on myself.”
“Is that why you have such a difficult time when anyone tells you to do something that might save your life?” Dario asked.
Her first reaction was to bristle like a porcupine, but then she tried to hear him and be fair. She did have a difficult time. Before Elie, she’d relied on her own judgment for everything.
“I suppose so. I never thought about it. I’m not deliberately being defiant or going in the opposite way someone’s telling me to go, but I’ve always done what I thought best in the circumstances.” She judged the distance to the sofa. It looked a long way off. Maybe it would be better to just sit down in the desk chair again, although it wasn’t very comfortable.
“For instance, right now, you’re pale and need to lie down, but you’re pretending you’re strong and don’t want us to know you need to lie down, so you’re going to sit back in the chair that’s making you hurt,” Dario said. “That’s good judgment? Or defiance? What is that exactly?”
She sighed, tempted to give him the finger. “I hate looking weak all the time.”
The two men exchanged a puzzled look. “Why would you think you look weak?”
“I don’t know. I think I view myself that way because I’m not like Emmanuelle. I always wanted to be. She and one of Elie’s cousins, Axelle, have always been held up as the gold standard in our business. I never met that standard, or even came close.” She looked across the room at the sofa. It was really far away.
“Ask for help, Brielle,” Dario said.