Her desk, the most solid piece of furniture she owned, had been her father’s. Made of dense mahogany, with two filling drawers on the left side and three smaller drawers on the right, it felt like a command station. If only it had a built-in espresso machine, she could rule the world from this very post.
Before leaving for Sicily, she had been re-reading some of Pete’s old stories and the polished surface of the desk lay scattered with them. Nearby, the portfolio she had requested from the Library of Congress was placed at the top right corner, papers tidily tucked away. Cassidy remembered waking in the middle of the night with a memory of a story Pete had broken, and it led to a crazy idea—probably due to sleep deprivation during those few hard days after Costa Rica—that Pete’s death might be connected to one of his stories. But after a cursory look through the stack from the Library of Congress, she found no evidence of this. And her latest conversation with Bruce hadn’t helped. She thought back to the phone call, his voice so clear he could have been in the same room.
“It’s just that . . . the clan is notoriously ruthless,” Bruce explained.
Cassidy had tried to remember more—she was sure Bruce had given her the name of the clan. Herero? Hidalgo? But a search of Pete’s headlines revealed no such clues. A wave of guilt washed over her. If she hadn’t been so self-absorbed back then, worrying about publishing papers like mad and the postdoc and her job search, maybe she would have seen something, noticed more.
“Did he ever seem afraid?” Bruce had asked.
A chill had shot up her spine. “What do you mean?”
“Like did he check the locks on the doors, or did he seem hyperaware of what cars were parked on the street, or was he jumpy. Things like that?”
“No,” Cassidy said.
Bruce sighed. “Maybe it’s nothing,” he said. “And maybe it’s better for you if it is.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She could feel her hackles rise.
“The family would have been keen to crush some of those stories he was digging into. People like that are extremely powerful. I don’t have any hard proof that they had anything to do with Pete’s death, just a hunch, and I’ve been wrong before.”
“So, you’re telling me to forget it?”
“I can’t tell you to do that,” he replied.
Cassidy waited, trying to tamp down her frustration. Had she misunderstood his comment back in Costa Rica? Or was it something else—that he didn’t trust her, maybe?
“It just might be better if you left it alone.”
So that was it—he didn’t want her stirring up trouble.
“I mean, say you get the police to open the case, and miraculously, they agree, and they even find evidence of foul play. What then?”
“Then they go to jail,” she answered in a hard voice. That dull pain rolled through her stomach again.
Bruce sighed. “Okay, let’s say justice is served and they do. Then what?”
Cassidy frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, sure, some bad guys get wiped out, and that’s awesome. But how will you feel?”
Cassidy hadn’t understood. Wouldn’t she feel great? Victorious?
“It’s a long road. A dangerous road. Are you up for the journey? And when it’s over, will the effort have brought you what you’re looking for?”
Cassidy sipped the last of her second beer, her memories drifting. She had found Pete’s story about an illegal cockfighting ring in Reno, but that hardly felt big enough for vengeance. Had Pete dug deeper, and found worse offenses? Or had he stumbled into something while following some other story? Like the coal plant that would further endanger Northwest salmon habitats, or the janitorial company that was basically enslaving its illegal immigrant workers, some of them forced to do sexual favors for the owners as a way to “work off” their transportation from places like Lithuania.
That story had inspired the book Pete wanted to write: “Immigrants in America,” a tell-all about the conditions and challenges immigrants faced while starting a new life. He had interviewed several families, enticing even reluctant people to tell their heartbreaking stories: a Russian nuclear scientist, an Argentinian political activist, a literature professor from Iraq. Cassidy remembered Pete sharing their stories with her but could not find his notes or any published stories on the subject. Likely, he had gathered everything in a folder on his laptop. Though Quinn had made her a thumb drive of everything before donating his laptop, Cassidy hadn’t the guts to peek inside it yet.
But Pete and his influence were never far from her mind. Like during her recent trip to Sicily. On her way down the mountain one evening, she had taken a back road to avoid the usual evening traffic jam. Typically, she wasn’t a very adventurous driver, but she had studied the route that morning over her coffee and memorized the detour so she wouldn’t get lost on one of the area’s many twisty backroads. Rounding a corner, in a patch of exposed dirt along the roadside, Cassidy saw two ebony-skinned women dressed only in lingerie tucked beneath black umbrellas.
Umbrella Girls.
Instantly, Cassidy had been taken back to when she and Pete had first seen these women. She and Pete had met up in Sicily after completing field work—Cassidy on Etna, and Pete in Greece. Pete had begged her to pull over so he could talk to these women, and once he discovered their horrible plight, he had become obsessed with exposing it.
But he never got the chance. Something about not having enough sources, and the hint that the Sicilian mafia was somehow involved—an angle his editor had not wanted to touch. “They’re chickenshit,” Pete had said to her, his hands braced on his hips—his usual button-down shirt rolled to the elbows and tucked neatly into his faded chinos. But without a home
