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“Only if you like putting money in the Mafia’s pockets.”
“Are you serious? The Mafia runs a pizza restaurant?”
“Gotta launder their money somehow. They run plenty of restaurants, but that’s one of the better establishments.”
“Uh, no thanks.”
Collier laughed and steered me across the street. Uncle Gino’s Pizzeria looked every bit as nice as Mamma Mia’s, but Collier assured me that the owner—Gino’s nephew—wasn’t involved in organised crime. We took a seat at the back, and Collier poured me a glass of water from the carafe on the table. This wasn’t the kind of sleek, fancy place that Ford liked to take me, but the worn wood and checked tablecloths felt welcoming in a homey way, and when I eyeballed the food on the next table, I decided that Collier had chosen well.
“If you like seafood, try the lobster ravioli,” he suggested. “You won’t get better.”
“Thanks for the recommendation.”
Once we’d ordered and taken the edge off our hunger with a basket of breadsticks, it was time to return to the problem at hand. Kaylin La Rocca. More specifically, her mystery man. I thought back to my relationship with Ford. That had stayed secret for about three seconds around the office, and it hadn’t been long before he was staying over in the apartment I shared with Mercy.
“She was seeing a guy, yet she didn’t mention it to her two closest friends?”
“Maybe she figured they’d disapprove?” Collier said. “Anisha seems like the judgmental type.”
“Why would she disapprove of a wealthy, handsome thirty-year-old? If he was wearing a suit at lunchtime, then it’s likely he had a good job. What’s FIT?”
“The Fashion Institute of Technology, over by Madison Square Garden.”
If only we’d been tackling this case three years ago, there might have been camera footage available.
“I wonder if he worked there? Kaylin could have met him through her modelling work. Do you think Martina D’Angelo would tell us if she ever did a job there?”
Collier grimaced. “I could try calling her, but I don’t want to do that more than once, so let’s list all the follow-up questions we have first.”
I made a note in the case file. Blackwood’s investigations app let us keep track of our thoughts, and our files automatically backed up to a central server so if a device got stolen, we didn’t lose any work. The data could be wiped remotely in an emergency. Plus Providence worked away in the background, adding extra information that might be relevant to the case. There was a memo telling me that Derek Trimmer had once been arrested for public indecency, for example. I scanned the details. When he was eighteen, he and three other boys had mooned their high-school principal on the eve of graduation. That fact probably wasn’t useful, but it did show that Trimmer hadn’t always been quite so uptight.
“Or maybe the guy was a model?” I said. “If he was handsome and he knew it? If we manage to get a list of talent, we could filter on age, hair colour, and height.”
“We’d still have at least a hundred possibles.”
“We could discount those with a lower net worth.”
“That might work. We’ll have to head back to the office—nobody’s running that kind of analysis on a phone.”
“I only hope Lux still has the records from four years ago. Martina D’Angelo didn’t strike me as the most organised person in the world, and if her hard drive is as messy as her desk…” A message flashed up on the screen, and I skimmed through it. Freaking heck, Agatha was a genius. “Hey, we have the event schedule and guest lists from Every Step already.”
“Fast work.”
“Agatha mocked up a website for an ice sculpture artist.” She’d called it Freeze the Moment, and it looked surprisingly professional for something she’d created in an hour. “Trimmer clicked to download the price list, and now we have access to everything.” Dammit, if only I had my laptop. I was gonna give myself eye strain by squinting at the phone. The waitress slid a plate of ravioli in front of me as I tried to make sense of the data, and there was a pattern, sort of. “For nearly two years, Kaylin worked four or five events a week with the occasional gap—presumably when she had to travel for modelling jobs—but in the months before she vanished, that dropped to two a week, then one.”
“There was a catalyst.”
“I think we’re looking at the end of June or the beginning of July.”
Which was further back than we’d thought. There was a build-up.
“What events did she work before that?”
“Weddings. Summer is wedding season.” Weddings were probably more fun than Christmas parties. Better weather, families and older guests rather than hundreds of drunk executives. “Plus a birthday party, but that was for a six-year-old, the notes say. You think she could have met a guy at a wedding?”
“Oh, yeah. Got four sisters and fourteen cousins, so I’ve been to a lot of weddings.” Collier smirked. “Hooked up at every single one of them.”
“With the waitstaff?”
