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“About six months ago. And yep, no one’s seen her since. It really let the air out of our investigation. Hell, maybe all of them are runaways.”
They weren’t. Dario could feel it in his bones, knew the potential in Hawk’s evil, had seen the evidence of it—just one day ago—in Gwen’s blood. He turned to the next girl’s photo.
“Now that one’s interesting. She was a Miss America finalist before she moved to Vegas and started waiting tables. Left work one night and never showed up at her apartment. Her car disappeared, just like the others. I swear, one day we’re going to find a garage full of them.”
“You need to search Hawk’s property. The house, the grounds. There’s evidence there.”
“Like I said, be patient.” He cocked one brow at Dario. “We’ve got to see where he leads us. Just give us a few days. We need just a little more if we’re going to put him away and actually keep him there.”
Dario lowered his head to his hands and squeezed his temples. He thought back.
Meeting Hawk and Gwen in Biloxi.
The date with Gwen, the night when Jenny killed herself, where Gwen’s eyes had darted to the exits, and she seemed positively terrified.
Hawk’s job offer. Gwen’s confession, her plea, her need to be rescued.
He’d always been a sucker for a damsel in distress. She had needed someone, and he had all but tripped over himself to save her from her father.
But he hadn’t, had he? In the end, despite their thirteen years together, despite all of his promises, he’d failed her. Even worse, he’d sparked the event that had led to her death.
Dario sat back with a frustrated exhale. “If the recording isn’t enough to keep him locked up on Gwen’s death, then arrest him on something else. Fuck, he’s bribed half of the city. Don’t you have anything on that? Or on tax evasion? Or…”
His mind grasped wildly, trying to find something, some way that—in all the time he’d known the man—he had slipped up. But Robert Hawk was smart. He paid the right people. Covered his tracks well and was always just on the right side of legitimate, always a little more interested in money over violence.
Money. The word stuck in his mind, and he mulled over it, lifting his head to see the detective shake a sugar packet into his coffee mug and sloshing the contents around. “With Gwen deceased, do you have the authority to access her financials?”
The man hesitated, the coffee cup almost to his lips, then nodded. “Sure. With her death being a murder, we can look through her financials to research her life, try and find someone with a motive.” He fixed his eyes on Dario. “Though, I gotta say, financially speaking, there’s not a better person than you, in terms of profiting from her death.”
Dario said nothing, his focus shifting through the accounts that Gwen had access to. “She’s on some of Hawk’s private accounts. Use that access to dig up anything you can. And the business accounts as well. Bribes, tax evasion, there’s got to be something in those accounts.”
“You realize that Gwen’s on your accounts, too. Opening this can of worms … it may come back to bite you.”
Dario shrugged off the threat. At this point, a bite was the least of his worries. They needed to drown Robert Hawk. Cut him off at the knees, handcuff him for every crime he’d ever committed, and hold him accountable for the monster he was.
And the sooner all of that happened, the sooner Bell would be safe.
Seven
ROBERT HAWK
Two decades ago, Robert Hawk had sat at his desk and watched a grainy handheld video where monsters damaged his child. The memory of it had never left him. It was one of the reasons he never sexually touched his pets, and a large part of the reason that he had always, once Gwen returned from Mexico, kept close tabs on her.
Leaving her in Mexico had been a calculated decision. You pay kidnappers once, and you’ll have a kidnapping problem forever. He had done the right thing, though Gwen had never seemed to appreciate the sacrifice. Of course, there had been a risk to her life. He’d known that then, and balanced out that risk with the knowledge that he had, should the situation turn badly, a second child.
Now, he watched a new video, one of his second daughter running down the interior hall of the house. She exited out the back door without looking back. He rewound the footage and re-watched it. Clicked through the other camera feeds and found nothing. She had been smart. Hidden in the pockets and covered her tracks.
He closed the video and let out a hard sigh, swiveling in his chair and looking out the window at the view.
He had learned about Claudia two months before her birth. The pregnant piece of trash who had shown up at the casino hadn’t been thinking when she had blabbed the news to his secretary in a thinly veiled threat. And the timing, which coincided with Gwen’s mother’s illness… had been inconvenient.
