“You’re kidding, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“One more thing,” Cassie said. “You haven’t told Jada or Shane or anyone about our conversation in my hotel room in Dubai that morning—and what I said, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, then. Good.”
“Send me your schedule for August, so I know when we’re both going to be in the same time zone,” Megan asked. “We have a lot to talk about. It would be great if it could even be in person.”
“I agree,” Cassie said. “I’ll send you my schedule. Maybe we’ll be at JFK the same day.” Then she thanked her—deeply and sincerely—and took the last of her Negroni to the bar. She knew she should call Ani now, but she couldn’t cope. She just couldn’t. The bartender was leaning back and looking at something on his phone. He had a gold badge with his name: Enrico.
“Another one?” he asked when he noticed her. He had only a trace of an Italian accent.
“Yes, please. You make a good one.” She couldn’t recall the last time she’d had sex sober, and wondered a little now at the synaptic connection between her body—body image, really—and booze. Between intimacy and intoxicants. She ran her fingers through her hair: she needed another drink to make these sorts of mental gymnastics go away. Some lives, including hers, were best left unexamined. She was buzzed just enough to crave a little shame. To crave this young waiter.
“Campari is an acquired taste,” he said.
“Oh, I acquired it a long time ago.”
“It couldn’t have been all that long.”
She shrugged. “You’d be surprised.” Then: “Your English is very good.”
“I have a grandmother who’s American. And we have lots of American guests here.”
“Tell me something, Enrico,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Did they pick the vests here because of your eyes?”
He smiled at her, one side of his mouth curling up a little higher than the other. If he hadn’t been so young, she guessed it would have looked rakish. She hoped he only worked until dinner, so she could bring him back to her room and still get a good night’s sleep.
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FD-302: MEGAN BRISCOE, FLIGHT ATTENDANT
DATE: August 1, 2018
MEGAN BRISCOE was interviewed by properly identified Special Agents NANCY SAUNDERS and EMORY LEARY at the FBI office in Washington, D.C.
SAUNDERS conducted the interview; LEARY took these notes.
BRISCOE said in her first interview (see FD-302 July 28, 2018, taken at JFK Airport) that she did not see CASSANDRA BOWDEN in Dubai, other than when traveling via the airline van between the airport and the airline’s hotel. She said that she assumed BOWDEN spent the night there alone in her hotel room.
When shown the two security camera images of the woman in the sunglasses and scarf at the ROYAL PHOENICIAN HOTEL, she said yes, that could be BOWDEN. She corroborated what flight attendant JADA MORRIS had said: the scarf the woman is wearing in the photo looks like the one that BOWDEN had purchased when they first landed in Dubai on Thursday, July 26.
She then remembered seeing BOWDEN at the airline’s hotel on the morning of Friday, July 27. She saw her returning to her own room and they spoke there briefly. In her recollection, BOWDEN said something that suggested to BRISCOE that the woman had spent the night with a man in a different hotel in Dubai.
BRISCOE said this wasn’t the first time that BOWDEN had disappeared when she traveled for work. According to BRISCOE, she does this often when she is overseas. And while these may be sexual liaisons, BRISCOE acknowledged that there may be more to them since BRISCOE has never once met any of the men that BOWDEN allegedly is seeing.
She added that the woman was distracted and upset in the van to the airport in Dubai that Friday morning and was crying soon after takeoff. She also said that BOWDEN lost her handbag in the United Arab Emirates, but not her passport or wallet.
11
Elena didn’t seriously believe that she had killed her father, but every once in a while, especially in the small hours of the night, she wondered if she had been the last straw. Years earlier, just as she was finishing her second year of college, her father suffered what everyone assumed was a stroke. He’d lived, but he was a frail shell of what he’d once been. He walked slowly and with a limp, the left side of his face sagged like badly bunched drapes, and his words—when he could find them—were barely comprehensible. Now she had flown to Sochi for a visit—the Olympic construction had begun, but his summer estate was on a small lake far from the madness—and had just helped him from the passenger seat of the BMW he could no longer drive, and either he had lost his balance or he had tripped where the asphalt met the first slate step, and suddenly he was falling onto the driveway. She managed to cradle his head just before it would have cracked onto the pavement, and for a moment was relieved at how quickly she had reacted. But certainly his fragile brain inside his fragile skull had been violently shaken. She knew it then and she knew it as the evening progressed. He’d seemed fine at dinner—or, at least, as fine as he ever was at that stage in his life, which meant that he spoke in drooling whispers and ate very little—but it would be later that night that he would be found unresponsive on the floor of the living room. It was his live-in nurse, a Georgian who coincidentally shared the name of a Russian football team her father followed, who had heard the fall, discovered him, and called upstairs to wake her. The nurse was a gentle giant with a chinstrap beard named Spartak. Elena had been nodding off in the very same bedroom she had lived in as a teenager those weeks or weekends when she would be sent to see him after her parents’ divorce. (Get to see him, really, because she missed him terribly after her parents separated.) He’d die at the hospital a few hours later. Cause of death? A cerebral hemorrhage. A burst blood vessel. Another one. This time his brain had drowned in its own blood.
It might have occurred moments before he fell in the living room. Most likely it did. But maybe not. Perhaps it had been a slow bleed that had commenced when he had nearly hit his head outside on his driveway.