Tal shook his head. “I never got a ransom.”
Dominic leaned forward. “Ah, yes, but from the kidnappers’ point of view, why simply take money from the victim’s family when they could first blackmail the person who set up the abduction? Once they bled their ‘cohort’ dry, they could always come to you with an exorbitant ransom request. And by doing it this way, they don’t have to give their conspirator any of the promised kickback. They simply could have cut them out altogether or killed them. Either way, they’re not sharing the fat ransom. So the longer they kept your cousin, the more likely you would be to pay an outrageous sum to get her back. In the meantime, they were busy getting paid by the same dirtbag who aided them in her kidnapping.”
“But the Lennox brothers found her first,” Cooper pointed out.
“Yes, and their only job was to rescue the princess and save the girls. They weren’t investigating the whys and wherefores because everyone assumed Alea had been caught up in a simple slavery ring. So the question becomes, who hates the princess enough to subject her to hell? And more than that, who needed the money her ransom would have brought?”
Dane held up a hand. “You said this had something to do with that girl on TV, the Hahn woman. Are you trying to tell us she had something to do with this?”
“Not at all,” Riley replied. “She really was a victim, and as far as I can tell, she has some very dark emotions toward Alea. You see, we believe that her story is true. Alea really was there during her torture, but maybe she was forced to use drugs as well. If so, her memory is not necessarily accurate. She would have had nightmares and delusions. It would be easy in that situation to see Alea as a villain. She wasn’t raped the way Brittany was. Even without the drugs, it’s possible that, because Alea’s torture was easier than her own, she would be resentful. I’ve talked to some of the other victims, and most of them see Alea as one of them. A couple of the women asked me to reach out to her. They want to meet and talk because they’re the only ones who really know what happened.”
“So if she’s not the one who helped with Alea’s kidnapping, what does she have to do with the person who did?” Cooper was starting to get antsy. His instincts had always been good, and he didn’t like the way his spine was prickling now. Something was very wrong.
It was the same feeling he’d had when he and Dane had been in the Korengal Valley just before everything went to hell. It was a combination of adrenaline and pure doom.
“Someone sent her money to buy a new wardrobe before her TV appearances.”
“Someone put her up to this? Someone wants to ruin Alea’s image?” Lan asked.
“Yes, the same someone who wanted to use her to make money. It would have been easy to hire someone to simply kidnap the princess. She was vulnerable in the States. She didn’t have the same type of security. The flip side was not a lot of people knew her connections to the royal family. There were some people in the embassy, but almost no regular New Yorkers knew who she was.”
Dominic Anthony seemed to deeply love the sound of his own voice. He was dragging this thing out like Sherlock Holmes reporting to the damn queen. “Who? Just give us a damn name please.”
Law seemed to be the only one who wasn’t into theatrics. “It’s one of the Thurston-Hughes people, most likely the chick, Yasmin. She was working for Reaching Across Cultures, the charity fund Alea had originally set up and planned to head once she got her master’s degree. The money that went to Brittany Hahn came from an account directly accessed by the charity fund director. I also confirmed that the Thurston-Hughes family has several offshore accounts, several in the Caymans.”
Talib had turned a dull red. Cooper briefly wondered if they still chopped off heads in Bezakistan. “Yasmin offered to head the charity in Alea’s stead. She was also the first one to call and to beg me to pay whatever ransom they asked for.”
“She was a jealous child,” Rafe said, running a hand through his hair. “She had everything given to her, but she couldn’t stand the fact that Alea lived in the palace. That Alea was called princess. Her mother and father were incredibly wealthy. Our parents were close to them. After Alea’s mother and father died, Yasmin’s parents offered to take her in, but my mother wouldn’t have it. She told me she was afraid Yasmin would make Alea’s life difficult. I would have thought she’d have grown up and gotten over it.”
“I don’t believe she has. She only married Oliver because she thought Alea wanted him. I overheard her talking to some friends at her engagement party,” Kade said.