“Dude,focus. Does Super-D’s phone number match any of the other contacts we have info on?”
“No.”
“Terrific. What’d they talk about?”
He skimmed. “She asked if ‘C’ has room for another baby this morning, and Super-D responded a few minutes later that C does have room.”
“Any idea who C is or where they are?”
“Stand by.” After a couple of minutes of looking, he shook his head. “No. Nothing in the call logs that matches. Let me check Henry’s phone.” He was finishing that as they pulled into the driveway of the house where Fawny supposedly lived.
But there was no one home. They let themselves in with one of the keys on Fawny’s key ring, and a quick search revealed no signs of a baby, or the supplies for one.
They tried the address for Henry again, found a working key, but also found nothing helpful—no supplies for a baby.
“Wonderful,” Joaquin snarked. “Now what? Do you want to try calling Super-D?”
“No. We don’t need him knowing something’s wrong and hiding out, or maybe even moving the baby. We need to find him. Let’s head back to the duplex where we caught up with Fawny and Henry.”
Which was also a dead end because there was still no one home. While Joaquin stood sentry behind her, Dewi tried all the keys on both Fawny’s and Henry’s key rings, and none of them matched.
So she wrenched hard on the doorknob, which snapped the lock. Without the deadbolt being thrown, it allowed Dewi to then push open the door.
A quick sweep of the one-bedroom apartment confirmed no one was home. It looked like a man’s home, from the sparse decor and items in the bathroom, but in one corner of the living room sat an older, well-used folding playpen and a grungy diaper bag.
Dewi snapped a pic of the diaper bag and sent it to Emily with a text asking if it was hers.
She quickly replied it was not.
“What the fuck?” Joaquin said. “They running a baby-snatching ring or something?”
“Henry has a bunch of baby mommas,” Dewi wearily said as she quickly rifled the apartment, looking for any sign of paycheck stubs or other info that might give them an idea where the resident worked. “Maybe Fawny’s booty call is babysitting or something.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Joaquin said.
Dewi turned. “What?”
He pulled out Fawny’s phone and opened the social media app. “This place belongs to the guy liking her pictures and posts, right? She’s friends online with him. Anthony Cordoba.” Dewi watched over his shoulder as he checked out the guy’s profile. “Oh, thank god. He’s got a recent employer listed.”
It was an oil change place close to downtown Miami. They saved screenshots of pictures of the guy on their own phones so they both had them and headed out again.
Twenty minutes later they were talking to the shop manager, who said Cordoba had quit three weeks earlier. He’d heard the man now worked as a mechanic over at a yacht club on South Beach.
That was their next stop.
After Dewi used the shop’s bathroom.
Which Dewi then Primed the manager to go in and clean the damned thing, because it was gross. If she hadn’t been pregnant and desperate, she would have held it a little longer.
Dewi took A1A over to the island as her phone’s map app guided them. Sunny day, gorgeous blue water, and barely a cloud in the sky. Postcard Miami.
“God, it’s beautiful out here,” Joaquin said, “but it would drive me stir-crazy after about a week if I lived here.”
“You and Malyah should come over for a weekend,” Dewi said.
“Maybe. Not right now. Between Tamsin, and Nami, and now Dania and the twins…”
She snorted. “And me. Because that’s the third rail you don’t want to touch, right? Mentioning that I’m going to pop soon?”
