By the time I boarded my flight back to Miami, I knew it would be too late to assemble the team in Hambis, where we’d been working. So I messaged them to meet me at 4:30 that afternoon at what had become my new home in the last twenty days: the Rio Rio Hotel.
Fifteen months ago, the Bureau paid for me to relocate to Miami, where my daughter, Camila, had been living with her grandmother, my former mother-in-law. I rented a two-bedroom condo, and Camila moved in with me. That was just before her eighth birthday, and it was the first time my daughter and I had lived together since her mother had gone away.
Together, we made a home of the place. Camila put up her drawings. We got permission to paint the condo in bright colors that reminded her of her Grandma Rosa’s house. And Rosa and I worked out a system. Monday through Wednesday, I would pick up Camila from school. Thursday and Friday, Rosa would. Rosa even agreed to stay the night in the condo whenever I traveled. She had just one request: that when she was there, I was not.
Then, three weeks ago, a leak sprouted in the ceiling above thekitchen. The owner brought in a plumber, who chased the pipe into the next room over, cutting a large hole in the wall. A week later, the owner moved us into the Rio Rio, a Miami art deco hotel that for some reason is named after the wordriverin Spanish. Twice.
I walked into the hotel lobby at 4:21 p.m. and approached the front desk, a curving waterfall-style counter, where Alberto, the day manager, stood. Today, he wore a zebra-striped shirt and black leather pants.
“Your messages, Mr. Gardner,” Alberto said.
Camila spent her afternoons creating art and puzzles and leaving them with Alberto. It was our custom that I solve these before going upstairs to our suite on the third floor.
I took the pile of construction paper to one of twelve shiny high-tops, where, in the morning, continental breakfast was served. Camila’s first note was on green paper with red writing in marker. “Give me a drink, and I’ll die,” it read. “Feed me, and I’ll get larger. What am I?”
I smiled gently.
My mother and I used to play games like this.
I clicked my pen. Wrote the wordfire.
The next one had a maze on it, and I drew my way through the small, uneven channels that Camila had made. At the end, it read. “Who♥s Dad?” with six spots for letters.
I wrote, “C-A-M-I-L-A.”
The last one was an ornately folded piece of paper—what was called acootie-catcherwhen I was young. I put my fingers into the folds and moved them back and forth, seeing that the words in each area formed a request: “Put a riddle here.”
I clicked my pen again and wrote a puzzle for Camila to solve.What question can you never answer yes to?
I folded up the papers and took the elevator to 3. Rosa had texted five minutes before I arrived, and I’d told her she could go.
At room 312, I tapped out our special knock on the door. “Camila?”
My daughter opened up. She wore a purple shirt and denim overalls that stopped above her knees.
“Permission to pass,” I said, and she grabbed the papers.
Camila has long brown hair like her mother, Anna. Her complexion is a mix of my lighter skin and her mother’s olive color. Over the last year, brown freckles have formed on her cheeks.
“Correct,” she said, dropping the green paper with the riddle on it onto the carpet as she walked. “Correct again,” she repeated, looking at the maze while she followed me into my room in the two-bedroom suite.
“I’m meeting the team downstairs,” I said. “I’m just here for a minute.”
Camila dove onto my bed, which this morning had been made with a perfect hospital tuck.
“Can I come to the meeting?” she asked.
I looked at my daughter through the mirror. The last year had been so different from the years before—when I’d felt more like a visitor, coming on the weekends to Rosa’s—rather than her dad. But now Camila and I were a team. “Us against the world,” she’d say. And I would smile without forcing my lips to turn. I’d feel something. Real emotion.
“Sorry, hon,” I said.
She rolled onto her back, the cootie-catcher in her hand. “Why not?”
“Case meeting.”
“Interesting case or boring case?” she said, studying the riddle I’d left for her.
I thought of how the meeting with Craig Poulton had ended. The threat of anonymous, untraceable guns on the street.What if Camila’s school was the one that got shot up?
