ICON CARTIER
By now, Sienna’s disappearance was all over social media. Langford was a concerned father, using his political ties to put the spotlight on his missing daughter. He refused to let her disappearance be swept under the rug, like so many other cases of missing Black women. Every time I turned on the TV, Langford’s face was there, along with his wife, looking wrecked, pleading for any information about their daughter. Social media had picked it up too. News stations kept running the same clips. Police were “following leads,” and tips were “coming in.”
This wasn’t just Reek’s problem. That was never how we operated. One threat touching one part of the family meant the whole family did what they had to do to fix it. So I took control of the cleanup myself.
By late evening, I had Jamir sitting across from me in the office with three screens up in front of him and that blank, locked-in look he always got when his brain was already ten moves ahead of everybody else’s.
“Langford is on every channel in this city begging for information, and the Feds are sniffing too hard. I need Sienna’s trail to lead as far away from Reek as possible. I agree withReek’s suggestion; the best play is to make it look like she got scared and ran from her Fed charges.”
Jamir nodded in agreement.
“Make it look like she started planning an exit a few weeks ago. I want searches on her phone and tablet about countries that don’t extradite. I want deleted draft emails that look like she started to confess something and backed out. I want strange logins on her bank accounts, travel-related activity, all that shit.”
Jamir’s fingers settled on the keyboard. “You want to make it look like she was panicking and had the money to run.”
“Exactly. Don’t make it look too professional. Make it look desperate, like she realized something was closing in and decided to run before we or the Feds caught up to her.”
I walked over and stood beside him as his fingers started to fly across his keyboard. “Langford’s making too much noise, and Agent Mallory will start to assume that Reek found out that Sienna was plotting, if she doesn’t assume that already. They don’t have proof, but they will have their suspicions. And once a politician starts grieving in public, suspicion spreads fast.”
Jamir replied with a small smirk and got to work.
I watched Jamir build it out step by step. He added the searches first, then the deleted drafts, then the fake bank activity, then the burner-phone trail. I told him not to make it too clean. I wanted it to look like Sienna got scared and started clicking, searching, and moving sloppy.
After a while, I said, “Make it look like she panicked, not like she planned this for months.”
Jamir nodded and kept typing. He pulled up one screen showing the searches, another showing the fake logins, and another mapping out the burner activity near airport routes.
I looked at all of it and said, “This looks good.”
Jamir didn’t look up. “To everybody else, it’s going to look like Sienna did all of it herself.”
That was enough for me. I needed law enforcement, the media, and Langford looking in another direction and convinced that she got scared and dipped, instead of decomposing in the foundation of our gawd damn building.
AVA REYNOLDS
“I told you, I’m fine,” I whined as I switched lanes and talked through my cars Bluetooth. “Zahra, you are about to pop. You need to be somewhere sitting down with your feet up, not coming with me to a prenatal appointment.”
On the other end, Zahra sucked her teeth. “You shouldn’t be going alone.”
“I’ve been going to prenatal appointments alone for months. I will be fine.”
“That is sad,” she shot back.
I rolled my eyes even though she couldn’t see me. “That’s what happens when you get knocked up by a man that doesn’t want kids.”
Zahra was quiet for half a second, then said, “He feels cornered, Ava.”
I blew out a breath. “I know he feels cornered. I know I kept it from him too long. But I didn’t make him have unprotected sex with me.”
“Honestly? That’s the part still blowing me. Reek is known to be very careful. If he had unprotected sex with you, maybe he has real feelings for you and don’t know what to do with them.”
I barked out a laugh. “Please.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m serious too. Reek is a grown man. He needs to deal with his trauma and stop acting like a scared little kid every time something feels real.”
“I agree,” she said sadly as I pulled in the hospital parking lot.
