I zipped the bag back up. “Think about it. If you decide to stay, I know where to come get my shit.”
Then I stood up and backed up toward the door, keeping the gun on him until I was out of the front door.
I reached the doorway, opened the door, and stepped into the hall, closing the door behind me.
My phone rang before I made it to the elevator.
I glanced at the screen and saw that it was Langford.
I answered, then turned toward the stairwell instead. Kam’s condo was only on the third floor, so I took the stairs so the call wouldn’t drop while on the elevator.
“Yeah.”
“I just saw a picture from that pop-up event,” Langford barked.
I pushed through the stairwell door and started down the steps two at a time. “And?”
“You were in the background with your hand on Ava’s stomach.” Then he asked, “Is that your baby, boy?”
I stopped on the landing. “Who the fuck you calling boy?”
“Did you get that girl pregnant while you were with my daughter?”
I let out a dry laugh. “You forgot that relationship was fake?”
He exhaled into the phone. “Fake, but you were fucking my daughter in real life.”
I started down the next flight, asking him, “What’s your point, Langford?”
“The point is that I still don’t believe my daughter would leave and not contact me,nigga, and now you have a child on the way. All of this seems very fucking suspicious.”
I reached the first floor and pushed through the door into the empty side hall.
“And I’m going to find out what happened to her,” he went on. His voice got colder. “And when I do, I’m going to burn down any and everybody involved.”
Then he hung up. But I remained cool because Jamir was a beast at his job. Langford may have had his suspicions, but as long as her body was in that concrete, there was nothing he could prove.
19
ALDERMAN HAROLD LANGFORD
Icalled Mallory the second I got off the phone with Reek.
I was still standing in my study with my hand wrapped too tight around my cell, staring at the picture of Reek and Ava on my iPad.
While the Cartiers were celebrating life, my daughter was still gone. She had vanished into some story that didn’t make sense to me.
Sienna was not perfect. She could be impulsive, spoiled, secretive, and too confident. But she was still my daughter. Despite all the things she kept from me, I knew her well enough to know that disappearing without contacting me didn’t make sense.
And now, I could no longer ignore what my gut had been telling me for months. Something about this wasoff.
Mallory answered on the fourth ring. “Langford.”
I didn’t waste time with greetings. “I don’t think my daughter skipped town.” I sat down behind my desk and looked back at the picture of Reek and Ava before locking the screen. “The more I sit with this, the less I believe the version being fed to us. I don’t care how many blurry images surface or how manypeople suddenly remember seeing Sienna. The Cartiers have too many resources, too much reach, and a lot of practice making things appear one way when they are really another. I’ve been in politics long enough to know when a narrative is being shaped. And this feels shaped.” I leaned back in my chair and rubbed a hand over my mouth. “Everywhere I turn, there is another convenient piece. A witness. A rumor.”
Mallory exhaled slowly. “I was thinking the same thing.”
“Oh really?”
