I asked them to send me a picture of Eva, but they ignored me. It didn’t matter. They’d opened the image. It was fucking Mobley. He sat there and lied to me. “I didn’t even know you had a kid,” he’d said. Fucking Mobley. He was freelancing and now I had to do something about it.

I thought about going right back to Froehmer, but maybe he was behind it. Maybe Denise was right about him. “I didn’t even know you had a kid,” Mobley said. Was that true? Froehmer knew; he’d known for years. But maybe Mobley didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t know it until I led him right to her. Somebody had followed me. I hadn’t been careful enough and now they had Eva. I figured it had to be more than just Mobley. He couldn’t pull it off on his own. I tried to think who else it could be. It didn’t matter for the moment; I had him. All I had to do was keep tabs on him. Mobley wouldn’t have Eva but he’d know where she was, and he’d check in on things now and then. I knew how it was going to work, or how they thought it would.

“I know who it is,” I told Denise. “And I know what they want. All I have to do is give it to them and we’ll get Eva back. I’ll have her back soon, I promise. I’m just waiting to get instructions.”

She wasn’t relieved. But neither was I. There was still a lot that could go wrong.

“I’m not going to fuck this up,” I told her.

It wasn’t convincing, not even to me.

—