A chill ran down Tonya’s spine. “Who are we talking about?”

“My father.”

Though it was Layla who choked on the word, Tonya felt her own throat close. For all intents and purposes, father was a term that should never have followed my for her daughter. At two, when Layla had first asked about her missing male parent, Tonya had said he’d been a sperm donor. The explanation, and the discussion of genetics that it had necessitated, had been too involved for a toddler. Nonetheless, Tonya had stuck to it all these years. She thought it less of a lie than an analogy. She’d received male genetic material and grown herself a child. Layla was hers alone. No biological father would ever claim her. She knew that for certain now.

“I don’t understand,” Tonya croaked.

Layla wrenched from her grasp. Her tears, Tonya realized, hadn’t been from sadness.

“The lawyer called.” She hissed. “My dad can’t pay anymore.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

RICK

The block was closed. A police car had parked horizontally at the street entrance, preventing traffic from passing through to the avenue. The lights of another cruiser flashed several hundred feet away. No cars were leaving this space, nor entering, Rick realized. There was no escape route.

Rick nudged the man in the driver’s seat. Frank clearly wasn’t paying attention to the view out the windshield. His head was turned squarely toward the building surrounded by uniformed officers. To Rick, the cops seemed to engulf Nate’s townhome, rats crawling up the steps, moving in and out the front door, feasting on whatever remained. They shouldn’t be there, he thought. They should be traversing the island, searching for Melissa before it was too late.

Unless they already knew it was too late.

“You don’t think slow-rolling the scene of a crime draws suspicion?” Rick asked.

Frank shrugged. “It’s like an accident. Everyone takes a gander.”

“There’s no point in being here,” Rick responded.

Frank’s knee shifted. He turned the wheel to the right and floored the gas pedal. The Porsche roared as it blindly merged into incoming traffic, a lion leaping into a herd. A horn blared behind them.

“Subtle,” Rick quipped.

Frank smirked, acknowledging what they both knew. The man had always been the opposite of subtle. Rick was the nice guy, the one called in to smooth things over after a bad meeting or general bad behavior. He was the talker. The fixer.

Frank was the animal.

“Let’s say we head over to the other place.” Frank released a hand from the wheel to dig a remnant of lunch from between his teeth.