“Kira Levin,” I said. “She worked here in the kitchen for a couple of years when it first opened.”

“That’s like, a really long time ago. Nobody in the front of the house is here from back then. Maybe somebody in the kitchen knew her. Some of those guys have been here forever. That long, I couldn’t say, but you can go check.” She waved a bottle in the direction of a swinging door at the end of the bar.

We all started for the kitchen.

“Hey, I can’t let you all back there. Two of you. That’s it. Tell them Kaitlyn sent you back.” Then she ripped open another box and started unloading it.

“I’m definitely going,” I said. “Who else is coming?”

“Jeanine should go,” Josh said.

“Definitely,” Kevin said.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Jeanine wanted to take a back seat on her field research? “Then who?”

Jeanine reached out and boinged one of Zoe’s curls.

Zoe growled and snapped her jaws at Jeanine’s hand.

“And make sure people see her holding Henry. Trust me.”

But Jeanine was wrong. The kitchen staff couldn’t have cared less about Zoe and her adorableness. They didn’t even look up when we came in.

Four men and one woman in white kitchen uniforms stood over shiny steel counters chopping and stirring to music on the radio.

“Excuse me,” I said to a guy mincing a mountain of garlic cloves.

“Hey, hey, hey!” A man wearing a backward baseball cap barked from the oven where he was stirring an enormous pot. “What you talking to him for? He’s got work to do.”

“Um, Kaitlyn sent us back?”

The guy gave one more stir, covered the pot, and crossed the kitchen to us. His skin was so pale, it was almost see-through. “What do you want?”

“Sorry, I know how busy restaurants are before the dinner rush but we’re…”

As I talked, the guy gave me the move-it-along sign with his finger.

“Hold up. Is that a rabbit?” he said.

Maybe Jeanine was on to something…

“Uh-huh.” Zoe scooped up Henry and cradled him against her chest.

“I love rabbit,” the chef said.

“Me too,” Zoe smiled. “They’re my favorite.”

“Mine too.” He put up his hand for a high-five.

Zoe smacked his palm, then stroked Henry. “Because they’re so soft.”

“And tender,” he said. I could have sworn the guy was drooling.

“Anyway, I’m looking for anybody who might have worked here with my mom.” We needed to get what we came for and get out of there before this chef started to rub Henry down with butter and rosemary.

“And who’s your mom?” he asked.

“Kira Levin? She worked here with Walter Ramirez.”

“Oh, the leeches.” He laughed.

“The what?”

“You know what a leech is, right?”

“You mean those blobs that suck your blood?”

“Hey, everybody!” the chef yelled. “It’s the little leeches.”

The other cooks laughed.

The chef then went on to tell me about how Chef JJ had flipped out when Mom and Walter left El Mariachi to work at another restaurant, how she never forgave them, and how she still talked about “the leeches”—the slimy, bloodsucking blobs who betrayed her by going to work for the competition.