Nobody's File

Rios called at nine, and what he said in the first ten seconds made Isabel sit down.

"The file's gone."

"Gone how? Archived, gone? Misfiled?"

"I mean the physical folder is not in the box your father's estate attorney keeps, and the digital record — the intake file from the original investigator, back in 2015 — has been purged from our system. Not deleted last night, Isabel. Purged years ago. There's a note in the metadata. Client request."

"My father requested his own son's case file be destroyed?"

"I don't know that yet. I know someone with authority on the account did, and there are only two names with that authority. Your father, and your mother, may she rest."

Isabel thought about her mother in the last year of her illness, thin and distant on the good days, gone somewhere else entirely on the bad ones, saying things near the end that the hospice nurses had gently told Isabel not to put too much weight on. Things about the boy and what your father did that Isabel had filed under morphine and grief, because the alternative was unbearable.

"I need everything you still have. Every scrap. The original police report, the M.E.'s notes, whatever the investigator wrote before the file walked."

"Isabel — if I start pulling that thread and there's nothing there, you're going to owe your father an apology he'll never let you forget. And if there is something there —"

"Then I need to know before he finds the girl first."

That silenced him. It was, Isabel realized as she said it, the actual fear sitting underneath everything else: not that her father had lied about a decade-old tragedy, but that somewhere in the city right now, a resourced, motivated, and increasingly alarmed Alejandro Marquez was also looking for a ten-year-old girl selling roses on Biscayne Boulevard, and Isabel did not yet know whether he wanted to find her to bring her home, or to make sure she disappeared again.

"Send me what you have," she said. "Tonight."

She hung up and looked at the christening photo again, at the small closed loop of the birthmark, at her mother's hand resting on the baby's chest in the picture like she could keep him there by touch alone. Whatever her mother's last confused words had meant, Isabel no longer believed they were only morphine.

She picked up her phone and called the one person who might actually know every rose seller working that stretch of Biscayne: the beat cop who'd taken her statement eleven years ago about a drowning, and who still, out of some old guilt or kindness, sent her a card every year on the anniversary.