The Perfect Mother(29)

“A sad?” Nell peered at him. “Is that a thing?”

“A Stay-at-Home-Dad. An S-A-H-D. Man, that joke usually works.” He smiled and shrugged. “My partner works in fashion, and travels a lot. I don’t pay the bills and get to stay home with Autumn. Doing my best not to screw her up.”

He became a regular almost immediately, but never offered more than a few details about himself—nothing significant enough for Francie to even recall. Francie still doesn’t understand where he went that night at the Jolly Llama, after disappearing from the table, and so this morning, when he e-mailed her about getting together, she told him the truth—that she and Nell were going to Colette’s—and invited him to join, hoping to pry some information out of him. “He asked if he could come,” Francie says quietly, hearing his footsteps in the hallway outside Colette’s apartment. “I didn’t know we were going to be talking about this.”

“Hey,” Token says when Colette opens the door. He looks terrible: unshaven, his T-shirt damp with sweat. Francie is surprised to see he isn’t wearing the sling in which he always carries Autumn. “The baby’s with my mom,” he says, before Francie can ask.

“Why did you come, then?” Francie catches her accusatory tone. “I mean, if I had a break from the baby, I’d be sleeping.”

Token sits on the couch. “I wanted to see you guys.” He rests his forehead in his hands, and Francie notices the patches of gray spreading from his temples. “I’m so worried about Midas. Everything that’s happened—you’re the only ones I can really talk to about it.”

Colette pours Token a cup of coffee and sits back on the floor. “Okay, so, about that,” she says. “Token. All of you. What I’m about to tell you—you can’t tell anyone.” She opens the folder and places three photographs on the floor. “They have a potential suspect.”

Token jerks his head up. “They have a suspect?”

“Yeah, this guy. His name is Bodhi Mogaro. They think he’s connected.”

Francie kneels beside Colette. The man in the photograph has deep-russet eyes and light-brown skin; his black hair is shaved nearly to his scalp.

“What do they have on him?” Token asks.

“He was seen around Winnie’s building twice. On July 3, he bought beer and cigarettes from the bodega across the street. Used a debit card. It’s how they know his name. The clerk remembers him as being uneasy. Said he then went and sat on a nearby bench, along the park wall, watching her building. Casing it, apparently. The next night he was spotted in front of her building again, acting erratically. Yelling into his phone.”

“The night Midas was taken?” Nell says.

“Yes.”

“He lives in Detroit,” Token says, reading a paper he’s pulled from the folder, the sunlight streaming through the window onto his patch of couch, washing out his features so that Francie can’t read his expression.

“Yeah,” Colette says. “He flew into New York on the third of July. Had a flight back on the fifth, but he didn’t board. They don’t know where he is.”

“What do you mean they don’t know where he is?” Francie asks.

“I mean, the police can’t find him. He’s disappeared.”

“Jesus,” Nell says.

“Do they think he’s holding Midas for ransom?” Francie asks. “Actresses probably deal with this stuff all the time. But Lowell told me that if this were about ransom, they would have asked for it by now.” She’s still convinced Lowell could be wrong. After all, Lowell’s uncle—and his one source on law enforcement—is a sheriff back home in Estherville. What would he know about a case this big, with a once-famous actress, a multimillionaire, the daughter of a well-connected developer?

“There’s no mention of ransom. At least not in this file.”

“You see he’s originally from Yemen?” Nell asks.

“Yeah, but he’s been here for twelve years,” Colette says. “I searched him online. There’s not much. He has a Facebook page, but it’s private, and everything’s written in Arabic. I did find someone with that name who is a mechanic for a company near Detroit that rents out private jets to rich clients. That’s got to be him.”

Airplanes? “He has access to airplanes?” Francie says.

Poppy cries from somewhere down the hall. “I called Winnie again,” Colette says, standing up. “It’s the third time. She’s not responding.”

Nell rubs her eyes. “And the scene around her apartment, with the cameras and journalists. It’s out of hand. Some asshole tried to stop me when I walked by on the way here, asked if I live nearby, if I have a comment.”

More than a few of Winnie’s neighbors have already given interviews, asked what they know about her, if they’d noticed anything suspicious that night. It sickens Francie how many people are willing to chime in, to say whatever it takes to see their names in print: that Winnie seems quiet, a little aloof. That they’ve never seen her with a man. That they’ve been curious, they have to admit, who “the father” is.

Token stands, pacing slowly to the window, peering across the street into the park. “They’re going to turn this into a fucking circus,” he says. “You can feel it.”