“Always. Think we should give Titan some kind of reward for spitting out his find?”
“Right, yes, of course.”
Raina unlocked her door. No one had tried to jimmy it. She wondered if Axel’s work hadn’t made him eternally suspicious.
“You know, a bird might have dropped that piece of meat,” she said.
“What bird do you know that’s big enough to carry that? No hawk out there is going to drop a morsel like that and leave it. No vulture or anything else I can think of. Anyway, better safe than sorry,” Axel said.
“Yes, of course, better safe than sorry, always,” she admitted.
“I need to get this to the local lab. Let’s give Titan a treat and head that way. You can keep trying Jordan while we go. We can swing by his place and see if he’s there, if you think it will help.”
She was quiet a minute. “He might talk to me, but not you. I don’t know.”
“He knows you’re with me.”
“I guess. Anyway, we’ll keep trying him.”
She checked Titan’s water bowl and gave him several of his favorite treats, then told him to stand guard.
Then they left again.
It was growing late. The Miami sun was going down.
But Axel apparently knew he would find someone at work at his local offices and he did. He left Raina in the reception area while he spoke with the local field director.
While he was gone, she tried Jordan again.
He still wasn’t answering his phone.
In the middle of her dialing, a phone call came through and she answered it quickly, thinking Jordan was calling her back.
It wasn’t Jordan. It was Lucia.
“Hey, I know this is late and you might be busy, but Mya and I were having pedicures this afternoon, and talked about doing something this evening. We called Elly and she was free, and Elly called Tate Fielding and he’s free, and, oh, Mya’s husband is free, and we thought, hey, Tall, Dark and Good-looking is still here, maybe we should have an impromptu dinner. All we need to get the gang back together is you and Jordan.”
“Have you reached Jordan?”
“No, but Elly talked to him earlier. He won something or another at the fundraiser and she needed to see about getting it to him. Something big. A piece of exercise equipment, I think. Anyway, he said to let him know if anything was going on and he’d show up. Text him a time and a place, you know? So, how about it? You in?”
“Um, I’m not sure yet. Do the same with me, okay? Just text me the details, and if we can, we’ll be there.”
“Cool. We, huh? So, you are together, then?”
Raina hesitated. “Well, for now. We went riding today. Out to the village.”
“You always did love all that nature and culture. But remember—your dude is an FBI agent. He’ll go back to big-time civilization when this is over.”
“Lucia, we live in big-time civilization. We don’t spend our days in the Everglades.”
Lucia laughed. “True. But it’s there, you know. Reachable, easily. But you went riding? In the muck and the swamp and the snakes and the gators?”
“There’s, like, a trail back there. I’m not into slushing through sawgrass, snakes and swamp.”
“I guess no one is these days. Except maybe the python hunters. Hey, they’re going to make a show about it, you know.”
“So I’ve heard,” Raina said.
She looked up. Axel was returning. “I have to go, Lucia. Just text me where you all are going and when.”
“Well, it will be soon. And nowhere fancy. Maybe Sergio’s—we all love that, right on Coral Way. Somewhere casual!”
“Text!”
“I will.”
She hung up, standing.
“Did you get Jordan?”
She shook her head. “But I was just talking to Lucia. She wants to get together for dinner, and Elly told her she’d talked to Jordan earlier, and he’d said if they texted a time and a place, he’d try to be there.”
He shrugged. “Sure, we’ll go. Where does Jordan live? We can drive by and just see if he’s home.”
“He lives in Coconut Grove. At this time, it might be easiest to shoot straight down US 1.”
“That’s fine. Keep calling.”
She did. She tried his number as they got to the car. Once again, it went straight to his voice mail.
“That’s his cell. Does he have a house line?”
She looked at him, arching a brow.
“Hey. There are people who still have house lines. And is it a house? Or is he in a condo or apartment?”
“No, a house. He inherited it from an aunt he’d been good to all his