Unlucky 13

Chapter 44

Chow’s was a coffee shop on 3rd Street, two long blocks down Mission from the Chronicle. It was a popular hole in the wall, serving home-style Thai and Chinese dishes as well as classic American diner fare. The place was packed from noon until three, but at just after eleven, Cindy thought Chow’s would offer the perfect change of scene she was hungering for.

She pushed open the heavy glass doors, waved at George behind the cash register, cruised past the takeout line, and slipped into a two-person booth at midpoint of the center aisle. When the waiter came to her, she ordered French fries and a chocolate milk shake.

“That’s it?”

“For now,” said Cindy.

She opened her MacBook and began a search for Erica Fish. Even before her fries and shake arrived, she found more than a hundred and fifty women with that name, equally distributed across the country. Between courses, she typed “Erica Williams” into her browser and found another four hundred listings, scattered from sea to shining sea.

Her search assumed that Erica Williams Fish was using some version of her actual name and that the closely guarded custody of young Ben Morales Fish had gone to the little boy’s paternal grandmother.

So it was also logical to check out Mackie’s mother, Deanna Mackenzie Morales, and her father, Joseph Morales. Mackie and her parents had lived in Chicago, but the thousands of listings for J. Morales totally swamped any possibility of a fine-tuned search without limitless funds and endless time.

But it took no time and cost nothing to type Mackie’s mother’s name in different permutations into her browser. Cindy did it—and like freakin’ magic, she got a hit. D. M. Morales, the one and only person in the entire country with that name, was listed in the San Francisco white pages.

Just the name.

The number and address were unlisted—which made sense.

If Mackie’s mother had lived in San Francisco prior to her daughter getting busted, she may have gotten custody of the child. If so, she would want to be way under the radar. So she’d blocked her phone and address so that people like Cindy couldn’t find her.

Cindy slurped her milk shake down to the bottom, paid the check at the register, and walked back to the office. As she crossed 3rd Street, she thought about how Mackie Morales’s recent past had taken her from Wisconsin to a bank in Chicago and possibly to a highway in Wyoming. She was heading west.

She might well be coming to San Francisco to visit Ben and her mother.

And here was the dark hunch she’d been harboring. Morales might have other business in San Francisco as well.