Excerpt

Florida Ortiz woke to the sun blaring at her through the window and her cell blaring at her from her nightstand. She picked up. 

“Hola.”

“You’ve made the news.” Officer Pedro Ruiz’s voice came through the line with a hint of agitation and fear. The agitation was basically her partner’s set point. He might gain or lose a few ounces, but he tended to stay there. Still, she never heard fear in his voice. Not even when they were working the dicier streets of San Juan. 

“What the hell are you talking about, Ro?”

“That pendaja mother of yours—

“Watch it.”

Silence and then, “Partner, you are in serious trouble. Some lunatic has put your name on a list of women who, because of their mothers, are bad seeds that he plans to murder.”

A rush of adrenaline got her out of bed and reaching for her wireless earbuds. She plopped them in with nervous fingers as she opened up the browser on her phone. 

“Flor, did you hear me?”

“Un momento.” She began with a search of her mom’s name. “Maybe, he’s all talk.”

“He killed Dorothy Shields.”  

A chill rolled down Flor’s spine as the first article popped up. Dorothy was murdered in her home and… Her stomach rolled. Gruesome. Vicious. He’d tortured her—at wrists, ankles, mouth, and head—until she resembled a puppet. Dorothy’s daughter, Felicity, had discovered her. A tear washed down Flor’s face at the horrifying thought of finding her mother murdered. She couldn’t imagine. She truly felt for her, this woman she’d never met. 

She read more details and came to what Pedro had talked about. The man who’d killed Dorothy, a killer the media had dubbed The Puppeteer, had compiled a list of women he claimed were as evil as Dorothy. But this list wasn’t the women he wanted to kill. No. He wanted to go after their daughters, claiming these women the next generation of bad seeds that needed to be eradicated. He’d put Flor on his kill list. “Ay, Dios.” 

“Exactamente. Even if this guy has no chance of getting near you—you’re a cop not a naive college kid with zero self-protection skills––this is going to stir up people’s blood.”

She ground her teeth. Would all that hostility start up again? After mom had been accused of embezzling hundreds of millions from Puerto Rico, people had turned their ire and resentment on her. It didn’t matter that she’d been eighteen and devastated by her mother’s alleged activities, few believed she’d been ignorant of the theft. 

Where Momma had gotten off free as a bird, she’d faced investigations and media and anger. Not to mention her own confusion and distress and disbelief. 

In the ten years since mom had fled, she’d quit college, learned self-defense, and joined the police force. The last in the hopes of gaining the investigative skills necessary to find and clear mom’s name. She’d managed to do neither. Mom had never been found, never resurfaced, and now this. 

“This is crazy. These women on the list…”

“Sí. I see them. They all have notorious mothers. Dorothy Shields being the most famous.”

“He’s not stupid, whoever this guy is. He picked women already hated, women few would have any sympathy for.”

“No, he picked their daughters, Flor Marie. He claims the mother’s bad blood is passed along, like Eve and her original sin. He couldn’t have designed a more promising misogynistic campaign if he tried. Look at the women.”

She scrolled the photos of each of the women and their daughters. She cringed. Why that photo of her? Not her in her police uniform, not her looking professional, but a beach photo pulled from her Insta.

“The people who wrote this NYTimes article picked some awful photos, but what are you getting at?”

“I can’t believe you don’t see it.”

“See what?”

“Every woman on this list has that rare kind of beauty that combined with the fact that they are rich will have few people sticking up for them.” 

“I’m not rich or beautiful.”

He snorted. “You’re not rich, but people don’t know that.”

She couldn’t go back to that fishbowl of hate. Her full bladder began to bark louder than the beating of her panicking heart. “I’ll call you back.” 

“Don’t bother. I’m on my way over.”