“Actually, it was sent to this phone’s number,” Detective Vance said, adjusting his glasses. “But Melanie was carrying it active.”

“She kept it on to monitor it,” Miller explained. “She wanted to make sure nothing went to your husband’s line.”

I looked toward the hospital crib where Sam lay, his tiny chest rising and falling.

“She blocked my texts,” I whispered. “Every single one of them.”

“We have our digital forensics unit downstairs,” Miller said. “They ran a quick bypass on the local storage.”

He swiped the screen through the plastic bag.

“Look here,” he said, pointing to a recovery log.

The screen showed a list of outgoing messages from three weeks ago, all marked with red exclamation points.

The text read: *Leo, please help us. Josephine took my keys. Sam has a fever and won’t wake up.*

Beneath it, another one: *Leo, they locked the nursery. I can’t get to the formula. Call me immediately.*

“Those never left the device’s internal queue,” Vance said. “A blocking application was installed on the root directory.”

“Who installed it?” I asked.