Not nice to meet you.
Not Caitlyn talks about you all the time.
The first thing out of his mouth was a question about my property.
“Thirty-one years,” I said.
He smiled. “Must be worth a lot now. Miami real estate has gone crazy.”
“I suppose it has.”
I did not like him.
I did not say that to Caitlyn, because I had learned something about adult daughters. Telling a twenty-six-year-old woman you do not like her boyfriend is often the fastest way to make sure she marries him.
So I smiled. I made dinner. I passed the rice. I asked polite questions.
And I watched.
Over the next several months, what I saw made the hair on the back of my neck rise the way it used to during night shifts at the port, when you learned to recognize trouble before it got close enough to introduce itself.
Cody Jenkins did not appear to have a real job.
He called himself a real estate investor. He had a clean website, a polished LinkedIn profile, and four different LLCs listed under his name. But when I looked closely, none of those businesses seemed to have much weight behind them.
He drove the BMW. He wore the watch. He picked up checks at restaurants, which impressed Caitlyn and did not impress me at all. I had been around enough hustlers in my life to know that a man who always pays for dinner is either genuinely generous or buying goodwill he plans to cash in later.
Cody was not generous.
I started digging quietly.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing reckless. I was not law enforcement. I was just a father paying attention.
I spoke to my neighbor Alicia, who worked in county records, and asked her to keep her eyes open for anything with Cody’s name on it. I called my old friend Morgan, who had spent twenty years in title insurance and had seen almost every kind of property fraud a person could imagine.