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  A sheriff’s department car had driven into the lot and parked. Two deputies got out. They nodded at Tom, and he nodded back. They walked into the restaurant. Tom continued. “Then he drove her body out to Ramona and threw it down the ravine. When he was trying to figure out what to do, he decided on a plan to encourage the police and the media into thinking that it was the same thing that had happened to Samantha. Every time he got interviewed, he brought up Samantha. A night out in the Gaslamp and she never comes home, just like the girl two years before. ‘I think it was a serial killer,’ he said to the first news station, and that was all it took. The media loves a serial-killer angle. He even acted like he cared about them: ‘The police need to find the man who took our girls.’ The way he knew to do that was because he had known Samantha when she lived by him, and so he had followed the story of her disappearance and knew all about it.”

  It made sense that Frank would want to make it look like the same person had taken both Samantha and Elissa. It would take the heat off of him as a suspect. It was actually a pretty good plan, and it would’ve worked if Madison hadn’t spooked him into doing something stupid and then followed him. That meant the person who took Samantha was still out there. And that person was probably Anonymous. And it was probably the person tweeting her today. It might also be the person following her. Elissa’s case was solved, but Madison still had to figure out who’d taken Samantha so she could find out who was stalking her.

  “I mean, sure, it would be easier if he had also taken Samantha and we could wrap the whole thing up. I’m willing to entertain the idea,” Tom said.

  Madison did a double-take. After everything he had just said, it didn’t make sense that Frank had had anything to do with Samantha’s disappearance. Maybe he was just being thorough and open-minded?

  “Okay, but remember …” And then she realized she hadn’t told Tom about the phone call Felicity had received, and how the wording matched her note. And she still wasn’t ready to tell him.

  “Remember what?” Tom said.

  Madison thought fast. “That someone was leaving notes on my door. Do you really think Frank drove from Golden Hill to La Jolla to put notes on my door in a game of cat and mouse? Does he seem passive-aggressive and subtle like that to you? He seems pretty violent and aggressive, like someone who killed in the heat of passion and tried to cover it up. He doesn’t seem like a sociopath who enjoys playing with his victims.”

  Tom had finished his water. He walked over to the garbage can to throw it out. He came back to her. “That’s true. I just like to keep all options open in an investigation.”

  “Did you catch this case? Isn’t it going to be handled by the same detective that handled the missing person? Cold case or something?”

  “It’s a long story, but yes, I’m handling this aspect. Although there isn’t much else to handle, since he confessed. We just have to continue processing the crime scene and getting everything together for the DA.”

  Another oddity, but then again, Madison wasn’t sure exactly how the police department worked.

  “Bottom line is, you did a good job, Maddie. Everybody has been talking about you today.”

  “Really?” Madison couldn’t help but feel proud. She had worked pretty hard and had been pretty scared in the process. But she had more work to do. “Hey listen: would you be able to get me a list of the names of the employees who worked at Hank’s Dive at the time that Samantha disappeared?”

  “Probably.” Tom stared at her for a minute. “If you hadn’t done such a good job, I wouldn’t be getting it for you.”

  “I realize that. I appreciate it.”

  “I’ll email it to you. I got to get back to work.”

  Madison walked over and got into her SUV. She decided to drive out by the crime scene; she wondered what it was like in the daylight. As she drove along the main highway, she kept an eye out for the small left turn Frank had taken, forgetting that there would be cops and yellow tape everywhere to mark the spot for her. Sure enough, as she approached it there were cops directing traffic to keep people from stopping and staring. Madison made a U-turn so that she was on the same side of the street as the crime scene. She rolled down her window to speak to the cop on duty at the entrance.

  “Hi … I was just going to pull over here for a minute. I don’t need to get behind the tape.”

  “Ma’am, I’m not going to be able to let you—oh. Are you Madison Kelly?”

  Madison had never had her reputation precede her to law enforcement, so this was quite a step up in the world for her. “Yes, I’m Madison.”

  “Okay, just pull over up there and you should be out of the traffic lane.”

  Madison pulled over near the entrance to the crime scene and turned off her engine. She sat quietly for a minute. She thought about a girl who was going to be a social worker and take care of other people; a girl whose mother worked her fingers to the bone to give her a better life; a girl whose only crime was loving the wrong boy.

  “I’m sorry he did this to you. You are not a piece of garbage to be thrown out in the trash. You mattered. And I found you because your mom needed you to come home.”

  Madison started the car and drove toward the beach. She needed to bring Samantha home too; but the work would have to wait. She needed a quiet night alone and a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow was a new day.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Actual summer in La Jolla was starting. Not the June gloom of overcast morning skies that beach dwellers had to live through to get to the good stuff, but actual summer. Madison stood on her balcony with a cup of coffee and enjoyed the feel of the morning sun on her face. There were a few wispy clouds in the sky, a gentle breeze, and the water was a sheet of cerulean-blue glass. Since living at the beach, Madison had increased her vocabulary when it came to colors. This ocean was too beautiful not to have the proper words to describe it.

  She heard her phone ring and went back inside. It was still early: she’d gotten home from Ramona, eaten a piece of toast with cashew butter and jelly, and passed out. She wanted to start fresh on Samantha’s case. This had become so much more than figuring out who was stalking her.

  “Madison Kelly.”

  “Hi, Madison, it’s Felicity. Felicity Erickson. Ummm, Samantha’s—”

  “Yes of course, Felicity.” Madison was struck again at how birdlike Felicity was. It made Madison want to protect her.

  “I heard. About Elissa. Do you think he had anything to do with Samantha?”

  Madison walked her apartment, checking the view out of the windows as she spoke on the phone. It had become her new routine: every so often she checked the alley and the garden in front. Nothing there. “I don’t. Not really. I think Elissa’s boyfriend killed her in the heat of passion and then tried to make it look like a serial killer. He didn’t have to work very hard, because the media jumped on connecting the two disappearances.”

  “Samantha’s not coming home, is she?”

  Madison sat in the wingback chair. “Are you and Samantha really close?”

  “Yes. We have been our whole lives. Really close.”

  “So then I think you know, don’t you?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then: “I want to hope.”

  Madison got up from the chair and walked back to the landing. There was a ship that was visible on the water; it must’ve been traveling out to sea from the harbor. “I think hope is sometimes all we’ve got left.”

  “I’m so tired of being afraid, Madison. This guy has haunted me for so long. First he takes my sister, then he calls me and taunts me. I don’t want to be afraid anymore. And I want to know where my sister is. Even if she’s not alive.”

  “I will tell you this: I will do everything I can to find her and bring her home. And I will take this guy out so he can’t scare you anymore.”

  Madison was surprised at how emphatic her words sounded. She couldn’t actually guarantee any of this; after all, the police h
ad been working on it for four years. But Madison felt determined. Sitting at the crime scene the day before, she’d felt powerful, like she had taken a wrong and made it right—Elissa was going home. Maybe she was drunk with her own power. In any event, she was going to find Samantha Erickson and bring her home too.

  “Did Josie call you? She was going to call you,” Felicity said.

  “We spoke once, and we met yesterday. She hasn’t called me since.”

  “Okay, well, I talked to her this morning. I think she’s going to call you. And … I know she’s sort of rough around the edges, but she cares about me.”

  “I understand.”

  They disconnected, and Madison pulled up her email on her desk computer. Tom had sent the list of employees from Hank’s, which was surprising, since he’d probably been working Elissa’s case all night. She printed them out and went through them.

  There were forty people on the staff list the week Samantha went missing. Hank’s was a big place with a lot of shifts to fill, so not all of them were working the night she disappeared. That list was shorter: about fifteen people had worked that night. Madison made an Excel document with those names. If she was going to do this, she might as well be methodical about it.

  She opened her PI database and started with the first name, then ran a comprehensive report. Her database wasn’t perfect when it came to criminal histories, especially when the person had lived outside San Diego County. The criminal court of each county in the United States had its own method of storing records, and not all of them were online. Madison would be especially interested in the criminal history of these employees, if any. She made columns on her Excel document headed Name, Age, Criminal History Yes/No, and Comments. Her first employee had no criminal history, and she checked the San Diego County Superior Court website separately to be sure. Her phone rang.

  “Madison Kelly.”

  “Hi, Madison, this is Josie. From Felicity—I mean, from Hank’s.”

  Madison had to smile. She actually had no idea if Felicity returned Josie’s feelings; maybe this was unrequited love? Was Felicity even gay? Well, it didn’t really matter to the case at hand. “Yes, hi Josie.”

  “I haven’t been able to get into my boss’s office. I want to get you that list of names.”

  Madison checked another name off her list. She wasn’t spending too much time on the female names; was that sexist? This just didn’t seem like a female crime. “I actually got the list of employees working that night from the police.”

  Josie’s words came out clipped. “You’re talking to the police?”

  Madison was starting to feel like Josie was more trouble than she was worth. She hadn’t brought Madison anything worthwhile, but she sure was annoying. “What is wrong with that?”

  “The police are hiding something.”

  Madison knew there were bad apples everywhere; the police didn’t corner the market on assholes. There could be bad police just like there could be bad PIs. But she hated when that was the default argument for why a case hadn’t been solved. “What makes you think that?”

  “Because it hasn’t been solved in four years! This girl didn’t just dematerialize off a street in downtown San Diego. And they have found nothing? No clues? I don’t believe it.”

  Madison wanted to keep working on her spreadsheet; she didn’t want to debate police conspiracy theories with this girl. She had jumped to the section of bouncers while on the phone and was checking their criminal records. “Let me read you the names I have. Maybe something will jump out. Didn’t you say there was a creepy guy? Larry or something?”

  “Yes. Larry or maybe Lawrence. I think we called him Larry, but that was a nickname.”

  Madison read her the names of the fifteen people working on the night Samantha disappeared. There weren’t any with a form of the name Larry. The guy with the criminal record was named Oliver.

  “I don’t remember an Oliver,” Josie said.

  “Could that be the Larry? If my name were Oliver, I’d want a nickname. And this guy has a criminal record. It is just petty stuff like stealing; there is a battery conviction, but it’s a misdemeanor, so no one was seriously injured in the fight. Either that or he pleaded down on the charge from a felony.”

  “I guess it could be.” Josie didn’t sound sure. “Do you have any other leads?”

  “No, I don’t have tons of leads right now. I’ll tell you what. I will do a thorough background check on this guy; I’ll go out to his house and see what I see. It’s a start.”

  Madison glanced over at the whiteboard. She’d have to tidy that up now that Elissa’s case had been solved. She needed to separate out what had been an Elissa clue and what might still be a Samantha clue. It felt like starting over. “I’ll let you know if anything pans out. And you keep me posted, okay?”

  They disconnected, and Madison went to the whiteboard and erased anything related to just Elissa. She put up Oliver’s name. He lived in the East Village, a gentrified part of downtown adjacent to the Gaslamp. It just didn’t feel right.

  What am I missing?? she wrote across the top.

  She needed to get out of her apartment. She grabbed her purse and keys and locked the door on her way out. She would go visit Arlo and see if he could figure out who had created the Twitter account that had tweeted her the day before.

  * * *

  With his office tucked into a strip mall across the street from the post office in Pacific Beach, it was easy to underestimate Arlo the computer guy. Madison was not a person who did so. She had seen what he could do. He was constantly getting invitations to work at Google and Yahoo, and of course there was the rumor that he’d turned down the NSA. He liked his little shop up the stairs from the parking lot with his view of the ocean and where he could keep his own hours. He liked to stay up late at night playing video games and developing software programs that he sold for more than Madison would ever make in her life.

  “I haven’t seen you in forever,” Arlo said when Madison walked into the shop. He was tinkering with a laptop. There was classical music playing softly from the speakers set within the walls. “Have you brought me an interesting problem?”

  “I have. I think you’ll like this one.”

  “I always like the problems you bring me, Madison. What is it?”

  She explained how someone had set up a Twitter account using her name and sent out subtweets in response to her subtweets. She didn’t have to explain to Arlo what a subtweet was: short for subliminal tweet, a tweet sent without a name but intended for a particular person. She pulled up her Twitter account on her phone and showed Arlo the exchange.

  “Can you give me your Twitter password so I can look into this?”

  “Of course. If I can’t trust you, I don’t know who I can trust.” Madison gave him all the information he needed. He said he would call her as soon as he had something.

  As Madison walked down the stairs back to her car, she felt like she was walking through molasses. She had this guy Oliver’s house to go look at, just to get a feel for him and where he lived, but it didn’t feel right. She felt like she had gone off track somewhere and didn’t know how to get back on. Right now her only leads were the tweet from the Twitter account with her name on it—and hopefully Arlo would find something out about that—and then she had the bouncer named Oliver who might or might not be the “Larry” Josie was talking about. She needed to generate some more leads, because everything she had now felt like a dead end.

  She headed toward downtown where Oliver lived, taking city streets to the 5 South. She was enjoying the sun sparkling on Mission Bay to the right of the freeway when she caught sight of the blue Blazer in her side-view mirror. He had gotten smarter: he was staying on the right side of her car, trying to remain in her blind spot. But he had failed.

  This time Madison was going to take a different tack: she wasn’t going to let him know that she had spotted him. Instead, she was going to make him think that he had lost her, and the
n she was going to follow him. This would not be easy. But she was going to do it.

  As they approached the 8 freeway, Madison casually moved to the right, setting herself up to take the 8 East. The Blazer followed behind, probably feeling proud of himself for not getting spotted. After they made the transition onto the 8, Madison started to slow down—a lot. She went down to forty-five miles per hour. Then forty. Several cars started moving out from behind her and passing her. The Blazer had to do the same thing or get spotted again. He came out from behind her and then floored it. He was looking to his left over his shoulder as he passed her so she couldn’t see his face, but she could tell it was a man. She gunned the engine on her SUV and exited at Taylor Street. She raced down the short ramp, barely stopping at the end, then made a sharp left turn and got straight back on the 8, utilizing the on-ramp there and accelerating onto the freeway. The Blazer didn’t see her; he was up ahead about a quarter of a mile in the fast lane.

  Now the tailer had become the tailed. “Okay, fucker, let’s see who you are.”

  They continued on the 8 freeway all the way into La Mesa. His license plate was a piece of paper used to advertise dealerships, put on a new car while it awaited its actual license plates; Madison knew it was also used to hide the identity of the registered owner for as long as possible. A person could get a ticket pretty quickly for not having real license plates or the new temporary paper plates finally being handed out to new cars in California. This guy seemed to get away with a lot, considering he also had illegal tinting on his car.

  He wasn’t acting suspicious at all. He didn’t expect her to have turned around and started following him. He drove calmly in the first lane for eleven miles. Then he transferred to the 125 South.