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  Dave had gotten his shorts on and removed the towel, which he folded and set on the rock. He looked at Madison but saw something over the top of her head on the street. He looked up and waved ruefully at someone. Madison didn’t turn around to see who he was waving at.

  “No,” he said, looking back at her. “I’m not ‘staking a claim,’ and you wouldn’t like it if I did. But I can worry about you, can’t I?” He reached out and touched the part of the scar that was peeking out from underneath her tank top. “Even if you are a badass, Madison Kelly.”

  She grabbed his finger. “Stop it, freak.”

  He bent down and kissed her. Sometimes she thought the only reason she kept him around was because of the way they kissed.

  “Wow,” she said. “What if one of your girlfriends sees us?”

  “Oh my God Maddie, I don’t have ‘girlfriends.’”

  “Right, Dave, save it for the judge,” she said. “I have to go.”

  He laughed and she turned and walked up the path.

  * * *

  She had left Dave on the beach, grabbed something to eat, and then taken a nap. She wanted to go to the Gaslamp District late at night and get a feel for the scene. She arrived around eleven PM, when things were just starting to hop. She parked her car in the same parking lot Elissa had used the night she disappeared, around the corner from Bourbon Baby, the club where she was last seen.

  Madison walked all the way down Fourth Avenue to Hank’s Dive, the bar where Samantha was last seen alive. She didn’t see much; she hoped this trip wasn’t a waste of time.

  She wouldn’t try to interview the staff at the bars in the middle of a busy night. She would need to come back in the early afternoon for that. However, whenever she started a case, she needed to get a feel for the scene, and like it or not, this was the scene: music blaring out of restaurants and clubs, people walking in twos and fours and groups in various levels of intoxication, couples on first and second dates slipping into nice restaurants with cute patios on red-brick streets. Hank’s was just as obnoxious as she had remembered it; in fact, there was a fight on the street in front of the bar that she deftly avoided. As she jogged to safety a block away, she wondered why she’d bothered to come down there. Sure, it was the “scene,” but she’d been to the Gaslamp before and knew what it was like at night. I had to start somewhere, she thought. And she was trying to keep her mind off the fact that she was taking on a case that seemed insurmountable, and she wasn’t even getting paid for it. She needed a starting point. A toehold. She’d thought she might find it in the Gaslamp, but she hadn’t. Feeling defeated, Madison walked back to her car from Hank’s.

  The summer air felt soft on her face. The air feels different at night; like hope. She heard a sound—swoosh—and she stopped abruptly and leaned her hand on the wall next to her. Sometimes pockets of sadness came out of nowhere and took her by surprise—like a punch to the gut. If she waited, it passed.

  Her father had started having seizures their last week in the Windansea condo; she’d had to admit him to a hospice for regular medication and monitoring. The hospice was in a beautiful setting on a hill overlooking Mission Valley, not far from where she stood in the Gaslamp District. Her father lay trapped in his bed and in his thoughts, the brain tumor sitting on a part of his brain making him unable to understand what he saw out of his eyes. So he kept them closed.

  “What’s that sound?” he’d asked.

  She’d looked up from a Sue Grafton novel she was rereading for the third time. She hadn’t heard anything, and she thought her father, a genius who’d ungracefully fought every loss to his senses because he missed them more than most, was imagining it.

  “There it is again!” he said, and then she heard it. A swoosh. She got up from the couch in his hospice room and stepped outside to the private garden. She looked over the cliff to the Fashion Valley mall below and saw the red electric trolley pulling away from the station at the mall. Swoosh.

  “It’s a trolley,” she reported when she got back in the room.

  “A trolley,” he said. “That’s perfect.” And then he fell asleep.

  For the next week, as her father slipped into a coma and she waited for the inevitable, the swoosh of the trolley kept her company. It was a dreamy sound, like a train whistle: the hope of brighter days in distant places. It became the sound of her dreams.

  Back in the Gaslamp District, the trolley had passed, and so had her melancholy. She lifted her hand off the wall and wiped it on her jeans. The brushing motion caused her bracelet to catch on her jeans and fly off. It landed in the crevice between two buildings. Madison at first tried to reach between the buildings to get the bracelet; she could just barely see the silver clasp where the streetlight hit it at an angle. The buildings were built as a pair, and the developers had really tried to keep them on the same lot—to the point that they were almost touching. It was no good. She couldn’t reach it.

  She probably would’ve left it, but the bracelet had been her mother’s. She saw a piece of metal rebar, rusted and dirtied, lying in the gutter. She picked it up and walked back to the crevice. As she stood deciding the best way to attack it, a homeless guy walking by made a fake scream and held his hands up.

  “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!”

  She stood holding the rebar, waiting for him to pass. He started to let out a demonic cackle, something that probably got a satisfying reaction from most girls on the street, but as he got closer and saw Madison’s expression, he broke it off abruptly.

  “I was only kidding, shiiiiiit.”

  Madison waited until he’d cleared the area before she turned her back to the street. She decided to carefully reach the rebar much farther than where the bracelet lay to make sure not to push the bracelet farther in. She knelt on the sidewalk and placed the tip of the rebar as far as it would go, then gently scraped it back toward her. The bracelet came out—along with an iPhone 7 in a Kate Spade cover.

  White hibiscus flowers on a clear background studded with crystals made to look like diamonds. Kate Spade New York at the bottom, with a little spade emblem. Very girly. Madison stared at it. What were the chances this phone belonged to one of the missing girls? Zero. Madison laughed that she’d even had the thought. She was standing right next to the parking lot where Elissa had parked her car, and Samantha’s car had been only one block over, but still. Ridiculous. Madison had never been very good with odds, which was the reason she’d stuck to playing craps and blackjack when she went to Vegas—nothing that required her to understand statistics. But she figured that if she presented this to a bookie, she could bet one dollar and win $1,000 if it turned out to be a phone belonging to one of the missing girls.

  Nevertheless, a girl could dream that she’d just found a missing piece of evidence in a major case. And having had the thought, she did not want to pick up the phone with her bare hands, in case it was a piece of evidence. She saw a trash can next to a bus stop that was overfilled and included a fast-food bag. She waited until a posse of ten girls—apparently part of a bachelorette party, given the drunken state of the revelers and the toilet-paper crown and veil worn by one of the girls—had passed on the sidewalk. Madison jumped across, grabbed the fast-food bag, tossed the leftover food, and took the napkins and bag over to her find.

  She used the napkin to scoop up the phone and place it in the bag. She walked the block to her car. Madison had had a supervisor at one of her first investigation jobs tell her, “Being a good investigator is fifty percent technique and fifty percent luck. And Madison, you have good luck.” She had thought about that a lot. She did have good luck. Still, it seemed unlikely that this phone belonged to one of the missing girls. But she would keep it as a juju until she figured that out.

  As Madison started the car in the parking lot, her phone went off with a notification from Twitter. Prior to leaving the house she had sent a direct message to Felicity Erickson, Samantha’s sister. Madison and Felicity followed each other on Twitter; Madi
son couldn’t remember how it started, but she seemed to recall Felicity following her after one of Madison’s tweets contained a suggestion for Lance and Tim on the podcast. In the direct message she’d let Felicity know that she was looking into the case, but she didn’t mention why; she just said she hoped they could meet. The notification was Felicity’s reply.

  I would love to meet you. I will do anything to find my sister. Can you meet me tomorrow? Anywhere you say.

  Madison tweeted back: Meet me at the Pannikin in La Jolla tomorrow at 11 AM. She pasted the Yelp review for the Pannikin with the directions.

  Maybe this evening wasn’t a waste after all.

  Chapter Seven

  The Pannikin in La Jolla was probably the only restaurant that catered to every group of La Jollans: the surfers living to catch the best wave and surviving on their last dollar; entitled young urban professionals who could afford a two-million-dollar beach condo the size of a postage stamp and were rushing to their high-paying jobs in downtown; and the one-percenters who lived in the multimillion-dollar mansions that peppered the coast and the hillsides in La Jolla and who stopped off before lunch or after a charity function to visit with their wealthy friends and see and be seen. Madison didn’t fall into any of those categories, proving to herself that she shouldn’t categorize people. But she identified most with the surfer group; otherwise she just kept to herself and watched everybody else. The Pannikin had reclaimed wood tables with broken-tile inlays, a huge tree in the patio area, and delicious coffee and baked goods. Everyone in La Jolla knew the Pannikin.

  As Madison walked up she unconsciously looked around for Dave. He drove a red Jeep, the old steel kind not the new ones that look like Tonka toys made of plastic, so normally she would be able to tell if he were here. However, the restaurant was within walking distance of his cottage so he could be there without his Jeep. She didn’t see him. She got a coffee in a huge white porcelain mug and grabbed a seat on the patio.

  Felicity Erickson looked just like her Twitter avatar: kind and warm with a determination behind her eyes. She walked into the patio area, and Madison stood up and waved. Felicity came over and sat opposite Madison, on the bench facing the street. She was about thirty years old and wore jeans and a cardigan. She had a tattoo on her wrist in beautiful script that said Samantha.

  “This is a nice place,” she said. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “Sorry to make you drive all the way into La Jolla, but whenever someone asks me where to meet, this is the first place I think of,” Madison said. “Would you like coffee?”

  Felicity ignored the question. “I hope you’re not going to waste my time. A lot of people have contacted me: psychics, amateur detectives, you name it. They want me to give them every last piece of information I have so that they can satisfy their curiosity, and then when they can’t solve the mystery in the first week, they walk away. Well, this is not a pastime for me or a hobby. This is my sister. Samantha. This is my life.” She held up the tattoo of her sister’s name.

  Madison realized that she was going to have to tread lightly. She did need information from Felicity, but she understood Felicity’s point, and she knew exactly the type of person Felicity had been dealing with: people who looked at her tragedy and saw it as a game or as something with which to amuse themselves when they were bored. There was nothing wrong with that, to a certain degree; podcasts were made for entertainment, and even Madison listened to them for that reason. But when it came down to actually contacting the family member of a victim, you had better be doing it for the right reason.

  “I completely understand,” Madison said. “I am not here to waste your time. First of all, I’m not an amateur: I’m a licensed professional. But in addition, this has become personal for me. Obviously not as personal as it is for you, but I have a stake in this. I would rather not explain why just yet, if that’s okay with you. But I am licensed to investigate this matter.” Madison took out her PI license and showed it to Felicity. “I can explain more as we go along, but I’d like to just start off with talking about what has happened so far in the investigation of this case, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Okay,” Felicity said. “I’m sorry if I sounded rude. It’s just that, since our parents died, it has only been the two of us. I miss her. I want to find her. It’s been four years. And I’m tired of getting my hopes up.”

  “I understand.”

  “And the police have told me next to nothing about what they’ve done. I’ve been left in the dark. Or else they just haven’t done much and don’t want to admit it.”

  “That’s okay. You probably know more than I do.”

  “Well, I’m going to need coffee for this.”

  “Let me get it for you.” Madison stood up and grabbed her purse. “What would you like?”

  “Black coffee would be great.”

  Madison walked inside to the counter. As she waited in line, she looked outside and saw Dave’s Jeep pull up with a pretty blonde girl in the passenger seat. The girl got out and ran inside as Dave pulled away.

  “Hi, Gabrielle!” a girl behind the counter yelled over the sound of milk being steamed on the espresso machine.

  “Sorry I’m late, you guys!” The girl—Gabrielle—walked behind the counter. She was wearing really short shorts and a tank top. Madison self-consciously looked down at her own attire: baggy jeans that hung down around her hips, an English Beat concert T-shirt, a jean jacket, and black-and-white Chuck Taylors. Maybe she should make more of an effort.

  “One coffee please,” Madison said.

  Gabrielle didn’t look familiar to Madison. Dave knew everyone in La Jolla, and it was conceivable that this was just a friend. Madison knew better than to try to figure it out. This truth would not set her free.

  Madison walked out to the patio and delivered the coffee to Felicity.

  “There are a lot of beautiful people in this town,” Felicity said.

  “Yes.” Madison sat down. She looked behind her to see if Dave had parked somewhere and walked back. Nope. “Unfortunately, a lot of the beauty is only skin-deep.”

  Felicity was emptying the contents of a stevia packet she’d brought with her into her coffee. She eyed Madison. “I think we’re going to be friends.”

  Madison reached into her purse and took out a plastic bag containing the cell phone she had found in the Gaslamp District. “Was this Samantha’s by any chance?”

  Felicity took the plastic bag from her and looked at the phone closely. “No, this wasn’t her phone. Where did you find it?”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now.” Madison threw the phone back in her purse. Why had she even asked her? Ridiculous, Madison thought. “So let’s do it this way: you’ve heard every single theory, both possible and impossible. What do you think happened to Samantha?”

  Felicity was warming her hands on her coffee mug, even though it was about seventy-five degrees under the umbrella on the patio. “Wow, you really cut to the chase don’t you? I like that. And the answer is I just don’t know.”

  Madison looked down at the broken-tile inlay at the table where they sat. She used her napkin to wipe a cleaner spot to rest her wrists on. “Do you think she would have taken a rideshare from the bar?”

  “Sure. She definitely would not have driven drunk. And according to the videotape at the bar, she was wasted. I don’t know why she walked out of the bar alone, other than the bartender cut her off and she was probably looking for her friends, or maybe she had to throw up or … I don’t know. When a person is that drunk, it’s hard to find motivation in their actions. You asked me what I thought happened, and the only thing I can think of is that she was the victim of an opportunity … someone saw an opportunity and grabbed her.”

  Madison thought for a minute. “I can see that. But something about that doesn’t make sense. It was a busy night downtown. I was there last night to remind myself, and it wasn’t even the weekend last night. The place is packed with people up and
down the streets. If a girl had been dragged into a van kicking and screaming, someone would’ve noticed that. So in order to get her away from the bar she had to willingly get into a car. Whose car would she have gotten into willingly?”

  “I see what you mean. Well, no one, other than a rideshare. She didn’t have a boyfriend. She would’ve gone with a rideshare driver, or one of her friends, but they were all inside the bar and accounted for. Or she might’ve tried to walk to her car to take a nap and got lost on the way to her car. Maybe someone picked her up in an alley? Then there would be no witnesses. Or else she would’ve gotten in the car with someone that she thought was a rideshare driver.”

  Madison thought about that. It was possible and one of her initial thoughts.

  “You said something on Twitter the other day,” Felicity said. “You said ‘I don’t scare that easily.’ And then someone with an account in your name said ‘We’ll see,’ or something like that. Can you tell me what that was about?”

  Madison paused. She didn’t want to share details of the note yet. As an investigator, she’d found that a “need-to-know” basis was the best way to operate. “I’d rather not say, if that’s okay. I might tell you later.”

  Felicity paused. A seagull had landed on the fence behind the bench she was sitting on. He was facing Madison; Felicity couldn’t see him. He looked down at them with interest, as if he were part of their meeting.

  “I do,” Felicity said.

  Madison’s attention jerked back to Felicity. “You do … what?”

  “I scare that easily. It’s one of the reasons I agreed to meet with you even though I’ve been burned so many times before. I felt like it was a sign: you saying you don’t scare easily, when I do.”

  Madison wasn’t even sure that what she’d written was true; she’d tweeted it for effect.

  “I’m afraid too sometimes. Everyone is.”