STAY IN YOUR LANE

I have to tell you a little about who I used to be, or none of the rest of this makes sense. I'll keep it short, because it still costs me.

Before Ridgemont, I spent nine years with the FBI. Behavioral Analysis Unit — the people field offices call when a crime doesn't make sense, when they need someone to look at the pattern of a thing and tell them the shape of the person making it. I was good at it. Not modest, not bragging — just a fact I have to put on the table so you understand what Ridgemont was sitting on without knowing.

Until a case in my last year, when I told a room full of people with more rank than me that a missing child was still alive, held by someone she trusted, that we had maybe seventy-two hours, and that we were looking in the wrong direction. The room decided I was wrong. They had a theory that was cleaner and a suspect who fit the headline better, and by the time they came back around to my way, we were eleven hours past the window.

Her name was Lily. She was eight. I don't say her name often.

After that I couldn't look at another file. I put in my papers, I drove until the FBI stopped being a place I could feel behind me, and I landed in a town that advertised itself as safe and asked for the beat where nothing happened. I traded profiling serial offenders for writing parking citations in the Flats, and I told myself it was peace.

For fourteen months, it almost was.

And then Denise Reeves put a photograph on my desk and told me her honor-student daughter had missed a chemistry test she'd studied two weeks for and hadn't texted, and every alarm I'd spent fourteen months disconnecting rang at once.

I could have coded it a nineteen. Powell told me to. It would have been the safe thing, the Ridgemont thing.

I looked at Aaliyah Reeves laughing in a school photo, and I thought about Lily, and I closed my notebook and I made a decision that was going to cost me the quiet I'd driven a thousand miles to find.

"Mrs. Reeves," I said. "I'm going to look for your daughter. Personally. Starting now."