STAY IN YOUR LANE

That night, off the clock, at my kitchen table, I did the thing I swore I'd never do again. I built a board.

Not a real one — a legal pad and my laptop and every open-source scrap I could pull. I started with Aaliyah and I worked outward, and within three hours the back of my neck was cold, because Aaliyah wasn't the first.

It took digging, because the whole point was that these cases were built to disappear. But when you know how to read the gaps, the gaps have a shape. Over four years: a sixteen-year-old from the Flats, coded a runaway, "returned to family out of state" — except no one could produce the family. A seventeen-year-old, foster kid, case closed in nine days. A fifteen-year-old two towns over, homeless outreach, filed and forgotten. Four girls, maybe five. All poor. All Black or brown. All the kind of missing that a town like Ridgemont codes a nineteen and never prints in the newsletter.

And all of them — I checked it four times, because I didn't want it to be true — within the service radius of a "free community van" program that had quietly expanded across three towns, run by a man who showed up at every fundraiser and coached the middle school soccer.

This is how a predator hunts in a place like this. He doesn't take the girl from the hill, the one who'd bring a task force and a TV crew. He takes the invisible ones, the ones the system has already agreed not to look for, and he uses the town's own bias as camouflage. Every time a tired detective coded one of these girls a runaway to keep the numbers clean, they didn't just miss him. They *hid* him.

I sat back from the table at two in the morning, and I understood exactly what I was looking at, and I understood that I had no badge behind me, no task force, no rank — a patrol officer told to stay in her lane, sitting alone in a kitchen with a legal pad.

I'd been here before. The last time, I'd let the room win.

Not again.