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Her name was Kelsey Marsh. Twenty-one. University of Michigan, third year, studying education. She left a house party on the fourteenth of October, and nobody has seen her since. Her housemates assumed she went home with someone. Her parents reported her missing four days later when she stopped returning calls. Four days before they called the police.

I quickly message Cain.

Miles

Can I make notes?

A message comes back fast.

Cain

A file no one can get in. Secure it like I’ve taught you.

I open a new file and create my own security. No one will get into it without me letting them. Then I start making notes.

The next file. Amber Reyes. Nineteen. Community college, Phoenix. Worked two jobs, sent money home to her mother. Disappeared from a bus stop three blocks from her apartment on a Wednesday evening. No witnesses. No footage. The camera covering that stretch of road had been offline for six days before she went missing.

Not offline. Taken offline.

I go back and check the Kelsey Marsh file. The car park camera nearest the party was also offline. Maintenance log filed two days prior.

I open a third file. Then a fourth.

By the seventh file I've stopped reading them as individual cases and started reading them as a system.

That's the only word for it. A system. The cameras go dark during the window of time, never longer than a week, never shorter than three days. This keeps it beneath the threshold that triggers automatic maintenance reviews. The girls all disappeared at transition points, between places, between people, in the ten-minute gaps where no one is responsible for knowing where they are. Someone has studied how disappearances get reported, what slows investigations down, and where the blind spots are in the way people move through their lives. Then they have built something around all of it.

This is not opportunistic.

This has been running for a long time.

I get up, grab another beer, and stand by the window to drink it. I look around at what type of security is on this campus. My baby sister is here. Are all the cameras working? Does the college have a back-up plan if they go out? This is something I’ll be looking into. By the end of the week, I’ll be into the system. I need to make sure Lileah has everything on her phone so we can always find her. But someone might throw the phone away. I need to figure something else out for her. I know getting her agreement is going to be one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had.

I go back to the laptop because I need to know more, but I also know I need to sleep. At the moment I need to know as much as I can. I need to re-read everything to understand the patterns that someone has been making.

Nineteen files. The number climbs as I go deeper into the directory structure, sub-folders inside sub-folders, and each one I open adds another name, another photograph and another set of last known details that stop within the timeline pattern that I’m seeing. There’s also a location, a timestamp, and then nothing. The file just stops. No more information.

There are thirty-one files in total. I've been reading for six hours, and my beer bottles are empty.

Thirty-one girls. Different cities: Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Seattle, two in Chicago, one in a town in rural Ohio which I have to look up to confirm it exists. The area list goes on. Different ages, seventeen to twenty-six. Different backgrounds, different circumstances, different everything. The investigating authorities in each case have treated them as separate incidents because they are separate, geographically, demographically, in every visible way. There’s no flag in any system connecting Kelsey Marsh in Michigan to Amber Reyes in Phoenix because no one has looked at them in the same room at the same time.

I rub my eyes with the heel of my hand. The screen blurs, refocuses, and then blurs again.

I glance at the clock in the corner of my laptop, three fourteen a.m. I sit back and look at the ceiling. I’ve been doing this for six hours. Thirty-one names, and I'm still in the surface layer of whatever this is, still in the files Cain considered safe enough to hand over, and still nowhere near the thing underneath that I can feel the shape of without being able to see it yet.

I can’t finish this tonight, not when my head is all over the place.

I close the laptop; my room suddenly goes dark except for the strip of light under my door.

Thirty-one names sit in my head in the silence. I don't try to move them.

I lie back on the bed without changing, one arm over my eyes, and wait for sleep to do something useful. I know it won’t because under all those names, one face comes to the forefront of my mind. Sadie.

***

The morning is too bright for my eyes. I only slept for three hours, and Mason has been talking since we left the house.

"…I'm just saying, you should have stayed and joined me on the sixth floor.”