When Amber’s phone lit up, she just kept working at her laptop. Anyone who didn’t leave a message didn’t need to talk with her that badly. When the voicemail arrived, however, she paused the Curtis Mayfield track she was listening to, and turned from her research with a sigh to tap it open and listen.

Ms. Page, my name is Shelly Fischer. My daughter, Colleen, was abducted three weeks ago…under…very strange circumstances. No one’s made any progress in finding her, and now… The woman’s composure faltered audibly—which brought Amber’s attention into sharper focus. They’re all just giving up, she quavered. We’ve heard nothing from the kidnappers, and the federal agents here packed up and left last week. Calling the police detective is like talking to a form letter now. We’ve done our research, and everyone says that you’re the best private investigator in the region. Our daughter needs your help. Please. Money is not an issue. We just need…someone who will keep at it until she’s found. Please call me as soon as possible—even if you can’t do it. Thank you.

The woman left her phone number and hung up.

Amber leaned back in her chair to gaze at the ceiling of her ‘office’—a converted walk-in refrigeration room in the little ex-corner-grocery-store she’d bought and had remodeled for use as her home. The last thing she needed at the moment was another case. And, three weeks? …No contact from the girl’s abductor? Everyone had moved on because the window for any real hope had pretty much closed. If anything, the kidnapper’s silence suggested that Colleen was either dead or no longer in the country. The world was full of places to sell a healthy American girl very profitably—especially if she was white, which Shelly Fischer had certainly sounded. White and wealthy. This had likely been a lost cause from the start.

The fact that Amber had never handled a kidnap case made this a questionable fit as well, but also an intriguing challenge. She couldn’t recall any case that hadn’t thrust her into unfamiliar territory of some kind. If an investigation didn’t start in no-man’s land, it usually ended up there quick enough—which was half the fun. The woman’s mention of ‘very strange circumstances’ certainly tugged hard at Amber’s obsessive inner puzzle solver. And she was a sucker for people who actually needed her help—not just wanted it, as so many of her clients did these days. Need had always meant more than reward to Amber, even as a kid.

She drew a long, deep breath, and looked back down at the laptop where her interrupted research posed its own objections to a new case now. But she’d never been the sort to leave a distraught caller dangling for no reason. She picked up her phone and touched the call-back icon under Fischer’s message, reflexively priming her ‘business voice,’ adjusted slightly for the hints of ‘well bred New England’ she’d detected in Shelly Fischer’s speech, and preparing to project ‘the three Cs’ as she’d come to think of them: Competence, Caring, and Control. There were things a woman needed to anticipate and preempt in any business transaction, all the more so a woman of color in Amber’s line of work.

The call rang only once. “Hello? Ms. Page?”

Amber almost winced at the desperation and surprise in the woman’s voice. Had she not expected a call back so soon—or at all? “I just got your message, Ms. Fischer. I’m sorry you’re going through this.”

“Yes. Thank you so much for calling back. Can you help us?”

“I’ll need more information to answer that question. But first, I need to be sure you understand that, even if I’m able to take your case, I can’t guarantee results of any kind. Anyone who says they can is lying. There’s no way to predict when or how events like this might be resolved. Some never are.”

“We just need someone who will keep trying,” said the woman. “Someone who really thinks it’s their job to try. We’re not paying the police detective—or the FBI.”

“Which might not have anything to do with their results so far,” said Amber, though she knew just as well that it might. “Any more than paying me may result in some better outcome—just to be very clear.”

“I understand,” said the woman. “What can I do to convince you to help us?”

“I don’t need convincing, Ms. Fischer. I just need a better idea of what I’d be investigating, and whether it’s something I feel equipped to take on.” And want to risk, she added silently. There were cases only a thrill seeker would consider, and Amber had never been that type. “In case it matters, you should probably know that I’ve never investigated a kidnapping before.”

“Oh. …Is there someone with more experience you’d recommend then?”

“Not off hand. It’s just not a very common crime, with the exception of custody cases. …How old is Colleen, Ms. Fischer?”

“Oh, no, no; she’s a graduate student—in social work. This has nothing to do with custody. Are you saying you’re not qualified to investigate this?”

“No. I’ve handled plenty of criminal cases, and every investigation is unique anyway. I just want to be sure the fact doesn’t matter to you.”

“Well…not if you don’t think it should.”

“You mentioned unusual circumstances?”

“Good god…” the woman sighed. “Where do I even begin…?”

What followed was the single most bizarre and disordered stream-of-consciousness screed Amber had ever heard—which was saying a lot! It started with secret letters about vague conspiracies delivered by mysterious stalkers seeking some old friend of her daughter’s fiancé, who had vanished seven years earlier after a violent confrontation had put the fiancé into a hospital, then a jail cell, and finally gotten him adopted by a social worker who ran a global diseases program for the university, but whose own father was in a penitentiary for racketeering, and her husband who had also been kidnapped for three years before being thrown out of a van in front of the hospital where the felonious fiancé had been recovering from his altercation with the vanished friend, who had since gone mad, it seemed, and sent them all now-vanished emails full of crazy stories about fairies hidden in the city, just before both daughter and fiancé had nearly drowned in the flooding Saddle and been hospitalized again prior to Colleen’s disappearance from a wrecked car in a garage where all the cameras had been sabotaged.

Well before Fischer had gotten to the ransom note that disappeared as well somehow before the police could see it, Amber felt quite sure that a psychiatrist, not a private investigator, was what this woman, and perhaps her entire family, really needed. That is, until the woman mentioned all the files mysteriously erased not only from a flock of phones and laptops but from an isolated police server and even the city’s main internet farms.

“Oh!” Amber blurted, just managing to stop herself from adding, ‘You’re that?’ She had actually heard about this recent super-hack, very unofficially, but from a highly reliable source. The matter was being tightly hushed up, but Amber had cultivated a lot of useful friendships over the years—in many different quarters—one of whom had been just bursting with a need to tell someone ‘safe’ about this impossible feat and what it might portend. And now, here it was, calling her on the phone! “That’s…quite a bit to take in, Ms. Fischer.”

“Don’t I know it,” she said wearily. “Would it be all right to call me Shelly?”

“Sure.” More names… Names made it even harder to say no. Did Ms. Fischer know that? “My name’s Amber. The first thing I’ll need to do is talk with the police detective. What’s his name?”

“Carl Schafer.” She spelled both names out.

“Thanks,” said Amber. Not a name she recognized. “Do you know his precinct?”

“The station, you mean?” Shelly asked uncertainly. “I’m from out of state, I’m afraid. I don’t remember the address. The station is downtown in…the historic district…maybe?”

Old Town, Amber thought, rolling her eyes. The guy who’d told her about the hacking had fastidiously declined to say exactly which station it had been, but she should have known it would be that one. The place was in a renovated historic market building, half tourist attraction and a frequent location for paranormal ghost-hunting shows. Not the most impressive fortress the city had to offer. “Have you got a number for him?” When Shelly had given it to her, she asked, “So, you’re not in the city now, yourself?”

“Oh. Yes, we are. I just meant that I don’t have a very good sense of where things are around here yet. We’re in a suite at the Pear Garden Hotel, out by the airport. My husband…has to fly a lot. For business reasons.”

Amber nodded to herself, wondering why whoever had taken Colleen—if that’s what had really happened—hadn’t just gone for the ransom. Not a question likely to have happy answers. “May I ask what business your husband is in, Shelly?”

“Green technology. Energy-efficient lighting, specifically.”

Okay…not a lot of likely mob or cartel involvement there… But these people sounded more than able to afford her services—and she was getting way ahead of herself. “I’m going to do my best to talk with Detective Schafer today, and get back to you with an answer by mid-day tomorrow at the latest. Is that all right?”

There was a pause on Shelly’s end. There almost always was. Everybody called hoping she’d just say, ‘You bet! On it this very minute!’ and rush out to start surveilling someone. “I understand,” Shelly said at last. “We’ll be waiting for your call. Thank you for considering it.”

“Keep hope, Shelly,” Amber said, still wishing, after years at this, that there was anything to say to people in such straits that didn’t sound offensive—even to herself. “I won’t keep you waiting a minute longer than it takes me to learn what I need to know.”

“Thank you,” Shelly said quietly, and hung up.

Amber turned back to her laptop, resumed the Mayfield track, and began a search for anything on Colleen’s kidnap. Within minutes, it was clear that nothing had made it into local news. Unsurprising given Shelly’s memorable story. Only a tabloid would have listened for more than a sentence or two, much less published any of it; and, her tale notwithstanding, Shelly Fischer hadn’t seemed like someone who’d go to a tabloid. Amber’s next search was Detective Carl Schafer, which produced a surprising number of newspaper and journal articles—most of them from many years earlier, and all laudatory. He’d closed the Marlin Kinski case over a decade earlier; another ‘bereaved husband and upstanding church elder with dark underbelly’ scenario. She remembered reading about it with some interest at the time, though she hadn’t registered Schafer’s name then. She found articles about other even earlier cases he’d solved, as well as awards and commendations over several decades. The guy had to be edging up against retirement by now—which might have something to do with the inattention Shelly had complained of. Still, what Amber was finding made him seem a pretty decent guy—and good at what he did—though public media did tend to filter things pretty heavily, skewing toward unremitting villainy or sweetness and light, but little in between. She could file an SB1421 registry request, and hope they didn’t make her wait for days, but she’d promised Fischer a speedy answer, and there were quicker ways to get what she needed now. She scanned the articles on Schafer one more time, mentally cataloguing potentially useful bits. Then she stood up, grabbed her sweater, phone and keys, and headed out of her office, turning to lock up and deadbolt its six-inch-thick, insulated metal door, then armed the alarm and stepped out onto the street.

Ten minutes later, she was in freeway traffic on her way to Old Town to look up a friend there. Amber had come to the city only fifteen years ago, but she’d made many, many friends since then, in virtually every part of town. Some of them were ‘influencers,’ but most were well beneath the radar of respectable people. Such friends were essential to her work, and their wide distribution through the city and its suburbs was no accident. But the fact that they were truly friendships, which she’d just as happily have made no matter what her work had been, was what made them so productive in other ways as well.

Amber found people fascinating—to an almost ridiculous degree at times—perhaps because there’d been so few of them around as she’d grown up. She’d been raised way out in the Northern California countryside in an intentional community, as folks had started calling such things after the hippy movement had melted down. Amber’s father had followed her mother and a few of her friends with whom he had grown comfortable out into the sticks to attempt lives defined only by their own consciences and the land itself, free of “toxic narratives” permeating the broken wider world. The Land, as they’d called the large, isolated property they’d purchased together, had been a lovely, slow and peaceful place. They’d all come with or developed skills useful to making homes and lives there. Their intentions had been good, and for a while it had seemed to work out well enough. A handful of others joined them there over time, not all of them white. By the time Amber was fourteen, her ‘family’ had been comprised of eleven adults, including her folks, and four children, counting herself, all raised as much by ‘the community’ as by their biological parents. Her only other regular companions had been an ever-shifting fleet of chickens, ducks, cats, dogs, goats, pigs, and long-horned Scottish coos. Her world had been defined by vast amounts of space with very little going on—or little ever changing, anyway—which had imbued her with a tremendous proclivity for focused observation and attention to details of the sort usually drowned out in hectic, normal lives. Her only consistent distractions had been daily interaction of, and with, others, and periodic visits to the one-room library in a tiny town eight miles away. The former had inspired endless analysis of what people around her did, and why, while the latter had nourished a vivid imagination, a pretty huge vocabulary, and a broad awareness of narrative flow—in both literature and real life.

Her father’s eventual run-in with that rural county’s parochial justice system had, in many ways, laid the final yellow brick in her road to life as an urban P.I. Her father had been a gentle, cheerful, hardworking carpenter, well liked by everyone who knew him. He’d also been sufficiently trusting of the world to think that a few small pot plants underneath a grow light in their basement, way out there in no-man’s land, weren’t likely to cause any real trouble. No commercial crop; just enough to afford himself and a few friends the occasional moment of decompression and good cheer. It had seemed to him, and to everyone else they knew, not much different than a beer or two after work or a couple lunchtime cocktails. Amber didn’t think her good-hearted father had expected anyone with whom he and Amber’s mother shared The Land to take him down. But one of their little ‘family’ had gotten himself into a bigger sort of trouble, reduced somewhat by an agreement to point local law enforcement toward other prizes.

Her father’s infraction had been pretty minor, even by legal standards of the time. But as a black man—married to a white woman—and a “founder of their commune,” as the papers had insisted on describing him, he’d been assigned the role of instigator, and made an example of—largely to demonstrate to the sleepy county’s good folk what hotshots their police force were. After protracted displays of religious outrage and moral posturing from many of the area’s respectable folk, her father had done years of jail time, lost all his carpentry clients, and The Land had been disbanded and sold off. Amber and her mother had moved into a shack on the outskirts of that little town, closer to the library, and awaited her father’s release. During those years, she had kept as much distance as she could from the town’s self-righteous and condescending inhabitants who, after destroying her family’s life to satisfy their haughty sense of ‘decency,’ had gone right back to whatever they’d been doing without so much as a glance behind them. But it was not until her father had finally come home, a quiet shell of his former self, that Amber really understood the full scope and permanence of what had been taken from them—and from her. Unable to repair or endure the changes in her once joyfully enthusiastic and affectionate father, or the equally persistent sadness of her mother, Amber had left as soon as she turned eighteen, and come here to the city, many states away from everything behind her.

The deftly observant people-studier and puzzle-solver inside her had only grown more fierce since then—relentlessly parsing clues to who others really were, and what was really going on around her. She’d rapidly come to understand how many more underdogs the world contained than she had once imagined, all in need of help that virtually no one seemed able, or willing, to provide. She’d also discovered that not all underdogs looked like her, or had troubles like her own. Surrounded by so many more people now, in so many kinds of need and conflict, she’d quickly come to recognize how rarely villains and victims were as easy to distinguish from each other as they’d seemed back in the little town she’d come from. Amber had long ago abandoned the idea that anybody was entirely ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ More often than not, the real issues at work in a case turned out to be very different from the ones described when she’d been hired. Everywhere she looked these days, she saw questions incorrectly answered, labels misapplied, consequences unjustly inflicted or avoided, and couldn’t keep herself from continuing to care—though after thirteen years of this work, she’d built pretty effective walls to help keep that care at manageable distances.

The hard things early on had proven to be strengths here. She didn’t just understand the struggles of ‘real people;’ she had shared them. Her many friends trusted her, because she trusted them—within reason—and cared about them too. The harder they had it, the more she cared. They knew she saw them. She belonged most anywhere she actually wanted to, without fakery, and neither looked, sounded, nor smelled anything like ‘the man’—which was no small part of how she’d come to be regarded as the city’s best P.I.

Having found a parking spot not too far from the substation in Old Town, she headed straight to Walter’s Smoke House, a long-established tobacco shop. Walter, its now aged owner, had been smart enough to cultivate such deep friendships from day one with everyone here who seemed likely to shake him down that none of them had ever tried to. His gifts as a listener were a big part of that success. Everybody in Old Town talked to Walter.

Entering his shop, she glanced around, pleased to find the place so empty at that moment—before spotting the two pre-teen boys huddled over a girly magazine beside a rack in back. No more dangerous gossips than little boys. So eager to impress the older men they knew with whatever secrets they might gather in their rambles.

When Walter finally looked up from his tiny black and white TV and saw her, a beaming grin transformed his face. “Awwww, look at that,” he crooned. “How you always know when I need cheering up?” He looked back down at the ballgame on his television. “My boys are getting their asses beat.”

She gave him a sympathetic smile as she came to lean against the counter, which he rewarded with the kind of flirtatious grin that can only seem charming rather than offensive on the face of an eighty-year-old man. “So, you finally ready to start smoking then?” he asked cheerfully.

She shook her head. “Sorry, Walter. Still can’t quite cozy up to the idea.”

He shrugged. “Can’t blame me for hoping.”

“I blame you for nothing,” she said, casting a pointed look at the two boys in back.

Walter’s gaze followed hers. “Hey you two! What’re you doing back there? That ain’t for you yet! You know it ain’t! How about I tell your mommas what you’re reading in here? Right after church on Sunday. You like the sound of that?” They shook their heads, eyes gone wide. “Then what you waiting for; see me pick this phone up right now and call’em? Get outta here.”

They dropped the magazine and trotted past Amber on their way through the door.

He gave a little chuckle when they’d gone. “What’s up then, honey?”

“I have a friend dealing with some legal trouble,” she sighed.

He gave her a sidelong glance. “Just the one?” He turned further toward her, his grin broadening. “You on vacation now, or something?”

She returned his grin. “I’m on my way to see a detective here I’ve never dealt with before, named Carl Schafer. Anything I ought to know before I walk into the lion’s den?”

“Schafer?” Walter looked up at the ceiling as if some reference catalogue were pinned up there. “Yeah, I heard about Detective Schafer now and then, I’m pretty sure. Not for a long time though, I don’t think. He still around?”

“Seems to be. Can you remember what you heard?”

Walter looked at her and shrugged. “Nothing bad, that I recall.” He nodded to himself. “Emma used to mention him sometimes. Said he had lunch a lot at the diner where she worked. Tipped big, and treated everybody nice.” He grinned and shook his head. “Kinda think she might have had a crush on him, though. She’d get this look when she was talking about him, but he sounded like a decent man—as cops go. Can’t recall ever hearin’ nobody call him trouble.”

That was good enough for Amber. If Schafer were trouble, she was sure Walter would have had less trouble remembering. “Thank you, Walter.” She took a twenty-stick pack of cherry-flavored gum from the rack beside his register and laid it on the counter.

Walter raised his eyes to the ceiling again, and shook his head. “I got Cuban cigars to curl a sultan’s toes, and all you ever want is chewing gum.” He took her money though, and blew her a kiss as she walked out.

The substation was just blocks away. As she started walking, she pulled out her phone and dialed the number Fischer had given her.

“Old Town station, Officer Haynes, 8124, how can I help you?”

Not Schafer’s direct number then—which was just as well.

“I’m just wondering what the best times to reach Detective Schafer might be.”

“He’s in now, I think. Shall I put you through?”

“Not right now, thank you.” She hung up without waiting for any reply. No point in making it easier for Schafer to blow her off or evaporate before she got there.

Five minutes later, she stepped through the substation’s main doors with the same wary vigilance she’d have felt stepping into an elevator late at night with a strange man. When she’d first started doing this work, just walking toward a police station had filled her with a mixture of loathing and dread. But time and repetition had enabled her to subdue that reflex to a dull tension. Even cops, she’d come to see, were not all of one kind. She’d become good at distinguishing—quickly—who was decent, as many were in her experience; who was offensive but harmless; and who was genuinely hateful or dangerous. Though she would always be a black woman in a bastion of macho white culture here, she’d learned how to navigate each of those terrains by now.

Old Town was a small station, and at this hour, shortly before lunch, there was no one else in its small lobby. She walked up to the station’s glass-screened reception counter, and smiled at the sober young woman behind it. “My name is Amber Page. I’m wondering if Detective Schafer might have a moment to speak with me.”

“May I ask what you wish to discuss with Detective Schafer?” the woman asked.

“I have some information regarding the Colleen Fischer kidnap case,” she said, which was technically true. He likely didn’t know yet that her parents were trying to hire a P.I.

“I’ll be right back,” the young woman said, walking briskly away and out a side door. When she was gone, Amber got her wallet out and slid her private investigator’s license from its pocket there. A moment later, the young woman was back with a graying, somewhat portly officer in tow. “Ms. Page?” he greeted her through the glass. “I’m Detective Schafer. Can I ask what your relationship to this matter is?”

She smiled and slid her license through the glass screen’s counter slot for him to inspect. “Colleen’s mother called me this morning to ask if I’d help search for her daughter. I’d very much appreciate the chance to talk with you before giving her an answer.”

She watched a complex sequence of expressions chase each other across Schafer’s face as he studied her license, then looked back up at her. “They’re hiring a P.I.?”

“They’re trying to,” said Amber, “and I’m trying to decide what I should tell her. Have you got a minute to discuss this, Detective?”

He gazed at her for another moment, clearly a little pissed, which was not all that surprising. But he gave her a tight smile, and slid her license back through the slot with a nod. “Come on back, Ms. Page.” He nodded to the young woman behind him as well, and went to buzz Amber through a narrow doorway at the counter’s far end. From there, Amber followed him back through the doorway from which he’d come.

As they headed down a hallway, presumably toward his office, he turned and gave her a wry look. “I’m pleased to finally meet you, Ms. Page.”

What? “You are?”

“Oh, I’ve heard about you. Your work on the Sandoval extortion case was impressive.”

“I’m flattered, Detective. So was your work on the Kinski murders.”

He turned to her with raised eyebrows. “How do you…? Were you even born then?”

“Do I look twelve years old to you, Detective? I was already a working P.I. then. I’m well aware of your work too, and the respect you enjoy on the street in this community. That says even more important things to me than your good press does.” Never too soon to find out how a little butter might affect things.

His smile widened as they stopped before an open doorway. “My bad.” He waved her through first. “Please have a seat.”

She settled into the chair in front of his desk. He walked back to roll his chair out from behind it and came around to sit facing her in front of the desk as well—which was interesting. “I don’t know what she told you,” Schafer said, pleasantly. “But I’ve bent over backwards to advocate for this investigation at a time when we both know resources are stretched mighty thin throughout this city. I had assumed they were aware of that. But if you’d like to take this case off my hands, I won’t mind at all.”

She struggled to keep a straight face. Clearly very pissed, which wasn’t likely to improve the quality of service Shelly Fischer could expect from him now. Amber’s first task here was to keep his somewhat understandable resentment from becoming aimed at her as well. If she took this case, she’d need his help—and she’d get it. But whether she’d be wrestling him for every ounce of it would likely be determined here and now. “We both understand that I can’t take this off your hands, Detective, even if I wanted to. I have a fairly busy caseload at the moment too, and if I’m not adding value somehow, there’d be no upside to my involvement for anybody. So, my first reason for coming here is to ask if you would like some help, or are my efforts only going to make a tough job even tougher for you?”

“Well, I think you know as well as I do, Ms. Page, that your involvement would mean more paperwork for me—which I hardly need just now.”

“But it might mean less legwork too,” she parried. “You have lots of officers available for that sort of thing right now?” He’d just said he didn’t. “I understand how this must seem to you, Detective—and I sympathize. But Shelly Fischer is Colleen’s mother—grabbing at any lifeline she can find, as what mother wouldn’t? I don’t think she meant this as any kind of slight to you. I doubt that possibility ever occurred to her. So let’s agree she’s stuck her foot in it. That aside, do you want me out of this—or can I help somehow?”

He leaned back to gaze at her, his face scrunched in an expression half aggravation, half apology. He had a very expressive face—a pleasing departure from the norm, in Amber’s book. “You have any idea what a nutter family circus you’re diving into here?” he asked at last.

Amber tucked her lips between her teeth in constrained amusement. “Ms. Fischer made that…clearer than she may have intended to this morning. That’s my next question, in fact. You’ve been on this for three weeks now; is it anything more than delusional theater?”

Schafer shook his head, clearly more in exasperation than in answer to her question. “Biggest freak show I’ve ever encountered. But the missing girl is real enough, and…there are other things I can’t easily dismiss—or explain.”

Like the server hacks he wasn’t supposed to talk about. Time to do some fishing. “Ms. Fischer mentioned a bunch of email correspondence that she said you’d been given copies of. What would it take to get a look at those?”

Schafer gave her a probing look. She gazed back—as pointedly as possible. His intent expression became a frown. She went right on staring at him.

“Shit,” he said under his breath, turning to look out of his office window in obvious irritation. “She was asked not to tell anyone.”

Amber offered him a conciliatory smile. “She didn’t, actually. I found out a week ago from someone else. Fischer’s call was pure coincidence. But there’s no need to worry, Detective. It’s not all over town. I’d bet that I’m the only one who’s heard yet—beyond the bunch of you.”

“Well, you’ve clearly got the knack. I’ll give you that.” He looked down and sighed. “There are a few tasks I keep handing out to people here who keep not getting to them. If you really want a piece of this, who am I to object?” He looked back up at her. “But I’m a by-the-book guy, so you’re gonna have to file the usual requests for access to what we’ve got.”

She nodded. “It’ll be done within the hour. Any more you can tell me now?”

“In general?” He shrugged. “They all seem like very nice people—but an inch below the surface,” he shook his head again, “it’s a crazy hall of mirrors and the stench of rotten fish.”

“What isn’t?” she said. “Beneath the surface. What’s all this about the ransom note?”

He raised his arms in a helpless gesture. “The Clarke kid swears it was scrawled across the wall above her bed—six feet wide—but forensics has been over that room with every tool and test we have, and nothing—no residue of any kind on or below the wall, no slightest surface variation.”

“So he’s delusional or lying. And no contact from anyone—beyond the hacks, I mean?”

“Nope.”

“Then I’m not seeing any kidnappers here. Was this an abduction?”

“Yeah, yeah; first place I went too. Would’ve bet my left nut the boy and or his family did something with the girl themselves, and fabricated all the rest. But we had all of them here or under surveillance when the real hacking went down, and even if we hadn’t, I’ve found no evidence that any of them has an ounce of the kind of tech savvy required for that. We also have proof that Clarke was nowhere near the apartment complex when Colleen was taken.”

“Ms. Fischer said the garage cameras were all sabotaged. Is that true?”

He nodded. “Out for the exact two minutes it took her to disappear. But Clarke and his adoptive parents all agreed to psych evaluations and polygraphs, which came out clean as whistles. The vanished notes, the stalkers and tails, sabotage of their devices, the disappearing friend and all the other weird crap in their pasts. What can be verified at all checks out just the way they tell it. No actual evidence they’re lying or delusional about anything. Nor, frankly, do I get such a vibe from any of them.”

“Well…what about that six-foot ransom note that clearly never was?”

He shrugged. “Somebody hacked both our server and the city’s—without trace or trail that even the FBI or NSA could find. Far as I know, that’s impossible too. Do I know what else such people might be capable of? Maybe that note was…” he waved his hands around, “projected somehow. Like a hologram or something.”

She leaned back with raised brows and a skeptical smirk. “So…this social work grad student was kidnapped by Interpol? Or are we talking fairy magic…for reals?”

“I have no idea what to think. But my best guess so far is that, whatever and whoever Dustin Clarke’s old friend has become since any of them last saw him, this isn’t just one delusional guy with a grudge. This is something big, organized, and slick as snot.”

“No disrespect, Detective, but I’m still not clear on why Occam’s Razor doesn’t suggest that some or all of the people telling you these stories aren’t behind them too—with or without tech-savvy confederates.”

“Hey, I’m open!” he said. “You wanna find me evidence to prove that in court, I’ll take it. But…let me tell you one more thing. That apartment complex had just been reopened days before the girl disappeared, after weeks cut off by surrounding flood remediation zones.” He leaned back in his chair. “You’d think most of its residents would’ve been eager to get back there and resume their lives, wouldn’t you? But there wasn’t one person there the afternoon Colleen vanished—not even the manager, who was supposed to be.”

“…Because?”

“Turns out most of the residents had come back—and been chased out again for a whole bunch of reasons as bizarre as everything else in this shit show. Some apartments were suddenly beset by awful smells that maintenance found no source or remedy for. Others discovered they had no water or electricity for reasons that proved identifiable and repairable. But as soon as they’d been repaired, the same utility went out again, for entirely new reasons, until the occupants threw up their hands and went back to couch surfing until it got figured out. And those were the tamest reasons. One woman told the manager there was suddenly a ghost in her apartment, though she’d never seen or believed in ghosts before. Others reported strange noises every night, or finding their furniture moved around in the morning, and left in fear that someone was breaking into their apartments while they slept. Three different residents said that from their first night back, they had such awful nightmares, they went elsewhere in hopes of better sleep. And here’s the kicker. The manager got a call that morning from her mother across town. Her mom’s speech was slurred and she was panicked about something she couldn’t explain. Fearing her mother was having a stroke, the manager left in a rush fifteen minutes before Colleen arrived, only to find her mom fine at home, swearing she’d made no such call. When the manager went to drive back, her car wouldn’t start. She spent the rest of that afternoon dealing with towing and repair companies before we found her and informed her of what had happened to the girl.”

Amber hunched her shoulders. “Random probability produces clusters of improbable occurrence. And there’d just been a massive flood, which might have generated all sorts of damage that could account for—”

“The place is on a hilltop,” Schafer cut in. “It wasn’t damaged at all, just cut off by lower flood zones around it. The day after Colleen disappeared, all these problems at the complex vanished too, and haven’t cropped up since. Not one of them.” He leaned forward again. “We’ve gone over all of those apartments for any evidence of how such scare tactics might have been generated—looked at days of security camera footage. Not a single find. Keeping those buildings cleared for days like that without leaving a trace of their activities took planning, at least a couple people, and unbelievable care. The Clarke kid had been in the hospital until the week before, and the girl there with him. We have pretty solid evidence of where both he and his parents were during the days and nights between then and her disappearance.”

“People were moving back into a big abandoned building after weeks of city-wide trauma,” Amber pressed. “Of course they had nightmares, and heard things in the dark. They probably talked to one another about it, spreading and feeding the paranoia. If you found no evidence of intrusion or tampering, then the obvious conclusion seems—”

“Calls to the manager’s office are recorded, Ms. Page,” he cut in again. “The call that morning is there. The manager’s voice is the only thing on it.” He raised his brows and gazed at her. “My point is, the wacko stories here aren’t just confined to Dustin Clarke and his family. They’re cropping up with everyone this thing has touched—including us and our server.” He leaned back again. “Yet I’ve got nothing. Still. Except a very bad feeling that I’ve just brushed past something large in the dark, before losing it again. …You wanna help with that?” He smiled and shrugged. “Be my guest.”

Oh, she was taking this case, all right. How could she not? It pressed every button she owned.