Alafair Burke - Long Gone

The town’s network was for shit, but the caller identification seemed to work just fine.

“First you block my porn. Now it’s Facebook? Pretty soon we’ll be down to nothing but National Geographic and the weather channel. Oh wait, they might show bikini shots for the weather in Miami.”

“Don’t get me started about the smut on National Geographic. Some of those baboons are pretty kinky.”

“Seriously, Gary? Facebook?”

“I know, it’s ridiculous. But the order came down from on high.”

“Too many hours spent on social networking ?” The name struck Jason as the ultimate misnomer. Socializing for the asocial. Like Happy Hour at a skid-row bar.

“Definitely. Major online time suck. But with this particular Web site, the blocking was personal. You didn’t hear it from me, but apparently thanks to Facebook, the mayor’s wife got a little too cozy with one of her ex-boyfriends from high school. Now he’s got his panties in a bunch over it. No town employee can access Facebook from a public computer.”

Morhart had met Dover mayor Kyle Jenson. And he’d seen his smoking-hot wife in those reelection ads. If she was stepping out on her husband, Facebook had nothing to do with it.

“Jesus. Seems like half our cases pull us online, and half of those run me right into one of these blocking problems. Can’t you exempt the detectives from this stuff?”

“Yeah, right. You mean to tell me Rollins had a work-related reason for every single one of those replays he hit on the Miss Howard Stern page before I got appointed the town’s cyber czar?”

Leave it to Rollins to mess it up for everyone.

“Well, can you at least unblock me? I got a missing girl and need to check out her Facebook page.”

Morhart heard a clucking noise in his earpiece.

“I saw that on the news this morning. My wife and I were sort of hoping it was a runaway kind of deal.”

“Might be, but I don’t think Jenson wants me telling the girl’s mother I’m not really sure because her mayor got cuckolded by his wife and won’t give me access to the resources I need to find her daughter.”

“No, I don’t imagine he’d be happy with that explanation.” Morhart took the sound of keyboard tapping on the other end of the line as a good sign. “All right. I unhooked you from the nanny system. Run. Be free. But don’t let Rollins near your computer, okay?”

Becca Stevenson had eighty-two friends.

Eighty-two friends sounds like a healthy number. To maintain eighty-two relationships required a certain degree of social activity and mutual care. But on the Internet, where “friendship” meant nothing other than the click of a mouse, eighty-two “friends” was nothing. Eighty-two friends for a high school sophomore made Becca something of a loner.

Funny how it was the loners who went missing.

Eighty-two friends might not be much in the world of Facebook, but it was too many people for Morhart to track down on his own. He was about to narrow down the field.

He clicked first on the tab for photographs, hoping to find an array of photos matching full names to smiling faces, the high-tech equivalent of a “question these witnesses first” list. Instead, he found only two photo albums. One, labeled “Profile Pictures,” included one shot, a photo of Becca’s little dog. The other, labeled “Big Apple,” featured grainy phone-quality pictures of what looked like Manhattan, posted three and a half weeks earlier. Water. Buildings. Graffiti on brick. No people. No smiling faces. Based on what he’d gathered about the girl’s disposition, he assumed she was trying to be artsy.

He read the postings on Becca’s Wall, the page where her friends could leave messages for her.

The entire first page consisted of messages submitted since Becca’s disappearance had been made public.

Linwood High misses you. Come back soon and safe!

OMG, Becca. Hope you’re just off being wild.

We love you, Becca, and pray that you’re well.

Morhart suspected the trite sayings had been scribbled by classmates who hardly knew the missing girl. He scrolled down further, searching for posts written prior to Becca’s current claim to fame. The level of posting activity suddenly dropped. He read from the bottom up, taking in the earliest posts first.

Four weeks ago, she posted a status update: “I know I shouldn’t, but I do love me some Glee.”

A girl named Sophie Ferrin posted a response: “And you say I’m the dork.”

Sophie Ferrin. Morhart knew the name. Best gal pal. Last to see her around.

Sophie’s post was followed by a second response. “That show is totally gay.” Authored by Rodney Carter. Morhart recognized that name, too. Boyfriend to Sophie. Accompanied the girls to the mall that same night.

He scrolled further up the page, skipping over the postings related to the nonsense games people played on Facebook. Squirreling up loot in one virtual world. A promotion to captain in another. The fertilization of nonexistent farms.

He was only thirty-four years old but felt like a cantankerous old geezer, shaking his head with scorn at the rotting brains of today’s teenagers.

A few days after the Glee posting, Becca had posted another update: “Heading to the city tonight. Woot!” The date matched the upload date for the city images he’d seen in her photo album.

“Have fun, girl, but not too much fun!” The response was from Sophie, meaning Sophie hadn’t accompanied her friend on the photography trip into New York. Morhart made a mental note to follow up on that.

He clicked again on the album of images from the city and noticed that Becca had “tagged” someone named Dan Hunter. Not a name Morhart had come across until now.

Morhart knew that tagging was used to identify people depicted in pictures posted to Facebook. It was also a way to make sure that the photographs would also be displayed on the tagged person’s own page.

He clicked on Dan Hunter’s name. His profile photo showed a sandy blond teenager in a basketball jersey shooting a free throw. Morhart scrolled down until he found the postings of Becca’s photographs. “Dan Hunter was tagged in a photograph.” Tiny thumbnail images of Becca’s pictures appeared on Hunter’s virtual wall.

The posting of the images had triggered a comment from an Ashleigh Reynolds, another unfamiliar name. Ashleigh had typed only one word, but it was enough to place her at the top of Morhart’s priority list.

Slut.

H ow did this happen?

It’s a question most people ask themselves at some point in their lives. For some, the question comes when they wake up one morning, look at the person sleeping next to them, and realize-all at once, for the first time, but with unambiguous clarity-that they no longer want to be married. For others, it’s a glance in the mirror at a face lost beneath years of self-neglect. Or the bank foreclosing on the house. Or a body that has lost its strength.

Most people experience a singular moment when they pause to take a hard look at their lives and don’t recognize what they see. For Alice Humphrey, that sobering moment came when she saw Drew Campbell’s body being carted through the narrow gallery door to a medical examiner’s van waiting at the curb.

An ambulance had previously arrived, just after the first marked police car. But the paramedics hadn’t bothered moving the body. Drew was that dead. Now his body was simply evidence. She felt herself flinch as the side of the metal gurney bumped the door frame.

That was the moment.

And, like anyone confronted with the fact she had been living a life she couldn’t recognize, she asked herself, How did this happen? And like anyone trying to answer that unanswerable question, she kept rewinding the clock, struggling to identify the second when the path of her life veered in this direction.