What I had noticed, though, was a list of phone numbers and email addresses at the back of the journal. It struck me as odd to see the phone numbers jotted down that way. Most people have them saved in their phones so they don’t have a directory like this anymore. With the possibility of a phone getting broken or lost, however, I can understand having a few important numbers written down, so I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. Now I realize they are far more than that.

  Flipping to the back of the book, I look through the list of contact information and pull out the name Laurel. The email address listed under the name is the same one that Samantha just gave me for the second social media profile. I look at the number listed beside it, ignore the area code like Samantha instructed, and start linking the numbers to the coordinating letters in the alphabet. When I come up with a word, I pull up the log-in page, type in the email address and the password, and I’m in.

  As simple and straightforward as the system is, I can’t help but be a little impressed by it. People tend to get so overcomplicated with their methods of keeping their private information secure and often end up confusing themselves. This is easy to set up, easy to keep track of, and would be extremely difficult for somebody who didn’t know what to look for to figure it out.

  My moment of being impressed by the password protection method is short-lived. As soon as I get into the messages on the profile, they’re the only things I can think about. I was expecting to see her talking to Samantha, Ethan, and maybe some other people from school. What I see, though, is a long list of conversations with much older men. Just scanning through a couple of them, I realize these are not casual chats. Each one of them starts with a quick and simple salutation, then sinks quickly into explicit exchanges that get more in-depth and personal as the conversations evolve.

  I scroll through the inbox and see that Brianna was carrying on these types of conversations with at least five people. In each one of them, she posted nude or nearly nude pictures of herself and got similar ones in return. My only source of relief in seeing this is that her face is not fully visible in any of the pictures. In fact, glancing at a couple of them, I notice slight differences in the photographed bodies that suggest to me that at least some of the pictures aren’t even her. But that doesn’t take away the intent.

  I’m not easily shocked, and this is far from the first time that I’ve seen this type of interaction from someone of Brianna’s age. I’ve encountered situations like this from people much younger. What surprises me, though, is that nobody in her life seems to know that this is going on. Except for Ethan.

  While he didn’t come right out and say anything about it, he did give the impression that there was something happening, and it involved other men. I highly doubt he knows the specifics, but he has certainly heard rumors. I click out of the messages and look at the profile itself. Ethan told me that a friend of his had seen the profile while signed in as his cousin, so I want to see what he did.

  The main profile itself is tamer than the messages, but the intention is very clear. Pictures and videos show Brianna in very little clothing, behaving provocatively. There are comments and shared memes that immediately resonate as desperate pleas for attention. I’m not surprised to see that this type of content became prevalent right around the time that she and Ethan broke up. Before that, the profile was more intimate and personal than the other one that I saw, but it didn’t show her in this light.

  I debate with myself how to handle this. I know what people will think when they see it. And it’s not fair. Brianna might have been doing things on this profile that might offend people, but that’s honestly their problem, not hers. I will not judge her for what she wore or how she chose to present herself. She is an adult. And even before she technically turned eighteen, there isn’t anything that she posted on the page that would be considered illegal. The problem comes in the conversations she was having. If any of those pictures are actually her and they were taken before she was eighteen, that is illegal. Beyond that, the conversations she was having with these men raise every red flag I can think of.

  The unfortunate reality is that people seeing this may immediately jump to the conclusion that she “deserves” anything that might have happened to her, or that she shouldn’t have the same level of attention and care put into her case as someone else. That is so outside of the truth and in no way actually reflects how I feel about her case. All it does is make me more worried about her.

  I know I’m going to have to tell the people closest to her about what I found. Not out of any obligation or sense that they need to know these things, but because of the possibility that one of them, especially one of the young people, might be hiding something from me. I decide to talk to them first. I highly doubt her parents know anything about this. If they did, there would be no need for a second profile. But there is a possibility that Samantha might know more than she actually let on.

  I call her, and within fifteen minutes, she is at the bakery with me. Her eyes widen when I show her the profile. Her head starts shaking before I even ask her a question.

  “I didn’t know about any of this. I had no idea she was talking to guys like that or posting those pictures. This has to be why she took all of us off her contact list, so we couldn’t get on the profile anymore.”

  “She never told you about any of this? She didn’t say she was talking to new guys or show you any of these pictures?” I ask.

  “No, definitely not. If she had, I would have shut it down. This is crazy. Who are these guys?” She looks closer at the screen and points at one of the profile pictures. “This one looks old enough to be her dad.”

  “A couple of them do. I’ve been reading through all the messages, and it doesn’t seem like she knows most of them in real life. But there is one she made plans to meet up with.”

  “What?” Samantha asks, sounding shocked and even horrified at the prospect.

  “Vin Gallagher.” I show her his picture. “They had plans for the week before the concert. I don’t see any other interaction after they made those plans, but I think that’s significant. And the reality is, just because the others didn’t make plans to meet up with her doesn’t mean that we can ignore them. There’s plenty of details on this profile that could lead any of them right to Brianna.”

  It’s the same thing I tell Noah a little while later when I get to the police station. I show him what I found and tell him about my conversation with Samantha. I’m convinced she didn’t know anything about what Brianna was doing, and she has agreed to cooperate in any way she can. She’s willing to contact the men and try to get information out of them, but I don’t want to put her in that situation. Instead, we need to find them and get everything we can out of them without putting anyone else in danger.

  “Samantha mentioned that they went through an internet safety class early in high school, but it doesn’t seem like a lot of it sank in. You can look at this profile and figure out where she is without any trouble at all. She posted the name of her high school football team. There are pictures near the mall with the name of it clearly visible. She might not specifically say where she is, but it wouldn’t take long for somebody determined to find her to track her down.

  “I need people making contact with every one of these men. This needs to be a team effort. Time is critical right now, and we need it done quickly. I need details on who they actually are, how well they know Brianna, how they got in touch with her, and if they have ever met up with her in person. I need to know where they were last Friday and get confirmation. I’ll contact Gallagher. I want to know what happened with their plans.”

  A couple of hours later, I drop my phone on the table in the conference room with an exasperated sigh and lean back, running my hands through my hair.

  “That doesn’t look like you got any useful information,” Noah says, coming back into the room.

  “I guess that depends on how you want to define useful. I just talked to Vin Gallagher. Turns out that’s not actually his name—surprise, surprise. Anyway, it took some needling karma, but eventually, he did admit that he had been talking to Brianna for a while. He said they made plans to meet up, but he chickened out and didn’t go. I asked why there weren’t any other messages between the two of them, and he just said that he decided he wasn’t going to message her anymore. He doesn’t know why she didn’t say anything to him. Maybe she got cold feet too. Either way, he was able to send me pictures of him several hours away the day that he was supposed to meet up with her, and I got confirmation he was on a business trip Friday night.”

  “Well, I guess I’m about to be the same kind of useful. All the other guys check out. At least two of them are twenty years older than they present themselves as being, but none of them were in the area on Friday,” he says.

  “I want all their contact information. They might not know where Brianna is right now, but any of them who were chatting with her before her eighteenth birthday and received pictures of her or sent pictures to her need to face charges. I will forward all that information to Eric and let him deal with it.”

  “Sounds good.”

  As he turns to leave the room, another officer appears at the door. He’s gripping papers, and he holds them out to Noah.

  “These just came through.”

  Noah takes the papers and looks down at them.

  “It’s the location reports from Brianna’s phone.”

  Just as I expected them to, the records show Brianna’s movements around the venue and then away from it. The officers searching the area beyond the cast-iron gate at the back of the loading dock lot couldn’t find anything, but these proved that she did pass through the area.

  Noah and I head back to the venue and park in that lot so we can follow the path she most likely walked. It’s important to go on foot the same way she did. There are areas we can’t access in a car and details we could miss if we weren’t looking at the route from the same perspective as her.

  The narrow ditch behind the venue is surrounded by overgrowth and debris. It isn’t easy to pass through, and I’m wearing jeans and combat boots. It would be even more difficult for someone in the short skirt and heeled boots Brianna was wearing Friday night. That tells me she was either familiar with going this way or had a specific destination in mind and knew this was the easiest way to get there.

  We follow the location information until we get to a road and then pass over a bridge.

  “She had to have been walking at this point,” I say as we make our way over the bridge. “The time stamps show her speed, and she wasn’t moving quickly enough to be in a car. She was definitely on foot the entire time up until the time her phone stopped responding.”

  We keep going and end up on a stretch of road without any buildings and only a couple of streetlights. At the time when she would have been walking along this area, it would have been extremely dark and very cold. As we’re moving through the last location on the list, I notice something catch the sunlight from the grass on the shoulder. Getting closer, I see smashed pieces of a smartphone.

  “This has to be hers,” I say. “We need to get somebody out here to photograph and collect it.”

  While he gets on the phone, I look around. This is the last spot we know Brianna was the night she disappeared. The smashed phone and lack of any location information after this point make me suspect that she was no longer on foot after this point. Noah finishes his call and comes over to me.

  “They’re sending a unit.”

  “What’s nearby here?” I ask. “What would she be walking toward going down this road?”

  “The university campus is down there. The school buildings, dorms, all of that. And a little business district.”

  “That’s where she was going. She was talking to those older men on her profile. I guarantee you, she had contact with guys on that campus. Remember, her parents said Brianna thought about graduating early and heading to college but changed her mind because she didn’t want to miss out on being with her friends. Somebody thinking about doing that isn’t just going on a whim. She had contact with that school and was headed there. She might not have ever used that shortcut from the venue before. I can’t imagine why she would have. But she would be familiar enough with the area to know that it would be a quicker way to get there than from the front of the building. We need to find out who she knew on that campus.”

  While we wait for the officers to come and collect her phone as evidence, I contact Samantha and Ethan again. Without giving them any specific details, I ask them about her knowing anybody on campus. Ethan tells me he doesn’t know anybody specific whom she would know. She isn’t involved in any kind of extracurricular activities or clubs that would have put her in contact with people who would have graduated before her. But Samantha gives me a detail that immediately sparks my interest.

  “They went to a party,” I tell Noah when I’m off the phone.

  The officers have arrived and are photographing and collecting the phone. He looks at me with a questioning expression.

  “Who?”

  “I just got off the phone with Samantha. When I asked about campus, she admitted that she and Brianna went to a party at one of the fraternities over winter break. She told me it didn’t seem like Brianna hit it off with any of the guys, but they also weren’t right next to each other the entire time.”

  “We didn’t see anything on her phone or social media from anybody who talked about campus,” Noah says.

  “That just means she didn’t talk to any of them through private messages.”

  One of the officers gives Noah and me a ride back to the venue, and we get in my car to head to the campus. It’s bustling with students, and there’s an energy in the air I recognize from my own college days. That kind of feeling would be very appealing to someone who feels like they’re being held back or someone trying to reinvent herself after it felt like her life has fallen apart.

  “Where are the frat houses?” I ask.

  Noah directs me, and we head there. I see the building with the name of the fraternity Samantha gave me and pull off to the side of the road. This area is much quieter than the rest of campus. I’m sure that’s not the case later in the evening and on weekends, but for now, a lot of the fraternity and sorority members are in class.

  I walk up to the door of the frat house where Brianna once went to a party and ring the bell. It takes a while, but after a couple of minutes and the second ring, a guy wearing nothing but a pair of flannel pajama bottoms opens the door. His hair is ruffled, and he looks like I just woke him up. He peers out at me through bleary eyes. He looks at me for a beat, then shakes his head.

  “Nah, I don’t want any, thanks.”

  He goes to shut the door, and I push it open. “I’m not here to sell anything,” I tell him.

  “I don’t need to find Jesus either,” he says.

  He tries to close the door again, and I flatten my hand on it, pushing it back open. He looks frustrated.

  “Look, lady, I’m trying to get some sleep. Whatever you’re here about, I’m not dealing with it.”

  I take out my shield and show it to him. “You don’t really have a choice. Agent Griffin, FBI. This is Detective White with the Stoneville Police Department.”

  “What the fuck?” the guy mutters. “Shit. Sorry.”

  “If you can believe it, I have heard those words before,” I say, putting my shield away. “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes. We could do it out here, but it’s cold, and I don’t know how much you’d like everybody seeing you talking to us.”

  Technically, we can’t force him to let us into the house. We don’t have a warrant or any probable cause at this point. All we have is information that Brianna attended a party here a few weeks ago. It would be very difficult to get legal paperwork granting us access, so I’m depending on him letting us in on his own accord. Fortunately, he’s cooperative. He steps out of the way and gestures into the house. Noah and I step in, and he closes the door behind us.

  “I’m Blaine,” he says. “Can you tell me what this is about? Is the frat under investigation for something?”

  I decide to gloss over that question. “Do you know a Brianna Wright?” I ask.

  His face twists slightly like he’s trying to place the name. “Brianna?”

  “Brianna Wright,” I repeat.

  “The name doesn’t sound familiar. Should I know her?”

  “She came to a party here a few weeks ago,” I say.

  He gives a little giggle and half shrug. “That doesn’t really narrow it down. Lots of people come to our parties.”

  I take out my phone and show him a picture. “Her.”

  He shakes his head again. “Nope, I don’t think I’ve seen her. I can ask the guys here though.”

  “Do that please.”

  He heads up the staircase behind him, and I wander into the living room off the entryway. The fraternity house was clearly once a luxurious single-family residence, and the layout suggests an affinity for entertaining. The front room flows into another space that then leads out to a wide verandah in the back. Despite Blaine’s somewhat disheveled appearance, the house itself looks well cared for. I’m assuming a lot of the cleaning and upkeep is done by the newest brothers.

  “Were you in a fraternity?” I ask Noah as we look around the living room.

  “Yeah,” he tells me, “I was actually president.”

  I toss him a sideways look. “Seriously?”

  “What? You can’t believe I’d be that popular?”

  “I’m not saying that,” I say.

  The truth is, I can absolutely see Noah filling that position. We all know kindergarten taught us never to judge a book by its cover, but he has that look. I don’t really know how to describe it any better than that. I can just see him in his khakis and button-up shirt smiling at prospective donors at fundraising events and showing people around campus during the day, then throwing on a sheet toga and having dominion over keg stands and foam-wrestling matches.