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“Oh,” Ashley said. “That’s another message. Came in a few minutes after eight. A voicemail. Said he wants to start at eight thirty.”

“Fat lot of good that does me,” I said under my breath. I tossed my coat onto my chair and grabbed my digital notebook beneath a stack of papers on my desk.

“You want me to call up and tell him you’re on your way?” Ashley called after me as I strode toward the door.

“Don’t worry about it,” I shouted back.

One slow elevator ride later, and I walked into the conference room. I was taken aback to see it had already been converted into a bona fide war room. Roy had four whiteboards set up along the wall. The large oblong table in the center of the room barely had a clear space on top of it. Instead, I saw six large open banker’s boxes. Files, reports, and photographs were strewn all over the table.

“Glad you could make it,” Roy said. There was sarcasm in his voice, but a twinkle in his eye. He meant no harm in chiding me.

I pulled out my cell phone and waved it at him. “You could learn to use one of these.”

“I hate ’em,” Roy said. He insisted on using an ancient flip phone with no access to the internet. He could call, text, and take pictures on it, nothing more.

“Is it just us this morning?” I asked.

“It’ll just be us most days. I may not like cell phones, but I know how to use my computer and the internet. We’ll touch base with the rest of the group after we’ve all had a chance to get up to speed on these.”

I went over to the small coffee cart along the wall. I poured myself a cup of coffee and walked up to Roy’s shoulder.

“What’s all this?”

By way of an answer, Roy went to the whiteboards. He pulled out a black dry-erase marker and wrote out a different name on the top of each of the three of the boards. I read them out loud as he did it.

“Lara Pasko, Jade Darby, Gretchen Small.”

He went to the fourth whiteboard and wrote Corrine Egan’s name but drew a big question mark beside it and circled it. He tossed his pen onto the table then grabbed four large photographs. He taped each one under the names he’d written.

“These three,” he said. “That’s who we’ve got. All went missing within the last two years. All solicited through WhisprMatch in the month before they disappeared.”

“And then Corrine Egan,” I said.

Roy tapped the question mark. “Hence,” he said.

“What do we know?” I asked.

He picked up the dry-erase marker and went to Lara Pasko’s picture. She was pretty. A long-haired brunette, a sweet smile. In her picture, she wore purple scrubs and an ID badge I couldn’t make out.

“She was a nursing assistant working at an elder care facility out of Sparrow Hospital in Okemos,” he said. “Most of what we know came from her sister, Amy. Lara started using WhisprMatch about two months before she went missing. A detective in Ingham County sent copies of her files over. She found the credit card transaction from when Lara opened her account with the app. According to the sister, Amy, Lara was meeting some guy who told her his name was John Bennett.”

Bennett. It was as if I had a gremlin in my mind. Some small, mischievous creature who repeated the name over and over. Bennett. The name of Lock’s dead brother. No. It was just another random coincidence. I could not let my mind spin like I had with Corrine’s interview.

“Probably fake,” Roy said. “Amy, the sister, said they went on three dates. Then she disappeared. Her car was found in the parking lot of a supermarket in Chelsea, Michigan, three days after she went missing. It was clean. No foreign DNA. No blood. No fingerprints that shouldn’t be there. Her keys were in the ignition, but the car was locked.”

“Anything in her phone?” I asked.

Roy shook his head. “We’ve got her profile from WhisprMatch, but any chat history she had automatically wiped itself. Just like it was supposed to.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “How could anybody develop something like that and not realize how quickly some psychopaths could abuse it? Is there anything else?” I asked. “Any red flags that tie this girl’s disappearance to any of the others outside that app?”

“A couple. They could be nothing. They could be everything,” Roy said. “First, there was a red ribbon found in Lara’s abandoned car.”

I kept my face neutral. Roy pulled a photograph from the file. It showed the floor on the passenger side of a car with a tan interior. Poking out under the floor mat was the frayed end of a red ribbon. The next photo showed the same ribbon in an evidence bag. I couldn’t tell from the photo if it was similar to my own. This was just a tiny piece of fabric. No more than an inch.

It could be nothing. It could be everything. I took a breath. I would not do this. I would not jump to conclusions.

“Amy said her sister was smart,” Roy continued. “Or tried to be. The first date she had with this Bennett guy, Amy tagged along in secret. To spy on him for Lara. She met him at a bar in East Lansing. Lara and the date sat in a booth and had dinner. Amy sat at the bar and observed the whole thing. She got a good look at the guy. Was able to provide enough details for a police sketch.”