I texted, to no avail. Rorie didn’t reply to the first text, or the second, or the third. She didn’t answer repeat calls either, which constituted a grievous violation of my parental phone policy. The deal we’d struck obligated Rorie to answer my calls unless she was dead. Anything nonessential could be covered in a text, so if I called my daughter, I expected an answer.

Still more irritated than alarmed, I went back inside. The likeliest explanation—that Rorie had fallen asleep somewhere and I’d overlooked her—meant I needed to check all the rooms again.

I did, finding nothing.

Now my irritation took on a tinge of worry. I returned to my desk and woke up the computer, opening the tracking program I’d installed on all our phones. A big market existed in the area of teenage surveillance software, promising worried parents they could not only track their recalcitrant offspring in real time, but also gauge the speed of the cars in which they traveled, and in the case of certain known associates, determine who was with them.

I had never before had occasion to use the program but figured it out in short order. And lo and behold, Rorie did indeed appear to be in a moving vehicle. Her blinking dot didn’t follow any of the MARTA lines, so she must have been in a car.

Rorie’s light stopped moving. According to the software, she was at or near the intersection of West Peachtree Street and Redwine Street, which meant not only was she still in Atlanta—probably at a red light—she was still in the Norcross neighborhood. If I’d been in a better frame of mind, I might have revisited my frequent contemplation of how clichéd it was to live near one of the ten thousand Peachtree Streets in Atlanta. If you stopped a random person on the streets of Mogadishu or Guangzhou or Hyderabad—or anywhere—and asked them to tell you something, anything, about the city of Atlanta, most likely they’d blurt out “Peachtree Street” and amble away.

Rorie’s dot blinked alongside another dot. I reverse-searched the phone number of the other dot, helpfully provided by the spy app. It came up registered to somebody named Paul Bettis.

Paul Bettis? The name meant nothing to me. I searched Rorie’s high school directory and found a Bettis family, who had two children enrolled: a ninth-grade daughter named Rebecca and a son, a junior named Christopher. Christopher? I opened Rorie’s contacts list, which I’d synced to my own computer, and searched “Bettis.” Sure enough, there it was: Crash Bettis.

Trying to contain a near-homicidal rage, I grabbed my car keys and flung open the door to the garage, then spun around back into the house. “Beau,” I called. “I have to run out for a minute. Can you take a break and come with me?”

“Okay,” Beau called back agreeably. “I will change my clothes.”