Though he wasn’t confident it would necessarily do a whole lot of good, he locked the door behind his unwelcome visitor, then leaned a grateful hand against the doorframe.

And then, scratching at his arm, he went to pour the nearly full pot of coffee down the drain.

++++

Tessa stood across the street from her high school, trying to decide if she was going to play hooky today or not.

She really wanted to know what Timothy had been talking about when he mentioned that woman going missing after his previous signing.

Although she was hoping to find out who that might have been, she knew that searching for the answer at school, either on her laptop or her phone—without getting caught—would be tricky, even for her.

But then again, it wasn’t like she’d never bailed on her classes before.

What would another day of unexcused absences really matter?

She could see both sides—but with her mom being troubled lately, she decided that it would be best not to add to her stress. Plus, there was an English exam that she had but hadn’t studied at all for. Better to pass it than get a zero. She could always slip out during lunchtime if she needed to.

Tessa crossed the street and entered the building just as the tardy bell was sounding.

++++

I paused in the hospital’s lobby and texted Christie that Calvin was open to seeing her. Maybe you can come over during lunch? I wrote.

Then I perused the online case files to see if there’d been any movement on things while I was visiting my friend.

According to the latest updates, the team was still looking for Julianne Springman’s location.

Yesterday we’d started the search for her, and frustratingly, it was taking longer than we’d anticipated. She hadn’t disclosed her new address to the Detroit Police Department when she left the force, and New York City can be a pretty big haystack to search through for a needle that isn’t necessarily interested in being found.

When I saw that we had a history of her credit card usage over the past two months, I took a careful look at the times and locations of her purchases. People tend to make financial and logistical choices based on trying to save time and money, so their purchase patterns often reveal their understanding of and familiarity with their surroundings and movement spaces.

Functional cognitive mapping is one of the foundational principles of geoprofiling, and now I found a cluster of purchases that narrowed down a two-block possible point-of-origin region in Brooklyn.

I contacted DeYoung and told him to focus the search within those blocks, looking for places that’d been leased within the last three months. “Focus on one-bedrooms that were rented to a single female Caucasian.”

“Consider it done. Where are you?”

“Still at Metro Medical. I was visiting Calvin.”

“How is he?”