“I’m not giving you consent to search my bag apart from the authority you claim to have under your search warrant. Do what you’re going to do.”

He took a cursory glance into her purse, as she’d thought he would, and handed it to her. “Peace be with you.”

He wasn’t quite as clever as he thought. “This will likely take a while,” she said to Hope. “I’m going to get you something to eat at least.” She turned to Decker. “Officers, can I bring you anything?”

They ignored the request.

She made sure that Decker didn’t have anyone follow her from the house before parking on Newtown Lane, removing Hope’s cat keychain from her key ring, and dropping it in a trash can beneath a rumpled takeout bag. After a quick pop in to Carissa’s Bakery, she slipped to the opposite side of the street and dumped Alex Lopez’s cell phone.

No turning back now.

She heard Hope’s voice in her head. Don’t ask me why, but when you said Wichita, I immediately thought, Doo Dah. There was only one explanation: like Alex Lopez, Hope had grown up in Wichita.

She opened the Facebook app on her phone and pulled up the summer camp alumni page where she’d found Katy Barnes’s post. She scrolled until she spotted a user named Holly Gunther, and then looked up the camp’s phone number. She got back into her car to make the call.

The woman who picked up sounded like she had started smoking straight out of the womb. “Edgemoor Rec.”

“Oh, hi, my name is Holly Gunther, and I went to camp there when I was a kid.” She hoped the woman wouldn’t recognize the name. “My old fifth-grade teacher is retiring, and her family is trying to collect messages from all the students she had such an impact on over the years. She’s the best teacher I ever had.”

“Oh my gosh, that’s so sweet!”

“I’m trying to find a kid from my class named Alex Lopez. I know he went to COP camp, too.”

She heard keys tapping on the other end of the line. “A few years ago, I did my best to digitize all the alumni info and such, but it’s catch as catch can. Yep, he’s in here. Enrolled for three summers. But there’s no contact information. I mean, that was a long time ago.”

“I think he had siblings?” She was spitballing now. “Any other Lopezes in those same years?”

“Yep, here we go: Emilia. Enrolled for the same years. We do our best to record their age and grade. It looks like she was one year older than Alex. But we only have her name. Could be two different families, for all I know.”