“And now we have an actual cold hit,” Lindsay said. She found herself wishing she hadn’t read the details of the College Hill Strangler’s modus operandi. She pictured Hope running for the front door of the Stansfields’ house. A masked man grabbing her from behind. A rope. A gag. She took a deep breath. “There must be some process that gets kick-started when you get a match.”

“Except they already have their guy,” her father said. “They caught him four years ago. They matched his DNA to every crime scene. A full confession, the works. And the DNA from that house in East Hampton isn’t his. Trace evidence could be from anyone. If you scratch a mosquito bite a little too much, there’s a spot of blood on the sofa. A paper cut. An accident with a kitchen knife. Someone who left behind a little bit of blood in a house in Kansas did it again on Long Island twenty-three years later. The odds of it having anything to do with Hope are pretty low.”

“But it’s all I’ve got, Dad. Did it sound like the police are even looking for her?”

There was a long pause before he spoke. “This Decker guy put in a missing person report based on the information you gave him, but you got to remember, Hope Miller doesn’t even exist on paper. It’s a missing person report filed under an alias. I did my best to personally vouch for her, explaining the whole situation with her memory and the car accident. But honestly? He sounded skeptical.”

Over the years, Lindsay had researched whether a Jane Doe could establish a legal identity under a new name. She was stunned to learn that it was all but impossible. The scenario wasn’t common enough, and the concerns about fraud were too strong. The federal government didn’t even have a process for tracking unidentified people who were still alive. A few years earlier, New Jersey had introduced such a database. So far, it contained only three entries—Hope, a toddler who was left as a newborn in the parking lot of a Newark fire station, and a mentally ill homeless man. Until there was a way to connect those local cases to data gathered nationwide, the state system was unlikely to provide any answers. Lindsay thought they could try to use Hope’s existence in an official state database, though, as a way to force New Jersey to issue a state identification card. Maybe if she at least had a legal ID, the cops would be taking her disappearance more seriously.