“Connor Moss?”

“Yeah. Huntington Beach PD collected DNA in conjunction with a DUI when he was barely in his twenties.”

“DNA for a DUI? Who does that?”

“California does,” she says. “Or did. Not sure if they do now.”

As Sarah goes lab-rat technical on the markers and the incontrovertible scientific analysis that connected Connor to Sophie’s body, I think about the Mosses. They were in the Lily cabin that weekend. Connor was too sick to give a statement until the next day when he and Kristen, his lawyer wife, came to our offices. I remember thinking that he was a pleasant guy, a waiter.

“We ran all of the witnesses through the system and didn’t come up with anything on Moss,” I tell her.

“You couldn’t have,” Sarah says. “His arrest record was part of the disaster ten years ago when California upgraded systems and ‘lost’ records. Thankfully, the DNA-collected data was on a different system.”

“So much for technology.”

“Not the technology, Lee. It’s always the people running it.”

She’s right about that.

I text Montrose right away.

I need to see you ASAP.

I keep my message vague, because I know that the contents of my phone are a public record and anything I share on it could become part of the case.

I want to text: Holy shit! It’s Connor Moss!

A beat later, Montrose texts back that he’s five minutes away.

While I wait for Montrose, I go on Facebook. This is well-trod ground, no doubt. Montrose worked the social media aspect of the case the first day of the investigation and turned up nothing.

I scroll down the page. I friended Adam a few years ago. I admit that I waited like a schoolgirl for three days—imagining that he didn’t remember me or care about me—before he accepted my request. I posted some innocuous message, and he gave me a like. That was the sum of our social networking. He had almost a thousand friends—which, where I come from, is a very big number. I have less than a hundred. Popularity has never been my thing.

I look at Adam’s page. He’s updated it since I last viewed it to include a beautiful picture of Aubrey taken, I think, the day her mother went missing. She’s standing in front of the Wisteria with her little pink suitcase and the biggest smile I’ve ever seen. I know that the photo will haunt her when she’s older and puts into context what happened later at the cabin.

I read the words of encouragement and the—for once—proper use of the love emoji.

Next I click over to Sophie’s profile. Her page is public, and it’s frozen in time, of course. She posted a message the day before the trip to Hood Canal that she was heading out to what she hoped was her new “happy” place.