“Forty. No one younger than three. No one older than five. They have two rooms, twenty kids to a room. Threes and early fours in one room. Older fours and fives in the other. Two staff members in each room. So four teachers. And a cook who works a few hours midday. And then there’s Alice. She fills in when a staff member needs a break or if someone is ill.”

Small operation. That didn’t mean bad. “Where are the other staff?”

“Majority of the kids get picked up by 5:30. According to Alice, she covers the center by herself from 5:30 to 6:00 most days to save on payroll costs. Emma Whitman is generally one of the last ones to be picked up. Everybody else was gone tonight and she’d already locked the outside door around 5:45 when the father pulled up and pounded on the door. At first, she assumed that somebody else had already picked up Emma. But once Troy called his wife and the grandmother, the only other people allowed to pick her up, she called Kara Wiese, one of Emma’s teachers, who said that Emma hadn’t been there all day. That was the first time Alice had thought about the fact that the parents had not reported an absence. She’d been covering for an ill staff member in the classroom that Emma is not assigned to.”

Perfect fucking storm.

“She quickly called the other two teachers and the cook, everyone who’d worked today, just to verify that nobody had seen Emma. When they hadn’t, she called the police,” Rena said. “Officers Pink and Taylor responded and secured the scene and began a room-by-room search. I arrived at the same time as Leah Whitman, mother of Emma Whitman.”

“When the parent or grandparent or whoever drops off, do they deliver that child to the assigned room?”

“I asked that. Alice said that’s what they want to have happen. But there are times, when a parent is in a hurry, that they will leave the child in this general area.” She waved her hand toward the front door. “When they do that, they are supposed to do two things. One, sign a clipboard that normally hangs there,” she said, pointing to the wall, right outside the office door, “and two, make sure they connect to a staff person, that somebody knows there is a child who needs to be escorted to his or her room.”

“What happened with Emma?”

“Again, according to Troy Whitman, Mrs. Broadstreet supposedly arrived around 7:15 this morning. She walked Emma into the building. There she saw Emma’s teacher, Kara Wiese, standing in the doorway of the office, and left Emma with her. Then she went to work at her job at Milo’s Motors.”

He knew the place. It was a used car dealership on the south side of town. “Did the grandmother sign in?”