“He was nineteen at the time. Maybe this conversation between Coyote and Chuck occurred after that. If Chuck was a sophomore, the two young men might have been twenty.”

“Do we contact Dusty?”

“I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

“Faster isn’t going to be happy with what we’ve got,” Rena said.

“We can’t manufacture facts,” A.L. said. “But you’re right, if there is one stone left unturned, Faster will use it to bash us over the head. I’ll reach out to Dusty.”

“Okay. I think we need to get back to Baywood.”

“Maybe swing by Troy and Leah’s house. Check in,” he said. “Still have to talk to Leah’s employer, too.”

“Maybe you could do that and I’m going to start calling the parents who dropped their kids off around the same time. We already have talked to those in Emma’s class who fall into that group but we need to look broader, at the other classroom. Those parents would have been going in and coming out of the main lobby area around the same time as Elaine Broadstreet. Maybe they saw something.”

“That’s fine. Although the times don’t always make sense on the sheets.” A.L. opened the file folder near his right hand. “For example. Here’s the sign-in sheet from the other room. First parent signs that they dropped their kid in at 7:07. Next one at 7:12. Next one at 7:10.”

Rena shrugged. “Slow watch. In a hurry. Bad with details. A thousand reasons.”

“Sloppy system, that’s all I’m saying,” A.L. said.

“I suspect Alice Quest will be instituting a whole host of new and improved systems in the coming weeks. Maybe she was sloppy. Maybe just casual. Because she thought that would be enough.” But now a kid was missing and every detail of her operation was under scrutiny.

“There were holes in her processes but I think she genuinely cares about the kids and their parents,” A.L. said.

“Yeah. And if we don’t find Emma, her life is never going to be the same.”

“Fuck that,” A.L. said. “You were part of the conversation with Marcus Page. If we don’t find her, none of our lives are ever going to be the same.”

Eleven

Ten minutes after A.L. and Rena had arrived back in Baywood and gone their separate ways, A.L. had his hands full. With a crying woman.

Not any of the women regularly in his life. A woman that he’d never met until three minutes ago. But she was clearly having a bad day and he was maybe the worst person in the world to offer assistance.

“I’m sorry. I can’t stop crying. I have a five-year-old daughter and I just can’t imagine what the Whitmans are going through. Leah is such an important part of our family.”