By Wednesday, the excitement of finding his first lead had winked out of existence entirely.

Partially because Micah had actually had to call Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez in to the station and tell them that their son was masturbating on camera for extra cash. (He’d promised both them and himself that he would keep them up-to-date with any breakthroughs, big or small, in their son’s case).

They’d denied that Nico was working as a camboy, of course – fiercely.

Micah wasn’t fluent in Spanish, but even he was able to pick up on the various (creative) expletives that Mrs. Sanchez, in particular, took to spouting in his general direction. In the span of a half an hour, he’d been called a “mentiroso” (liar), a “puto” (whore), and Micah’s personal favorite: “inútil como un saco de mierda”.

With an apologetic wince, Manny, the interpreter, had explained to Micah that she’d called him “as worthless as a sack of shit”, except she’d went on to add that “even the sack had its uses if one washed it thoroughly enough”.

Micah understood their anger.

He’d told them that their son was getting himself off for random men on the Internet for money, and they saw it as an attempt to smear Nico’s character – maybe even as an excuse to put his case on the back burner.

Of course, the fact that Nico was working as a camboy didn’t make finding him any less of a priority. In fact, Micah had argued to Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez that it made finding the nineteen-year-old more urgent since it was possible he’d disappeared after meeting one of his… customers from the website.

After Micah had explained that, they’d seemed a tad more open to the possibility that their son had, in fact, been working as a camboy – at least enough to look at the evidence.

A quick exploration of Nico’s search history had revealed the website their son had been working for, and when Micah had typed in Nico’s location and demographics, he’d been able to find the profile he thought belonged to Nico: goldenboi19. There was no face in the naked-except-for-his-underwear profile picture, but the small, barely noticeable birthmark underneath his right pectoral (that the Sanchezes had made note of when they’d filed Nico’s papers) had Micah convinced.

Mr. Sanchez had wilted a bit at seeing the picture, but not Mrs. Sanchez. She hadn’t been persuaded until Micah had used Nico’s laptop to pull up her son’s Venmo account. Luckily, Nico had saved his password to the laptop, which made pulling up the account easy. It confirmed Nico had been receiving fairly large amounts of money from seemingly random strangers since mid-October.