That was enough to finally get Mrs. Sanchez to accept the facts for what they were, and she’d gone from cursing Micah’s very existence to all but crying in his arms.

Micah so badly wanted to find her son for her.

Which brought Micah to the main reason his excitement had faded. Progress on Nico’s case had come to a standstill.

He had contacted the website Nico had been working for. There had been no number listed under the customer service bar – a major red flag. There had been an e-mail address, however, so Micah had written to them his dilemma. In return, he’d received what he could only conclude was a form letter, which stated that in order to protect the privacy of its clientele, the website’s policy was to under no circumstances reveal identifying information of its users.

Venmo, apparently, adhered to the same policy.

Unless, of course, Micah had a warrant. Which he couldn’t get without probable cause.

It was bullshit.

And it sucked.

There had been no further useful information on Nico’s laptop. Like everyone else under the age of fifty, the nineteen-year-old conducted most of his online activity on his cellphone, which Micah didn’t have.

Micah had been forced to rethink his approach to the investigation.

He’d called various administrative members of Queen’s College, requesting permission to examine the CCTV footage of the camera he’d noticed situated outside of Nico’s dormitory the day before.

Watching the footage verified that Nico had left on foot Saturday morning – in the opposite direction of the subway. It all but confirmed Mateo’s theory that Nico had left via Uber.

Unfortunately, whatever vehicle he’d gotten into hadn’t been caught on camera. And it wasn’t like Micah had access to Nico’s phone to simply reverse dial the number that had called him before he’d left.

So… despite the fact that Nico had likely met up with someone he’d encountered on the sketchy site he webcammed for (spankbankboys.com, honestly), Micah still didn’t know who that person was or where Nico was meeting them at or… or even if he was still alive.

The intimate knowledge that with each hour Nico remained missing, the more likely it was he wasn’t alive, hung over Micah like an ominous cloud, threatening to crush his spirits at times, but he refused to let dark thoughts take hold.

Instead, Micah was using the fact that Nico – and his parents – were depending on him to find him before anything bad happened, as a motivator.

Which was why despite the fact that it was past six in the evening and there was a monster migraine building behind his eyes (probably from staring at his computer screen as he obsessively checked Nico’s various social media platforms for updates), Micah was still at work.