Gibson stared back, as he always did, locking eyes with Suzanne, waiting for her to smile shyly at him the way she had when she wanted to tell him a secret. Waiting for her to tell him what had happened. Why she’d run away. In all the intervening years, he’d never stopped hoping for an answer. But the little girl on the security video wasn’t talking.

To him or anyone else.

In a final gesture, Suzanne drew her baseball cap low over her eyes and looked away for good. At 10:56 p.m., she stepped out the door and into the night. Beatrice Arnold would tell the FBI that the girl seemed anxious and that her eyes were red as if she’d been crying. Neither Beatrice nor the couple pumping gas noticed whether she got into a vehicle. One more frustrating dead end in a case of dead ends.

The FBI failed to turn up a single substantial lead. No one ever came forward to claim the ten-million-dollar reward offered by the family and their supporters. Despite the frenzied media coverage, despite her famous father, Suzanne Lombard walked out of the gas station and vanished. Her disappearance remained an enduring American mystery alongside Jimmy Hoffa, D. B. Cooper, and Virginia Dare.

The news went to commercials, and Gibson exhaled, unaware that he’d been holding his breath. The tape always left him spent. How much longer were they going to keep showing it? There hadn’t been a development in Suzanne’s case for years. Today’s big breaking story was that Riff-Raff had cut his hair short and earned a college degree while in prison for a felony drug bust. The Internet, in its infinite snark, rechristened him Professor Riff-Raff or Raff 2.0. Other than that it was all a maudlin rehash of what everyone already knew, which was nothing.

But the tenth anniversary of her disappearance loomed, which meant the networks would keep running their retrospectives. Keep exploiting Suzanne’s memory. Keep trotting out anyone with even a passing relationship to the family or to the case. Staging their tasteless reenactments at the service station in Breezewood and using computer models to project what she might look like today.

Gibson found the mock-ups especially hard to look at. Suzanne would be twenty-four now, a college graduate. The images tempted him into imagining what her life might have been. Where she might live. Her career path—something to do with books, no doubt. He smiled at that but caught himself. It wasn’t healthy. Wasn’t it time to give her some peace? Give them all some peace?

“Heck of a thing,” the man beside him said, staring up at the television.

“Sure is,” Gibson agreed.