“You were being held against your will in a cellar or basement somewhere. You know, like Ariel Castro, who kidnapped three young women and kept them captive for years in his own home. If so, it was a nightmare scenario for the cops. The only real hope of finding you after so many years would be down to dumb luck. A successful escape bid or discovery after the captor died or took seriously ill.”

“And the third theory?”

“You already know the answer to that question, Jessica,” he said softly. “Alicia Lavelle grew up leading a normal life. She either knew her real identity or was completely oblivious to her past. It was the theory Geersen and I always liked best. I began my search on the basis Alicia Lavelle was living somewhere under a different name and probably unaware folks had been searching for her for more than two decades. I guess we were right. What we still don’t know is whether you always knew you were Alicia Lavelle?”

“I’m the one asking the questions. I’m also the one holding the gun. How did you track me down? Paper tripping?”

Connor nodded. “Back then, it was a good way to disappear. I can’t tell you how many weeks I spent trawling through birth and death certificates at the Department of Public Health’s Vital Records office.” He laughed. “The girls who worked there even knew me by name and used to bring me coffee each day.”

“I bet they did.”

He went on. “I started off searching for girls born a year or so either side of Alicia Lavelle’s birthdate who had died by the time they were three or four years old. Then I went through the same process for males born around the same time as Rob Young. Of course, we had no date of birth or anything official on the guy, so I had to guess his age and search a couple years either side of that estimate. This time, I was looking for young men who had died before they’d been assigned a Social Security number.”

“Yeah, I know how it works.”

“Of course. Once I had two lists drawn up, I cross-referenced them for surnames in common and ended up with six possible matches, so I started checking each of them out, including a Jessica and Tony Shaw in New York. Your own website was easy to find, but I couldn’t be certain the woman in the profile photo was the same person as the three-year-old kid I was trying to find. Then I got lucky and found a photo of Tony Shaw.”

Jessica was confused. “Tony never liked having his photo taken. He always preferred to be behind the camera. I can’t believe there would be any photos of him floating around on the internet.”

“There was,” Connor said. “It appeared in an online newspaper article about a photography exhibition in Williamsburg.”