“Night off. Anything I can help you with?”

“I doubt it.”

He bristled slightly, then nodded at the two drinks in front of her. “Anything else?”

She shook her head and dropped some bills on the counter and told him to keep the change.

Jessica could feel the eyes of the hat guy following her as she made her way to an empty booth on the other side of the room and set the Scotch and beer down on a table sticky with overlapping drinks rings. Flopping onto the seat, she pulled the laptop, a yellow legal pad, and a pen from her bag.

She turned to a fresh page in the pad and wrote Jason Pryce with a big question mark next to the name and underlined it three times. Jessica wanted to know what a cop from LA had been doing at her father’s funeral on the other side of the country. But first of all, she needed to know as much as possible about the Lavelles.

She plucked a food and drinks menu from between a matching set of salt and pepper shakers and studied it to see if there was a customer Wi-Fi code printed on it. There was. It read, iheartacesbar.

She rolled her eyes and tapped in the pass code.

There was no need for fancy age-progression technology to tell Jessica the kid in the photo she’d seen in the diner had grown up to be her. But what she did need to establish was whether the image had been uploaded to the missing persons website by mistake. Human error maybe. Or just someone’s idea of a sick joke. Most likely the person who’d sent her the email, the mysterious “John Doe.”

The name John Doe was used to refer to a male whose identity was unknown, especially corpses in crimes where the victim was unidentified. Had the website link he’d emailed to her been about any other missing person, Jessica would have assumed the sender was likely a true crime nut with a particular enthusiasm for the case. Someone who had probably emailed a number of private eyes in an attempt to spark some interest in finding out what had happened, especially if it was a long-forgotten cold case.

Was it simply a coincidence that she might actually have a personal connection to this one? Jessica wasn’t a big believer in coincidences.