She had an excellent contact in New York, an IT geek whom she could ask to examine the email for her and try to track the sender through their IP address. But that kind of work would take time and money. And if John Doe had figured out the link between Jessica and Alicia Lavelle, he was clearly smart. Certainly not dumb enough to be sitting in his bedroom, firing off emails on a laptop, and waiting for a knock on his door. Even so, she forwarded the email to her IT contact and asked him to try to shed some light on the sender. Then Jessica turned her focus to the Lavelles.

She opened Google and noticed her fingers were shaking as she typed the words Alicia Lavelle into the search bar. Taking a deep breath, Jessica clicked the button to search for images. Most of the results were irrelevant, hits for famous Alicias instead—Alicia Keys in concert, Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.

The first ten results were relevant. Six were of the photo she was now familiar with, in varying sizes and quality. The other four were of another different photo.

Different outfit, different backdrop, same little girl.

Alicia Lavelle.

Jessica Shaw.

Shit.

Next, she searched for newspaper reports from the time of the disappearance but found nothing from the early ’90s. Too long ago to have been uploaded online. The photos of Alicia Lavelle produced by the image search were either from missing persons sites, including Lost Angelenos, or from anniversary pieces written in the last fifteen years or so when it had become more common for newspapers to post print articles on their websites.

Had she still been alive, Eleanor Lavelle would have been fifty. Her death could have happened at any time over the last twenty-five years and for any number of reasons. Run over by a truck. An incurable illness. Maybe even took her own life after failing to come to terms with the loss of her daughter.

Or none of the above, as it turned out.

According to the anniversary pieces, the cops in charge of the investigation at the time didn’t just wind up with one cold case festering away in their open-unsolved files.

They had two.

The disappearance of a three-year-old girl.

And the murder of the child’s mother the same night.

The first photo Jessica had seen of Alicia Lavelle, while drinking coffee in the diner in Simi Valley, was clearly a cropped version of the original. She was looking at the original now. Little Alicia, with the brown hair and the blue eyes, holding on to the Barbie doll. Its hair had been hacked off, just like the one Jessica had taken everywhere with her until she was about ten years old. In this picture, Eleanor Lavelle was crouching down next to her daughter.

Jessica stared at her.