There was the missing mom who’d vanished from her home in the middle of the day. The middle-aged guy who’d left for work one morning and never arrived at the office. The teenage girl who’d failed to return home after school. There were thousands of other similarly tragic stories, all of the people apparently disappearing into thin air.

Dead or didn’t want to be found.

The way Jessica saw it, most missing adults fell into these two distinct categories, like a gambler in a Vegas casino deciding whether to nudge his pile of chips onto black or red. Red, they were probably dead. Black, they might just come back. After seven years as a private investigator, five in New York and the last two on the road, she usually had a pretty good idea from the get-go which of those scenarios she was dealing with.

Jessica was mentally sorting the faces on screen into blacks and reds when the waitress’s voice broke into her thoughts. She quickly closed the laptop. A diner wasn’t the ideal place for this kind of work, but she liked to think of shopping malls, motel rooms, gas station restaurants—hell, anywhere with a decent Wi-Fi connection—as her office. It made her feel like she was really working and not just running away.

Today’s office was a small diner in Simi Valley, a pleasant medium-size city tucked into the southeast corner of Ventura County. Thirty miles from downtown Los Angeles, it was best known as the venue for the Rodney King trial in ’92 and then as the final resting place of Ronald Reagan twelve years later.

Jessica didn’t know it just yet, but it was also the place where her life was about to change forever.

She’d never visited this particular diner before, but she had been to diners just like this one a million times. A low-budget, low-expectation establishment. High stools in front of a sticky counter. Day-old doughnuts displayed in a glass case dotted with eager fingerprint smudges. Waitresses wearing powder-blue uniforms and white tennis shoes and forced smiles while handing out coffee refills.

One of those waitresses was hovering over her now. “What’re you having?” The waitress tapped a crimson acrylic nail impatiently against her notepad as though she had someplace more important to be.

Jessica had looked at the menu, with its gaudy, hand-drawn cartoons of pizzas and burgers and wipe-clean laminated plastic, just long enough to locate the Wi-Fi code and fire up the laptop. Glancing at it again now, she saw a hardened eggy glop covered the appetizers. So much for wipe clean. It was a late lunch, the best part of the day having been spent packing up her things, ready to move on again. Maybe LA this time. Or San Francisco or San Diego.