“Guess you left your lights on this morning, Miss Spritzer.”

“I finally got around to setting the timers over the weekend. Thanks for bringing me home, Will. See you in the morning.”

The driver wagged his finger but waited till she was inside and the door closed. The moment he heard the lock snick into place he turned on his heel and walked to the Lincoln Town Car.

Inside, Maggie stood stock-still as she waited to see which of the Sisters was in her house. Kathryn emerged from the kitchen, a chicken leg in hand. Kathryn’s appetite was as notorious as Maggie’s.

“I didn’t know I had any chicken in the fridge,” Maggie said inanely.

“You didn’t. I stopped at a deli and bought two bags of food. I was starving. I didn’t know you worked this late, Maggie. It’s almost midnight.”

“I try not to, but with the profiles pouring in, I have to stay on top of it. Ted and Espinosa are working overtime. I want to start our new series midweek if possible.

“We’re going to run with something else, too. It’s a long story, but, fast-forward, I remembered something that has been niggling at me. There was this kid who called in to the paper right before the switchboard blew out. It was right after we started running the series. I hate to admit this, but I sloughed him off at the time. You know what they say, everything happens for a reason, so maybe even if I had paid attention, I wouldn’t have attached any importance to what he said. I just don’t know. What I do know is we are definitely onto something now.

“I sent Ted and Espinosa to Silver Spring, Maryland, to look for a garage where I think this young man might be working. The kids aren’t just in Silver Spring, they’re all over the map—Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda, etc. They finally found him, and his name is Antonio Vargas. He had a story to tell, and Ted got it all. Espinosa has the pictures to back it up. The young man gave us a few other names, and those people gave us more names, kind of like a domino effect. In total, Ted and Espinosa, along with Dawson and his partner, managed to profile sixty-seven kids. I call them kids because the lot of them just turned eighteen. Male and female. Those profiles just broke my heart, Lizzie. Here are these kids living in foster care and not having the love and affection of a set of parents. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the foster parents didn’t care about them, but nothing can take the place of a set of birth parents.

“Each and every one had a refrain: ‘I can’t wait till I’m eighteen, so I can get out of here.’ And when they did get out, look what happened to them. One girl, Melanie Blackman, is so musically inclined and gifted she was accepted to Julliard, but when she tried to apply for grants and open a bank account, apply for a part-time job, she was told she had such a poor credit history it wasn’t possible. Not one of them understood about credit reports, FICA scores. Each one of those kids has a story. We’re going with six of them in the paper. Ted did a superior job on the profiles. While we’re only doing six profiles, we are listing the names of all the others.