The Vance house sat on a quarter-acre lot on the east side of Caro—one of those tidy ranch homes built in the seventies when the hospital was hiring and people still believed small towns had a future. The lawn was cut short even for November, edges clean along the sidewalk. Somebody cared about this property. Somebody kept score.
A yellow ribbon was tied to the porch railing. Not new—the ends were already starting to fray from the wind. She'd probably tied it there herself, back when the world still made sense and front porches were for decoration.
I parked on the street and walked up the drive. Old habits—I clocked the sight lines without thinking about it. The neighbor to the north had a clear view of the driveway. The neighbor to the south had a privacy fence. No security cameras on the house. No motion light over the garage.
Emily Vance came home to a dark driveway every night. That detail went into the file in my head.
I rang the bell once and waited.
You learn patience at the Bureau. Not the kind they teach in classrooms—the kind you learn sitting across from men who've done things that would keep you up at night, waiting for them to fill the silence because the silence is heavier than anything you could say. You ring once. You don't knock. You don't shift your weight. You stand like you've got all night, because the person on the other side of that door is deciding right now whether you're worth opening it for, and every extra sound you make gives them a reason to decide you're not.
The door opened.
The man standing there didn't say a word. Mid-thirties, maybe. Built like he'd played something in high school and hadn't entirely let it go. Three days of stubble. Eyes that had stopped expecting good news.
"Mr. Vance? My name is Jackson Dahl. Tom Henderson called ahead—I'm working with him on Emily's case, and I was hoping you might have some time to talk. I'd like to hear about her."
Not ask you some questions. Not follow up on the investigation. I want to hear about her. It's not a trick. It's the only door that's still open for a man like this—the chance to talk about his wife like she's a person instead of a case number.
He stared at me for a long beat. Then he stepped aside.
"Come in."
The tennis shoes were the first thing I saw. White Nikes, slightly dirty, sitting on the mat just inside the door. Laces loose the way they get when you toe them off in a hurry. She'd stepped out of those shoes and walked into the house in her socks, probably heading straight for the kitchen or the couch, and she'd never put them back on.
Three pairs of shoes now. Rachel's flats in the Escape. Emily's heels on the floor mat of the Civic. And these—the ones she chose when nobody was watching. The ones that were just hers.
I didn't stare. I stepped past them and followed Vance into the living room.
"Sit down. Please." He gestured toward the couch, then seemed to remember something. "Can I get you anything? Water or—"
He was holding a Labatt. Not his first of the evening, from the look of the recycling bin visible through the kitchen doorway. He caught me noticing and something flickered across his face—embarrassment, maybe, or the ghost of whoever he used to be before this.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—"
"I'll take one, if you're offering."
He stopped. Looked at me like I'd said something in a language he hadn't heard in days.
"Yeah. Yeah, okay."
He came back with a bottle and handed it to me. I took a long pull off it and stared at it for a second. Nodded toward Vance.
"Thank you. Nothing like a cold beer." Then I set it down and looked at him straight. "Excuse my frankness, but you don't look like you're doing so well. I'm here to help, but I need your help to do it."
Something in his posture shifted. Not much. Just enough. The guardrails came down. I could see it in his shoulders—the way a man settles when somebody finally stops treating him like glass.
"What do you want to know?"
"Tell me about her routine. Not the night she disappeared—just a normal night. What does that look like?"
Vance looked at me like the question didn't make sense. "She just... drives home."
"Does she call anyone on the way? You, her mom, a friend?"
"She calls me sometimes. Not every night. And yeah, she talks to her mom a lot. Carol lives over in Unionville, so Em would call her on the drive because it's the only time she's not busy."
I knew that rhythm. Sarah used to call me on her drive home from her sister's place. Never had anything important to say—just chatter about her day, what she wanted for dinner, something funny the dog did. I used to half-listen with the phone tucked against my shoulder while I did something else. I'd give a lot to get one of those calls now.
Twenty minutes on the phone with her mother. Eyes forward, mind somewhere else, not checking mirrors. Predictable window of distraction at a predictable time on a predictable route.
"Does she ever stop on the way?"
"There's a Sunoco on 53 just south of the hospital. She'll grab a coffee or a snack if she didn't eat at work. Maybe twice a week."
A regular stop. A location where someone parked across the road could confirm she'd left work and clock exactly when she'd be passing the empty stretch south of town.
"How about dinner? She ever pick up food on the way home?"
"Sometimes. There's a pizza place in Marlette she likes. She'll call ahead and grab it." He almost smiled. "She always orders the same thing. Medium pepperoni, extra cheese. Every time."
A phone call to the restaurant gives a departure timestamp. A takeout stop adds three to five minutes and confirms the route. If you're sitting in a work truck on the shoulder of 53, you can practically set your watch.
"When she gets home, what's the routine? She pull into the garage or the driveway?"
"Driveway. The garage is mine—too much crap in there. She always said she was going to make me clean it out." He stopped. Stared at the bottle in his hands.
"The porch light—is that on a timer or does she turn it on before she leaves?"
"I turn it on for her if I'm home. If I'm not..." He trailed off. "If I'm not home it's dark."
No garage. No motion light. No security camera. A dark driveway on a street where one neighbor has a fence and the other goes to bed at nine. She arrives home alone, in the dark, carrying takeout or coffee, phone still warm from a call with her mother.
Every single thing this man was telling me was love. The pizza she always ordered. The phone calls with her mom. The ribbon on the porch. The husband who turned the light on when he remembered.
And every single one of those things was a vulnerability.
She was routine. She was predictable. She was alone. And she moved through the world the way most people do—assuming that the structures around her were safe, that the road between work and home was just a road, that the truck on the shoulder with its hazards on was just a truck.
"Did she ever mention anything unusual on that drive? Someone following her, a vehicle she kept seeing, anything that made her uncomfortable?"
"She did say something a few weeks back. Maybe a month. She said there was a truck parked on the shoulder one night with its hazards on. Said it was there when she drove past and it made her nervous because there was nobody around it."
"What was it about the truck that bothered her?"
Vance thought about it. Rubbed his thumb along the neck of the bottle.
"She said nobody was there. Like, the truck was just sitting there with the flashers going but nobody was outside it. No cones, no signs, nothing. She said it looked like somebody had just parked and left, but why would you leave your hazards on?"
"Could she see if anyone was inside?"
"She didn't say. I think she just drove past. You know how it is—you notice something weird but you're almost home so you just keep going."
"She ever see it again?"
"I don't think so. She only mentioned it the one time."
One time was enough.
A work truck on the shoulder with its hazards on and no activity around it—that's a vehicle pretending to have a reason to be there. No worker, no equipment, no job site. Just a truck and a pair of hazard lights doing the only thing they needed to do: making every car that passed accept its presence without question.
He wasn't broken down. He was watching. Timing her commute. Learning the road the way a hunter learns a game trail—where the deer come through, what time they come through, and how long the gap is between one passing car and the next.
And Emily drove past him and came home and mentioned it over dinner like it was nothing, and her husband said something like huh, that's weird and they moved on with their night.
She'd been that close. And neither of them knew it.
"Mr. Vance, I want to shift gears for a second. In the last year or so—has anything changed in your routine? New neighbors, new friends, anybody come into your life that wasn't there before?"
He thought about it. "Not really. We're pretty boring. Same friends, same family. Em's got her people at the hospital and I've got the guys from work. We don't go out much."
"Any work done on the house? Contractors, repairmen, anyone coming to the door?"
"We had a guy come out to look at the furnace in September. And there was someone from the county about the water main—they were doing something on the street and knocked on a bunch of doors."
That one slowed me down.
"County water? Do you remember what he looked like?"
"Not really. Big guy. Had a clipboard. Wore one of those reflective vests." He shrugged. "He asked if we'd had any issues with water pressure and said they were doing work down the block. Em talked to him—I was in the garage."
"Emily talked to him."
"Yeah. Just for a few minutes. She said he was polite."
Polite. Of course he was. They're always polite.
"Did he come inside?"
"No. Stood on the porch. Em said he asked if he could use the phone because his had died. Said he'd been out on the road all day and forgot his charger." Vance shook his head. "I mean, that happens to everybody, right?"
Right. That's the whole point.
A dead cell phone is the most relatable problem in America. It turns a stranger into a person. It takes the edge off the request because you've been there—standing in a gas station or a parking lot staring at a black screen, feeling like an idiot. You don't think twice about someone asking for help with that because you've needed the same help yourself.
He wasn't asking for a phone. He was asking for empathy. And Emily gave it to him because that's what Emily does.
"She said she felt bad but told him we don't have a landline. Nobody does anymore." Vance almost laughed. "She said she apologized to the guy. Can you believe that? Some stranger shows up at our door and she apologizes."
Yeah. I could believe it. Because that's exactly the response he was calibrating for. He didn't need the phone and he didn't need the apology. He needed to know what kind of person she was. Would she panic? Would she shut the door? Would she call for her husband?
She apologized. She was kind to him. She made him feel welcome even while turning him down.
She told him everything he needed to know about herself in thirty seconds on her own front porch.
And the phone story was wrong. A county worker with a clipboard and a vest doesn't knock on a residential door because his cell phone died. Every municipal vehicle in the state has a two-way radio. Doesn't matter if you're water department, road commission, or county drain—if you're on the clock in a marked vehicle, you've got a closed-loop communication system. Handheld Motorola, dash-mounted unit, something. It's not optional. It's liability. A crew member can't reach dispatch, somebody gets hurt, and the county gets sued.
His phone didn't die. And even if it did, he had a radio in the cab. He chose the porch because the porch got him face to face with Emily Vance.
But it told me something else. A current municipal employee wouldn't use the dead phone excuse because he'd know it doesn't hold up to anyone who understands how fleet vehicles work. He'd come up with something better.
This guy was close enough to the job to have the vest and the clipboard and the confidence. But he was far enough removed to miss the small things.
A washout. Someone who used to belong but doesn't anymore.
And the escalation mattered. The shoulder of 53 was passive—sitting, watching, clocking her schedule from a distance. The Sunoco was closer—same parking lot, line of sight, but still no contact. The front porch was active. He came to her home. He stood where she lives and tested her face to face.
That's not a man still deciding. That's a man building toward something. Each contact was closer, more deliberate, more personal. He was compressing the distance between himself and Emily Vance, and the porch visit meant the distance had closed to zero.
Whatever he was planning, the timeline was short.
"Anyone else? Anyone at all, even something small. Somebody who stopped to ask directions, someone in a parking lot, anything that struck either of you as a little off."
Vance was quiet for a while. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen.
"There was one thing. Maybe a month ago. Em came home and said some guy at the Sunoco was staring at her while she was getting gas. Just standing by his truck watching her. She said it creeped her out but he never said anything and she just left."
"What kind of truck?"
"She didn't say." He paused. "But she said it was big. Like a utility truck."
Same truck. The shoulder of 53 with the hazards on. The Sunoco while she pumped gas. And now the front porch with a clipboard and a vest and a polite request to use the phone.
Three contacts. Three data points. And Emily Vance had driven past every single one of them thinking she was safe because the man behind it all looked like he belonged.
"Mr. Vance, did Emily ever mention anyone making her uncomfortable? Not on the road—at work, at the store, anywhere. Someone who paid too much attention. Someone who showed up where they shouldn't have been."
He shook his head slowly. "No. Em's not—she's not the kind of person who makes enemies. Everyone likes her. At the hospital they call her Sunshine because she's always—"
He stopped. Set the bottle down on the end table. The sound was louder than it should have been.
"They call her Sunshine."
Present tense. He caught himself using past tense earlier and corrected. Now he was holding onto present tense like a rope over a canyon.
I knew that grip too. After Sarah left, it took me months to stop saying we when I talked about the house. We painted the kitchen. We adopted the dog. The language of a life built with someone doesn't update as fast as the reality. Vance was still living in we and the world was trying to drag him into I and he wasn't ready.
I took another pull off the beer and gave him the silence. He needed a minute. I needed one too, because the woman taking shape in this room—the tennis shoes by the door, the ribbon on the porch, the medium pepperoni extra cheese, the coworkers who called her Sunshine—that woman was either alive in a building somewhere in the Thumb or she wasn't, and the statistics said she wasn't, and I was going to find her anyway.
"Is there anything else?" he asked. His voice was thin.
"One more thing. The route she takes—53 south through the stretch past Clifford—is that the only way she comes home, or does she ever take back roads?"
"Always 53. She hates the back roads at night. Too dark, too many deer." He paused. "That's why she takes the highway. She thinks it's safer."
She thought the highway was safer.
I finished the beer and stood up. He looked like he wanted to ask me something else but couldn't find the shape of it.
"Mr. Vance, I know I've taken up enough of your time. You've been more helpful than you think." I pulled a card from my jacket and set it on the end table next to his bottle. "Not just if you think of something. If you need anything—anything at all—you call that number."
He nodded. Took my empty and carried it to the kitchen. When he dropped it into the recycling bin, the clank of glass on glass was loud enough to echo. There were a lot of bottles in that bin.
I was halfway to the door when I stopped.
"Hey." I turned around. He was standing in the kitchen doorway, backlit, holding onto the counter like it was the only thing keeping him vertical. "Do me a favor. Get some rest tonight. I know that's easy for me to say, but I need you clearheaded. Whatever comes next—and something will come next—I need you sharp. Can you do that for me?"
He didn't answer right away. Something moved behind his eyes—not offense, not shame. Recognition. The look of a man who knows he's been seen.
"Yeah. I can do that."
I walked back to him. Shook his hand, and before I let go I put my other hand on his shoulder and held it there for a second. Gave it a squeeze.
"Take it easy, buddy. I'll be in touch."
He nodded. Didn't trust his voice. I didn't need him to.
I let myself out. The tennis shoes were still by the door. The ribbon was still on the railing. The porch light was on—he'd remembered to turn it on tonight even though there was nobody coming home to see it.
I sat in the truck for a minute before starting the engine.
Three contacts. The shoulder of 53. The Sunoco. The front porch with the dead phone. A man in a county vest who looked like he belonged, sounded like he belonged, and used Emily's own decency to map the route to her disappearance.
And somewhere in the Thumb, in a building I hadn't found yet, Emily Vance was either waiting to be saved or past saving.
The engine caught on the second try. I pulled out and headed south toward Dry Creek.
I had a profile. I had a pattern. What I didn't have was a name.
Not yet.