Just Another Missing Person

“First Day Missing”

Julia, a police detective, is at dinner with her daughter, Genevieve, and husband, Art. A man at a nearby table reminds her of someone she put in jail for murder, and she googles his name under the table. Genevieve teases Art about his restaurant choice while Julia looks on, unsure of how she feels about her husband. Julia gets a call from work about a missing woman and departs for the police station. She asks Genevieve and Art to note the suspicious man’s license plate number.

At the station, she encounters her long-time informant Price. He won’t tell her why he’s there, but she makes him a cup of tea and goes to her office. Her team comes in and begins their investigation into Olivia Johnson, a 22-year-old woman who has been missing for a day. Julia’s right-hand man, Jonathan, arrives. She trusts him completely.

Looking over Olivia’s file, Julia is reminded of a similar case from last year, when a woman named Sadie went missing. She was never found, and Julia feels she failed Sadie and her family. The team finds that Olivia moved into a new house two days prior and left for a job interview the next morning. That night, she sent her new roommates a text asking them to “please come.” She was not seen again. The police interview her roommates, speak to her father, and review CCTV footage from the area in which she was last seen. Julia thinks of Genevieve, who is only 16 but has become interested in Julia’s job.

Julia assigns tasks to her team, and a few hours later Jonathan reports on Olivia’s social media activity. An Instagram post features a coat resembling one worn by a woman in the CCTV footage. They watch as the woman, whom they agree must be Olivia, goes into an alley but never comes out. They walk to the alley, just a few blocks away, and find that it is a dead end, with no other exit.

As Julia walks to her car to go home, she talks to Genevieve on the phone. As they talk, Julia thinks about last Christmas when Art told her he slept with a colleague. Since then, they sleep in separate bedrooms and barely speak. Genevieve asks about Julia’s case, and her interest disturbs Julia. She hangs up and gets into her car. A man wearing a balaclava sits up in the backseat and tells her to drive.

A man named Lewis is at work renewing passports and thinking about his daughter. She is not yet identified (referred to only as “you”), but she is Sadie. He remembers when she worked with him at the passport office. He received a call from her roommate telling him she was missing.

Back in Julia’s car, Julia notes the man’s height, build, and eye color, and recognizes his local accent. He gives her an address, and she recognizes it as Olivia’s. When she pulls up near the house, the forensic team is already there. When the man grabs her wrist, she scrapes her nails into his skin to get his DNA.

The man gives her a metal box. Inside, she finds a cigarette and a glass, both in plastic bags. An instruction sheet tells her to plant the items in Olivia’s room to implicate a man named Matthew James in Olivia’s disappearance. Julia realizes that if the man in the car is trying to frame someone else, he probably knows what happened to Olivia. When she refuses to go along with the plan to frame Matthew, the man tells her he knows what she and Genevieve did.

Julia doesn’t believe him. She never told anyone what happened with Genevieve, not even Art. However, the man somehow knows she erased CCTV footage relevant to the incident. He opens the car door, and she realizes that he wants her to plant the evidence immediately.

A flashback reveals that when Julia and Genevieve went to the movies a year earlier (the scene at the beginning of the novel), Genevieve was mugged and fought back, cutting the mugger’s jugular vein with her keys. The mugger, Zac, was a familiar petty criminal to Julia. She called an ambulance anonymously then broke into the CCTV cupboard, took the footage home, and destroyed it to protect her daughter, fearing that Genevieve’s actions would not be considered reasonable force and that she would be convicted of a crime. Julia and Genevieve left before the ambulance arrived, assuming that Zac would die, which he eventually did after medical complications. Julia hates the idea of planting evidence to frame Matthew for Olivia’s disappearance but sees no way out.

As Julia goes into Olivia’s house, Jonathan calls and says they have Olivia’s phone records. Her last location was near the alley and not far from Matthew’s address. Because she had a new phone, a new job, and a new house, they might think Olivia is a runaway, but her father, whom they spoke to on the phone, doesn’t think so. After she hangs up, she climbs the stairs to Olivia’s bedroom.

Erin, head of the forensics unit, comes out of the bedroom. She tells Julia that the roommates didn’t see Olivia leave. They only knew her for two days, which makes it odd to Julia that they were who Olivia texted the night she disappeared. There are no signs of struggle in the room, and Erin believes she left of her own accord. Julia is relieved they haven’t yet taken photos of the room. She plants the cigarette butt outside on the windowsill and rolls the glass under the bed.

Julia returns to her car, and the man is gone, although he left a note thanking her. She decides to have it examined even though she isn’t optimistic about the results. When she arrives home, Genevieve and Art are awake. She and her daughter have hot chocolate and listen to the sea through the open window.

Julia asks Genevieve if she told anyone about Zac, but her daughter is emphatic that she didn’t. She tells Julia that she thinks about him every day, and as she turns to go upstairs, asks to hear about Julia’s new case the next day. As Genevieve goes upstairs, Art comes down. He is as disheveled and distracted as ever, but calm. Julia, on the other hand, gets upset every time she sees him. She never trusted Elle, the colleague he slept with, and it doesn’t matter that it only happened once.

Julia goes upstairs. In the bathroom, she scrapes the man’s DNA from under her fingernails and puts it in a storage container. Hearing Art go into the spare bedroom, she thinks about their old ritual, in which they would look out the skylight over their bed and talk about their days. Despite their separation, when their dream house on Sugar Loaf Beach came up for sale, they bought it, and now she sleeps alone in the master bedroom, which has no skylight. In bed, she looks through Jonathan’s printouts of Olivia’s social media.

Olivia’s social media presence includes Instagram posts, Tweets, emails, and texts. On Instagram, she posts a photo of peonies she bought to celebrate spring, and on Twitter she mentions watching her boyfriend’s HIIT workout on the beach. She gets a comment from a man named Doug Adams on an old Facebook post. She emails a friend, and her potential employer, and texts briefly with her father and her new roommate, Annie, about her plans to move in.

“Second Day Missing”

Emma waits in the car for her son, Matthew, to finish therapy. When he told her he wanted to go, she worried about what he would reveal. Now she thinks it is a good thing. Matthew feels good again and ready to move on. Emma wonders if he told his therapist about what happened last year.

Julia researches Matthew James and finds a likely match on Facebook. He looks young and innocent, and she hopes he is not the man she incriminated. Jonathan received a call from Doug Adams, the man who commented on Olivia’s Facebook post and who worked with her briefly years ago. He and Julia ponder the fact that Olivia’s Facebook account is only a year old, which seems strange because her generation typically doesn’t use Facebook.

After Jonathan leaves, Julia sends her DNA scrapings to a private lab. Then she calls Price, her informant, to ask what he knows about Zac Harper, the man who attacked Genevieve. She trusts Price who, for some reason, is very loyal to her, and he reports that Zac was close to his brother. After they hang up, she goes to the evidence room and examines Olivia’s belongings. She didn’t have many clothes, and they are in a wide range of sizes, from 8 to 14. Other than clothes, there are a few possessions including her passport.

Julia has the feeling that something is wrong with this case. She wonders if Olivia herself is trying to frame Matthew James. She leaves the evidence room and sees Jonathan, who tells her that Olivia’s boyfriend has an air-tight alibi, having been out of the country when she disappeared.

Sadie has been missing for two days. Lewis and his wife Yolanda are at the police station waiting for news. They meet with Julia and DC Robert Poole, and as their questions continue, Lewis realizes the police consider him a suspect. When Lewis tells them about Sadie’s boyfriend, Andrew Zamos, they take immediate notice. While Lewis insists that he is controlling and manipulative, Yolanda claims the boy is just socially awkward. Lewis notices that Julia is distracted, and even looks fearful when an officer waves his phone at her. Poole escorts Lewis and Yolanda out of the station. Lewis returns later to give them a forgotten detail, sees Julia leaving, and follows her.

Last year, Julia was so focused covering up Genevieve’s involvement in Zac’s death that she didn’t pay as much attention to Sadie’s case as she should have. Sadie was never found, and Julia wonders if it is her fault for being distracted. Now, with Olivia’s case, she feels she is making the same mistake again. Returning to where she parked the night before, she asks a nearby gas station for their security footage. When she watches it, she sees the masked man leave her car, but she can’t identify him.

Erin tells Julia that they have DNA results on a glass and cigarette found in Olivia’s room, but they have no matches in the system. Julia thinks of a way to implicate Matthew in the disappearance and suggests that they ask all the men in the neighborhood to voluntarily donate DNA and present it as an opportunity to clear their names.

Later, Julia’s boss comes to her office. He questions her about the case, saying that her team told him that she is distracted and acting strangely. She brushes off his concern, but before he leaves, he reminds her of her failure to find Sadie last year.

At home, Julia waits for Genevieve and Art to return from the theater. When they come inside, she is struck once again at how well she thought she knew Art. He smiles, and she remembers a night when she was anxious. He wrote her worries in a notebook then answered them point by point, calling it the “worry list,” and set her mind at ease. She misses him, and when he smiles, she realizes that she hasn’t seen him smile in a long time, and it may be partly her fault.

After Genevieve goes upstairs, Art mentions her interest in Julia’s latest case. She wonders if she should have told Art about the mugging and Zac’s death at the time. She was afraid he would blame her job. She wants to talk to Art about Olivia’s case, but instead they go to their separate bedrooms.

Olivia posts a picture on Instagram of a golden retriever on Sugar Loaf Beach and one about polishing her table with Zoflora, a disinfectant. She tweets about going to the drug store with an eye mask on and a cold sore. On Facebook, she posts about giving her father crossword answers, and he replies. She also sends an email to a friend about meeting at a bar.