Page 44 of What Lies in the Woods

“I told you. It’s personal,” I said.

He rubbed a hand over his head. “Um. Okay. Am I law enforcement or a civilian?” he asked.

“Civilian.” I snagged a French fry and dragged it through the last smudges of ketchup.

“If I was a PI or something, I’d start by talking to family, friends, roommates…”

I shook my head. “No, not that kind of missing. You know someone is missing, but you don’t know who they are.”

“So I’m trying to identify a Jane Doe and hopefully match them up with a missing-person report?” he asked. He looked at me curiously. “You really aren’t going to tell me what this is about?”

“I wasn’t planning to, no.”

He rested his palm on the table, one finger tapping an idle rhythm. “There’s a theory,” he said. “It’s pretty popular in certain true-crime-fan circles. Alan Stahl was active for five years. His attacks all took place in the summer, one or two each year. Except for one year. People call it the ‘quiet summer.’ But there are some people who think that he didn’t takethe year off—that we just haven’t found the victim or victims. So you have two camps—the quiet-summer theory and the missing-summer theory.”

He thought I was looking into Stahl. I almost objected, but then I glanced away, as if he’d found me out. It was a safer explanation than the truth. “It’s been bothering me, what you said about the profile not fitting,” I said. That much wasn’t a lie. “I thought that maybe if there were other victims that had been missed, there would be some connection to explain why he targeted me.”

“Naomi, your friend just died. Is this really the time to be worrying about that?” he asked.

“I need to focus on something,” I said, and my voice broke. It was true. Not for the reasons I was implying, but true all the same.

“A lot of people have spent a lot of time trawling through missing-persons reports to try to match them up to the quiet summer. There’s too little to go on. Too many missing girls,” he said.

“Humor me,” I told him.

He sighed. “You don’t have a body or a missing person, you’ve got an MO and a hunch. Which makes this basically impossible. You need to find a report of a murder or a missing person that matches the MO and go from there. It’s a huge task. You could start by looking at the forums where people discuss Stahl and the quiet summer. They’ll have done a lot of the work already. Or you could look at the Doe Network.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Here, I’ll show you.” He pulled out his phone and tapped something in, then handed it to me. It was a simple website with the banner “International Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons.” “It’s a database of reports on unidentified bodies and missing persons. You can search by gender, location, date.… It’s got the advantage of being a lot better organized and centralized than casual message boards.”

I tapped through the menus until I found missing women in Washington state. It loaded slowly—dozens and then hundreds of missingwomen reduced to tiny thumbnails of smiling faces. I made a noise in the back of my throat, guttural.

“It’s kind of overwhelming,” Ethan said.

There were numbers under each photograph. 1292DFWA. 2546DFVA. “What do these mean?” I asked, my heart pounding. I’d seen those numbers before.

“Case numbers,” Ethan said. “The DF means ‘disappeared female’ and then there’s a state code, if I remember correctly. I’m not sure about the numbering system.”

There had been three numbers on the sticky note in Liv’s room. She’d been looking at these same photographs. Persephone was one of these faces.

“You know,” Ethan said carefully, “there’s another piece to the missing-summer theory.”

I looked up from the sea of photographs. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, gaze fixed on my face.

“Stahl dumped the first couple bodies in places where they were found quickly, but after that he started hiding them,” he said. “That’s part of why the six-victim number is almost certainly incomplete. Part of the evidence against him was that he was seen in the woods half a mile from the third victim’s body, a few days before she was found.Monthsafter her death. Which suggests that he was going back to visit the bodies. Probably a way of reliving the kills.”

I shuddered. “As if he wasn’t awful enough already.”

“The thing is, nothing about your attack makes sense as part of his pattern. Unless—”

My skin prickled as I realized what he was talking about. “Unless I wasn’t a target,” I said. “I was a witness. He wasn’t there for me at all.”

“He was there to visit a body,” Ethan said.

Not justabody.

Persephone.

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