Maren
Blackthorn

⁂

I stopped there because that was as far as I'd gotten.

It was the first thing I ever recorded — the whole of it, a minute and a half of me talking into a headset microphone I'd unplugged from a gaming setup I no longer owned, in a bedroom that doubled as my entire apartment, at an hour when reasonable people were asleep. There was no Focusrite yet. No evidence board, no red thread, no two million downloads, none of the apparatus I'd eventually wrap around this thing until it became the load-bearing wall of my life. There was just me, twenty-one years old, six weeks into a criminology master's I'd talked my way into mostly so I could keep standing close to the kinds of questions nobody else seemed interested in asking.

Let me back up. Six weeks earlier.

I'd come to Chicago for the program and stayed for the library, which is the most honest sentence I can offer about that fall. The coursework was fine. The seminars were fine. But the university sat on top of forty years of court records and case files and microfiche nobody had digitized, and I had discovered within my first week that a graduate ID got you into rooms an undergraduate could only stand outside of. I spent my evenings in those rooms the way other people spent theirs scrolling — reading cold cases until my eyes burned, one after another, the way you eat chips you don't even like because the bag is open and your hands are bored and somewhere underneath it all is a hunger you've decided not to name.

I knew what the hunger was. I just wasn't going to say it out loud, least of all to myself at one in the morning.

My sister had been dead a few years by then. Long enough that people had stopped lowering their voices when she came up, not long enough that I had. I won't do the whole thing here — that's not what this chapter is. I'll only say that when you've watched a file close on someone you love before anyone thought to ask the obvious questions, you develop a sensitivity. An allergy, almost. You start to flinch at the administrative shrug. The closed box. The word that gets used to make a person stop being a problem.

Which is how I found Bree Sandlin. By accident, the way you find most of the things that change your life.

I'd been chasing something else entirely — a 2011 case out of Rogers Park, a name I'd pulled from a footnote — and the database had coughed up a cluster of adjacent records the way those old systems did, throwing six things at you when you'd asked for one. Most of it was noise. One of them wasn't.

A missing-persons entry, eight years stale. A girl, twenty, last seen leaving her shift at a café on the North Side. And beside her name, in the field where the system recorded what had become of the people it was supposed to keep track of, a single classification, entered by a detective whose name I would come to know better than I wanted to.

Voluntary.

I read it three times. Then I started reading everything.