“This will be helpful,” said Angie.
“I did get a bunch e-mailed to me from Nadine’s friends.”
Angie stopped what she was doing to shift through the collection of photos. She ignored the booze on Carolyn’s breath. Finding Nadine would be only half the battle. Angie might locate the missing girl, but without big changes in the Jessup family, Nadine might not stick around.
If the photos were any indication, they had a lot of fence mending to do. The pictures of Nadine with her parents were somber, her brown eyes heavy with sadness, but not all the photos were gloomy. Some showed Nadine laughing with her friends, making goofy expressions, looking like a kid who had a place in the world, who fit in, who wasn’t lonely and alone.
Angie began to believe that life with her alcoholic mother and disinterested father was the main reason, if not the only reason, Nadine ran. It was a show of defiance, a way to teach them a lesson. On the poster board of cutout celebrities, Angie recognized one of Anna Kendrick from the movie Pitch Perfect. The “Cup” song from that film featured the line, “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.” Angie wondered what those lyrics meant to Nadine.
“What are you going to do with these, anyway?” Carolyn’s words came out a little sloppy. She wobbled slightly on her feet.
Two in the afternoon and the woman already had her drunk on. This job made it easy for Angie to appreciate her good fortune, to be ever grateful to her parents for her upbringing.
“Bao is going to create a Find Nadine Jessup Facebook page,” Angie said. “We’ll list my phone number, but we need as many recent pictures as we can get. This goes up today. Then we’ll e-mail all of Nadine’s friends and ask for their help linking to the page.”
Bao was hunched over Nadine’s laptop, but listening. “I’ve already created the e-mail address, Find Nadine Jessup at gmail dot com,” he said without peeling his eyes from the screen.
“Not saying it will go viral,” Angie added, “but it could, and it’s an important step in the process.”
“Have you found anything helpful on Nadine’s computer yet?” Carolyn asked.
Bao spun around the small wooden desk chair to face Carolyn. “She wanted to cover her tracks. She deleted her browser history before she ran. This was a planned event.”
Carolyn looked crestfallen.
“Don’t worry,” he said, pushing his long black hair from off his face. “Nothing is ever deleted on a computer. She must have read something about deleting the cookie file, but there are other ways to get at the data. Right now, I’m running a system restore and I’m also parsing the log files. We’ll know soon enough what she was looking up online. Chances are, that’s where she headed.”
“How do you know?” Carolyn asked.
“Because that’s what I would have done.”
“Most runaways don’t go far,” Angie said. “From my experience, the ones who leave foster care are more likely to leave the state. Others stay close to home, crash with friends, people they meet. Few leave home thinking the street is their ultimate destination.”
“But I’ve already called every one of Nadine’s friends and all my relatives, like you asked,” Carolyn said. “She’s not with any of them.”
“That’s why I’m going to talk to each person individually,” Angie said. “Maybe one of them isn’t telling us the truth.”
Bao returned to his efforts while Angie spent some time cross-referencing the list of friends she had compiled with the pictures Carolyn had collected. Angie was clicking through the photos, taking in every detail of Nadine that she could. Was there a boy online she’d been talking with? Somebody who had lured her away? Somebody who made her feel special and loved? Bao would find that out soon enough.
“Bao, any luck with the Facebook page?”
“No, she logged out and her Facebook profile is set to as private as can be. I’m working on getting access, though.”
“What about social media accounts? WeChat? Vine? Twitter? Instagram? WhatsApp?”
“Checking them all and the logs,” Bao said. “No activity on any of her other social media accounts.”
“What about any kind of tracking on Nadine’s cell phone?”
“Like a Find My Phone app?” Bao answered. “I wish, but we’re not getting that lucky.”
“Carolyn, whatever you do, do not turn off the phone,” Angie said. “I’m assuming it’s in your name.”
“It is.”
“I want a call log history,” Angie said. “I’ll need your help for that. Your cell phone provider should be able to assist. Get on that right away, if you can.” And no more booze, she wanted to add. “We need the last few hours of calls, every text, every call coming in and out of that phone.”
“What’s that going to do?” Carolyn asked.
“We’re looking for patterns. Who was she talking to around the time she went missing? Had she made other calls to that person? Who was she texting?”