What Lies in the Woods(42)

“I surrender,” he said. He threw up his hands. “I’m sorry I barged in here.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said quickly. Alone, my thoughts had scrabbled through my skull like panicked rats. With him here, they’d settled to faint, anxious scurrying. “I’m not … good at being alone,” I confessed.

He gave me a sidelong look, considering. “I wouldn’t have guessed that. You have a loner vibe.”

“No, I have an asshole vibe. Which just means that I end up spending all my time with other assholes,” I said.

“Does that include me?”

I shrugged. “Haven’t decided.”

He watched me as I skinned a spoonful off the top of the milkshake. The pause had a tender quality I knew all too well—that moment where you were trying to decide whether to address the obvious subject or skirt around it. He was going to ask me about Liv. His lips parted, the words starting to form.

“Maybe you can help me with something,” I said quickly, groping for a distraction.

“What sort of something?” he asked.

I shifted in my seat. Ethan Schreiber, it occurred to me, was exactly the person to ask about how to track down a missing woman. If I could do it without revealing too much. “I’m working on this project,” I said. “Just a personal thing. And I’m trying to do some research, but I don’t really know how to start.”

“I am good at research,” he conceded.

“I know,” I said. He gave me a curious look. “I sort of looked up your podcast. I only listened to a minute of it, but it seemed like it was … good.”

“Not our best review ever, but I’ll take it,” Ethan said.

“So that’s what you’re working on here? An episode of Aftershocks about Stahl?” I said. I wondered what the episode titles would be. The Survivor. The Families. The Son.

“No. This is a new project. It’s still in development. I haven’t quite found the right format yet.” He considered me, like he could tell I was stalling. I didn’t know how to ask what I needed to without raising suspicion. “What is it I can help you with, Naomi?”

No more stalling, then. “Right. So. If you were trying to find a missing person, how would you start?” I asked in a rush.

He stared at me for a beat. “Does this have something to do with Liv?”

“Liv isn’t missing, is she?” I said sharply.

“Okay,” he said, drawing out the word. “Then why are you asking about missing persons?”

“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 take the 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.”