Payne had never seen a case like this: zero physical evidence, nothing to indicate Samantha had been abducted. Yet here was an eighteen-year-old girl, her face all over the news, a city of three hundred thousand people looking for her, with no money—and even if she had stolen from the register, that was maybe two hundred dollars at best—no proof she had even left town. If Samantha wasn’t abducted but also hadn’t run away, what was the answer? What were they missing?
