Did you find what you were looking for, Detective? Or are you just another missing life?

It wasn't that she couldn't afford the book. She needed the digital footprint . The victim, a college student named Maya, had been obsessed with the gritty realism of Kate Gable’s thrillers. On the night she disappeared, Maya’s browser history showed she had been desperately searching for a leaked, unreleased copy of Gable’s newest manuscript, Missing Lives .

The wind howled through the skeletal branches of the pines as Detective Sophie Allen stared at the pixelated screen of her laptop. She’d been hunting for a killer for months, but now she was hunting for a ghost: a girl who had vanished from a locked room without a trace.

Sophie rubbed her eyes and typed the phrase into the search bar one more time:

Sophie clicked a link on the third page of the search results—a shady, flickering forum. A download progress bar appeared. 98%... 99%... Complete.