Читать книгу Unbreakable - Elizabeth Norris, Elizabeth Norris - Страница 12

ecily and two of the evac center’s armed guards escort Deirdre and me back to the car.

“Don’t worry, it’ll get better,” I lie as I hug her.

Then Deirdre and I are in the car and driving through the maze that is the parking lot. We suffer in silence for a few minutes, Deirdre with her lips pressed together, her frown lines etching themselves more permanently into her face. I briefly wonder if she’ll ever laugh or smile like she used to, and then she says what I’ve been thinking this whole time. “Another one.”

I don’t answer, because I don’t have to.

My dad worked in Missing Persons—it was his first job as an analyst with the Bureau—back in the nineties. His first year, there were 67,806 active missing-person cases in the US. I remember thinking then how unfathomably huge that number seemed.

But that was when he was alive.

It doesn’t seem huge anymore.

Because as of this morning, there are 113,801 missing persons—the ones not presumed dead. And that’s just in San Diego County.

Renee Adams is number 113,802.