I’ve learned a few dreadful things since this started. First, don’t poke around in dark corners unless you are prepared for what lunges out at you. Second, this world is full of dark corners.
The Monday this began, it was my turn to bring donuts to the office where I work as a data analyst. I got up extra early and drove to the big box retail stores out near the highway exits.
The only other vehicle in the parking lot was a white pickup truck parked across the lot. I pulled up into a space about a football field’s length from the store’s main entrance.
I noticed out of the corner of my eye the little figure of a person standing against the front wall of the store. It was still early in the morning and dark, so all I could tell was they were probably a small woman. I remember looking down just long enough to make sure my car was in park, and then when I looked up that person was standing right outside my passenger window.
It looked like a young woman with shoulder length hair and a slight build. However, there was something odd about the haircut and the clothes. The dress and overall appearance gave the weird impression of being just slightly outdated.
They said something to me through the glass. I am pretty sure it was “Can I get in your car?”
My instinct was to get out of my car and walk into the store as quickly as possible. I did not know what this person wanted and I remember wanting to be inside the store where at least some employees would be opening up for the morning.
I turned off my car, got out, closed the door, and walked purposefully past this person towards the building. As I did so, I asked if I could help them.
This person then asked for a ride to the next town, the one to the north of my town. Then again I was asked, “Can I get in your car?”
“I’m not headed that way,” I said, still walking.
They asked me again for a ride, but this time it was for a ride to my own town, which was completely in the opposite direction. I was bewildered by this, and just kept walking toward the front of the store.
Then for a third time they asked, “Can I get in your car?”
By then I had made it to the entrance of the store. This strange little person, who I was thinking maybe was some type of hitchhiker, had followed me a few paces.
“I’m not headed that way either,” I said over my shoulder to the hitchhiker, and walked into the store.
The last time I saw the hitchhiker, they were standing about halfway between me and where my car was parked.
My instincts were telling me I was the one in danger. The hitchhiker didn’t seem to be some kind of druggy or prostitute, yet something was alarmingly wrong with the whole situation.
Inside the store, I took my time getting the donuts. When I stepped back outside, the parking lot was completely empty except for my car. The sun was now out. There was no sign of the hitchhiker.
I remember being hit with this surprisingly intense feeling of paranoia when I went back to my car. Of course, I know a lot more now than I knew then. At the time I had no real idea how close to the gaping maw of destruction I had unwittingly come.
After convincing myself the car was empty, I set my boxes of donuts on the passenger seat, got in, and drove to work.
Everything else in my life was normal until the following day.
About mid-morning that Tuesday, my wife called me at work. Usually we text each other so to have her call me at work told me something serious had happened.
My wife was sobbing on the phone. Immediately I thought of our two boys, who were supposed to be in class at their high school. I asked my wife what was wrong, and she told me that Kathy’s husband Ron had been missing since the previous morning.
Let me back up here a bit and explain that my wife and Kathy are best friends. Kathy was a friend of my wife’s family when my wife was a kid, and Kathy had been kind of like an aunt to my wife. They both reconnected a little over a year ago when Kathy and Ron moved to our town. Since then, my wife and Kathy have been almost inseparable. Ron and I got along alright. He was a decent guy. Needless to say, it was a terrible shock to hear Ron had gone missing.
The paranoia I had felt the previous morning in the parking lot came flooding back to me during that phone call. I immediately thought of the hitchhiker when I heard about Ron. The rest of that day I spent on the phone with my wife, piecing together exactly what had happened to Ron.
Quite simply, Ron headed to work early the same morning I had made my donut run. He never showed up at work. He never made it home. Late that night, Kathy went to the police. The following morning, in the parking lot of a big-box store in a town about thirty-five miles northwest of ours, Ron’s truck was found. It was empty. Ron was gone and there was no sign of what had happened to him. One of the many things my wife did for Kathy on that terrible day was help her file a missing persons report for Ron.
I took the next two days off from work, despite the looming deadline. My wife and I spent the entire day at Kathy’s house after getting the boys to school. I was conflicted about taking the time off from work, but this was the spouse of my wife’s closest friend, and the situation was getting worse as each hour passed with still no sign of Ron. Kathy of course was in a total panic. Since she and Ron had no children, I suppose it was fortunate for her that my wife could be there for her.
Those two women called every police department, bus stop, jail, hospital, church shelter, airport, and hotel within a hundred miles, trying to find some clue about Ron. The police dropped by Kathy’s house once that day, and once again the following day. They came in and asked some questions about Ron’s social media activity and stuff like that. I didn’t get the impression they were getting anywhere with Ron’s case. It kind of felt like they were waiting for Ron to just show back up on his own.
I kept thinking back to what happened to me in that parking lot. I could not get the thought out of my mind that the strange little hitchhiker who wanted to get into my car was somehow involved in this. Finally, I told Kathy and my wife about the strange encounter.
As silly as it may seem now, I fully expected Kathy and my wife to be disgusted with me. But instead, Kathy latched onto this information right away like it was her first beacon of hope. My wife was ecstatic to get this tiny piece of information. For her, it was the first real break in the case.
Kathy called the police immediately with this news. That phone call precipitated another visit from a new pair of police officers. But then they just told me to call them if I see this hitchhiker again, then they left.
Kathy was frantic to act on this information, with or without the police. We live in a small town, and Kathy happened to know one of the assistant managers at the store where I encountered the hitchhiker. Long story short, they let us view the store’s security tapes from the morning Ron disappeared.
We found nothing on the tapes except one grainy clip of a pickup pulling out of the parking lot and heading north. Kathy screamed when she saw the video that it was Ron’s truck. I felt like kicking myself for not recognizing it before when I saw it in the parking lot that morning. But there are so many white F150’s in our town. This whole country is full of white F150’s.
From the grainy video we could not really see the face of the driver, but Kathy swore that it was indeed Ron. We could not see if there was anybody else in the truck with Ron. It looked to me like Ron was alone in his truck when he drove out of the parking lot. There was no sign of the hitchhiker.
We contacted the police again and had an officer view the tape. All he told us was that they already knew Ron was probably at that store some time that morning.
Despite the underwhelming response of the police, Kathy and my wife were quickly putting two and two together on their own. They were convinced the hitchhiker was real and was the key to what happened to Ron.
I returned to work that Friday. There was a lot of catching up to do, but I made some phone calls and helped Kathy arrange a meeting with a private investigator, someone my company used occasionally. Kathy hired the private investigator and tasked him with finding out anything about the hitchhiker.
This private investigator spent the weekend talking to all of the shopping centers and big-box stores in the area and viewing security footage of their parking lots.
By Monday, the investigator had come up with nothing on the hitchhiker. But what he did find was no less interesting. He found a similar disappearance, one that bore the hallmarks of Ron’s disappearance.
In the week prior to Ron going missing, a man had left his house to go to one of the big box stores near his home. He was to return some shoes his wife had bought but that had turned out to be the wrong size. He left his home early because he wanted to arrive right when the store opened. This man also had never made it home. Two days later his car was found abandoned in the parking lot of one of the store’s sister locations thirty miles away from the man’s home. He has not been found, and there are no suspects. The case became a missing persons just like Ron’s, but it was being handled by a different police department. To the best of the private investigator’s knowledge, these cases were not considered to be connected.
With new information, Kathy and my wife stopped all of their other search efforts. They feverishly scoured the internet, looking for any other missing persons reports that matched the two we already had. They found several, going back over the past eight months. All of the disappearances involved middle aged men, traveling alone in their automobiles. A whole string of cars, pickup trucks, minivans, and SUVs have all shown up in some empty shopping center parking lot, with no sign of what happened to the occupant. All of the men were either on their way to work when last seen, coming home from work, or had stepped out for a shopping errand close to home.
Despite the apparent similarities between these cases, there was plenty of variation as well. The age range of all the men who had disappeared was from thirty-five to fifty-five. There was considerable ethnic and socio-economic variation. The abandoned vehicles never showed up within the same police jurisdictions. The police had not made any connection between these cases. As far as we could tell, nobody was connecting the dots.
I decided to connect the dots. I mean, I’m a data analyst at my job. I used the research my wife and Kathy had done to construct a predictive algorithm. First I was able to establish there was statistically more to the connection between these cases than the immediate and apparent similarities. If I could establish statistical similarities, I could possibly get the algorithm to predict future disappearances.
When I told my wife that I was going to try this, she told me to take time off from my job if I had to. Actually, she told me to quit my job if I had to, if that is what it took to get the algorithm working. This was a total shock to me. It was completely out of character for her to even consider risking our jobs. Looking back now, I realize that even then, a dark miasma was slipping its way into the fabric of our lives, without our noticing but affecting who we were. Needless to say, when I contacted my office that day and let them know I had to take more time off, they were not happy. But I had to focus on helping Kathy in any way I could, and would deal with the fallout at work later.
I got to work designing the algorithm. Once it was built, I fed it a database of all the shopping centers in our area. Next, I fed the algorithm recent census data on all the men in the area who matched the description of the known victims. This was a huge task but I got it done. Then, I fed the algorithm the list of known drop-off points for the abandoned vehicles from all the missing person cases. Finally, I set the algorithm up to pick from the list of shopping centers the most likely location of the next disappearance. I included this last part because, sadly, we had to assume that the trend of disappearing middle-aged men would continue.
The algorithm ran successfully, but it returned useless, meaningless junk. Not only was this very frustrating to say the least, I was certain that my job was now jeopardized. Also by then it had been almost two weeks since Ron’s disappearance. Those days were all dreadfully difficult for Kathy, and my algorithm idea had given her some hope. Now, my bright idea was turning out to be a waste of time.
But then my wife pointed out some things in the data that I missed. First, none of the abandoned vehicle locations were closer to each other than twenty miles. Second, the same location was never used twice. Also, while I was working feverishly on the algorithm, Kathy and my wife had kept doing research. They found several more missing persons cases that matched Ron’s case. When I updated the algorithm with the new parameters and the new data, the results were remarkable. The algorithm predicted where the next disappearance would most likely happen: a shopping center adjacent to a rest stop about forty miles west of our town. The next disappearance would happen the following morning.
We knew it would be no use taking this to the police. We were on our own. Kathy declared she was going right over to the shopping center by the rest stop, and was going to sit there waiting for the hitchhiker to appear. We told her that was a terrible idea. We knew how desperately Kathy wanted to find her husband. But none of us knew anything about the hitchhiker. The hitchhiker could be dangerous. The hitchhiker could be armed, or working with accomplices.
Let me be clear about something at this point. My wife and I were only concerned for Kathy and Ron, not for ourselves. We had no idea what we were doing could expose our two sons to any sort of danger. We were just worried something might happen to Kathy if she went solo to confront the hitchhiker. We did not know that already we were exposing our own family to a malignance and that a hazard now lay on our own road, just beyond the beam of our headlights.
Kathy ended up disappearing. She did not come home by noon the following day like we had agreed, but my wife and I were already becoming alarmed much earlier than that. Before Kathy left, she agreed to let my wife put a location tracker on her phone. I had the same location tracker on my phone. I made sure my battery was full. I told Kathy to hide my phone in her sock so there was a backup tracker. Just a few hours after Kathy left us, both phones went dark. My wife could get neither one to show up on her tracking app.
According to the data sent from both phones, Kathy made it to the parking lot and then remained there, not changing location, for just over an hour. At about the one hour point, the data showed Kathy was on the move again. Her pace indicated she was walking north across the parking lot to the side where there was just a grassy area and no buildings. Kathy’s movement then halted for about a full minute. After that, we lost contact with both phones.
We texted and called Kathy repeatedly after that until it was time for us to get the boys ready for school. We dropped the boys off early at a fast-food place a couple of blocks from their high school and told them to wait there until school started. Then we sped over to where we knew Kathy had last been.
There was no sign of Kathy or her car, just cracked pavement, lamp posts, and a few tiny trees that wouldn’t give any real shade for another decade.. My wife started to cry. It was a panicky, hyper-ventilating cry. She only cried like this one other time in all the years I have known her. It was back when she was pregnant with our eldest and a cop had pulled us over. He stood at my open passenger side window and bellowed across me at my wife for not slowing down enough when she had passed him on the road. As soon as the cop stomped back to his car in a huff, my wife started having a panic attack. It was that kind of crying I was hearing from her right there in the parking lot. I started to get scared. That was the first time during all this I started to get really, really scared.
I told my wife to please drive very slowly along the edge of the parking lot, opposite the stores, that bordered what was basically just a waste space. I was vaguely hoping to spot some hint of what happened to Kathy among the wild plants and weeds that grew freely in that untended no-man’s land that you find at the edge of parking lots all over this country. As we did so, a few more cars and trucks pulled up closer to the store fronts. Each time, a single passenger would get out, give us a brief, furtive glance, then turn their backs and walk into one of the stores. After a few minutes of this, I realized how idiotic I was being. I had no idea what I was looking for or even how to look. This wasn’t raw data on a computer screen that would eventually yield to my will. This was the inhospitable pavement under our tires, the utter indifference of the people walking by, as blind to my plight as the birds in the branches of the tiny, wilted trees. All the secrets that mattered had sunk out of sight. Something in this world was swallowing people up, and all it was giving me for clues was the worthless, barren hiss of traffic. So we called the police.
We were on the phone for a while, parked on that fringe of the paved world, trying to explain to the dispatch officer exactly what we were calling about. The dispatch officer told us to come in and meet with the missing persons detective who had just been assigned Ron’s case that morning. We drove straight over to the station.
The rest of that day didn’t go well, at all. The detective sat at a table across from us in a small room, and I went into detail about all about the research we had done, and about how Kathy had now also disappeared. The detective asked that we leave the laptops with him, along with their passwords. This stopped me cold. I remember stammering out a question as to why he needed the physical machines when I could just send him the data? My wife asked the same question. It was like all of a sudden we both finally understood the words of a song we’d been dancing to, and they weren’t at all what we thought they were. From that point on, we were extracting ourselves from an interview that was turning out to be an interrogation.
When we got home that night we were beyond exhausted. My wife and I were flabbergasted by the whole experience at the police station. My wife was in a complete rage at that point, actually. My usually unflappable spouse was venting absolute, pure fury at the police. She typically never cast aspersions at anyone, but that night I heard her say awful things about the police, their motives, and their overall competence. This was coming from someone who was raised to respect the police, and had taught her boys to do likewise. This was another example of many very jarring transitions I would witness in my wife over the following weeks.
After that, we left things in the hands of the police, and hoped they were making progress with the case in directions that did not lead to us. But our hopes were in vain. The police were not looking for Kathy. There was no missing persons report for her. We were considered the main suspects in Ron’s disappearance.
So, that is what came out of nowhere to consume our lives.
I returned to work. It felt like being under a dark cloud. My coworkers were less affable. I found out that I was not being asked to meetings I was usually included in.
The missing persons detective made contact with my wife and I weekly. We knew this was a bad sign. Usually in the case of missing persons, friends and family of victims have to go to great lengths to get any feedback from the police. But the detective on Ron’s case showed up at our house and he showed up at our jobs. He was always very friendly, and acted like these visits were just him doing us a favor and keeping us in the loop. But we knew this is absolutely not how the police spend their time. The detective would never give us any actual information on the case during these visits. He would just deflect our questions and continue asking his own questions about our whereabouts, our acquaintances, and our activities. If we had any lingering doubts about the detective’s motives, they all evaporated the day police officers came to our sons’ school and pulled them both out of class for questioning. That is when we got a lawyer. She cautioned us to do nothing further regarding Ron or Kathy’s disappearances. We could not give the police any excuse to arrest us for impeding the investigation.
A week after that, the raid happened. Several officers in body armor showed up at our house with a search warrant. Me, my wife, and my two very confused boys had to sit on our screened-in back porch for a couple of hours while our house was searched. The police took all of our computers, tablets, and cell phones.
And through all this drama, of course, there was still no sign of Kathy or Ron.
About a week after the raid, I was called into my manager’s office. When I saw the lady from HR hovering in the corner, I knew this meeting was not going to end well. Apparently my company had already been subpoenaed for any records I had ever touched. Also, a number of my colleagues had been questioned by the police. My company was not happy about any of this, so HR unearthed a google search I had done on missing persons cases. Unfortunately, I did the search on a company computer and on company time. That was all the grounds for dismissal they needed. Five minutes later I was carrying a box of my stuff and was being walked to the elevator lobby by the HR lady.
My wife was beyond furious at me when she got home and I told her the news. All the stress and worry of the past several weeks finally welled up and exploded out of her in my direction when I told her I had lost my job. My wife said things to me someone typically only says to a person after a long period of secretly harboring a lot of malevolence against them. I slept on the couch that night.
When I woke up late the next morning, my wife was still home, despite it being a work day. She was sitting at the dining table, silent and slumped, arms crossed. Her work had called early that morning and fired her. Apparently, the police had been paying visits to her office as well. Not only did her work fire her, they had a court order barring my wife from coming near their building.
My wife fell into a deep depression. She took some of the little severance money we had left and used it to buy another laptop. She spent all day in our room with the door shut, watching online videos, mostly social media personalities prattling on about this or that banal drivel. My wife never had any interest in social media before, but now she was not even using headphones.
The boys were affected by this. Word had spread around the school that something very wrong was going on at our house. I can’t begin to know the destructive effect this had on their secret teenage lives, but I knew this made both boys vulnerable to the things that plague teenagers when there are troubles at home. My daily life devolved into a running battle against those threats. I drove the boys everywhere so I knew exactly where they were and who they were hanging out with. I fought with them to keep up with their school work. I made them sit for evening meals. I enforced curfews. Meanwhile, the whole time, I was waiting for a knock on the door from the police.
A nameless but growing threat was encircling our lives, as unseen and as deadly as car exhaust.