Read Gone The Next for Free Online

an hour without telling the viewer anything new. Looping the same video over and over. There’s something salacious about it. It seems to be more about entertainment — and ratings — than about offering information that may somehow help solve the case.
    Something else bothers me, too. The cases that receive mega-airtime almost exclusively involve a white victim. An upper middle-class white victim. An attractive, upper middle-class white victim. I’m not sure if that says something about the value we place on various members of society, but I hope not.
    Regardless, for whatever reason, Tracy Turner quickly became one of those high-profile cases. When I got home and turned on the TV, there she was on the screen, hair in pigtails, and I could feel a hole open up in my chest. The news anchor was talking to an expert who was delivering statistics that I knew, unfortunately, by heart.
    Roughly 800,000 children are reported missing in the United States every year. Two thousand every day . Many of them are runaways, some are abducted (usually by a family member), and some are lost or injured.
    Child abductions leading to murder are relatively rare. One hundred cases a year. Most are “average” kids leading “normal” lives with “typical” families. Three quarters of the victims are female. Eighty percent of the time, the initial contact between victim and killer takes place within a quarter-mile of the child’s home.
    The average abductor-killer is twenty-seven years old, unmarried, and has at least one prior arrest for a violent crime. He lives alone or with his parents. He’s unemployed or working in an unskilled or semi-skilled occupation. He’s what cops and psychologists and criminal profilers call a “social marginal.”
    When a child goes missing — listen up, mom and dad; listen up, small-town deputy who thinks the kid might’ve just wandered off — you’d better get your ass in gear, regardless of what the statistics say. More than three quarters of children who are abducted and murdered are dead within the first three hours. Yes, the odds are overwhelming that a missing kid won’t be killed, but if he or she is in the hands of a killer, time is absolutely of the essence. Three hours. That’s how small the window is.
    Tracy Turner had been missing for 36 hours. When — okay, if — I had seen her this afternoon, she’d been missing for about 32 hours. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I had to hope that since she’d made it past the first three hours, that she’d make it for many more.

    Brian Pierce had a Facebook page.
    I’ll admit that I was a little surprised. A lot of lowlifes don’t bother with Facebook because they don’t have many friends to begin with, or because they aren’t social animals. They value their privacy. They don’t want to share anything with anybody. More often than not, they are hiders, not sharers.
    Even bigger surprise, Pierce had 359 friends. That’s a pretty big number. I couldn’t see his wall, so I wasn’t able to gauge how many of those were real friends versus online friends. If I could see some of his status updates and the resulting comments, I could learn a lot about him. But he had his privacy locked down fairly tight. Facebook users can still hide most of their content, despite gripes to the contrary.
    I couldn’t see Pierce’s photos, either, or even his friends list.
    What I sometimes do in this situation, in the course of an investigation, is send a friend request to the suspect. Not from my own account, of course, but from either “Linda Peterson” or “Robert Tyler.” They are fictitious identities that I had created in the past couple of years. Both of them have been online long enough to collect more than one hundred friends. Both of them are above average on the attractiveness scale, but their profile photos aren’t such ridiculous come-ons as to look like spam. Beyond that, both of them are average people with average tastes in music,