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drives. They were referred to as “the Beth Movies,” and there was, incredibly, no way to get them off the Internet.
    Kick scratched under Monster’s hairy chin and looked into his milky eyes. She didn’t care what the vet said: sometimes she could swear that dog could see her.
    “Hey, Monster,” she said. “Did you miss me?”

3
    THE LETTER FROM THE court went with the others, unopened, into a cardboard file box in Kick’s bedroom closet. The boxes took up half the closet now, three rows, four boxes high. Before she filed for emancipation at seventeen, the letters had come addressed to her mother. Kick hadn’t known anything about them. A few weeks after she moved into her apartment, the first letter showed up, addressed to Kathleen Lannigan, Kick’s legal name.
    She had opened that one.
    A man named Randall Albert Murphy was being prosecuted in Houston, the letter stated, for trading nearly three thousand child pornography photos and videos online. Sixty-seven of the images were of her.
    After that, Kick stopped opening the envelopes. She kept track of the numbers for a while, adding to the running tally every time one arrived. After five hundred, she stopped counting.
    Kick turned her back on her closet. Monster was staring blankly out the bedroom door, down the hall, with his head cocked.
    She went over and scratched him on the top of his skull as she studied the map.
    The Rand McNally pull-down classroom map of the United States hung from a bar mounted near the ceiling on the south wall of her bedroom. The map was as tall as she was, and wider than shecould reach. It had come out of a classroom in Wisconsin—at least, that’s what the people on eBay had said—and it had those cheery elementary school colors: lemon-yellow landmasses, tangerine-orange mountain ranges, cerulean-blue oceans and lakes. Florida was a little wrinkled, there was a tear near Delaware, and at some point in the map’s life someone had circled Death Valley with a black Sharpie.
    Kick had done much more damage since then. Pushpins marked the locations of kids who had been taken since Adam Rice had disappeared three weeks earlier. Oakland, Riverside, Chicago, Columbus, Richmond, Baltimore, San Antonio, and on and on. Red pushpins meant a stranger abduction; blue pushpins meant a runaway; white pushpins meant custodial interference. The system was imperfect. Runaways might leave out of free will but get abducted off the street. Custodial interference might result in the abductor parent panicking and harming or abandoning the child.
    Kick ran her fingers over the surface of the map, feeling the tiny holes where pushpins had pierced the map and then been removed. A hole meant a kid had been found—dead or alive. The small perforations were hard to see with the naked eye, but under Kick’s fingers the map felt like it had been peppered with buckshot.
    Monster nudged her leg with his snout and Kick lowered her hand back to his head.
    Printouts of Adam Rice papered the wall around the map. They’d released two Missing Child posters, and Kick had found several more pictures of him online. She had Google Street View images of the apartment building where he was taken, and a street map of the area with Post-it notes marking the locations of witnesses. Not that anyone had seen anything particularly useful. Adam’s mother had been inside her first-floor apartment, twenty feet from the yard he was playing in. A utility worker installing new cable line at the corner had seen Adam still in the yard. A neighbor had seen Adam as she left to run an errand. He was there. And then he wasn’t.
    Monster slipped away from under her hand and a moment laterdropped a ball at Kick’s feet. She picked it up and tossed it behind her through the bedroom door, down the hall, and Monster went loping after it.
    A newspaper photograph of Adam’s mother making a statement to the press a few days after his abduction was taped next to the Pacific Ocean. Her