The city’s horizon was alight with a bloody sunrise. Gage couldn’t take his eyes off it, no matter how hard he tried to focus on the stack of papers on his desk. He usually wasn’t in the office this early, but he couldn’t sleep the night before. He kept waking up from nightmares and immediately forgetting what they were about. The darkness of his own bedroom and the loneliness of his empty house were too creepy for him. At least here, in the shared office space where he pimped himself out as a private investigator, he could hear his downstairs neighbors, a dental office, begin to turn on their buzzing equipment and loud televisions. It simultaneously annoyed him and somehow made him feel a little less alone.

 

Ding. The bell above his door jingled, jolting him out of his gloomy thoughts. An older couple, with greying hair and immaculately dry-cleaned clothes, stepped through his door, their eyes darting anxiously around Gage’s office. “Can I help you?” Gage asked, straightening up a little in his chair. He usually didn’t get business this early in the day. These people must have been desperate.

 

“Um, yes, hello,” the older man said, removing his hat from his head and holding it to his chest. He fidgeted with the brim of his hat awkwardly, staring at Gage rather than saying anything coherent.

 

“Uh, why don’t you go ahead and have a seat?” Gage said, gesturing to the two chairs in front his desk. The couple looked at each other, and Gage had a feeling they were silently debating whether to stay or go, but after a few seconds, the woman stepped forward and sat down, gripping her purse so tightly in her hands that her knuckles shone white through her skin.

They were quiet a minute, both staring down at their laps rather than meeting Gage’s eyes. An experienced investigator might have thought they were behaving strangely, like some aliens that couldn’t speak the language or something like that. But Gage had been around enough tragedy during his time on the job that he able to tell when someone was carrying a heavy weight around in their heart. Something was wrong. Very wrong. These people needed help.

 

“Who do I need to find for you?” Gage asked, cutting through the bullshit niceties to get right to the point.

 

His bluntness obviously surprised the man, who finally looked up and met Gage’s gaze directly. The older man had heavy-lidded, sad eyes—eyes that had clearly seen too much for one lifetime. Gage had a way with people. He could sense things like this. You sort of had to if you were going to be in this line of work. The most important questions never get answered verbally. That’s what Gage always used to say to his ex-girlfriend, Fiona, anyway. People don’t ever just say what you need them to say, Gage thought. You have to read them. The most crucial answers come during moments of silence. And this silence spoke volumes. Gage could practically smell the grief wafting off of their bodies.

The woman slowly began to unzip her purse, the sound of it loud and harsh in the solemn quiet of the office. A second later, she pulled out a long, thin photograph, something that had probably just been taken out of its frame for this purpose. The woman stared down at it for a second, the shadow of a smile playing across her lips before falling away. A moment later, she handed the photograph across the desk to Gage, who took it between his fingertips, handling it with care.

The photograph depicted a happy, smiling teenage girl with bright green eyes and a birthmark the size of a quarter right in the middle of her left cheek. In the picture, she was on a swing, her hair caught in the wind, her legs stuck out in front of her, ready to swing back at any moment.

Every time Gage took a case like this, it was like another tiny little shard of glass was shoved carefully into his heart, strategically placed where it would cause the most pain without stopping the flow of blood. At least, that’s what it felt like. But it didn’t matter. He knew he was taking this case. He knew where it was going already, even if it was important for the parents to explain it, to have their voices heard.

“It’s our daughter,” the man said in a low, small voice. Gage could tell he was trying to keep his tone steady, to stay calm for his wife, who trembled in the seat next to him despite the heat of the office.

“What’s her name?” Gage asked, staring into the eyes of the girl in the photograph, trying to commit her image to memory.

“Victoria Greenwood,” the mother said, staring down at her own wrinkled hands. “But she goes by Tori nowadays.”

 

“When did you last see her?” Gage asked, placing the photograph down on the desk so that Tori’s mother could take it back if she needed to. Instead, the picture sat in the middle of the desk, untouched. Gage would put it in his files later, if the parents left it with him.

“Two days ago,” Mr. Greenwood replied.

Gage took a deep breath, preparing himself to give the canned response that was obligatory in this situation. “That’s not necessarily cause for alarm, Mr. Greenwood. Kids run off sometimes. Most often, 99.9% of the time, they come back. You might not need me here.”

“You don’t know Victoria,” Mrs. Greenwood said sharply. It was clear from her tone that Gage’s prepackaged speech had offended her. Hell, it would’ve offended Gage, too. He hated telling parents to calm down, but if he didn’t, people would accuse him of fanning the flames of hysteria every time a kid went missing.

“Tell me about her,” Gage replied, leaning back in his chair to get more comfortable.

Tori’s mother bit and sucked on her bottom lip, staring down at the floor as she gathered the right words into her head. “She’s…responsible. To a fault, even. She never misses a homework assignment, never late to anything, always does her chores.”

“Dream child, huh?” Gage asked, and Mrs. Greenwood nodded, smiling sadly.

“She said she was just going out for a study group at the nearby pizza parlor,” Tori’s father began, “but then she never come home. That night, I called the parlor and asked if she’d left to come back home, but they said she never got there.” He paused for a minute, his throat working visibly as he attempted to keep his voice under control.  “So…we knew something was wrong right away. And then...in her room, I found…I found this,” Mr. Greenwood said, taking a small slip of paper out of his pocket and pushing it across the desk to Gage.

It was a normal slip of plain, white paper, the kind that Gage used to print off documents for his cases. But in the center of it, done in pencil, was a crudely-drawn knife with small little droplets of blood drawn coming off of the sharp tip. Below the knife and the line of blood was a heart, lopsided and full of thick veins. This was his signal—The Knife.

“Have you shown this to the police?” Gage asked.

Mrs. Greenwood shook her head. “They think she’s run away and staged this to make it look like she was kidnapped. Why…why would she do that? She would never do that to us. I know my daughter. I know my daughter, and she just wouldn’t,” she rambled, sighing deeply as her words ran out.

“I understand,” Gage said, attempting to make his tone as soothing as possible. “Look, I’m going to be upfront with you.”

“Oh, boy, here it comes,” Mrs. Greenwood said. “Is this the part where you tell me that my daughter just ran off for no reason?”

Gage shook his head sadly. “No, it’s the part I tell you she didn’t. I’ve been…following this case in my spare time. The Knife, that is,” Gage said, noticing that Mr. Greenwood flinched when he spoke the name of the serial killer that had been terrorizing the city over the past year. “This is his M.O. Each month, he targets girls from different parts of the city, making it hard to guess where he’ll strike next, and then he…Well, I guess you know the rest.”

The Greenwoods looked at each other for a second, their shoulders slouched down like they were carrying the weight of the world itself. “Will you find her?” Mrs. Greenwood whispered, a pitiful mixture of desperation and hope blended together in her voice and the expression on her face.

Gage sighed, staring across at their distraught faces. It was so tempting to just offer them a lie, wrapped up tight with a nice, neat, little bow. That would be so much easier than the alternative. But he chose the tough path, anyway. That was kind of how Gage operated in most circumstances. “I’m not going to sit here and give you empty promises. It’s not guaranteed. This guy has killed over twelve young women already, and if I don’t find him…that’s what’s going to happen to your daughter.” Mrs. Greenwood flinched at that, her face crumpling a little as she fought to keep herself from crying.

“But,” Gage continued, “I will do everything in my power to find her, to get her back for you. I swear to you on that one. I’ll do everything I can.”

“Please, please,” Mrs. Greenwood said, her words coming out shakily in between little pants for air. “Please, please, find her. I’ll pay anything. Please.”

Gage shook his head. “Not necessary.”

“Please,” Mr. Greenwood said. “Money is no object here. We just…we need our daughter back. Please.”

Gage nodded. He knew he was the Greenwoods last and only hope, but he still didn’t want to give them false confidence. It was possible that their daughter was already dead, even if The Knife usually kept his captives for about a month, torturing them, before doing enough damage to kill them. The last girl he kidnapped hadn’t even been found yet, but thus far, there had been no survivors.

“What do you need from us?” Mrs. Greenwood asked, sniffling repeatedly, even though she had successfully suppressed her tears thus far.

“I’ll be stopping by your house later to look at your daughter’s room, get some insight into her habits and routines. If she has a diary, I’d like to see it.”

The Greenwoods shared a loaded look with each other, obviously a little hesitant about this latest request. The mother spoke first. “Um, I’m not sure…”

“I understand that you want to respect your daughter’s privacy, ma’am, but there are more important things at stake here,” Gage cut in before she could finish her thought. He was sometimes a little too blunt, a little rude with people. But he figured that was part of being a private investigator. If he wanted to be nice, he would’ve chosen another profession entirely. This one was about disappointing people, mostly finding the disappointing birth parents of stupidly hopeful adopted kids and providing proof of countless spousal infidelities. It wasn’t a cheerful job, but it was the only one he was suited for, really.

But Mrs. Greenwood just nodded rather than taking offense. “Okay. We’ll…we’ll give it to you as soon as we can. Maybe…maybe we should go ahead and get it, right, John? Stop wasting time?” She wiped at one of her eyes as she got to her feet.

Mr. Greenwood followed her, placing a hand on the bottom of her back. “We’ll be back later with the diary. Actually, I think she had more than one. I know she kept one on her computer,” he said.

“Bring both,” Gage instructed. “And….get some rest. I’ll take it from here.”

 The older couple exited the office as quietly as they’d entered it, their heads bowed like they were already in mourning. Maybe they really were. But it was up to Gage to make sure they didn’t have to grieve.