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22. MEGHAN
Salt Lake Valley, Utah
6 months before
As strange as it sounds, I missed the mountains: my burial grounds.
I didn’t think twice about jumping into the front seat of Detective Domanska’s police cruiser. But as the rutted, narrow road finally spit us out onto a paved road with signs directing us toward Cedar Fort, I wished I had at least said goodbye to the raven. She wouldn’t have known. I knew that. I missed her anyway, though.
Grandma Rosie’s words echoed in my memory as we drove. I’ll be here when you’re ready. I wasn’t sure what I would learn at the police station, exactly, but I no longer felt a gnawing desperation.
I wanted to be found. I wanted to see him arrested—maybe he already had been? I wanted to say goodbye to my family—surely there would be a funeral now. And then I wanted to pass on.
* * *
Detective Domanska hadn’t drawn the short-straw to answer the Forest Service’s request to check out the suspicious shoe by the side of the road. I quickly learned that she was the detective assigned to my missing persons case—which was rapidly recategorized as a murder case. She’d been hoping to find me when she got the tip from the Forest Service.
She’d been looking for me for four months, ever since Sharesa had reported me missing the morning after my “date.”
I read the call transcripts in my missing persons report as Detective Domanska flipped back through her notes and records. Sharesa had been described as “hysterical.” I smiled. It faded when I read the transcript of my parents’ calls and interviews.
My mom’s first phone transcript was marked “unintelligible” every other line. They’d been on a rafting trip on the Salmon River in Idaho when it happened. Which meant that they hadn’t learned of my disappearance for a full five days. They’d been talking about that trip all year. My mom had gifted it to my dad for Christmas.
The waitress at Gracie’s had remembered me. She’d remembered Jimmy, too: how handsome he was, mainly. And the fact that we’d stayed until last call. She remembered me being off-my-face drunk as he helped me to the parking lot. “I thought they were a couple,” she’d said in her interview.
They’d found my phone in the parking lot. Which was the main reason—in addition to Sharesa’s hysteria—that they had escalated my search so quickly.
There were dozens of newspaper articles printed and filed among Detective Domanska’s notes. I read all of them. Each article used the recent headshots I’d taken when I got my last work promotion. I’d been so proud of those headshots. They looked like a professional, kickass modern woman who knew what life owed her. But in black-and-white, splashed across the front page of local papers, I had a hard time looking at them. I didn’t know her anymore. She looked naive instead of badass. Like she had no idea what was coming for her.
I learned that Jimmy Carlson was a ghost.
He’d never actually existed.
It didn’t matter that Sharesa knew his name. Or that she had provided Detective Domanska with a link to his—now defunct—profile on MatchStrike, which I’d sent her before the date to get her approval. He’d registered the account with a fake name, a fake email address—and a VPN. The best MatchStrike could do, even with his messages in my defunct account, was to confirm that his bogus account had been created a year earlier, on July 15th. The last time it had been accessed was the day I disappeared. He’d deleted the account soon after.
They did recover his profile photo—which was zoomed out far enough that it was hard to see a lot of detail, especially in the low-res web upload. I remembered the feeling of relief when I met him at Gracie’s: He wasn’t a Neanderthal. His photo didn’t do him justice. Not even a little bit. Usually it was the opposite situation with MatchStrike. But not Jimmy. Jimmy was handsome. I’d said as much to him on our date. He really needed a better photo. Secretly, I’d been thrilled by this. I’d found a diamond. So what if his photo skills were subpar? It was better than the up-close gym selfies on every other profile.
Domanska ran the photo through facial recognition software, but even enhanced, the photo was too low-res and zoomed out to deliver any matches.
My phone had been bagged as evidence. A partial print from his car—not mine—had been recovered. It wasn’t in the database. Detective Domanska’s file included my call logs going back six months, as well as transcripts of all my chats.
There was nothing from “Jimmy.” We’d only ever communicated through the MatchStrike app. The detectives had combed through those messages, which weren’t any more telling than his photo. When I re-read them I wondered how I’d ever found them so sparkling and charming. Now, they just sounded like the opening lines of a horror story.
* * *
During the day, I followed Detective Domanska around like a puppy. I wasn’t her only case. But, as a commenter in one article stated bluntly, I was a pretty white girl. And now that I’d been found, the missing persons case turned into a manhunt.
After some debate, Detective Domanska turned his photo over to the press, asking for anyone with information about his identity to come forward.
The next morning, his photo appeared next to mine in the articles. I learned from Detective Domanska’s reports, they received more than 500 tips by phone, email, and even the police department’s Facebook page that day. The tips continued to pour in the following day from a woman who had been out with a creep from MatchStrike who fit his description. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Tall. Handsome.
There were so many calls.
Some of the women were in tears on the phone. One woman in Wyoming had been assaulted on her date. Another had narrowly escaped.
I rode along on every follow-up that Detective Domanska made personally.
I didn’t expect to actually find him.
