Content Warnings: Mentions of human trafficking, child neglect, divorce, alcoholism, smoking, bad pop music.

I opened my eyes, smelling the cigar smoke in the air, seeing the dark room. I rolled over on my cheap, lumpy twin bed. I haven’t been getting much sleep recently. 

As I rubbed my watering orbs and forced myself to wake, I found myself staring at the all-too familiar cork board on my far wall. 

With a grimace, I forced myself up out of bed, and into the bathroom. I pulled my long blonde hair into a messy bun, and poked at the dark bags underneath my beautiful blue orbs. It wasn’t like me to get absorbed in cases like this. Not to this extent, anyway. 

My ex wife had always told me I was too intense, that I took the job too seriously. But when you’re a detective like I am, it’s not like the stakes aren’t high. I have a job to do; every day is a race against time to save lives. From gruesome murders to million-dollar heists, every second meant life or death. Wilma just didn’t understand that. 

With a sigh, I briefly stopped into the kitchenette of my dingy, bachelor apartment to pour myself a cup of cold, stale coffee. I’d brewed a pot while pouring over case files the night before, but fell asleep before I could finish it. I took a sip as I returned to the cork board. It tasted like ass. 

As I relit my cigar and took a deep puff, I scanned the corkboard. I had been working tirelessly to solve this care, spending night after night trying to find some piece of  the puzzle I had missed. 

The cork board before me was covered in the photos of missing girls, their images connected across the board to various newspaper clippings and hastily scrawled notes with red string. Every teen girl was from a different town, but they all had something in common: their parents had all been financially struggling before the disappearances, but had quickly come into large sums of money. Enough and more to cover the debts from the nasty drug habits common among the parents. 

This wasn’t too unreasonable in trafficking cases. After all, desperation makes people do bad things, especially when those people are neglectful parents. But one detail of the cases kept nagging at me. One tiny detail that told me that there was more to these cases than I had thought. One detail that every single one of these disappearances shared.

 I narrowed at the one photograph in the middle of the chaos.

In every town, the night of each and every disappearance… One Direction had a concert.