Blue studied the devastation on Cece's face and felt empathy well within her. The last time anyone had seen Lila Mills was around 8 a.m. when Cece watched her daughter walk around the corner at the end of the block to go to the bus stop.
At this point, the first-grader could be anywhere. Maybe she'd fought with her mother and decided to run away. Maybe she got scared by a person or an animal and found a place to hide. She could've taken a walk and simply gotten lost. Blue wasn't sure how far Lila could get on her own in the ten minutes between when she left her house under her mother's watchful eye and when the bus arrived.
The worst-case scenario, and the one they hadn't yet been able to rule out, was abduction. Lila had disappeared a little more than two hours ago. Statistically, a perpetrator with ill intentions would most likely molest and kill a kidnapped child within three hours.
Three. Hours.
It was a horrendous statistic to think about.
