Hol­ly Gib­ney meets ear­ly with Pen­ny Dahl, a dis­tressed moth­er seek­ing her miss­ing daugh­ter, Bon­nie Rae Dahl, at the Fourth Street munic­i­pal park­ing lot. Before their meet­ing, Hol­ly observes a Vol­vo plas­tered with images of Bon­nie and miss­ing per­son notices. Hol­ly, draw­ing par­al­lels between Pen­ny’s voice and her late moth­er’s, expect­ed Bon­nie to be younger but finds the actu­al pho­tos show a woman in her mid-twen­ties with a vibrant and care­free appear­ance.

Inside the Fred­er­ick Build­ing, Pen­ny, appear­ing unkempt and focused sole­ly on find­ing her daugh­ter, dis­cuss­es Bon­nie’s dis­ap­pear­ance with Hol­ly. She pro­vides pho­tos and men­tions a secu­ri­ty video from a Jet Mart, which Detec­tive Jaynes shared with her, show­ing Bon­nie’s last known loca­tion. They watch the video, cap­tur­ing Bon­nie’s mun­dane final moments before van­ish­ing. Pen­ny shares her frus­tra­tion with the police’s lack of progress in find­ing Bon­nie, empha­siz­ing a mys­te­ri­ous note found with Bon­nie’s aban­doned bike that sug­gests she had “had enough,” though Pen­ny vehe­ment­ly denies her daugh­ter would harm her­self.

The chap­ter dives deep into Hol­ly’s inves­ti­ga­tion as she begins to unrav­el the con­text of Bon­nie’s life: her job at Reynolds Library, her rela­tion­ships, and her last inter­ac­tions. Insights into Hol­ly’s method­i­cal approach to the case are pro­vid­ed, reveal­ing her ded­i­ca­tion to uncov­er­ing the truth amid her com­plex feel­ings of grief and respon­si­bil­i­ty. The chap­ter ends with Pen­ny reluc­tant­ly dis­cussing a heat­ed argu­ment she had with Bon­nie over her for­mer boyfriend, Tom Hig­gins, hint­ing at deep­er issues beneath the sur­face.

This encounter sets the stage for a lay­ered inves­ti­ga­tion, intro­duc­ing var­i­ous char­ac­ters and poten­tial leads while show­cas­ing Hol­ly’s empa­thy and deter­mi­na­tion. It under­lines the emo­tion­al toll of a miss­ing loved one and the des­per­ate search for answers against a back­drop of per­son­al and soci­etal chal­lenges.