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Rathdrum, Idaho

I t’s lunchtime and Steve Goncalves is exactly where he likes to be on football Sundays: In his living room in front of the TV watching the Seahawks game, surrounded by his noisy family.

He moved to Rathdrum, Idaho, because he wanted to make life easier for his wife, Kristi. The cost of living was cheaper; the state was safer than California.

He wanted her to quit her job as an accountant at Chevron and be a full-time mom if she wanted to. She didn’t—because that’s Kristi for you. Independent, strong, a great role model. She’d decided to become a teacher.

Steve’s a proud girl dad. Four of his five kids are daughters. But they all love football. Their cousin Bryce is hoping to get recruited by a college team.

An extra bonus today is that his eldest daughter, Alivea, will soon be home for Thanksgiving. She lives in LA, where her husband, Robbie Stevenson, works in postproduction on the series Ted Lasso .

But that morning there was a scare. Steve just discovered he has Ramsay Hunt syndrome, an inflammation of the facial nerve caused by the chicken pox virus.

Alivea is twenty-two weeks pregnant with her third child, and Steve is worried about possibly being contagious, so he and Kristi are on and off the phone to Alivea, figuring out if it’s safe for her to visit.

So when they call Alivea yet again, she doesn’t sound surprised to hear from them. But then Kristi says, “I think something’s happened to Kaylee.”

They were not expecting Kaylee back from Moscow until Tuesday; she had gone to show Maddie her new Range Rover and hang out with her friends.

But Kaylee’s younger sisters, Autumn and Aubrie, have been getting strange calls from Kaylee’s friends about police being at King Road.

Something weird is happening there. An unconscious person.

Then there’s a Vandal Alert about a homicide.

They try Kaylee. It goes to voicemail. They try Maddie.

It rings but no answer. They try Jack. No answer.

But they start to see photographs of the King Road house coming online. It’s surrounded by police tape.

The Goncalveses are flummoxed. Where are the police?

Why hasn’t anyone said anything to them?

Alivea phones Maddie’s mom, Karen Laramie, to ask if she’s heard anything.

Karen says she’s already on her way to Moscow.

She, too, has received alarming messages, but nothing from the police.

She promises she’s going to bring both girls home.

But Karen doesn’t get to the King Road house. The police reach her when she’s almost to Moscow and tell her to go to the police station.

The Goncalveses, meanwhile, are sitting, waiting, hoping, praying that Kaylee and Maddie are okay.

It’s another few hours—between four and five p.m.—before the police show up on their doorstep to deliver the shocking news that Kaylee is dead and so are Maddie and two others.

When Steve and Kristi ask how and why, the officers have no answer.

After they leave, Steve heads upstairs to the bedroom he shares with Kristi. He shuts the door and weeps. Tears of shame as well as grief. He’s the family protector. He moved here to Idaho to keep his family safe. And he couldn’t protect Kaylee and Maddie.

When Kristi tells her the news, Alivea goes numb. And then she takes control of the things she can.

She tells Robbie they need to get into the car with their two kids and drive through the night—twenty hours—to get to Rathdrum and her parents.

She doesn’t want to fly because she doesn’t want to be trapped with strangers in an airport. She wants to work while Robbie drives. She wants to talk to whoever Kaylee talked to in her last hours alive.

In the passenger seat, she goes into detective mode. Kaylee is on their mother’s cell phone plan, and Alivea knows how to pull up her sister’s phone log online to see who Kaylee called and who called Kaylee. She phones the people her sister spoke to. And she follows every lead she can find.

By the time she and Robbie pull up in Rathdrum, late afternoon the next day, Alivea already knows a few things:

Kaylee was at the Corner Club just after one in the morning.

Kaylee called a rideshare driver from the Grub Truck at 1:50 a.m. and she got into the car with a friend. Alivea knows this because she reached the rideshare driver via text message.

She knows that the friend was Maddie, because she was told by the driver that the Grub Truck had a camera on the roof and was live streaming, so she pulled up the video on Twitch and saw Maddie and Kaylee waiting in line.

She knows the two arrived home safely at 1:57 a.m. because she tracked down a neighbor’s Ring camera footage.

And she knows that Kaylee’s last call that night was to Jack.

Alivea tells her parents she’s certain that Kaylee’s murderer wasn’t someone known to her. Alivea never met Xana and Ethan, but from Kaylee, she knew enough about them, their life, and their friends. She is certain that no one in their group would have done this.

She tells her father that she feels in her gut that whoever did this was a stranger.

The mystery is why.

When he looks back on Alivea’s quick thinking, Steve can’t help but be impressed by his eldest daughter.

He’s always been sad that, with her smarts, she didn’t go to law school after college; she’d chosen instead to go to Los Angeles with Robbie so he could pursue a career in film and entertainment.

Alivea is fiercely intelligent—she scored 1300 on the SAT—and, like her parents, she never takes no for an answer. Not from anyone. Kaylee was the same way.

Here she is, pregnant, having driven with her husband through the night, two little ones in the back seat, on a mission to find answers.

Steve makes himself a promise: He will not rest until whoever did this is brought to justice. That is what Kaylee would want. That is what Kaylee would expect.

And Steve will not let the Goncalves women down.