Travis Kasperbauer gently ran his hand over the large, painful bump growing on his forehead. 
Holy shit, he thought. That guy really drilled me.

Travis was sitting on the curb at the corner of H. Street and Poplar, rubbing his head, trying to recall what had happened before he hit the pavement.
"The signs... He was ripping the signs off the light posts," Travis said to himself. "The signs with Laney’s picture on it. He didn’t want anybody to see them. He didn’t want anybody to go looking for her."

Travis stood up a little too fast and had to sit back down again. He took a few deep breaths, waited for his vision to stop spinning, and then stood up again, this time more slowly.
His head was throbbing––he was pretty sure that the hooded man had given him a concussion––but he tried to ignore it.

As he walked down H. Street he wondered how long he’d been unconscious and why nobody had tried to help him, or if anybody had seen him knocked out on the sidewalk in the first place. He checked the time on his phone. It was 5:57pm.
"So I’ve been out for..." he did the math in his head. "...about 20 minutes. I think. Shit. That guy could be anywhere by now."
Travis stopped walking, discouraged, and was about to turn around when he made eye contact with, of all people, Laney. Laney!

Not really Laney, though. Just her picture, the one that Travis painted last week.
The missing persons flyer lay wrinkled on the ground a few feet in front of him. He walked over to it and picked it up, noticing the rip in the paper where it had once been stapled to a light post.

Travis immediately started walking again. One might even say he was speed walking, which was quite impressive, considering his recent head trauma. And although he didn’t know where he was going exactly, he had a feeling that he was headed in the right direction. (It did occur to him that that feeling may just have been his own wishful thinking, but he continued nonetheless.)
He walked past the post office, the bus stop, the Forever 21 that he went into for the first time earlier that day. As he walked, he noticed that the shoe store down the street had a surprising number of customers, even for the week before Christmas, and that one man entering the store was, oddly enough, missing his left shoe.
Just like Missy, Travis thought. 

Speaking of shoes, specifically those for the left foot, lying in the field behind the old sawmill theater was none other than a little pink left shoe. Seeing as the color pink does not particularly blend in with the color of grass, it actually caught Travis’ attention, despite the fact that he was thoroughly distracted by the thought of Missy and by the throbbing pain on his forehead.

Approaching the shoe, he concluded that, yes, that was definitely the right size shoe for a seven-year-old girl, and that, no, that could not have possibly been just a coincidence.

Travis picked up the shoe and examined it. He didn’t know what he expected to discover, so he wasn’t too disappointed when he discovered nothing.

That’s when he heard it, the sound of a little girl crying, or, more accurately, whimpering.
Travis tightened his grip on the little shoe, almost as though he was afraid someone would take it, take the only real substantial clue he had.

He couldn’t pinpoint the origin of the whimper until he heard another sound coming from the same place.

A few yards away, the door of a small shed opened, and the same hooded man Travis encountered earlier stepped out. He had the same black messenger bag hanging over his shoulder, and the same gray sweatshirt with thumb holes in the sleeves. The only thing that was different about him was that, this time, he wasn’t wearing a hood.