In That Darkness, forensic specialist Maggie Gardiner investigates, among other things, the murder of a young girl found draped over a grave in Cleveland’s historic East Ninth Street Cemetery. It wounds Maggie to think that the young teen could go missing without anyone calling the cops, filing a report, or looking for her in any other way. Her fingerprints are not in the criminal database and Maggie discovers that there are precious few other ways to track down the identity of one lost girl.
One of the nets she can cast, however, is called NamUs—the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. It came into existence after 9/11 and is a national centralized repository of information, separated into three distinct databases :
