But trust without verification is just a door you leave unlocked, and there are people in this world who spend their whole lives walking down streets, trying the handles, waiting for the one that opens.

Ask the questions.

Photograph the papers.

Track your own files.

Sometimes a single question, asked at the right moment, is the whole distance between burying a lie and finding your child alive.

I want to say one more thing about that, carefully, because it is the closest thing to a message this whole ordeal left me with, and it is easy to hear it wrong.

When I tell grieving families to ask questions, to photograph the papers, to track their own files, some of them look at me as though I am telling them to become suspicious and cold, to trust no one, to move through the worst day of their lives clutching their documents and doubting every helping hand.