Previously on The Vanishing Years, while the media obsesses over the disappearance of Lydia Fairfax, a darker, quieter pattern was being ignored. Seven elderly women—poor, mostly Black, living alone—had vanished across the city, their cases barely earning a paragraph in the press. No outrage. No follow-ups. Just silence.
Detective Terrence Graham, a cop nearing retirement, confirmed what no one wanted to admit: the department didn’t care. These women had no headlines attached to their names. But he had uncovered one chilling connection: all of them had worked for the same biotech firm, Temex.
For the journalist chasing the story, that wasn’t just a lead. It was a bombshell.
**
I kept grinding away on the Lydia Fairfax disappearance, filing the predictable copy, chasing the predictable leads.
Roger appreciated it, and I’m sure our backers did, too. The clicks rolled in, and by the seventh day, we had a whole team chewing on the story.
It was the kind of case that fed itself, an heiress vanishing into thin air. National headlines, international too. CNN, Fox, and NBC all parachuted in, turning the city into a media circus.
On television, Lydia’s family played the part of the anguished innocents. But off-camera, they carried themselves with an odd indifference.
I caught her sometime-boyfriend, the aspiring actor Kai Monroe, for a brief phone interview. He answered questions like a man desperate to hang up.
I logged all of it, but my mind was elsewhere. I hadn’t told Roger yet, but I was digging harder into the other story, the one nobody cared about. The seven elderly women. Everyone of them worked at the Temex biotech plant. Each of them vanished inside the factory, late at night.
Terrence had gone dark, so I followed the digital crumbs myself. I started with Beatrice Harlan. Seventy-one. Widow. She lived alone in a cramped studio in Redgate, a neighborhood notorious for its gun violence. She’d only been on the Temex janitorial staff for six months before she vanished.
On a humid Friday afternoon, I stood outside her building, stopping neighbors as they came and went. Most brushed me off until I met Marquis, a polite thirty-something who introduced himself as a security guard at Temex.
“Yeah, I heard about Beatrice,” he said.
“What exactly did you hear?”
He hesitated, eyes darting. “Look, I need this job. I don’t want to lose it.” The sun was brutal on the cracked asphalt, and sweat rolled down both our faces. “But … that company is weird, man.”
“Weird how?”
“There are whole sections locked off, top-secret clearance stuff. I mean, I knew it was biotech, but I didn’t realize how deep the secrecy went until I started working there.”
His voice dropped. His eyes scanned the street again. I waited, let the silence stretch.
“But I can’t say much,” he finally muttered. “Because the truth is, I don’t know much. I’ve only been there a few months.”
He took my number, promised he’d call if he heard anything. I doubted he would, but it didn’t matter. He’d already confirmed my hunch, and that was enough. Back in my car, I checked my phone. A new text from Terrence. Just a link, no explanation.
It led to a Temex press release from earlier in the year. I skimmed the corporate boilerplate until a single line near the bottom froze me:
“Harrison Fairfax Sr. has joined a group of investors to inject $500 million into Temex, ushering in a new wave of longevity technology and bringing cutting-edge research to the wellness industry.”
I stared at the sentence, the name jumping out on the screen. Lydia Fairfax’s father.
To be continued …
God Is In The Radio 
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