On June 9, 2017, 26-year-old Yingying Zhang was a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, building a new life thousands of miles from her home in China. That afternoon, Yingying left campus to meet with a landlord about an apartment. She never arrived. Surveillance footage captured her waiting beside a road. Moments later, a dark-colored Saturn Astra pulled up. Yingying approached the vehicle, spoke briefly with the driver, and got inside. It was the last confirmed sighting of her. What followed was an urgent investigation spanning the University of Illinois campus, local law enforcement, federal authorities, and Yingying's family, who had traveled from China in the desperate hope of finding her. As investigators reconstructed her movements that afternoon, seemingly ordinary details became critical: a missed bus, a vehicle captured on surveillance, phone records, and a sequence of events that would gradually reveal just how little time had passed between Yingying's disappearance and the beginning of the search.