A boy has disappeared from his school. Heloise Kaldan heads over there to look into it. At the schoolyard she runs into her close friend Erik Schafer, the outspoken investigator on this case. The boy, Lukas, doesn’t show up, but his phone does. It reveals that Lukas is obsessed with pareidolia: the psychological phenomenon that makes us see faces in random things. One particular photo of a barn door that looks like a face catches their attention. Is this where Lukas is?

Heloise is ordered to drop her current article, a controversial investigation into soldiers with PTSD, to cover the story of the missing boy. But when things that point to the traumatized soldiers appear in Lukas’ case, Schafer will need Heloise’s help making heads or tails of this enormous jumble of clues: Who is this Apple Man that the school children are talking about? Does Lukas’ mother have a problem, or is she just soothing her anxiety with a cognac?