Ties in mention of involving other states in leads - sounds like LE believe whoever has her is on the move.
I wonder if the perp is someone she befriended as a student nurse...
*IF* she was already doing patient care, this is a possibility. In my first semester, I was proposed to twice. In my last semester, I had a patient so fixated on me that he would not let the Drs see him until I was in the room with him; and the day he was discharged, he came by the school looking for me (security informed me...). I also had another proposal from a patient in my last semester, too, and he was quite serious...showed me his bank account book to *prove* he could "afford me". LOL. In between those two semesters, there were girls followed after school by former patients (usually from third semester, when we worked in the psych floors), and so on.
It's hard, as a student nurse, to know how exactly to deal with this stuff. Thankfully, our hospital badges did not have our last names on them, but that's because of some problems in times past at our school. I don't know if it's that common, honestly, to take off the last names from student badges; and the 'regular' nurses have their last names (but most cover them with wound tape...LOL...).
It is not a stretch to imagine that she was identified by a patient as someone who was an easy target - my school hours had me leaving my house at 6 am, coming home between 6-7 pm, and during the fall/winter, that meant I was leaving in full dark and returning in full dark.
So, all this is to say that it's not at all impossible to think that this was a patient who decided to poke around; in a small community, I am positive it's easy to identify someone like her, with a relatively unusual last name...shoot, we do it all the time here - get the address from public records.
Dunno if that's what happened, but it's definitely a possiblity.
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Herding Cats