If they think she was killed almost immediately upon returning home, that might explain the swift response by Nicole and LE.
If a friend of mine, in that kind of marriage, was going to have the conversation that she was leaving him, and she told me about it...heck yes I’d sound the alarm early and often if she stopped texting me back! By noon that was almost 10 hours. And there’s no way most LE would wait 24 hours, especially with 2 kids involved. What they were really doing was responding to a welfare check, not a missing person (yet).