The whole thing was just a pain. It was getting late on a Friday night and I had given up on action in the streets. I just wanted to finish my work, kiss the editors goodbye and head home for the weekend.

The switchboard operator hailed me over. This is one of those switchboard operators who knows as much or more about what’s going on in the world than most of the reporters paid to monitor such things. A switchboard operator I would gladly pay half my salary if she would agree to become my personal assistant.

A switchboard operator doing her best to keep me there late on a Friday night when I only wanted to bolt.

At issue was a missing person, a woman who had vanished a few days before and who had left no clues to her whereabouts.

“You really should look into this one,” said Girl Friday, eliciting from me a heavy reporter sigh that indicates long suffering.

I get several reports of missing persons each month, you know. So many people go missing, it’s a wonder that the downtown streets don’t echo with emptiness and that tumbleweed doesn’t blow down abandoned sidewalks.

Here is what generally happens. A frazzled woman will call to report that her 16-year-old daughter has vanished. Invariably, the missing girl is an honor student, a fine young lass, just the apple of her poor momma’s eye.

So I look into it, call the police, some friends of the missing and anybody else who might shed some light. Typically, I will learn that the 16-year-old saint is a frequent runaway who has fallen madly in love with a pizza boy and who is rebelling against her parent’s attempts to keep them apart.

With this new information, I will call back the frazzled mother and she will say: “Little Paris has returned home and is doing just fine. And anyway, this is none of your business, reporter man. Stop calling here.”

Missing people are almost never missing. They are hiding.

And I was about to relate this fact to the switchboard lady when I recalled a missing person case from just a few years back.

In that one, I was put upon by a very nice but very unsettled woman who told me her part-time boyfriend had been gone a week. It was later revealed that the part-time boyfriend was a notorious drinker who hoisted his cups mostly in the woods down by the river, in the company of others with a similar ardor for booze.

Sounded to me like the only thing missing was the man’s sobriety, which hadn’t been seen since the early 1990s.

But there is also a bitchy part of my brain that recalls that brushing things off in haste is often foolhardy. And so I checked into it, wrote a blurb about the missing man, appealed to the public for help.

And a week later, as I drove into Vermont on the year’s Halloween vacation, I got a call from a source. The missing man had been found, along with another, in a shallow grave next to the railroad tracks in the Lewiston outlands. A double homicide was at hand, foretold only in the small blurb I had written about the vanishing.

Dubious is the missing persons beat. Nine out of ten of them will prove to be rebellious teenagers, unhappy wives, deadbeats or bail jumpers.

That one out of ten, though, is a killer. Or a victim.

With this in mind, I did not ignore the switchboard operator and her appeal for a story on the missing lady. I went back to my desk and wrote 8 or 10 inches of copy detailing the disappearance of Donna Paradis, seven months pregnant with older kids at home. Wrote it, filed it, waited.

You try to avoid getting cynical, you really do. When you live in a state that sees fewer murders each year than an average-sized city, you don’t expect the worst very often. A woman goes missing, you still expect to learn she was found on a three-day bender at a motel in Kittery, the victim of crushing stress rather than anything sinister.

But that one out of 10 will remind us that monsters exist, and that not all missing persons chose to be that way.

We all know what happened to Donna. She was snatched by a man she thought was a friend. She was tied up, raped, strangled, left dead in the dirt with an unborn baby still inside her. She was the victim of a monster, now caged and locked away from the rest of us, but too late to do any good for Donna Paradis.

If you’ve ever fretted because your wife is late coming home from the office, or your kid coming home from the junior high dance, you know that gnawing unease. The logical part of you understands that the chances are good your wife only stopped to look at something gleaming in a store window. The kid probably got tempted by a friend with a Wii and lost track of time.

But the pessimist about you remembers that there are real fiends in the world and you can’t shake the thought that anyone can fall prey to that one in ten chance of random horror. It’s a special thing, that math, that serves as a fine ingredient for insomnia.

And so it is with me on the missing persons beat, where nine in 10 of the vanished will return home drunk, ashamed and embarrassed while one in ten will not.

Mark LaFlamme covers crime for the Sun Journal.