Last week, as America’s media class was consumed with every twist and turn in the Donald Trump impeachment hearings, a different sort of media frenzy was playing out in the U.K. Prince Andrew had just participated in a disastrous BBC Newsnight segment about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, which was widely seen to make the prince look even worse than he already did (a difficult feat). It was as if some insane plotline from a future final season of The Crown was being written in real time.

The scandal had largely faded from view over the past couple months, in the wake of Epstein’s jail-cell suicide on August 10, pushed aside by headlines, here and abroad, concerning the Trump-Ukraine inquiry and Britain’s looming general election. Then, in 49 awkward and uncomfortable minutes on November 16, Andrew’s BBC sit-down shoved it right back into the center of the news cycle. The interview also reignited one of the most bedeviling angles to date: Where on earth is Ghislaine Maxwell?

With Epstein dead and Andrew crawling back under a rock—the duke announced last week that he will “step back from public duties for the foreseeable future”—Maxwell has, in effect, become the primary person of interest in the entire sordid affair. It was the überconnected British heiress, after all, who introduced Epstein and Andrew in the first place, and Maxwell has her own sins to answer for: allegedly acting as the fixer who pressed Epstein’s underage masseuses into service. Her story is a potent mix of criminal intrigue and stratospheric social influence, and the mystery of where she has been since Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in July makes it all the more mouthwatering—along with the fact that, for the most part, Maxwell has proven incredibly adept at evading bloodthirsty journalists and federal investigators alike.

One does wonder exactly what the FBI knows about Maxwell’s involvement in Epstein’s sex trafficking web that the public does not, or whether investigators actually have spoken to her over the past few months, or if an indictment is or is not in the works, given Maxwell’s centrality to the whole thing. (Certainly someone in the federal law enforcement bureaucracy has to know where she is, right?) As Candace Trunzo, the executive editor of the DailyMail.com, put it, “She’s the one missing link, and everybody wants to hear from her.”

A BBC Panorama interview with accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose defamation lawsuit against Maxwell resulted in a trove of sensitive court documents being unsealed in August, is set to air on December 2. In the American media market, Maxwell came back under scrutiny in a big way last week when CBS This Morning spoke with another one of Epstein’s accusers, Maria Farmer, in her first TV interview. “All day long, I saw Ghislaine going to get the women,” Farmer told cohost Anthony Mason. “She went to places like Central Park. I was with her a couple of times in the car…She would say, ‘Stop the car.’ And she would dash out and get a child.” Farmer, who also shared her story in late August in a dramatic episode of The Daily, went on to allege that Maxwell had threatened her life: “She says, ‘You’re going out to jog on the West Side Highway every day, and I know this. You need to be very careful because there’s so many ways to die there. So you have to be really careful. Look over your shoulder.’”