Look around on your laptop, do a search using the advanced options and set the date range to seach for to a few days or so on either side of the day you think you saw it.

Don't know what camera you have, but mine has an internal memory and an SD card, I can pick which place to store things to, so it might be in your camera, I would look there first, then your portable.

The bad news is that if you did not use remove or eject to pull the card out of your portable it might had corrupted it and wiped it out.

Hope you find it, but look in the camera in could be there, I had a friend with that issue, he has his setting to store in camera and his SD card was always empty, I found his missing photo's in the camera and it had a menu for transtering them from the camera to the SD card or using the USB to copy them to the computer. I changed the setting in his to always store to the SD, he is not a computer type of guy.