I spun on my heel and walked back into the bullpen.
"Alright, everyone listen up!" a few heads popped up from computer screens and then slowly gathered in front of me. I pulled a board on rollers over to the middle of the bullpen. The front side was a corkboard – the back side was a white board. I liked this approach because it kept everyone in the know. Communication was always one of the difficult things in a case, whether it be between a twenty-man team or a backwoods shop like this.
"If anyone doesn't know who I am, I'm Amanda Graves... You may know me as Amanda Parker. You may know what happened to me here five years ago. You may know my daughter died and my marriage fell apart. You may have known Jeremy Wilson..." I pinned a headshot of him up against the corkboard. "Frankly, I don't give a shit. Because none of that matters right now... There is only one thing that matters..." I flipped the board over to the whiteboard side and bit off an Expo marker cap. I wrote two words on the board in large capital letters.
The Trail
"The trail is all we care about. To visualize the trail we must build our timeline." I began drawing a long horizontal line across the board. I then sectioned off three segments of the line and drew a star over a line dividing the line in half. "When did we determine that Jeremy went missing?"
I aimed the question at the Sheriff. "A smashed clock at the crime scene read 9:17"
"AM or PM?"
"PM... he was seen at work that morning."
"Okay then..." I walked up to a large black digital clock hanging on the wall. I typed in a number after doing some quick math in my head. "He disappeared on Tuesday so he has been gone for 36 hours and 27 minutes." The clock illuminated in bright red numbers 35 hours 33 minutes. With a click of a button it began counting down. "The vast majority of people who go missing and do not turn up in 72 hours either never turn up or turn up dead. Ladies and gentlemen this the Jeremy clock. This clock is ticking away Jeremy's life. We do not find him before time runs out, may God have mercy on his soul..." I returned to the board. "The disappearance is the point of reference. We need to know everything that led up to it if we are going to figure out what happened after that point. I want you all thinking in these terms. Got it!"
Tired nods responded with as much enthusiasm as they could muster.
"We need to set up a hotline for anyone in the town that might have any information for us. Donna, please set that up."
"How do we get the word out?" she asked.
"Tell five people walking down main... it's a small town, honey, word will travel fast." I sized up a couple of doughnut cops in the bullpen and issued the next directive to them. "We need to find the phone. Figure out what provider he had and call them. They can run a trace on the phone to determine either where it is or where it was last pinged by phone tower before it's battery ran out."
There was a row of nods of cops, puffing out their chest to the call of duty.
"Sheriff Rogers, you are going to manage the board... collect anything and everything from the investigation to date. If you think its relevant put it up on the board," he offered a low mhmm. "I also need you to call Mayor Hughes and set up a Town Hall meeting for tomorrow night. We have to manage the town at this point in the game, your residents are really going to start getting worried. We need to turn them to be our assets and help. We can't let this disappearance exist only through the rumor mill. It's real and we need to mobilize the town." I surveyed the room for disagreement and found none. So, I patted Peters on the shoulders.
"You're the lucky one who gets to come with me."
"Where?" Peters asked. I slapped the central point on the timeline.
"To the crime scene."
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