Colby Jones was pacing up and down in the meeting room, waiting for everyone to gather up for a special meeting. He was breathing heavily, he gained weight and it was taking a toll on him. A few drops of sweat started to trickle down his forehead as the room was getting packed with police officers of Mofocity who were ready to be debriefed with a new case.
He scanned the room and saw pretty much every face he expected to be there, then he turned off the lights. He gave the signal to the operator to turn on the projector and shoot out a photo of Dorian White on the wall behind him.
“Dorian White … age 30, a nightcrawler and a bartender at The Dungeon … was reported missing today … allegedly, he’s been missing for two days now … no one had seen him since after the Jack Ash concert at The Dungeon … his girlfriend tried to contact him the next day ’cause he supposedly had a day off work but no answer … she went there to check on him but the door was locked and no one was answering her call … she asked the landlord to open the door and found the place still intact just as she left it with the subject on the afternoon before the concert, so the assumption is … he didn’t come home after the concert … he was supposed to show up at work today but he didn’t, so Miss Sadie Cook … the girlfriend and Mr. Jordan Cromwell, the employer, reported him as missing …” he paused, “Any question?”
Some of the officers were taking notes, others were just staring at the picture of Dorian and tried to dig into their memories whether they have ever seen his face or not. Colby signaled the operator to change the slide. Five pictures showed up on the wall including Dorian’s and Heta Lee Brown’s, two other young women, and one other young man.
“Any new leads in either of these cases?” CJ opened a question to the room. Everyone looked reluctant to answer. His eyes narrowed as they pierced through the faces of his main investigators. He knew he didn’t just have a bunch of unsolved missing person case in his hands, he had a room full of incompetent police officers who couldn’t help him solve them.
Finally, someone raised his hand slowly, he was the appointed officer to lead the investigation on the three earlier cases. “Our preliminary theory was these subjects must have run away into the woods … however from the CCTV monitoring for the past four months, there were no sightings of anyone to have crossed the fences … we have also searched abandoned buildings across town and didn’t find any trace of evidence suggesting these subjects were ever there.”
“Including the asylum?” CJ made sure of it.
“Well … no … no one in their right mind would go in there.”
“Well … you need to go in there and do yer search before tellin’ me that you’ve searched EVERY abandoned building across town!! Ye’ hear me??”
“But we need to get permission from three different places to …”
“Do you know how many people trespass that place every day??”
The room went silent.
“I don’t care what you need to do to get some answers ’round here … go do your job!!”
CJ signaled to the operator again and now the projector showed a wall full of faces in rows and columns.
“50 cases of missing people for the last 30 years and 40 of ’em occurred in the past year alone! These last five are people who interact regularly in the society and that’s why we’ve been receivin’ reports on ’em … while the rest are people who lived alone with no relatives and no social activities … the only way we had known about ’em bein’ missin’ was because we monitored them regularly and they were just not there when we checked on ’em …” CJ looked at the faces of his shameful officers.
“Now there are two possibilities that might occur if you asked me … ONE is that we are not doing a good job … and TWO … the worst of our fate is starting to happen … I would like to think that it’s number one … because with less than 3000 people currently living in this town, we cannot afford to have missin’ people at this rate … especially people at the age of 20 to 40 years of age as y’all can see on the board!!” CJ’s face turned red, his shirt was wet with sweat.
“I’m not fuckin’ kidding when I say this is a red alert matter!! You know the birth rate is getting low in this town, and I need to know what the goddamn hell happened to these people??”
Another officer raised his hand and posed a question, “What if it’s not a ‘who’ that had done this? What if it’s a ‘what’?” Given the mystique ambiance of Mofocity’s history, this was not an illegitimate question.
“Then you go find what the hell that is!! I want fuckin’ answers! Do you hear me??” he shouted to everyone in the room.
“Yes, Sir!” they replied.
Chief Colby Jones was torn with his own theory of what could’ve happened in his town. He wanted to believe that there’s someone out there that’s responsible for all the missing people so that he can catch him and put him in jail. On the other hand, it seemed too far-fetched to assume a single person was responsible for the crimes and left no clue and evidence whatsoever. All the cases bear no similarities, all the victims had no tie with each other, there was no witness that can say they saw any of the subjects at the moment of their disappearance. They have literally vanished into thin air. Not one of them was ever seen alive nor dead.
It would’ve made his job so much easier if it were that dreadful freakboy who had caused all the mess. Jordan Cromwell’s right-hand man who does all Jordan’s shit for him. An invisible henchman whom everyone underestimates, who moved quietly in the dark when no one was watching. He certainly had the freedom to do whatever dark deeds that he wanted to do because no one would care, no one cared for an orphaned loner, a weirdo, a total freak. But Colby never underestimated him, he knew what an invisible henchman can do, especially Cromwell’s most trusted man. He knew how competent a right-hand man can be, someone who does all the work better than his employer. Someone who knows his way around town and knows how to earn the trust of a powerful man. Someone like himself.