4338.215 · August 3, 2018 AD
The Room Rebuilt Before Dawn
Overnight, someone stripped the whiteboards, replaced the maps, prepared individual folders, and positioned themselves at the head of a table that belonged to someone else twelve hours ago. The officers who arrive at seven find their assignments waiting, their questions anticipated, and two things missing that nobody in the room will mention out loud. Whatever this investigation was yesterday, it isn't anymore. Whatever they thought they were looking for — they're looking for something bigger now.
Alexander Stout doesn't need the room to trust him. He needs them to be precise. Trust comes later, if it comes at all.
The man standing at the far end of the conference table has spent twenty-four years in Major Crime examining things other people missed or preferred not to see, and what he sees this morning is an investigation that fractured overnight into something far larger, more politically volatile, and more personally costly than anyone in this room anticipated. Charlie Claiborne is on personal leave — events at Berriedale, no further discussion. Sarah Lahey is a principal witness — formal interview this morning, no participation in the investigation. Two chairs empty. Nobody looks at them.
Stout draws the pattern on the whiteboard. Four names connected by one thread. Jamie Greyson, nine days missing. Kain Jeffries, five days. Brianne Sitch, yesterday. Karl Jenkins, yesterday. Luke Smith the common element in every disappearance — and Luke Smith himself now a potential fifth. A geography that contracts from Berriedale to the manor grounds to a single outbuilding, each vanishing drawing closer to the property's centre.
Then the warrant arrives. Signed at six-forty-five, no conditions. Jeffries Manor and all structures. The home of a family whose name appears on hospital wings and university buildings across the state is about to be opened room by room, wall by wall, floor by floor — and the officers tasked with opening it understand that what they're looking for may have been hidden there for considerably longer than nine days.
