Brianne put her phone back in her pocket and started heading for her vehicle. "Hopefully, Mr. Garvey. We will soon see."
Garvey followed Brianne back to her car saying, "If I can be of any further assistance, please don't hesitate to ask. Good luck in finding the girl...and the cop too!"
Brianne nodded as she jumped into the running Ford Taurus unmarked police cruiser, put on the seatbelt, put it in reverse and backed out of the space faster than she had intended. She unintentionally spun the tires as she pulled out of the Department of Transportation lot and turned toward Interstate 95.
Brianne Carmen Archer was a twenty-three-year-old detective and had only been working with the Jacksonville Police Department for a little over two-and-a-half years. She was assigned to Missing Persons when Colleen Bens went missing and the administration assumed the missing detective was not coming back anytime soon. Brianne's uncle was the Chief of Detectives and used his position to get a relatively inexperienced Brianne into that vacated slot. Therefore, most everyone in the Missing Persons Unit assumed Brianne was only there because of nepotism, but if they had paid her any attention, they would have noticed that she was a gifted investigator with a keen sixth sense and a dogged mentality that pushed her to exceed all standards.
Brianne had, since her arrival in the unit almost four months previous, had an exemplary record. She had tracked down several missing adults and children - one of the children who was in the custody of a sexual predator - and was not afraid to tackle the tough cases. Unfortunately, her exemplary work went unnoticed by her peers and superiors. Not only because of the nepotism belief, but because of her personality.
Brianne was a little aloof at times and a bit narcissistic. Everyone in the office said she was a fashionista, but Brianne disagreed with their assessment. She thought she was more of a femme. She was a beautiful young lady who liked to look good, took pride in her appearance and always outshined her peers in effort, work product and fashion. On the typical day when everyone in the office was wearing button-down shirts and khakis, Brianne was wearing an expensive, tailored business suit and heels. Even on this particular day, what was known as a Dress Down Friday, while her co-workers were all wearing Levis, Jacksonville Jaguar polos and sneakers, she was wearing a black J.Crew Madelyn blazer over a white, polyester-spandex blend, sleeveless cropped tank, a Sapphire blue Fit Jeans 360 High Waisted stretch jeans and light brown Calvin Klein Cerine Booties. Her entire "dress down" outfit cost more than the Glock 17, two spare magazines, handcuffs and badge she wore on her limited edition Christian Dior 30 Montaigne belt!
Brianne stopped at a light, thought about activating her emergency lights and siren, decided against it and thought of the case she was working. She had been assigned the Scarlett Wilde disappearance on this past Monday and had made a little - be it not very much - headway. Scarlett had been interning at the local paper and was working with a reporter named Tom Dean. Scarlett was researching information on Detective Bens' disappearance the previous January by reinterviewing witnesses. According to Tom Dean, Scarlett had interviewed the three highway troopers to last see Bens on the side of the interstate back in January. All three state troopers verified this to be true. The only other witness listed on the original report was a DOT employee that one of the troopers mentioned had been on the scene when he arrived, but Dean was adamant that Scarlett never reinterviewed the DOT employee. In fact, Dean said he told Scarlett not to interview Garvey.
Scarlett's parents, who lived in New Jersey, contacted the Jacksonville police after two weeks when they could not get in touch with their daughter. A report had been filed, but it took almost another week before it made its way to Brianne's desk.
Brianne had subpoenaed Scarlett's cellphone records, email, GPS and internet search information. These types of companies were notoriously anti-law enforcement and took their time on turning over the required data. On Wednesday, Brianne had received the email information, but there was nothing there to assist the investigation. The next day, Thursday, she was informed that the cellphone provider could no longer provide location information on their customers because of a change to their software. This sounded like a bullshit excuse at best to Brianne, but nothing she could do about that in the short term.
This morning, the cellphone provider had emailed her a list of calls that Scarlett had made during the month of July, up until the day she disappeared. Also, Scarlett's internet service provider has emailed a list of sites that Scarlett had visited on the day she disappeared.
Brianne discovered that the last call Scarlett had made was to the Jacksonville Police Department's Missing Persons Unit. Ms. Emily Dester remembered taking the call and said the caller wanted to talk to the detective in charge of the Colleen Bens missing person case. She added that she forwarded the request for a call back to Detective Salazar, who was the lead detective on the Bens case. Salazar told Brianne that he tried to call the number back a week later but no one answered. Brianne did inquire why it took him a week to call Wilde back, and Salazar claimed he had been busy. Brianne thought that was a bullshit excuse as well, but she bit her tongue.
Scarlett's ISP had emailed the sites she had visited on the day she went missing, but only a general list. The last several sites she had visited were every possible social media site and then county tax records of Jacksonville, every surrounding county and then outlying counties. The last search was Echols County, Georgia. Unfortunately, this list was not specific in that it did not show exactly what Scarlett was looking for, but rather it was only the sites she visited.
Fortunately, Brianne found a helpful woman, after twenty minutes of talking to robots and playing phone tag, at Scarlett's ISP. After she explained she was working on a missing person case with the possibility of foul play involved, the woman broke company protocol and looked up the specific information that Scarlett had been researching. She told Brianne that Scarlett Wilde had been looking up tax records for an unincorporated area near the town of Needmore, and she even provided Brianne with the address.
Next, Brianne contacted the Echols County Tax Collector's Office and found another helpful person. An older gentleman looked up the information and discovered the property in question was owned by a limited liability company called Cool Protege, LLC. There was absolutely zero information about Cool Protege, LLC on the internet, and the tax collector employee stated the property appeared to have been recently transferred from private ownership to that LLC within the last few weeks. The gentleman promised to look up the previous owner's name but it might take a couple hours.
Brianne gave the man her cell number, the office number and her email address. He promised to expedite Brianne's request and had apparently come through in only two plus hours.
Brianne had decided to interview Clarence Garvey to ensure he did not talk to Scarlett Wilde. She traveled to the DOT yard and had to have the DOT dispatcher radio Garvey to return. It took almost an hour, but he arrived and, unfortunately, did not shed any light on the situation. Not that Brianne thought Garvey would, but she was just trying to keep the case moving forward now that she had the slightest momentum.
Also, because she had always believed the Wilde case was linked to Detective Colleen Bens' disappearance - a theory that Brianne's superiors and peers in the Missing Persons Unit vehemently disagreed with - she had asked for and received, from the DOT dispatcher, Clarence Garvey's work schedule over the past two years. She wanted to see if Garvey was working on the nights that the seven women - the seven women that Detective Bens thought were a pattern and had pushed her lieutenant and sergeant to conduct proactive deployments to apprehend a possible serial abductor and/or killer - had disappeared. Brianne also figured she would check to see if Garvey was working the dates that Bens and Scarlett Wilde also went missing, just to officially scratch him off the list of potential suspects.
Brianne glanced at the papers on the passenger seat that annotated Garvey's work schedule over the last two years. She figured it would be a waste of time, but better to check all the boxes. Garvey was definitely an oddball, but Brianne did not get a bad vibe from the guy. The light finally turned green, and Brianne sped off toward the I-95 on ramp.
She pulled the Taurus onto the interstate, heading toward downtown and laid down on the accelerator. She was driving faster than she should, wanted to get to the station as quickly as possible, when a warning light illuminated on her dashboard. It was a horseshoe-shaped light with an exclamation point in the center. Then, before she could do anything else, the vehicle dipped to the left and the steering wheel began to shake in her hand.
Brianne slowed the Taurus, put on the flashers and made her way to the left shoulder. Brianne knew she had a flat. She put the car in park, shut down the engine and exited the vehicle. Sure enough, the front driver's side tire was completely flat.
The August morning was already turning brutally hot, so Brianne decided not to waste any time. She removed her blazer and left it on the passenger seat. Then, she popped the truck lid, emptied out all her assigned equipment and placed it on the side of the car away from the interstate. Once the trunk was empty of all her police gear, she pulled up the floor, revealing the spare tire. One of the only good things about vehicles that were purchased with a "police interceptor package' was that they had a full-size spare.
Brianne began manhandling the jack out of a side compartment in the trunk that came with the vehicle, when a DOT Road Ranger truck pulled in behind the Taurus and activated the yellow emergency lights. Brianne could see that the man behind the wheel was Clarence Garvey. The light board in the truck bed extended up warning drivers to move over a lane.
Garvey exited the white pickup and said, "Fancy meeting you here, Detective? Flat?"
Brianne nodded. "Yeah."
Garvey nodded. "Let me get my hydraulic jack. Don't mess with that silly little thing that Ford pawns off as a car jack."
Brianne smiled as she placed the ineffectual jack back in the side compartment in the trunk and pulled out the spare tire. Garvey walked over with a large hydraulic jack on four wheels and a long, steel handle. He also was carrying a four-way lug wrench.