A few weeks later it was time for another round of espionage. Quarterly reports were being prepared and it was time to check up on some of my investment choices. This time, I was also going to head out east and check out several companies in my old hometown, where we had lived with mom before she was taken. Originally, I hadn’t planned to expand the list of companies that I was investing in, but since I’d added vengeance to my to do list, I needed to get a copy of the police files on my kidnapping. Once I was heading to a city over two hours away, I figured that I’d add a few companies to my list and fill up my day.

I woke up really early and headed out to catch the first scheduled bus heading to Raleigh. I’d left a note for dad that I’d be doing research today for the stock competition and that I’d check in with him later. It was a ped-day at school and so my absence would go unnoticed.

I caught the bus just before it left and found my way to an empty seat. It didn’t really matter if the seat was empty, as I was in R1, but I preferred not to have the distraction of a superimposed ghostly image around me. On the bus I reviewed the company research that I’d downloaded to my phone the night before, as there was no wi-fi or cellular data in R1 or R2. This time I would be investigating three companies; one in mining, one in biotechnology, and one in technology devices. I’d chosen the mining company, Ascendar Mines, mostly because of the McKenzie’s, I was curious to learn more about their industry.

Between the reading and taking notes for my files, the bus trip passed quickly, and I soon found myself in downtown Raleigh. I made my way to the financial district and found the first company’s offices. The next few hours were very busy and productive, as I infiltrated each of the target companies and listened in on confidential briefings, took pictures of key financial reports, stole passwords and ensured that I could have remote access to their servers. That last part was important if I wanted to continue to find out what they were doing without having to make the trip out to Raleigh again.

By lunchtime I was done with my corporate espionage and I moved back into reality for twenty minutes to grab a sandwich at Subways before I proceeded to break into a police station. Finding the right station wasn’t hard. I just googled ‘John Buckler police officer Raleigh’ and his whole bio came up, including his precinct.

It took me over half an hour to get to John’s old station and it was a hive of activity. If I weren’t in R1, I’d be terrified even thinking about what I was about to do. Instead, I just strolled in right through an exiting police officer and into a waiting area that was overseen by an older officer sitting behind a raised desk. Police officers used their passes to open a door to the older officer’s left. Everyone else waited to speak to the officer at the desk. I simply shifted from R1 to R2 for a few seconds and walked through the door.

This is the part of my plan where I just penciled in “Find old file” without any idea as to how to accomplish the task. From TV and books, I knew that older unsolved cases were kept in a cold-case file room, but I had no idea where that was or how old a case had to be to be put there. I supposed that 12 years would qualify as a cold case, but maybe it was different if the FBI was involved, as they were in mom's case. It was also possible that the precinct had digitized all their files years ago and they didn’t even have a cold-file room at all. I needed a map.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Luckily, fire regulations required that all emergency escape routes be posted with a ‘You Are Here’ designation. I found one such map in a nearby corridor and I oriented myself before spending 20 minutes wandering around getting to know where all the departments were. The fact that each department was labelled on the map and on the doors themselves really helped.

This felt just like doing surveillance on one of the companies, except that it was a police station. Once I got my bearings, the first room I checked out held the internal camera monitoring station. Unsurprisingly, they only had four of them dedicated to the general office and work areas, and three of those cameras were watching corridors that led to exit doors. Nobody expected anything to happen in a room full of police officers. Most of their cameras focused on their holding cells, the interview rooms, the waiting rooms, the evidence locker and the exterior of the station. If I had a uniform and a pass, I could probably walk around this place unnoticed.

The cold-case file room wasn’t in the basement, like I thought it would be. Instead, it was in one of the windowless interior offices. I shifted to R2 again to get through the door and back to R1. The room was large, with several rows of racking holding file-storage boxes and each box was labelled with a year. There were over thirty years of cases in here and some years needed several boxes, either because they had a lot of unsolved cases that year or because some of those case files were really large. I crossed the room from end to end and checked behind all the stacks to make sure that there wasn’t anyone taking an off-duty nap. It was clear of people.

Knowing that there were no cameras in the cold-case file room gave me the confidence to shift back to reality and head to the boxes labelled 2008. There were three boxes and they were stacked next to each other on the bottom shelf of one of the stacks. At least I wouldn’t have to climb a ladder to get them down. Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, I pulled out the first box and saw that it had a list taped to the lid. It was list of the cases inside the box. Someone at the station was either very organized or had a lot of time on their hands. Or both.

I didn’t recognize any of the names on the list, so I pushed the box back and took out the second box. A third of the way though the list I saw Metzstein-Smith. Metzstein was my mom’s maiden name. Lifting the lid, I scanned through the tabs until I found the right file. It wasn’t very big, only about half an inch thick. I wanted to start reading it right away, but this wasn’t the right place to do that. A file this size would take at least an hour to study properly.

The shift to R1 took less than a second and I got my camera out to take pictures of each page. In a few minutes, I was done and put the file back in the box and the box back on the shelf.

Back in the safety of R1, I took a few minutes to gather myself. I hadn’t read any of the material, but I’d seen the pictures. My mom had smiled back at me from several different poses as I flipped the pages. I’d seen most of those pictures in our family albums, one was even from her ‘Have you seen this woman?’ poster, but seeing those pictures in a police file was different. More tragic. Sadder. A family album is meant to remind you of the best of times, the times that you though worth remembering. Pictures in a police file never reminded you of good times.