December 6th, 2016
Las Vegas, Nevada
Sarge felt disappointment that they hadn’t found the key to the strange file numbering system in the desk. It had to be somewhere, but the question was where.
He and Pickett went over and each picked up a journal. The journals looked like they had come out of a stationery store, with green cloth cardboard covers.
At the top of the inside cover the person writing in the journal had put a number and it was circled. And the pages were all numbered.
Sarge sort of leafed through the book, not really reading, but noticing that some entries were only one page and other entries went on for a while. And the dates seemed to jump all over the place.
Suddenly it dawned on him what he was seeing.
He was holding journal number two and an entry about a purchase of a car started on page forty-seven.
“What journal number do you have?” he asked Pickett.
“This has a five inside the front cover.
“Go to a page where an entry starts,” Sarge said.
She flipped quickly a ways into the journal and stopped.
“Page thirty-two,” she said.
Sarge stood and moved over to the first file cabinet and opened the top drawer. The hanging files seemed to be numbered randomly in two, three, or four digit numbers.
“Still missing something,” Sarge said. He went back over and picked up the journal numbered with a one and looked at the first entry. It was dated September, 1989. Just under a year from the time Heather was locked in that room. She would have been just starting her first year in college.
He went back over to the first file cabinet and Pickett stood and followed him. He opened the top drawer and looked at the first file.
921.
“Got it,” he said. “The ledgers are the key. He pulled out the file labeled 921 and motioned that Picket should join him back at the table.
“9th month, page two, first journal,” Sarge said.
He opened the file, then opened the journal. The entry in the journal matched the names in the paperwork in the file.
Pickett kissed him on the cheek. “Damn, what’s it like to be so smart.”
“Not smart,” Sarge said, “just lucky. Especially finding you.”
She kissed him again and laughed. “That was pretty lame, but I loved it.”
“Good,” he said, smiling at her. “Got lucky again.”
She laughed and they set about testing his labeling theory. It seemed that the person who had done the journal always went through the entire cycle of nineteen journals with an entry before starting over.
So the second file was the day after the first file, but the journal entry was in the second journal, second page. And so on until the 20th entry was the second entry in the first journal.
They tested that with about a dozen files and the system held.
So Sarge wanted to see now what the last entry said, the last file said, right before she went to that hotel. Assuming, of course, that it really was Heather Winston who had done the journals.
It took them a moment to find, but the last dated entry was not in August when Heather was locked in that hotel room, but on December 20th of the same year.
The entry gave the date and then simply said, “New car smell turning rancid. Took twenty-five of the forty-one. Shutting down for now.”
Either Heather hadn’t been locked in that hotel in August when she vanished and was replaced by Connie, but instead went into the shuttered hotel after December twentieth, or these journals had been done by someone else.
All Sarge could do was stare at the entry and wonder exactly what it meant. Like everything in this case, nothing was making sense.