Robert Lawson was exactly what you expected an analyst to be. He fit the stereotype of geek chic with his thick-lensed square glasses, gelled parted hair, stripy shirt and cords, which were held up by braces. His ability to communicate in person was limited, but when it came to computers, he was a smart cookie. He’d got the job after completing a coding game online, which followed up with a call from the CIA who had quickly assembled the best and the brightest talent in the country to join them.
‘Good job on the website, Lawson, but what excuse can we make for the Oak Ridge page not being updated ahead of time? The managing directors of this place are pretty on top of things like this. There is no way the public will believe we simply forgot.’ Grieg Sommers of the Springfield Tourist Bureau commenced the debate. He was a round man with grey hair, stubbly beard and black designer frames. He spoke with a lisp. Finding clothes to fit him was clearly a struggle as what looked like a brown bed-sheet covered his body. ‘I still don’t understand why we can’t just put this out to the public? We’ll find this body in no time.’
‘The President has given us the strictest orders to keep this under wraps for now. God knows what kinda harm this could do to our nation and to this impending election,’ Hill replied. ‘But I am interested to know the answer to Grieg’s question about the website, Lawson.’
‘We’ve argued that we had already put it on the website but the viewers had the site cached.’
‘Cached?’ Darnell asked with an air of confusion. When he first entered the business everything was written down on the back of a cigarette packet. Today, he was lost amongst the multiple devices one needed to succeed as a detective and the thesaurus of technical terminology required to communicate with his peers.
‘In layman’s terms, when you visit a website, your web browser…’ Lawson paused as he saw Darnell’s eyes glaze over ‘…the screen that you use to see web pages, it saves the document you are viewing onto your computer so that when you revisit the page, it can show you the last image you saw, rather than having to rebuild the image, saving you on your bandwidth usage.’
‘So how would anyone get past that?’ Vanessa asked; she knew, but she wanted her colleague to feel that he wasn’t the only lost soul in a technical world. She’d had enough one-upmanship for one day with her knowledge of Lincoln and Darnell’s career calamities. Commander Hill had offered her some feedback earlier that morning on building a relationship with a man who’d been in the force longer than she’d been alive.
‘You can remove the saved pages on your browser by deleting something called cookies, and no we’re not talking about Maryland cookies, sir.’ Lawson giggled but Darnell did not waver.
‘But what happens if somebody hasn’t visited the site before?’ Darnell scratched his head, feeling nervous as he put his question out in a place where he was already being looked down upon for being far from tech-savvy. ‘Surely if I hadn’t visited the webpage before, it wouldn’t have anything saved in my…. cookies.’
‘Well….’ Robert read over the notes he’d taken on his laptop. ‘We can claim that our servers were down, so while we had updated the program in which we edit the website, due to the internet being down at the time of posting, we didn’t realise that it hadn’t actually gone online.’
‘Don’t you think we’re getting a little bit side-tracked here? We seem to be more worried about the public’s view of a website for a graveyard than actually finding Lincoln himself!’ Vanessa chimed in. ‘So have we had any thoughts on where this body could be?’
The group around the table all looked at each other gormlessly. The ticking of a clock was the only sound as they awkwardly waited for the first person to make a suggestion, each too nervous to recommend anything.
‘Well I have some ideas anyway…’
‘We’re all ears, Jamison,’ said Hill.
‘For one thing, look at the date that the body was stolen, exactly the same date that there was an attempt to steal Lincoln’s corpse back in 1876. Maybe it’s a ploy. I say we check out the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan. That’s where the gangsters who tried to steal it last time had planned to take it. It could be a simple copycat case.’
‘Do you really believe that somebody would take it exactly where it was historically meant to be taken last time? Come on, is anyone really that stupid?’ Darnell chuckled and looked to his colleagues for reassurance, which wasn’t delivered.
‘You never know, Jackson, there are some crazy kids out there who love to recreate the past. I can name a dozen or so murder investigations I’ve been involved in where someone had the idea to copy an infamous killing. Maybe this is what’s happening now?’ Hill jumped in to defend his new recruit.
‘What else have we got?’ Darnell moved on.
‘Well as you said, it could be ransom,’ Vanessa continued. ‘Although I don’t see how they can really believe they’ll get away with it. If you ask me, their motivations are political. I know you’re stuck with this whole money thing, Darnell, but I can’t help but believe the date is significant.’
‘I actually agree with you there, Vanessa,’ Darnell replied. The group around the table all sat up, rumbling with surprise over the detective’s sudden change in direction. ‘Don’t look too surprised!’
‘What made you change your mind?’
‘I received something.’ Darnell lifted into his pocket and dug out a piece of paper; it had crumpled where he’d folded it into four. The detective passed the document
