Tracy was excited today. And a little anxious as well. Truth be told, the fact that he was now an official consultant to the police department had not yet fully sunk in.
At exactly ten past eleven, John Moore, one of the junior investigators of the police department, arrived at Tracy's office with what appeared to be a case file. After the initial introductions and chit chat had been done away with, he came straight to the object of his visit.
"We've got quite a strange case here, Tracy.". he began. "And we could sure use some help."
"Go on.", replied Tracy. "What is this about?"
"I take it you are aware of the theft of Mrs. Mulligan's necklace, which happened the day before yesterday."
"Yes I do. I was reading about it a little before you arrived."
And indeed there would hardly be anybody who would not be aware about it. The details of the incident had been splashed over all the media. The case was open and shut, as far as the theft was concerned. It was the chauffeur, Francis, who was the culprit. He had been recorded in the act by a concealed camera in the safe. It was an open secret that the trial was going to be a mere formality.
However, one problem remained unsolved. The necklace was nowhere to be found. Francis admitted to selling it, but this could hardly have been the case, as he never had enough time for that.
The police had done a thorough search of the house and the adjoining lawns, but had come up empty. They also dug up the ground at a few places where the soil looked freshly disturbed, also without success. Even the few trees that adorned the surroundings had been thoroughly examined, but the elusive necklace was not to be found.
This clearly implied that there was someone else involved. The authorities then directed their efforts towards identifying possible accomplices. But this too, the news reports said, had been a waste of time so far. The inability to locate the necklace was likely to have a bad impact on the police department's reputation, and hence the authorities were enlisting assistance from "all possible sources" to help locate the necklace.
Initially, the police thought that they had almost solved the case when they found that Francis's sister Mary, was employed as a governess at the Dobsons, who lived a mile or so away from the Mulligans. This had fuelled the theory that Mary had assisted her brother in the crime, and was the one whom Francis had given the stolen necklace for safekeeping. So she ended up becoming a 'Person of Interest' for the police.
But here again, things did not go as expected. A search of Mary's belongings turned up nothing of importance. This led the investigators to think that the necklace had exchanged hands once again. And there was still one more problem, the timelines did not match.
Francis had stolen the necklace a little after six that morning, and five minutes past six, the cameras at the gate had recorded Francis exiting through the main gate and entering a car waiting outside. Two minutes later, the car was spotted entering the main road from the lane which led to the Mulligan estate by two patrol cars, who succeeded in capturing Frank and his accomplice after half an hour of heated chase on the almost empty early morning roads.
Now, every day, Mary would go out at six a.m. for her daily morning run. It would have taken her close to five minutes to reach outside the Mulligan estate. So she could have very well been the third accomplice, save for the fact that on the day of the theft, she had started on her jog five minutes late. This had been captured on the closed circuit camera installed near the little side exit which Mary used. Not one to leave any stone unturned, the police had tested the theory of Francis having driven in the opposite direction to the Dobson house, and found that Francis would have taken at least three minutes to drive there, hand the necklace to Mary and drive back to where the patrol car had spotted him. That meant they had to account for the additional minute somehow, before they could take any action against Mary.
Needless to say, it was decided by the Dobsons, who were close friends of the Mulligans, to relieve Mary of her duties, at the end of the month.
Tracy quickly glanced through the case file, and found that the main facts were more or less same as the news reports. The file also contained some additional details regarding the crime scene, which police normally withhold to gain the upper hand.
"Are we sure that the necklace has not been sold yet?", asked Tracy.
"Pretty sure.", replied John Moore. "No fence would risk moving it when the entire region's police force is searching for it. Also, our informants have not picked up any chatter to indicate that such a sale is going to happen."
"Hmm.", said Tracy, deep in thought. "In that case, let's go to the scene of the crime. Maybe we'll find something we missed before."
And with that hope, they started on the twenty minute drive to the Mulligan house.
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