Detective Douglas Dugglesworth was perturbed. No, 'perturbed' wasn't quite the right word. He was baffled and dumbfounded and just a little bit flummoxed, which was a feeling he loathed.
Several weeks ago, the information for James Hook, the man responsible for the Liverwood Bank robbery, had appeared in his secure files. Detective Dugglesworth had been elated. The case of James Hook had perplexed the police for almost a decade, and Dugglesworth had been at the forefront of the investigation. Suddenly, with the serendipitous information, he would finally be able to apprehend the mysterious James Hook, which would most certainly mean he would get a promotion, which would most certainly mean he would get a raise, and he would finally be able to afford the pair of Bengal cats he had been pining for.
He had been making great progress, even though the search for the wanted criminal usually led him to Chinatown, which he had scoured thoroughly and come up with almost nothing. However, he had recently decoded a map which looked promising, and his intuition told him he was closing in. But a few days ago, the file had disappeared. Vanished as easily as it had come into existence, and with it, his dreams of owning those fantastic felines.
An entire team of specialists was assigned to recovering the file, but there was no trace of the mysterious record. They concluded it was linked to a breach of one of the PNC databases the night before the disappearance of the record. The investigation into that occurrence was equally dismal. All they could report was that a boy who appeared to only have a head and feet had broken into the database, accompanied by a small robotic fairy, which one of the guards had smashed.
And now Detective Douglas Dugglesworth sat slumped in his chair, stroking a sparse mustache and blaming all of his misfortunes on his overbearing mother. There was a knock on the door of his small office.
"What?" Dugglesworth grunted, wishing for a few more minutes of self-pitying solitude.
"Sorry to interrupt, sir, may I come in?"
Detective Dugglesworth slid his gaze over to his young assistant, Jack Baker, whom he generally disliked, if only for the fact that the young man could grow more facial hair in one week than he could in a lifetime.
"Yes," Dugglesworth intoned, looking back at the mess of useless papers on his desk.
Jack stepped in quickly and shut the door. "We've made some progress with the fairy, sir."
"Fairy?"
"The broken robot."
"Well?"
"We've recovered some kind of navigational system which was wired into it. By analyzing the patterns of the system, we think we've discovered a possible location for the convict, and it's really quite interesting."
Jack held out a map, which the detective took eagerly. His eyes widened as he looked at the diagram, and for the first time in three days, he smiled.