Chapter 5a

By now, my research team has fallen apart. Their names are only memos next to phone numbers in a notebook I've had packed away for years. Their faces have dulled and lost features while they rotted in my memory. I have no one to turn to with my newest discoveries so I turn to myself.

There is another entry, only a couple blank pages away from the last we found. One of the pages before it was ripped out, possibly to write the suicide note we had discovered at the end of our investigation. I've studied it as closely as I can and I think I'm starting to make some real headway for the first time in years.

Packard did not die after writing this missive. He was gone, that much was true, and his whereabouts are still unknown, but there is evidence that definitely indicates he is still in good health.

Monday, December 20, 1999

Leaving was easier than I expected. My note went over well. Sandra was furious. I had to try hard not to laugh. I'm still trying not to laugh. It's Monday and I have literally no obligations. I can go anywhere and do anything. I am going anywhere, doing anything.

I'm going West someplace, though I'm not sure where just yet, and then I'm going to settle down, maybe get a new identity, and stay there until I'm comfortable enough to disappear again. I think I've got everything planned out. I left my note, and I shouldn't have done that, but everything else has been smooth. I told nobody of my plan. I never talked about anywhere I wanted to go except places I didn't really want to go. I left my car, took only cash, no checks or credit cards, bought a car from a shady old man with no title for a couple hundred dollars and didn't stop until I was six hours down the road.

I'll find work under the table, maybe construction or something where they won't have me fill out a bunch of papers. Eventually I'll start to build a real life and history for the people there to believe in and the next time I go they'll have even less to find me by.

I'm really looking forward to this adventure. I wonder who I'll be at the end of it?

The whole page was scrawled unevenly, as if maybe the author were heavily sedated, drunk or very hurried. With no more to go on than that I still had little to use, but the pieces seemed to be fitting together. This mystery was not a simple problem, no, this was the very mystery of life and death. Each problem was only a single piece of the puzzle. With each piece being so huge it's hard to get an idea of the whole picture even when you've got most of it in place.

No, it wasn't until I was hurdling down at it from miles above the surface of the earth that I could finally start to read the message laid out in pieces below me.

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