Police Sergeant Vanished in 1984 — 15 Years Later, What They Found Was Too Horrific to Explain

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On the wall of the Sunridge Police Department, a framed motto hung in crooked seriousness: **SERVE WITH HONOR. RETURN HOME SAFE.** Sergeant Emily Reigns used to tap the glass with two knuckles on her way out for night shift, a tiny ritual no one noticed until the night she didn’t come back. Sunridge, Arizona was the kind of town that tried to be forgettable on purpose—sand-colored streets, low roofs baked by a hard sun, and a sky so big it made people feel small and polite. It was quiet enough that the police blotter read like a calendar of inconveniences: stray dogs, noise complaints, a drunk who always apologized. Emily Reigns was the person you wanted in a crisis and the person you didn’t want to disappoint. Twelve years on the force had given her a calm that felt like authority rather than ego. She didn’t shout. She didn’t posture. She listened until the truth ran out of places to hide. On **October 14th, 1984**, she signed in at **6:00 p.m.** sharp, in the same neat handwriting she used for everything: incident reports, grocery lists, the birthday cards she mailed two days early so they’d arrive on time. A few officers were playing cards in the break room. The dispatcher, Gloria, raised her coffee cup like a toast. Emily nodded, clipped her radio to her shoulder, and stepped out into the heat that still clung to the asphalt like a memory. It was an ordinary night—until it wasn’t. She stopped at Morales Diner for the coffee that tasted like burned hope, waved at the gas station clerk who always saved her a newspaper, and drove her route with a patient boredom that let her notice small things: a porch light that was out, a gate left open, a car parked too close to a stop sign. At **9:45 p.m.**, her voice came through the radio. “Dispatch, this is Sergeant Reigns. I’ll be checking a suspicious vehicle near Quarry Road.” The dispatcher acknowledged. Emily didn’t request backup. In Sunridge, you didn’t call for help unless you *had* to. Pride was a currency; Emily spent hers carefully. Besides, it sounded routine—the code for “suspicious person/vehicle,” the kind of call that ended with a warning and a bored driver claiming they were “just waiting for a friend.” Gloria logged it. She glanced at the clock, sipped her coffee. Then… nothing. No follow-up. No “clear.” No new transmission. No raised voice. No panic button. By **midnight**, Emily hadn’t returned. The radio in the bullpen clicked with emptiness as her unit tried to raise her again and again. “Sergeant Reigns, come in.” Static answered. At **12:27 a.m.**, Officer Dunn drove Emily’s last known route. The patrol car headlights swept across the dirt shoulder, the quarry access road, the brush that crouched low and thorny like something that lived on secrets. There were no tire marks leading off the road. No disturbed gravel. No broken branches. It was as if Emily had never gone there. And yet dispatch had the log. The time stamp. Gloria’s handwriting. The small official proof that a moment existed. By morning, the station smelled like sweat and stale coffee and something else—fear, faint but undeniable. Emily’s sister, Marlene, arrived early. She was younger by five years, with the same dark hair and the same quick eyes, but without Emily’s careful patience. Marlene didn’t have a badge. She didn’t have to pretend the world made sense. She walked into the precinct and saw how the officers avoided looking at her. “How long has she been missing?” she demanded. No one answered directly. They said Emily was “off the grid.” They said it was “being handled.” They said they were “assessing jurisdiction.” Marlene stared at them as if they’d spoken another language. “Jurisdiction?” she repeated. “My sister didn’t drift into another county like a weather system. She’s *gone*.” A lieutenant tried to guide her toward a chair, a softer voice, an official sympathy. Marlene pulled away. “Where are the helicopters?” she asked. “Where are the dogs?” He hesitated just long enough for her to understand the truth: they weren’t coming. Not yet. Maybe not at all. Rumors moved faster than official statements. By noon, Marlene heard whispers that made her skin feel tight: Emily had raised questions about a drug bust the week prior. A “minor” case, the kind that should have closed cleanly. Except it didn’t. Except there were inconsistencies in the paperwork and a connection to someone who wore a uniform by day and carried influence by night. Emily had mentioned something else three weeks earlier, casually, like a joke she didn’t quite believe: she thought someone had followed her home from the station. “I’m probably imagining it,” she’d told Marlene. “It’s just… the same headlights too many nights.” Now Marlene heard those words again in her mind, and they didn’t sound like imagination. They sounded like a warning that had waited too long to be understood. When the department tried to access the emergency tracking system in Emily’s cruiser, they found the ping history was corrupted—gone, as if erased. Officials blamed a system error. Marlene watched the chief’s mouth move as he explained it and knew, in a way that had nothing to do with evidence, that he was lying. The search covered fifteen square miles. Officers walked in lines, boots crunching through desert grit. Helicopters swept overhead. Infrared scanned for heat signatures across the rocky terrain. Nothing. No vehicle. No body. No weapon. No radio. Emily’s service weapon—registered and accounted for—had not been on her belt when she vanished. And then there was the strangest detail of all: her patrol map had been altered. The printed schedule showed a reroute—one that was never logged through dispatch. Only a few people could have accessed that schedule. Emily, of course. And her supervisor. That supervisor transferred abruptly weeks later. When questioned, he claimed he didn’t recall any changes. “I don’t recall.” That phrase became a wall Marlene bled herself against for years. A month after Emily disappeared, the town budget reallocated resources away from the search. It wasn’t announced with cruelty. It was done quietly, like turning the volume down so low you could pretend the music had never played. The case went cold the way desert nights did: suddenly and without mercy. Nearly a year later, a rookie officer resigned. His name was Darren Holt. He was twenty-two, fresh-faced, still carrying the posture of someone who’d grown up believing in the badge. He asked Marlene to meet him at a roadside diner outside town—somewhere no one would see a squad car parked too long. He arrived late, glancing at the window like it might sprout eyes. “I liked Sergeant Reigns,” he said before Marlene could speak. “She didn’t deserve what happened.” Marlene leaned forward. “What do you know?” His hand trembled as he slid something across the table: a torn page from a logbook, the edges ragged like it had been ripped in a hurry. On it, scrawled in block letters: **Q ROUTE 9PM**. Below that: **HL**. Marlene frowned. “What does HL mean?” Darren’s gaze dropped to his coffee. “Don’t ask that out loud,” he whispered. “Did you see her?” Marlene pressed. Darren swallowed. “I saw her cruiser that night. Around 10:30. Tail lights turning off into the brush near the quarry service road. I radioed dispatch to check if another unit was logged there. They said no.” He looked up, eyes shiny with something like shame. “I didn’t follow.” “Why not?” Marlene demanded. His jaw worked. “I was told to let it go.” “By who?” He hesitated too long. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t say.” He stood abruptly as if the booth had caught fire, dropped a few bills on the table, and walked out without finishing his food. Marlene stared after him, the torn page cold under her fingertips. For years, she pushed. She wrote letters. Filed requests. Called journalists. Most doors stayed closed, and the ones that cracked open revealed only darkness behind them. In 1992, she got a call from an old number. Gloria, the dispatcher, retired now, asked to meet. They sat in Gloria’s living room where the curtains stayed drawn even in daylight. “I kept something,” Gloria admitted. “I know I shouldn’t have. But something felt wrong.” She produced a cassette tape and a photocopy of radio transcripts from Emily’s last shift. Marlene held the paper and saw the line at **9:45 p.m.**: Quarry Road. Possible 1066. Solo approach. Emily’s voice on the tape was steady. Not panicked. Not breathless. Calm—almost too calm, like she was forcing herself to sound normal. Then Gloria’s hands tightened around her mug. “That quarry call?” she said quietly. “It was erased from the department archives. Cut out. Not lost. Not corrupted. Removed.” Marlene felt the room tilt. “Why would someone erase it?” she whispered. Gloria stared at the carpet as if afraid to meet Marlene’s eyes. “Because what she saw,” Gloria said, “someone didn’t want anyone else to hear.” In late 1994, Marlene received a call from an unknown number. A man’s voice, trembling and low: “You’re still looking for her?” “Yes,” Marlene said, barely able to breathe. “I can’t say much,” the voice whispered. “But check the drylands. North Gully. South Ridgeline. Below the old service road.” The line went dead. Marlene reported it immediately. A unit drove out, filed a short report, and labeled it a false lead. No formal dig. No drone scan. No dogs. Three months later, the area was developed for off-road vehicle training. Bulldozed and reshaped. The original topography lost, as if someone had erased a crime scene with heavy machinery. Marlene couldn’t make sense of it—unless someone didn’t want it searched. Unless someone had been watching her, tracking her steps like a hunter tracks footprints. And if so, who knew she’d received that call? In 1998, during a dry season that cracked the earth like old pottery, an amateur hiking group wandered into a rock gulch deep past the usual trails. The desert had pulled back some of its camouflage, revealing what it had hidden. They saw it first as a shape that didn’t belong: a rusted roof, a battered antenna, faded red and blue lights coated in dust. A police car. Half-sunk into dried mud, wedged in a narrow pit like it had been driven or pushed off a slope. Sun and sand had eaten at it for years, stripping paint, chewing metal. Authorities arrived. They confirmed the VIN. **Emily Reigns’s patrol car.** It had been there all along. Hidden in plain sight, in a place that should have been found in the first week—if anyone had truly looked. Inside the trunk, there was no body. No weapon. Just a folder sealed in plastic, rotten around the edges, marked in fading ink: **Q ROUTE** Under special light, faint handwriting appeared on a smeared note: *It wasn’t supposed to go this far.* The handwriting wasn’t Emily’s. The note ended with two letters: **H L**. The department tried to keep that detail quiet, but Marlene still had connections—one officer with a conscience, one with old loyalty to Emily. A photograph arrived in her mailbox, anonymous: the folder under blacklight, the initials glowing like a curse. Marlene stared at them for hours. Could it really be Darren Holt? Was he involved? Or had he tried to stop something and failed? She tracked him down in Nevada. He was living under a different name, working a job that kept him quiet and hidden. He agreed to meet in a parking lot outside a grocery store, never letting his back face the open street. He looked older, carved by worry. When Marlene showed him the photograph, his face tightened. “I told you I tried to help,” he said. “But some things… they’re bigger than you think.” “Tell me what HL means,” Marlene demanded. He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.” “I already know enough to never sleep,” she snapped. “Say it.” His eyes flicked toward a passing car. “I can’t,” he repeated. Then he turned and walked away as if leaving her could protect them both. In the official case file, there was another detail Marlene couldn’t stop circling: Emily had a habit of recording her shifts on a personal camcorder—not department issue, her own. She kept it mounted on the dashboard, angled toward the windshield. A safety measure, a quiet insurance policy. When the cruiser was recovered, the camcorder was gone. Not just missing—removed cleanly. No wires. No mount. No trace. Only scratch marks where the bracket had been. Someone had gotten to the car first. Or someone had access to it long after. Then a retired auto mechanic named Walter Pike came forward. He’d done part-time maintenance for the department in the early eighties. He remembered Emily bringing her cruiser in a month before she vanished. “She asked me to check the brake lines,” he said. “Specific. Like she knew something.” He leaned forward when he spoke, voice dropping. “And she told me—quiet as anything—‘If something happens to me, look at this car first.’” After her disappearance, no one investigated the vehicle records. No one called Walter. Fifteen years passed. He saw the recovered cruiser on the news and recognized the dented fender he’d repaired weeks before Emily vanished. “Did they ever check the brakes?” he asked. No one had. Marlene requested access to Emily’s personnel file and the full case records. At first, she was told to wait. Then came the official story: a storage mishap, an electrical fire in the archives room, several boxes destroyed—*including Emily’s.* No injuries. No report filed. Just a quiet apology and a closed door. Marlene discovered only her sister’s files and a few related traffic-stop logs were missing. Everything else on that floor remained intact. “It’s like someone wants to erase her from history,” one clerk muttered under his breath, then went pale as if he’d spoken a forbidden prayer. Marlene leaned closer. “Then why did they leave the cruiser?” The clerk stared at her, eyes tired. “Maybe they wanted it found,” he said softly. “Just not too soon.” After the cruiser discovery, a town hall meeting was held. Dozens of citizens gathered, reporters present, officials tense. Marlene stood and spoke about her sister—about truth and fear and the way silence could be an accomplice. The crowd applauded, but Marlene noticed a man standing at the back of the room in shadow, arms folded. He wasn’t taking notes. He wasn’t whispering to anyone. He was watching. Something about him felt familiar in a way her body understood before her mind did. After the meeting, she tried to find him. Gone. The next day, an envelope appeared in her mailbox. No return address. Inside was a faded photograph: Emily at a gas station, timestamped fifteen minutes before her last radio call. In the background, leaning against a black sedan, was a man wearing a jacket similar to the one Marlene had seen at the meeting. Her stomach turned to ice. Whoever he was, he wanted her to know: *I can still see you.* Marlene requested patrol logs for the night Emily vanished—not just Emily’s, but every shift scheduled around it. Pages spread across her dining table like a paper map of a past that refused to stay buried. Names, times, locations highlighted in ink until her fingers cramped. A pattern emerged: two officers from another district—hours away—were listed as riding along in Emily’s area that night. An unusual crossover for routine patrol. But their names were redacted in the version she received. She filed for unredacted logs. Denied: **personnel safety**. Why would a fifteen-year-old name put someone in danger unless those people still had something to lose? Then a former local reporter handed her a receipt from the old gas station: Emily’s signature, timestamped **7:42 p.m.** the night she disappeared. But her radio dispatch log recorded her last location call at **7:35 p.m.**, miles away. Was the receipt wrong? Or were the logs doctored? If the receipt time was correct, Emily was alive and on foot after she’d supposedly been somewhere else. Marlene visited the gas station. It had changed hands three times. A current employee vaguely remembered the old owner mentioning a nervous cop who came in that night and didn’t pump gas—just stood near the pay phone. No surveillance tapes survived. But Marlene wondered: who did she call? With a private investigator, she traced pay-phone records from that night. It took weeks, favors, and money Marlene didn’t have. They found an odd call placed to an unlisted number tied to the regional DEA office. Emily wasn’t assigned to the DEA. There was no record of any DEA crossover in the area that month. A former DEA agent, retired and reluctant, finally spoke to Marlene after she cornered him with the kind of desperation that couldn’t be brushed off. “Bridgeway,” he said, like the word tasted bad. “Operation Bridgeway.” When Marlene pressed him, he leaned closer and warned, “Emily got too close to something that still isn’t meant to be talked about.” “She wasn’t taken for what she did,” he added, voice flat. “She was taken for what she found.” Then he refused to say another word. A sketch surfaced from the original police file—one that never made it into the public record. Drawn by Emily’s own hand two weeks before her disappearance. It showed a narrow bridge over a ravine: three figures, a parked vehicle nearby. One figure had a badge; the other two did not. Marlene stared at the sketch until her eyes blurred, then drove out to the rural bridge Emily used to visit when she needed to clear her head. Beneath overgrowth on one support beam, Marlene found carved letters, faded but unmistakable: **EJ, I saw you.** A warning. Or a promise. Back home, Marlene combed through a last stack of neglected records and found a tattered file mislabeled under an unrelated traffic stop. Inside: a grainy photo of Emily out of uniform, taken from a distance. She was meeting someone in a diner parking lot, head turned as if sensing she was being watched. A note attached: **CB** and the words, *She knows too much.*

The file had a fingerprint tag. Marlene paid for analysis. The print matched a former federal agent who’d died in 1999—officially ruled a suicide. Unofficially, whispered about as a man who’d made enemies in rooms without windows. If Emily had been under surveillance by feds as well as locals, her disappearance wasn’t random. It was a decision. A retired city councilman, blunt and tired of secrets, went still when Marlene mentioned Bridgeway. “That wasn’t local,” he said. “That came from above—way above. We were told to stay out of it. Keep things quiet.” He described what he’d heard: drugs, cash movement, compromised officials. “She had photos,” he added quietly. Photos of what? And where were they now? Marlene found the last untouched space where Emily’s life still existed: the garage attic of their childhood home. Dust and heat and memories. In a rusted toolbox beneath old uniforms and empty shell casings, she found a locked metal box. Inside were three undeveloped rolls of 35mm film and a handwritten note in Emily’s precise penmanship: *If anything happens to me, don’t trust the badge. Only show these when it’s safe.* The film was too old for standard development. A preservationist agreed to help, but it would take two weeks. The waiting nearly broke Marlene. She slept with a kitchen knife beside her bed and jumped at every unfamiliar car sound outside. When the scans finally came back, Marlene’s hands shook as she opened the envelope. Frame after frame: night photos. Locations noted in Emily’s handwriting. A dockyard near the bridge. Unmarked vans loading crates onto boats. Men—some in uniform—passing duffel bags at a storage unit numbered **114**. And in the last roll: a sequence of photos of a black sedan following Emily’s car on multiple nights. One photo, taken through a rearview mirror, caught the driver clearly. A man still active in law enforcement. Marlene stared until she felt sick. Proof had weight. Proof changed the air in a room. She arranged a meeting with a reporter from a national paper. They chose a café near the courthouse, neutral territory. The reporter never showed. Instead, a man in a plain gray suit sat across from her as if he’d been expected. “You need to stop,” he said calmly. “This story doesn’t end the way you think.” He slid a manila envelope across the table. Inside was a sealed file from 1985 stamped with Emily’s badge number. At the bottom: **Case resolved internally.** No explanation. No signature. Marlene looked up, heart pounding. The man was already walking out the door. She chased him into the street. Gone. The number **114** burned in her mind.

Public records showed the storage facility still existed. She drove there, found it tucked behind an industrial yard—rusting chain-link fences and dead weeds. Unit 114 was still registered, not to Emily, but to a shell company dissolved in 1991. Marlene slipped through a loose gate panel. The lock was old and brittle. With a crowbar and a racing heart, she forced it open. Inside, a single crate wrapped in heavy plastic sat under a blanket of dust. She pried it open. And found cassette tapes labeled **EMILY NOTES** and a sealed brown envelope marked **CONFIDENTIAL**. At home, she dug out an old recorder. She hesitated before pressing play, because some evidence didn’t just inform—you could feel it step into your life. Emily’s voice crackled through the speaker, tired and urgent but unmistakably hers. “If you’re hearing this, I guess I never made it back. I was right. They’re hiding something under the bridge. I saw crates, guns, drugs, and someone I knew was involved…” Emily listed badge numbers, dates, times, locations in a calm, methodical tone that made it worse—because it wasn’t paranoia. It was a ledger. On the third tape, her tone changed. “They know I’ve been watching. Same car again last night. Same license plate. They know where I live…” Then, on the last tape, the final minute was mostly silence. A soft knock. Emily whispering: “They’re here.” Marlene dropped the recorder. The brown envelope contained blurred black-and-white photos: docked boats, badge flashes, night scenes, and one unmistakable face—the man from the black sedan. A typed note paperclipped to the photos read: *If this ever gets out, careers will end. Maybe lives.* Not signed. One photo showed a shoreline angle Marlene recognized—taken from the spot where Emily’s car had been found fifteen years later. Who took that photo? And why keep it hidden? Marlene drove back to the cliff site. The desert wind smelled like dry stone and old rust. A rocky area near the riverbank. A steep incline. Loose boulders. Investigators had claimed they recovered only part of the vehicle, not the entire chassis. With a flashlight and a courage that felt like sickness, Marlene followed the cliff’s edge. She found a narrow opening half-covered by brush—an almost-hidden shallow cave, dry and walled off. Inside were tire marks, scraps of faded plastic, insulation fibers. Someone had tried to move the car—or part of it—deeper into the rocks. They’d failed. Or they’d been interrupted. Marlene visited Emily’s old apartment, now rented to strangers. The landlord allowed her into the basement storage unit. Behind a water heater, she found an old wooden box marked with a heart and a single initial: **E**. Childhood trinkets. Old letters. Underneath, a false bottom. A cassette tape—unlabeled. Marlene played it. Emily’s voice, low and close as if recorded in the dark: “I’ve copied everything and hidden the rest. I’m scared, but I can’t walk away. If anything happens, look for the badge with the scratch.” A badge with a scratch. Marlene didn’t understand until she remembered one of the photos. The scratched badge number was **7431**. She looked it up. Officer Kenneth Doyle. Still active duty. And shockingly, Doyle had been part of the initial search team when Emily disappeared. He’d been promoted twice. Quiet career, no awards, no blemishes—too steady, too clean. Marlene dug into internal affairs reports and found a buried complaint marked *non-actionable.* Emily had accused Doyle of falsifying evidence in a drug arrest. A week later, she vanished. Marlene tracked down a man named Delroy, homeless in the eighties, dismissed as unreliable. Delroy lived in a halfway shelter now, older but sharp-eyed. When Marlene mentioned Emily, he nodded immediately. “She was scared,” he said. “Arguing with a man near the cliffs. He grabbed her. Pushed her down. They laughed at me when I told them.” Marlene showed him a photo of Kenneth Doyle. Delroy’s eyes went wide. “That’s him,” he whispered. He added something that made Marlene’s throat tighten: he’d seen Doyle weeks later, throwing something into the river. Marlene hired a private dive team with the last of her savings. Sonar scanning near the muddy riverbed. They found a long metal object wrapped in chains. A duffel bag, sealed tight, waterlogged, reeking. Inside: a rusted handgun, a badge with a scratch across the number, and a notebook so damaged it was barely legible. One line survived like a ghost refusing to fade: *If I disappear, this man is why.* Signed: **E.** Emily. Marlene took the tapes, photos, notebook, and badge to an investigative journalist who’d once covered corruption. He listened in silence. When she finished, he said, “That’s not a story. That’s a bomb.” They met with an attorney. They submitted everything to a state investigator. And were told: **insufficient criminal evidence.** As if a voice saying *They’re here* didn’t matter. As if a scratched badge pulled from a riverbed didn’t matter. As if a department erasing transcripts didn’t matter. Then came another blow: Kenneth Doyle had quietly retired two months earlier and moved out of state. No forwarding address. Vanished, in the smallest echo of what he’d done to Emily. Marlene felt the trap closing: every time she reached for the truth, someone moved the pieces. A retired officer mentioned a cabin—Emily’s uncle’s place near Mirror Ridge. No mention of it existed in official reports. Land records showed the property had been sold in 1989, five years after Emily disappeared, by someone claiming to be her next of kin. The signature was forged. Marlene drove there. The cabin stood overgrown but intact, the wood gray with age. Inside, dust lay thick as ash. She found a trap door beneath a rug. She descended into a crawl space lined with stone, damp and cold. Her flashlight beam caught writing scratched into the wall, crude and jagged: **I’M STILL HERE.** A frayed piece of cloth lay nearby—pattern and color matching the uniform Emily wore in the eighties. No bones. No body. Just words. Forensics later said the handwriting matched Emily’s known samples, but there was no conclusive evidence she’d died there. The question spread through town like wildfire: had Emily been kept alive? Marlene laid out the timeline on her wall and found gaps like missing teeth. A five-year stretch when no one looked hard. In that span, other women vanished from nearby counties—dismissed as runaways, domestic disappearances. Marlene compared case files. In several, she found the same initial investigator name: **Kenneth Doyle.** Her phone buzzed with a voicemail: a digitally altered male voice. “You’re looking where you shouldn’t,” it said. “Some doors aren’t meant to open.” A cyber-security contact traced the signal to a ping near the old police headquarters. Doyle hadn’t left the state. He’d gone underground. Marlene passed her findings to a senator’s aide who promised an internal review. Weeks passed. Then the story disappeared. Her article draft was rejected. The reporter took sudden leave. Marlene’s emails were breached. The forensic report from the cabin vanished from public databases as if it had never existed. Then the cabin burned. Arson. No suspects. The police called it a vandal’s accident. Marlene stood at the blackened foundation and tasted smoke and certainty. Someone had decided Emily’s story should end with silence. But silence, Marlene learned, did not erase truth. It only delayed it. Every year after the patrol car was found, someone left fresh lilies at the cliff’s edge. No note. No signature. Just flowers placed with careful hands. In 2005, a memorial plaque appeared in a park near the precinct: **SERGEANT EMILY SLOAN 1952 – UNKNOWN YOU NEVER WALKED ALONE** No one admitted authorizing it. The department denied it. The city said it wasn’t registered. Marlene visited often, placing her own candle beside the stone. One day, she found a note tucked behind the plaque. *Truth buried is still truth, but it waits.* The paper matched old department memo pads. Marlene looked up at the sky and felt the desert stretch around her like a patient witness. Years passed. Sometimes Marlene received calls from untraceable numbers. No voice. Just static. Like someone checking to see if she was still looking. She always was. Because Emily Reigns was not just a mystery. She was a wound in the town’s history, a place where the story didn’t heal because someone kept reopening it—intentionally, methodically, from inside. One winter, a package arrived with no return address. Inside: photocopies of old case notes, redacted, barely legible. On each page, a faint stamp: **SERGEANT EMILY SLOAN – OFFICIAL** One entry made Marlene’s breath stop: **Interview notes with Sloan, July 1986. Protective custody transfer pending.** Protective custody. Two years after Emily vanished. Marlene called the U.S. Marshals office. They had no record of anyone by that name. No file. No transfer. Nothing.