Shortly afterwards, the Gurus came into my bedroom. "We didn't know if you wanted an update on the case", said Miguel, "but we thought we'd let you know what we were doing and maybe have a little brainstorming session."

My eyes got a little teary. "Thank you", I said. "That's the worst part about being benched. I feel useless."

Nick smiled. "You won't be benched for long. You're too stubborn to allow it."

I snorted out a laugh.

"Before we start that", said Julie, "tell me the history behind these ribbons. The girls just kept calling it a courage ribbon, and the explanation was a little garbled."

I laughed and explained why they were called courage ribbons. "Alix is a little shy and I have suspected for a while that she is nervous to be starting school in September simply because there are so many new people. She was the one out of all the kids that particularly connected with Colin. Having a courage ribbon in his tartan will mean a lot to her. As I said to her, it shows that he is in Heaven and looking down, cheering her on and giving her courage. She seemed to like that thought."

Julie smiled. "He was a good man, and I can see why that thought is comforting to her."

I smiled. "Okay, what do you have?"

"With Ben's help, we contacted the Chief yesterday afternoon and talked to him. Ranger wasn't in on the call since he was with you, but Ben and Hal and the four of us were. Hal told him the kinds of things we have done in the past, and the kinds of cases we have helped out with. He set him up with Joe's number and Neil's number so that the Chief could talk to our liaison and to the Chief in Trenton. We had a good conversation but it was very superficial. Davis, the Chief here, then talked to Neil about what we could do, and he checked out our claims. Apparently, we had downplayed our abilities according to Neil. Davis called us back half an hour later and was almost falling over himself to sign us up.

"While he was sending us the data that we needed, we talked to Lili and the rest of the managers here. We explained what was happening with you and Ranger, and we explained that we were now going to be training the staff in your stead. Although they were worried about you, they were pleased that they wouldn't have to wait longer for the training as they said they were looking forward to learning new techniques. They seem like a good group of people.

"This morning, we went into head office – nice building, by the way – and started the training session. We started with the managers and directors, and we pulled in expert help as needed. We had a staff member clean up all the video surveillance, and that was good. We had another staff member identify all the victims and match them up with their HR file. We then showed the staff how to do an in-depth on a murder victim, and this morning we were able to do the in-depths as well as match them up with their HR file. The four of us were just going over the different victims when you called us up."

"When you say victims, do you mean the police officers?"

"Yes. We haven't tackled the students yet."

"Maybe get the Castle Force team to do them tomorrow while you roam amongst them and help. Any similarities in the officers' files?"

"If you feel up to it", said Julie, "we were thinking we'd ask you to go over the files. There are no similarities in family history that we could tell. They come from different backgrounds and so on. The only real similarity is that they were all twenty-four years old."

"Interesting. Did they all go to the same high school or college?"

"Yes", she said. "They all attended Inverness High."

"So they all attended the same high school and were the same age, which means that they were in the same grade. I would review yearbooks to see if anything important happened in the years that they attended. I would also check criminal records to see if there are any sealed juvie files for those years." The four of them were smiling at me. "Let me guess – you've already done that."

Dirk laughed. "Actually, I was just thinking that we had missed you in the war room. We had checked criminal records, but we hadn't checked yearbooks."

"I had wondered when you were all smiling at me."

"Don't know why those yahoos were smiling at you", said Nick. "For me, I'm just glad that you're back."

"Me too", said Miguel and Julie at the same time.

I smiled. "It's nice to be back." I thought for a moment. "Let's see the video surveillance."

Julie called it up on her computer. There were twenty-seven videos of someone selling drugs to a high school student. Each student died of drug-related causes afterwards. We watched the purchase of drugs by each of the victims. In each case, the person selling the drugs was wearing a dark hoody and a pair of jeans. Male, filled out a little more than usual for a high school student, face hidden as the person stood with his back to the camera. It made me think that he knew where the camera was.

In the first video we watched, though, the man passed over the drugs and, when he did, he showed a paracord bracelet. The second video didn't show the bracelet, but the third video did. By the end of the videos, over half of them showed the paracord bracelet.

"Blow up that bracelet", I said.

"It's just a paracord bracelet", said Miguel as Julie blew it up. He looked a little confused. "Lots of people have one."

I looked at the blown-up image. "Do they all have Medic Alert identification on them?"

"What?" said Miguel, Dirk, Nick and Julie at the same time. As they looked, they could just see the bottom quarter of the medic alert symbol.

"I'll be damned", said Miguel softly.

"It's going to take some time", I said, "but it might be a good idea to look through the people that the officers went to school with and identify whether any of them have signed up for the Medic Alert program."

"That makes sense", said Nick.

"Same thing with the other officers in the unit. And if we are really lucky, we will find someone that they went to school with who wears a paracord medic alert bracelet who has the body shape of the person in the video. Alternatively, we can talk to the Medic Alert program and find out which people have purchased the paracord identification bracelet. If there is only one, we have saved ourselves a lot of work. If there are five thousand, we can keep that information on the back burner to add to the file when we have identified the person."

"And this is why we say that you're the best", said Miguel. "All four of us and all six of the senior staff that we were training today crawled all over those videos earlier, and every single one of us missed it."

I smiled. It was nice to be appreciated.