"I thought you had class with Haggerty tonight." I said directing my comment to Sherry.
"That the problem." She said. "I am supposed to have class with Professor Haggerty tonight."
I knew that didn't explain any thing but I had learned to keep my mouth shut and let her finish.
"Professor Haggerty didn't show up for class. We waited a half and hour and then went looking for him." Sherry continued.
Angel took the next turn. "Sherry found me in the lab and we went together to Professor Haggerty's office. I opened the door and nothing was there."
"You mean nobody was there." I clarified thinking that she should really work on her English a bit.
"No. I mean NOTHING was there. Professor Haggerty's desk had been cleaned out. His books, journals, and files were all missing too. It was kind of spooky looking at the empty desktop and the empty shelves."
My first reaction was that he couldn't leave. It's the middle of the semester and he has classes to cover. But then I thought about how he looked the night before leaving the pub and realized that whatever was going on was way beyond meeting classes.
"I have to see this for myself." I said. I looked at my half finished oatmeal stout and thought about how difficult it is sometimes to do the right thing. I put the glass on the bar and followed Angel and Sherry over to Haggerty's office.
It was exactly as Angel had said. Haggerty's desk had been cleaned out and everything that belonged to him was gone. In a neat stack on one of the shelves were all his papers from his classes. Good old, Frank. Whatever personal trauma he was going through, he took time to put his class papers in order so the students wouldn't be affected.
"O.K. Here's what I need you guys to do. Angel, change all of the administrator passwords on the lab servers. For now just make them all 'changepw'. We'll sort them out later. Then go through all the user accounts on all the servers and disable them. We can bring them back one at a time, as we know they are safe. Tell the TAs in the lab not to give out any passwords to anyone, no matter what. Whatever is going on with Frank, we have to protect the network. Sherry - Go over to academic computing and tell them to restrict the firewall so it doesn't accept any IP addresses that are not local to the campus. When a system administrator quits you have to shut down the system until you know it is safe. I don't know if Frank would do anything or not, but I'd rather be safe than sorry."
Besides, I thought, he never did explain that business about the missing web pages.
"Sherry. When did you see Frank last?"
"Well, I saw him for sure in class last week?"
"Was he behaving strangely in any way?"
"No. In fact he seemed pretty upbeat."
"How about you, Angel. When did you see him last?"
"I saw him last night before he left to meet you at the pub. He seemed pretty upbeat then too."
When we met last night he was confident and upbeat. By the end of the evening everything had changed. I thought about his words, "You think you know everything. But there are LOTS of things you don't know." Maybe, I thought, but I will find out. I didn't go through all that detective training just to let you disappear without a trace.
"What are you going to do Professor Wentworth?" asked Sherry.
"Well, first I am going to make sure that you guys do what I asked you to do to secure the network. Then I am going to get somebody to cover Frank's classes. Then..." I trailed off.
"Then, what?" asked Angel.
"Then I am going to find Franklin V. Haggerty." I said, with a little more conviction that necessary. Frank's betrayal had opened an old wound; a very deep old wound that I got years ago from my parents. This time they aren't (he isn't I corrected) going to get away with it.
"You're going to find him?" they chimed together.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm going to find him. If it's the last thing I do." And it may very well be, I thought.