The Vanished Into Thin Air Affair

The man vanished.
    One split second before, he had been walking across a rather non-descript street in an ordinary, small town, several hours southeast of Topeka, Kansas. He was wearing a red, plaid, flannel shirt and blue denim overalls. His brown hair was short and sweaty. His hands were worn and dirty from hard work. There were, in fact, several men on the street that day closely matching his description, but he was the only one who slowly faded out of existence as he went along his way.
    The woman screamed. It took 2 hours, 5 police officers, and a sedative from her doctor to calm her enough to fill out a report on what she had seen.
    The truck turned wildly out of control and crashed into a blue and white mailbox in front of Ed Neely�s Drug Store. The driver swore he hadn�t been drinking, but no one who knew him believed him. It wasn�t, after all, his first mailbox.

Alexander Waverly sat in the large, comfortable chair at his desk. The bushy, gray eyebrows that extended across his forehead were set in their usual frown. As he read the report that had just been spewed out from a nearby computer, the frown deepened. He took the long, smoking pipe from his mouth and lay the report on his desk where several more sheets of paper lay scattered. Each sheet held a report strikingly similar to the one he had just read. He leaned back in his chair and puffed several small breaths from the pipe as he stared at the ceiling.
    Suddenly, his mind was made up. Leaning forward he pushed a button on the small box positioned on the left corner of his desk. "Ah, Miss. Carper?"
    "Harper, Sir," the muffled voice replied from the box.
    "Ah, yes. Miss Harper, please have Mr. Solo and Mr. Kuryakin report to me as soon as they arrive."
    "Yes, Sir, Mr. Waverly."

Waverly sat at a long table with the report print-outs spread out across it. He pointed to or picked up each one in turn as he spoke.
    "Tori Smith, 3rd grade teacher and mother of three. Vanished while hanging laundry in her backyard.
    "James Hostetter, third rate Lawyer in Minnesota. Vanished while purchasing a hot dog from a street vender.
    "Pierre Malais, vanished while walking across a busy street in Paris during rush hour."
    Solo sat up in his chair and reached to pick up one of the reports. Kuryakin stopped reading the one that he held and peered over his dark rimmed glasses as Waverly continued. "Andrea Mirkovitch, she ran a small restaurant in Minsk. I understand they serve excellent pelmeni.
    "Miso Kimiko, Japanese airline pilot. Luckily, he was playing baseball with his son and not flying! The list is extremely long, gentlemen, and each case is strikingly similar. These people are not famous or well known. They have nothing in common except that they vanished off the street or out of their yards into thin air. The incidents date back well over a year. It has taken way to long for us even to notice, much less to put together a discernible pattern."
    "What is the pattern, Sir?" Kuryakin looked over several of the reports spread out in front of him.
    "Only this, Mr. Kuryakin, the vanishings have been becoming more and more frequent. Over the past year there have been 106 reported vanishings. This month alone twenty men and women have disappeared off the streets of the world. Five of those have been in the past week."
    "What can we do, Sir? Are there any leads, any connections between these people? Where do we start?" Solo lay down one report and picked up another, perusing it quickly.
    "You will start here." Waverly dropped a report and it floated gently toward Napoleon. "Elmer Crat, a farmer from Washita, Kansas. Vanished, yesterday morning, right off the street. There are two witnesses. Find out everything you can."

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