Читать книгу Limb from Limb - George Hunter - Страница 11

At the same time Stephen was spilling his story to Hughes in the lobby, the telephone rang in Lieutenant Elizabeth Darga’s office, located just off the lobby. Darga, who oversees the day-to-day operations of the department’s detective bureau, found the phone call peculiar.

“It was a woman who said she was a sergeant out of the Michigan State Police post in Lansing,” said Darga, a twenty-year police veteran. “This woman said she knew the Grant family, and had been in contact with Tara’s sister. She said that Stephen Grant was planning to come in to make a report, and that we should really look closely at this case because something was not right. She said there was no way Tara would have left like that.”

Darga relayed the Michigan State Police (MSP) phone call to her boss, Captain Anthony Wickersham, who headed the detective bureau. “I said, ‘You might want to hear this one. I just got off the phone with a female state police sergeant from Lansing,’ and I told him what she said,” Darga recounted.

Wickersham agreed that the case warranted a closer look. “It was obvious from the beginning, something wasn’t right” he said.

Learning that Hughes had just concluded his meeting with Stephen Grant, Darga called Hughes into her office. “I asked, ‘Did you just take a report about a missing woman?’” Darga recalled. Hughes said he had, and relayed to his boss what Stephen had told him.

“We immediately put a priority on this case,” Darga said. “There are times when you get a missing persons report and there are factors that lead you to believe they took off for whatever reason, or there’s some type of substance abuse. But in this case, there was none of that.”

The first phone calls made in the investigation were to Tara’s family. “Everyone said there was something wrong, because she would have never left her children,” Darga said.

Darga assembled several detectives in her office at about 1:30 P.M. and explained the situation. “I told them about the information I’d gotten from the state police sergeant, and I directed everyone on what we needed to do,” Darga said. “We had to start checking everything.”