Abigail Laura Wright (Caucasian woman, age 26), a successful fine artist, is missing from her apartment in Manhattan. She was last seen four days before she was reported missing on 4 JUN 1995 by her father, Nassau County police officer Thomas Wright (Caucasian man, age 50). He pulled strings to get the NYPD immediately involved.

Abigail Wright lived in Manhattan for seven and a half years. In that time, she only went to the police once, to report a mugging in 1994 (unsolved). She had a distinguished academic record and an impressive list of credentials and former clients. Late last year, her first show was held at the Mercury, a trendy art gallery downtown on Franklin Street. She managed to sell 15 pieces, and with this money she took a half-year off to paint.

Six months later, she disappeared on, as best the authorities can guess, 1 JUN 1995. Police entered her studio in the Macallistar Building at East 32nd Street, in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, on 4 JUN 1995. They found a baffling tableau. What once was a modest apartment had become an obsessive-compulsive’s dream.

Every available surface was covered in junk, glued or taped to the walls. Only the floor remained clear, the rug yanked up to reveal a battered linoleum surface. Among the junk were sets of dentures, partial dentures, a 1940s wheelchair, modern and antique artificial limbs, dozens of shirts, shoes, and briefcases, assorted radios spanning several decades (some still operational, but mundane), all manner of jewelry, earrings, rings, and necklaces, and thousands of papers of all designs and ages, some in Spanish, some in Mandarin, and even a college economics report in Farsi. Almost all these items were glued to the wall with a fast-setting, cheap, full-bond epoxy.

Prior to this, Wright had been a fastidious young woman not given to accumulating odds and ends. There were no obvious signs of a struggle or any sort of violence, and the neighbors offered no useful testimony. Detectives investigated several leads but uncovered nothing. The apartment remained a crime scene and was visited four times by the NYPD, but only twice by detectives due to backlog.

Two months later, on 4 AUG 1995, Wright’s credit card was used in Patience, Maryland, to purchase a pack of Old Gold cigarettes. The case was given to the New York FBI as a possible kidnapping. The FBI reexamined the tenants of the building and Wright’s associates and friends, and came to the same dead end which stopped the NYPD. Employees at the gas station where Wright’s credit card was used had no particular recollection of the transaction and did not recognize Wright from photographs. The signature on the receipt was her name but not her handwriting. The gas station had no surveillance cameras.

Among the debris found in Wright’s apartment was a piece of paper with an occult symbol hastily scrawled in golden ink. The symbol caught the attention of a Delta Green friendly at the New York FBI who was marginally associated with the case. This friendly, Sandra Levinson, reported it to her Delta Green contact, the leader of New York’s M-cell: Agent Marcus