It's the first week of July 2011. Detective Julia Bowman settles in at her elbow beaten desk at the Laguna Beach Police Department.

And on that desk is a Manila folder.

With just a post it saying look into us with her signature or see if you can do anything

with this something like that. The post it note is from her sergeant who's just gone out on medical leave.

In her cramped cubicle, Detective Bowman opens that folder.

All of her kind of extra notes, the vehicle checks, the reports from DHS or those kind of things, so they were all contained

in this Manila folder.

It's a missing person case.

Now, people are reported missing from time to time in Laguna Beach, just like anywhere else,

but since the 1980s, pretty much all of them have turned up.

The papers on her desk tell the story of a young millionaire named Chris Smith, who sailed off

into the Pacific. Bowman says the betting money in the department

was that Chris Smith would pop back up

just like all the rest of them did.

Even so, Bowman's intrigued.

I think detectives are probably all the same.

Like, you just can't help to pull the thread, you know, you, whatever it is, you're like,

well, yeah, I guess I'll work, like, I can't help but get into it. The 20 pages or so also include

email exchanges between Chris from his far-flung destinations and his family. He seems to be traveling all over the world.

The scribbled notes in the folder are punctuated by asterisk and question marks.

It's a jigsaw of raw data and possible leads.

So I just go to work plotting the timeline and creating links and finding ways that, know a plus b equal c and then seeing if it doesn't if a

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