[Crime Mystery] We all hope that Chris Coan will be found safe and sound, if he wants to be. Still, the mystery surrounding his disappearanceengages the imagination.Coan wrote down the number "208" before leaving his job at a Subway sandwich shop in Enoch. Then he drove away and hasn't been heard from since.
Did police use the time-honored "scribble on the notepad with the edge of a pencil lead" technique to discover what it was he had written down? (This worked in The Big Lebowski and countless other spy movies and Perry Mason episodes, but it's really easier--though less cinematically dramatic--to hold the paper at an oblique angle to the light.) Why do police assume 208 is a phone number? It's only three digits. Nobody ever writes down just an area code or an exchange; phone numbers are seven or 10 digits. And Coan doesn't even have a cell phone. My theory is that 208 is a hotel room number. You wouldn't necessarily write down the name of a hotel if you knew where it was, but you would probably write down a room number if you were meeting a guest there. According to Bill Frost, if this were an episode of The Rockford Files, 208 would be the number of a locker at a bus depot.