Richmond, Virginia — At a Lowe’s in Richmond, Virginia, store manager Mike Sida has always had a favorite employee: Francine the cat. 

“She wasn’t quite as friendly in the very beginning,” Sida told CBS News. “But after a little while, she found her way into a lot of people’s hearts, I guess you could say.”

Cats can do that. For nearly a decade, this former stray was a constant presence in the garden department. She’d become a local celebrity. Then one day, a few months ago, Francine vanished.

“I just had a gut feeling that she was gone,” said Wayne Schneider, a Lowe’s employee and Francine’s primary caretaker.  

Schneider figured Francine must have wandered onto a freight truck bound for a massive Lowe’s distribution center in Statesville, North Carolina, about 85 miles away. If so, she could have been anywhere in the distribution center, hiding in the piles of pallets, or tucked in the rows of trucks.

“Maybe they opened the trailer up and she got out,” Schneider said. “We would never find her.”

But Schneider said he had to try. So, he elicited the help of distribution center warehouse managers Preston Bullock and Taylor Taconet.

“As long as they had fight in them, we had fight in us to help support,” Bullock said.

“Our mission is to solve problems,” Taconet added. “And that’s exactly what we took it as…We’ve got a missing family member out here, so we’re going to jump on top of it.”

They pulled out all the stops. They tried to lure Francine with Fancy Feast. They brought in a thermal drone to fly over the distribution center. They even searched it with a high-end 360-degree camera.

But they had no luck — until surveillance video captured a grainy image of Francine in a parking area for cargo trucks, and they were able to find and collect her.

“I could have cried, I’ll be honest,” Taconet said.

“I was so overjoyed,” Schneider said. “Tears were just coming down my face, that we had found her.”

Sida and Schneider drove to the North Carolina distribution center, loaded Francine up in a car, and brought her back to Richmond, a triumphant return for their star employee.

Today, Francine is back to her old routine, prowling the store and posing for customers.

“It’s good to see her back where she belongs,” Sida said.