The Trinity Murders Page 2

  He knew the two men were always there but he never took it for granted. As he approached the park, he was happy to see them both in their customary positions. “Topper my boy, how are you doing this morning?” George reached out to shake Topper’s hand and Topper patted him on the shoulder.

  “I’m good, old man. Just catching a flight to Dallas in a few hours and thought I would come by and see what’s going on.” He had never been much of a liar and he would never lie to these two, but Topper was treading gingerly, hoping they didn’t ask about his job.

  “Would you like to play a quick game then? Harold doesn’t know it but I’m two moves from mate so this one is just about over,” said George with a little glare for Harold.

  “Who do you think you’re dealing with? I know you think you’re two moves out which is why I’ve got you right where I want you. That’s always you’re problem. Always getting ahead of yourself,” said Harold with a wag of the finger for George.

  “He’s right George. This game is far from over. It’s just as well, I’m just going to relax and mull some things over before I catch my flight,” said Topper, taking a seat at an empty bench.

  “Well if you change your mind, let me know. I can close Harold out anytime I want.”

  Shaking his head, Topper said he would let them know. The two men went back to their game and Topper was left with his thoughts. For years his identity had been tied to the badge and now that badge sat in a bedside drawer. Part of that identity was being a white knight for those in need and, although he knew he could still be that person without the badge, he questioned whether people would see him the same.

  Watching Harold and George play what must have been the millionth game between them, he thought about his father and all the games he’d missed in the past six years. Topper thought he understood the word forever, but it wasn’t until his father passed that he truly understood the meaning.

  Part of Topper’s drive was to always make his parents proud, but it was the pride of his father that really mattered. He wanted to call Trufant and tell him he changed his mind. He wanted to retreat to some tiny island with his surfboard and a margarita glass and get lost for a few months.

  He knew his father would want him to persevere. His father always taught him to get right back on the horse and it served him well all these years; he wasn’t about to stop listening now. He felt blessed that he was given another opportunity to make his father proud so soon after letting him down. He was taught to cherish the gifts he’d been given and the gift he had now was the chance to give closure to thirty-two girls. He had a chance to make sure no others were lost to this killer. He had a chance to bring comfort to all those families. He had a chance to reshape his identity and maybe in the process restore the shine to his badge.

  His thoughts shifted to Sarah as they usually did. She was the rock that kept him grounded. When Topper couldn’t see the forest for the trees and thought all hope was lost in a maze of terror and pain, it was Sarah who had the ability to show him that compassion and kindness still existed.

  His love for her grew everyday and today was no different. That’s what made his decision so hard. He thought back to how his father taught him that the toughest decisions were never easy but as long as you listened to both your heart and your head you would never go wrong.

  An hour had passed and just like Topper thought, that game had been nowhere near being done but he had to go. “Hey George, Harold’s got mate in three.” And with that he was gone, on his way to reinvent himself.

  Nothing made Topper feel more like himself than his Mustang. He had owned other cars over the years; currently he also drove a Ford Expedition, but the Mustang would always be his baby and that’s what he needed today as he set off for the airport.

  For his twelfth birthday, his father Bill bought him a ’65 Mustang. It was a junker that wouldn’t run. It didn’t even have tires. It was found rusting away in a barn two towns over and Bill was able to get it for a song. Over the next four years he learned how to work on cars and they rebuilt that Mustang from the ground up. They worked on the car every weekend, and once a year Bill would use a week of his vacation during the summer so they could spend that time rebuilding it. Rangoon Red with Wimbledon White interior and a white soft top. It was the most beautiful thing Topper ever saw. His dad let him take his driving test in the ‘stang and the next day when Topper showed up at school he definitely had the best car in the lot.

  Although the airport was only ten minutes away, Topper didn’t hesitate to put the top down as he pulled out of the underground garage. Vintage Raybans, engine rumbling, Topper never felt more free as driving down the highway with the wind blowing through his hair.

  He pulled the car into long-term parking and put the top up. One thing Topper was not was a slave to his possessions. He could have parked the car in short-term parking so it was in a covered garage or he could carry a car cover with him to keep it from the elements, but as much as he loved that car, he knew it was just a car. He took all the normal precautions: he locked it up tight and turned on the alarm. In his opinion anything more than that was foolish. He did drive around for ten minutes, though, until he found a spot on the end where he could park as close to that end line as possible. Although his convictions were strong, he was only human.

  He entered the terminal with over an hour to spare while waiting for his flight. As he chose a seat with his back to the wall he wondered if his training and years with the bureau chose his seat for him or if this would be a natural selection for him. With his feet up, he was sipping on a bottle of water and eating a banana while reading the latest copy of ESPN magazine.

  Being a Tuesday, the airport was relatively empty. Topper looked up from his magazine and watched a father and his small boy playing together a little ways down from him. He smiled as the father was playing “got your nose” with his young son. Topper always loved children, but working for the FBI gave him a level of compassion he didn’t know he had. After so many years witnessing children’s pain at the hands of others, he would fiercely defend any child who needed it.

  Topper wanted children of his own but his career always took the lead. For as long as people roamed the earth, evil has roamed with it and it will be like that until the end of time. There was always another case, another victim, another crisis. When he first started with the FBI he never believed a personal life was possible. Sarah changed all that. Although he was fiercely loyal to his job, she helped him appreciate a life outside the FBI. After awhile he believed a family and children were within his grasp. He hoped he hadn’t closed the door to that. He looked at the boy and father once again and smiled.

  As the counter attendant made the announcement that boarding would begin, Topper had a quick flash of doubt as he gathered up his things. That doubt was short lived as he knew he was on the right path.

  Boarding the plane, Topper began to have that same rush of adrenaline he had while talking with Sergeant Trufant and he was excited to be back in the game.

  This was all new to Topper. Sarah had finally convinced him to take a vacation but it was still six weeks away. Prior to that, he hadn’t taken a vacation or leave of absence since joining the FBI. They were forced to take two weeks off every year but he would spend those weeks studying the latest techniques, trying to make himself a better agent. This was the first time in five years he had flown on anything other than an FBI private jet. Security, boarding passes, a cramped plane filled with 200 of his fellow citizens; he had no idea how well he had it all these years.

  He now found himself making small talk with a tiny silver-haired woman catching a connecting flight out from Dallas to California to see her grandkids. She hadn’t been back for three years but since her son and daughter-in-law just had their second child last month, she decided it was time to go back. Topper hadn’t realized how detached he had become as he was unable to relax even for a few minutes and have a meaningless conversation with this woman. All he could think about was the
thirty-two victims and if there was a way for him to stop there being a thirty-third. He continued to make small talk without offering anything about himself or his travel plans and soon Doris turned her attention to her novel.

  Once he made sure his safety belt was fastened and made himself aware of the exits, Topper pulled out his tablet and started to do what he did best, build a profile. Lack of evidence is the one thing that each victim had in common. Since there were no murder sites, all evidence collected came from the dump sites and there was nothing. No DNA, no hairs or fibers, saliva or bodily fluids. The main thing each crime had in common was the dump site. Each body was buried approximately four feet deep in a part of the local wilderness that saw seasonal use. Each girl had ligature marks on her wrists and ankles that were believed to be left by shackles.

  This guy was organized and methodical. The murders did not appear to be on any set schedule but where the bodies ended up did. There had been thirty-two bodies recovered so far, eleven in Louisiana, eleven in Texas and ten in Oklahoma. The last victim was found in Texas and if Sergeant Trufant’s theory was correct, the next body would appear in Oklahoma.

  Petechial hemorrhaging showed that each girl died of asphyxiation, but the lack of ligature marks around the neck or fibers in or around the mouth or nose suggested to Topper that they had been suffocated with a bag. Topper spent the last hour of his flight going over crime scene photos and family statements from the girls they were able to identify. He made sure he had a window seat so he could position himself where he wouldn’t bother anyone with the details of his case or the photos that went along with it.

  The first reported victim was Jenny Atkinson. Jenny was a runaway from Arkansas. As a child, she was fingerprinted through her elementary school and her identification proved easy. Her parents had reported her missing two years before her body was found and the ME estimated her time of death at seven weeks prior to that. Based on that information, Jenny was kept anywhere up to two years before being murdered. A canvas was done to find someone who had seen her so they could build some type of time line, but that proved fruitless. There was no way to know if the abduction and burial site were even in the same state, so the canvas had little hope of success to begin with. Someone as careful as this un-sub probably didn’t bury his victims in the same place he abducted them from.

  The best information they received was from the eleventh victim, Melissa Brewster. Her body was found in Texas nine weeks after she was murdered. The same characteristics were present as in all other victims but in this case, her parents reported her missing three weeks before her murder. Although this un-sub changed enough variables to stay ahead of the law, most preferential killers were creatures of habit, so it was safe to say he didn’t keep any girl longer than three weeks.

  As his plane began its descent into Dallas and Topper was stowing his electronic devices, there was one thing he believed he knew: these murders were connected. He decided to try again and made small talk with Doris as they waited like cattle to exit the plane. He wished her luck on the rest of her travels, clearing the jet way into the hot Dallas terminal.

  Immediately, Topper realized how good he had it before. The terminal was loud and stuffy with people moving in every direction. Gone were the days of private terminals and waiting federal cars at your disposal. It just now dawned on him that he didn’t have a ride. He thought he would have to take a cab to the precinct and was getting ready to call Sergeant Trufant when the sergeant approached him from out of the melee.

  “Topper, how was your flight?” Trufant was a man in his late 40s with some gray around the temples. He kept himself in pretty good shape but he was probably a little heavier than he was ten years earlier, although he probably wouldn’t admit that. He walked with a purpose and when he shook Topper’s hand, it was with a firm grip.

  “Interesting, to say the least. I thought people nowadays had to have a ticket to get past security.”

  Trufant flashed his badge. “Membership has its privileges. I figured you weren’t used to finding your own transportation so I looked up your flight plans. I have a deputy waiting at the curb. Shall we go?”

  Looking to his left, Topper saw a woman trying to yank her child away from a chair while the little boy had his arms securely locked around the legs. To his right he saw a teenager with a recently overturned cart, luggage strewn everywhere while his father stood next to him yelling at the boy. “Sounds good. It appears I have a lot to learn.”

  The corners of Trufant’s mouth raised ever so slightly. “Well, you’ve been living in first class the past five years. You’ll have to do things a little differently, but you can be just as successful and it can definitely be just as rewarding.”

  Topper didn’t think the air conditioner was on inside the airport, but as they stepped outside the heat hit him like a ton of bricks. A police issued SUV was waiting just outside the doors.

  “Topper, Detective Mayfield.”

  Detective Mayfield is exactly how they breed their law enforcement in Texas. Six feet tall, blond high and tight and he wasn’t afraid of the gym. If not a cop, Mayfield would be right at home patrolling centerfield for the Rangers or playing defensive back for the Cowboys.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Topper

  “The pleasure is all mine sir,” said Detective Mayfield. “Last summer I came to Virginia and took your seminar on crime scene analysis. It was very informative.” His eagerness was dripping from every syllable. Every precinct in America had a Detective Mayfield. Somebody who thought of the police force as the minor leagues and getting to a federal agency as a bump to the majors. It always turned out to be either a blessing or a curse. He wasn’t sure which this would be but he would give Mayfield the benefit of the doubt.

  “Thank you,” said Topper, shaking hands. “You sent one of your men out to Virginia, sergeant?”

  “No, actually, Detective Mayfield took personal time and went on his own,” said Trufant with a touch of pride.

  “Yes sir, I hope someday to be a profiler with the FBI, so having you out here is a real honor. Not the reason that brought you out here, of course.”

  Trufant clapped his hands together. “Alright boys. Where would you like to go first Topper, the crime scene or the station?”

  “Let’s head out to the crime scene while it’s still fresh.”

  “Sounds good,” said Trufant and they all loaded into the SUV.

  4

  At seventeen, Mandy was the oldest of seven children and she stopped getting attention from her parents long ago. Although she wasn’t getting positive attention, negative attention was not something she wanted either, so she did everything she could to be a good kid. Her parents loved her and gave her everything they could, but with seven stomachs to fill, seven bodies to clothe, seven minds to shape, there was only so much of her parents to go around and, as the oldest, Mandy got the short end of the stick.

  She got decent grades. Sports were out of the question since she wasn’t very athletic and she wasn’t a fan of sweat anyway. She was on the yearbook committee, captain of the chess team and was a member of the drama department. Her portrayal of Emily Webb in Our Town the previous year was still talked about to this day.

  She also loved clothes. Not necessarily expensive clothes, but she enjoyed a wide array of tastes and she enjoyed changing up her look daily. It was common for her to show up for school one day in Goth, one day as a preppy school girl and one day dressed in grunge, all in the same week.

  When Mandy turned fifteen, the natural next step was to get a job at one of the clothing stores in the mall. She loved helping girls pick out clothes. The 20% discount wasn’t too bad either. In the two years that followed, Mandy rose all the way to assistant manager and she was really proud of her accomplishments.

  None of that changed the fact that there were things lacking from her home life that left her unfulfilled. She loved her siblings and didn’t mind doing more than an average seventeen-year-old to help out around th
e house, but she knew that money was always tight and she was one extra mouth to feed. She used her salary to pay for her own food as often as she could and she was always helping out the family, buying laundry detergent or clothes for her brothers and sisters when she could. Although they never mentioned it, her parents knew what Mandy was doing and were grateful for her help.

  Her plan had been to find a scholarship to any school, so she could go away and give her parents one less person to provide for. She was waiting to hear back from a handful of schools but her plans changed when she met Jason. Her parents started to save the day she started junior high and on her first day of high school, they gave Mandy a laptop for her school work.

  What Mandy found with that laptop was chat rooms. Chat rooms about chess, chat rooms about clothes and chat rooms where she could meet boys. That was where she met him. Jason was nineteen years old and living in Beaumont, Texas.

  They talked for six months through e-mails and chat and talked about everything from school to her life at home. It was when Mandy would talk about her isolation at home that Jason would mention moving out to Texas. They talked about starting a life together and how she could go to school in Texas just as easily as anywhere else.

  After weeks of talking about it, she finally decided she was going to do it after she graduated high school.

  She tried to talk to her mom about it, but between her own job and the kids there never seemed time for Mandy. After a few failed attempts to talk with her mom, she got fed up and decided to make a drastic decision. She packed up, got in her car that she spent her entire fifteenth year saving up for and headed for Texas. She knew she should have waited until she finished the last three months of her senior year but her heart outweighed her brain and she never looked back. She thought she could either finish school in Texas or get her GED and start college.