The Trinity Murders Page 6

  As Topper and Trufant surveyed the room, Joann stood behind them at the threshold. “I thought about putting her room back the way I remember her, at least, the way I want to remember her, but I decided to leave it. Once this monster is caught I think I’ll be able to move on and I’ll clean all this out and just keep the important things. If you look over there in the corner, um, behind the body, a lot of her trophies are still there on the shelf. I think she really wanted to come back from wherever she was. Anyway, I’ll leave you guys to look around. If you need anything, I’ll be down the hall.”

  And with that she was gone. Trufant had been up before and didn’t really find anything of interest so he stood back as Topper looked around. He shuffled through the paper on her desk. Looked at the pictures on another corkboard in the room. The pictures were clearly with her new batch of friends. Everyone was in black with cigarettes and drinks. He noticed something behind one of the heating vents and took off the cover. He found a small bag of pot. He put it in his pocket and would flush it down the toilet later. Once Mrs. Brewster did clean out this room, she didn’t need to find that. He stood back in thought for a second, looking around the room.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Trufant.

  “You never found a diary right?”

  “Nope, and Mrs. Brewster never mentioned finding one either.”

  “There has to be one in this room. Everything this girl had gone through, there is no way she wasn’t documenting her days in a journal. Just give me a second, I’ll find it. I’m sure it would be something she wrote in daily so it would have to be easily accessible but also hidden from sight and not somewhere obvious.” He put his hand to his mouth and closed his eyes and thought for a second. He walked over to the bed and sat down. He looked over to the desk, cluttered to the point that she wouldn’t be able to write there. Any writing she did in this room would probably be sitting on this bed. He looked to the nightstand and pulled it away from the wall. “Now that’s clever.” She had created a makeshift pocket on the back of the nightstand with a cover that was all painted the same color as the back of the nightstand. At a simple glance it would be almost impossible to notice the addition, especially with shadows being cast from the absence of light. Topper took the top off and found a thick journal sitting in the cradle. He pulled it out and sat down on her bed, thumbing through some of the last entries and settling for one near the end.

  April 4th

  I spent a couple hours with Jake at therapy again today. I’ve been going almost every day for a couple weeks now. I know Mom and Dad think I’m cutting school to drink with my friends and get in trouble, but I think I’m almost done with that. I wish I could tell them that I’ve been coming here but I really need to do this alone. Watching the progress Jake is making is so much better than all those stupid shrinks they paraded me to. I also don’t want to get their hopes up because I am still struggling with so much, but alcohol can only numb the pain for so long. I want Jake to be proud of me. If he saw how I’ve been acting, he’d be anything but. I know it’s not too late for me to turn this around. I’m still not 16 yet, I have time. The grades will be easy. Maybe lacrosse and softball too. I think I’ve wallowed just about long enough. I know it will be hard and I’ll slip here and there, but what is it they say, it starts with a single step.

  Topper flipped through a couple more pages but he had seen all he needed to. He called Mrs. Brewster back into the room. “Did you know your daughter had a journal?”

  “No, not at all. Where did you find that?”

  “It was hidden in a secret compartment behind her nightstand. She was a pretty clever girl. We need to take this with us to go through it for any evidence that could help with the case but the first thing I’m going to do is photo copy the entire journal and bring the original back to you within the hour. I’ve only looked through one entry, from April 4th, a week before she went missing. I can almost promise you she didn’t run away. That’s pretty clear to me.”

  For the first time in ages, the tears streaming down Joann’s face did not get their start from pain but rather from joy. She felt a vindication that could not be described. All along she wouldn’t believe that her baby would abandon her. She was taught to be a fighter and to persevere. This only proved what she knew all along. She practically rushed Topper and threw her arms around him. She wept into his shoulder for what seemed liked forever. There were three things she wanted in regards to her daughter. One she could never have, one, the godsend Topper had just given her and the last, after meeting Topper, she knew he would give her that one too. For the first time in three years, she felt like closure was a real possibility.

  11

  His service records were impeccable. Oil change every 3000 miles, regular tune-ups, spark plugs, fuses and he changed out all his bulbs every year, just to be on the safe side. He had two vehicles which he used, both chop shop specials. An SUV he used to abduct girls and a panel van he used to dispose of them. Tonight he was cruising in the SUV.

  For awhile it was just the panel van but when you’re trolling for girls, you have to use bait that’s comforting. The panel van was not comforting. The van was not too old, so as not to call attention to itself, but it was white and it had a total of three windows, a windshield and a driver’s side and passenger window. A girl would have to be nuts to be picked up on the streets in that ride and after awhile, he realized that nuts was all he was able to lure.

  Drugged out, strung out girls were his usual catch with the van and although he still managed to have fun, it just wasn’t right for him. The meat never tasted quite right when it was pumped full of chemicals.

  There were lots of car shops in Louisiana but his favorite car dealer was Jimmy Chop. You tell Jimmy what you want and in less than a week he’ll produce. It took him three days to get an untraceable SUV and that is what he was rolling in tonight.

  In one respect, he approached his craft like a door to door salesman. The ones with the best luck always had the most well-rehearsed spiel. They were nonthreatening and easy to look at, and they knew how to close a deal. He had been practicing for years and was really good at it. He could close a deal with the best of them and he knew it. He had a third vehicle for everyday use and sometimes he would test that theory by cruising schools or malls and try his hand at picking up girls there. Those girls were strictly play things. They were more about the hunt than the capture. He wasn’t about to jeopardize his livelihood by eliminating somebody who would be missed.

  Usually he would just drive around with them talking, maybe give them a ride from one place to another. Sometimes he would end up at a motel but that was never the goal. Like a fisherman just out for sport, he would reel them in and throw them back. When he was out looking for a meal, that was a different ballgame. Tonight he was hungry.

  He was also in a hurry. He was behind schedule and he needed to find a girl quick. In any thirty-mile radius he knew where to go to find the local street talent and that was usually what he preferred. He would be nonthreatening with them and the first time they had sex was always fun because they still assumed that they were leaving at the end of the night.

  Tonight though, he was patrolling the roads out of town looking for a hitchhiker. He resorted to that when time was a factor. Sometimes he had to be patient and drive around for a few hours before he found what he was looking for. Sometimes it would be all wrong and he would drive them for a few miles then make an excuse about having to go back for something, leaving them on the side of the road again to advertise their stupidity. Luckily he didn’t have to resort to them very often.

  Hitchhikers were a predator’s wet dream. These girls were actually saying that they were willing to get into a stranger’s car. Over the years, the perils of hitchhiking were well documented and the practice had died down considerably, especially among women, but there would always be girls desperate or dumb enough and that’s what he was looking for tonight.

  He had been driving around for three hours
and burned through an entire tank of gas. He was making one last pass and then giving up for the night when his persistence paid off. She couldn’t have been older than seventeen, carrying a backpack with her thumb thrust into the air like a beacon of light pointing west. He was already going the other direction so he pulled off the road and waited ten minutes. He didn’t want to scare her away by realizing he had just turned around to pick her up.

  He knew just how to act to make her feel comfortable and not arouse suspicion. He pulled about ten feet in front of her and rolled down the passenger window. This gave her a chance to turn and walk the other direction if she felt threatened or like a spider with a fly, walk right into a waiting trap. She quickly chose the latter and bounded up to the open window.

  He always let her speak first. It would be easy to ask her where she’s going and then say me too. The savvy hiker would see right through that so he waited for her to speak. She put both hands on the window frame and leaned her head in. “Where ya headin’?”

  With the size of the backpack she was carrying and the road they were on he already knew the correct answer. “I’m heading into Texas.”

  “Me too,” she said enthusiastically.

  “Well, if you want a ride I can take you as far as Beaumont, but that’s as far as I’m going.”

  She thought for a second and then poked her head farther into the SUV and looked around. Not seeing anything out of the ordinary, she agreed.

  When he first spotted her he noticed the size of her backpack and that it wouldn’t be able to fit into the front seat with her. That meant if she was carrying mace or some type of weapon she wouldn’t be able to get to it in her backpack. He was clean cut, wearing jeans, a button down shirt and a pair of topsiders. He could easily pass for a college student heading home on break so she immediately put her trust in him and asked if she could put her backpack in the back seat. She tossed it in and hopped into the front seat.

  He was a professional. There were some things he did, precautions he took that set him apart from the amateurs. A lot of vehicles had the type of door locks that automatically locked when you put a car in gear and started driving forward. He made sure he had one of those cars. He also made sure that when he started driving forward, both hands were on the steering wheel so when then doors locked, she would notice that was a car feature and he hadn’t locked them. Being locked in, especially as a hitchhiker, was the easiest way to trigger someone’s fight or flight impulse. He preferred to work on his own schedule and not be forced in a certain direction based on what she might do.

  Most current cars had child safety locks on all rear doors. It was a simple latch on the side of the door but when engaged, the child would not be able to open it. It was an important advancement in child safety. It was also an important advancement in predator warfare. The first thing he did after getting the car from Jimmy was install a child safety lock on the front passenger door. It would have been easier to have Jimmy do it but it also had the possibility of arousing suspicion so it was better to do it himself. As the car started forward and the doors locked, he was home free.

  12

  Minnie had planned to work through the night, but since her team was not currently on assignment and she had nothing pressing to do, she got a good night’s rest so she could hit the ground running in the morning.

  Technically she got started on the case the night before but the work she did was for herself and not Topper. All of the files relating to Trufant’s case were online and she spent a couple hours going through them and printing out pictures of all thirty-two girls. Normally she would print out 8 x 10s and hang them on one of her white boards but because she thought of this as a “black ops” mission, she printed wallet-size pictures of each girl, pasted them all on a small piece of poster board and kept them under the keyboard for her computer. Today the real meat and potatoes began.

  She started by running a search of all known sex offenders in the three states who had been released three to eight years ago. That would return a rather large list which she would then whittle down by eliminating people who were currently back in prison or were in prison during any of the past three years. She removed people who were deceased or had moved to a different part of the county. She would also run other various searches such as if they owned land and where they were currently living. People living in apartments would not be able to commit these crimes.

  After that, she would run them against DMV records to look for owners of SUVs or vans and hopefully end up with a manageable number. From there she would go through the names and hopefully be able to present Topper with a list of viable suspects.

  Minnie was a visual person. She liked to be able to touch and feel things, turn things over in her hands. That was when she was able to do her best work. Hacking was about understanding lines of code and how to find holes in the code. It was also about creating your own code to trick or fool systems. Creating code was very easy for Minnie because she could see it. She could see how it fit together and it made her a better hacker. It was also what made her a good technical analyst. She was able to see things others weren’t because of how she laid things out.

  After she started the search for Topper, she pulled out a map she had made the night before which contained only the states Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. She kept a three-step ladder in the corner of her office. She used that to help tack the map up to her cork board.

  She pulled out the case files and she started marking each of the spots on the map where a body had been found. She was hoping to find some sort of pattern along travel routes or certain types of areas, or who knew what. She hoped it would reveal itself to her before she was done. It was at that time that her super secret phone rang. She gave it the ring tone from the Batman TV show from the 60s. She almost forgot that she had it and it startled her.

  “Is the line secure?” said Topper in little more than a whisper.

  “Stop it,” said Minnie, pretending annoyance. In the background the song Papa Was a Rolling Stone could be heard.

  “So we’ve just come from Joann Brewster’s house.”

  “The mother of victim #11. Hold on, I’ve got it right here,” said Minnie as she pulled up the relevant case material.

  “Yeah, sometimes I forget you have a photographic memory.”

  “Well, you are getting a little old, so I’ll forgive you. Melissa Brewster, she never made it home from school one afternoon. She was a wild child, battling a lot of demons but her mother always contended that she was abducted.”

  “Why do I think you didn’t even look at the file? As it turns out, Melissa was most likely abducted. Clever girl. I found a diary hidden in a secret compartment in her room. I’ve copied the diary and I’m sending the pages to you. I’d like you to see if there is anything else of interest in them. I went through most of it but nothing jumped out at me.

  “Then I’d like you to add that into the search. It’s still possible she ran away but it’s doubtful. If she was abducted it could just be a crime of opportunity or he just couldn’t resist. Abduction is not his only method but we need to look at it.”

  “So we’ll look at everyone convicted of kidnapping or attempted kidnapping. Weed out anybody whose preference is boys or kids younger than teenagers, cross referencing that against all perps who were released three to five years ago.”

  “I love how you could always read my mind. I’ll be in touch.” And with that, Topper was gone.

  Of the twelve computers in Minnie’s office, only three were currently in use. That didn’t include her personal laptop which she used during downtime to chat with friends, play games and update her blogs.

  She rolled over to the Cadillac, a hexacore behemoth with eight gigs of memory. A superstitious girl at heart, Minnie used the Caddy for only the most important research. She mainly used it when working cases involving children, cop killers or now to help Topper. She started the search and got back to her map.

  She was halfway through placing
pins when she did a double take but didn’t want to stop until all the pins were placed. Moving in a clockwise circle around the three states, she continued until all thirty-two pins were anchored. Once she was done, she stepped back and gasped at the pattern so clear she could almost see the wall behind it.

  13

  Crossing from one side of autopsy to the other, Carl Magnusson took a bite of his sandwich and then made a few more notes in her file. He had been going over her body with a fine tooth comb all morning knowing that Trufant would be down at some point to go over the results.

  Carl was an imposing man. He stood a little over 6’2” with a strong build and a silver flattop. Pushing sixty-five, he was of retirement age but that was nowhere on the agenda. His wife had died three years earlier so there were no cross-country trailer trips in his future. He planned to remain the ME until he could no longer stand up.

  Grabbing a fresh pair of gloves, he snapped them over his hands and went back to the body. The white sheet covering her had come askew and he repositioned it to make sure she was only exposed from the neck up. Grabbing his digital recorder, he flipped the switch and got back to work.

  He was almost finished when Trufant and Topper came in. Both men were eager to hear what Magnusson had to say but neither expected anything to differ from the previous script.

  “Carl, good to see you. This is Topper McMullen,” said Trufant.

  “Good to meet you,” said Carl with a nod.