Chapter Twenty #4
He shared.
“I found an inmate that was in a federal prison for some interesting charges. When I dug into his name, there was a sealed file that I had to tap dance to get open. That’s why it took me over eight hours to get back to you.”
Both feds looked at each other.
“Okay, what was the arrest for?” he asked.
Greyson told them.
“Someone had improper conduct with underage girls. In fact, someone at a school had improper conduct with students there. That’s why it caught my attention. This person did time in Nevada, but the crime went down in Utah in Damascus.”
Holy.
Shit.
That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Now could it?
Ethan touched a piece of paper with the victim’s names, and his finger was on one particular name.
‘Megan.’
Mitch had said she was skittish around men, and a victim of sexual assault as a child would do that.
Now, they needed to know.
“Who?” Gene asked.
Greyson read the information from the paper in front of him that he’d printed out from BOP, the Bureau of Prisons.
“We have a Franklin Elston. He was a teacher at the school there over fifteen years ago. He liked touching the girls, and he actually had sex with five of them. He was a serial pedophile.”
The light bulb went on.
“Okay,” Gene said, as Ethan began searching that name to see what they found, and hopefully, to see who they found tied to him. If he had a family, they would be the top suspects. “Who are the five girls?” he asked.
Greyson explained.
“That was the tap dance. They testified against him, but because they were all underage, their names were redacted, and they went by Jane Doe one through five. I contacted a federal judge, and I got the names.”
Hot.
Damn.
Gene had his pen in hand.
“Hit me.”
Greyson read them off.
“We have Ivey Slee, Phylis Smith, Megan Vessey, Vina Beede, and a Summer Crito.”
Well, shit.
Gene only had to write one down—the last one.
At the same time, where he was sitting beside his partner, Ethan was running a search on Phylis Smith, to see if that was Phylis Lizney’s maiden name. As soon as he found the marriage license online in the database, he nodded.
And Gene understood.
“So, we have our victims, and one he hasn’t gotten yet?” Gene asked.
That told Ethan exactly what he wanted him to do, so he began running it. If they could get to Summer Crito, they could catch this dude in the act.
Fingers.
Crossed.
“Yeah, it appears. Does that make sense?” Greyson asked.
Oh, it did.
“With the ‘see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil’, and the latest victim having ‘liar’ burned into her tongue, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Clearly, the person doing this doesn’t think that the pervert should have gotten arrested.”
It was looking that way.
“What else do you have?” Gene asked.
Greyson shared.
“I ran a general search on the man, and there’s one marriage listed for Franklin Elston. Apparently, after he was accused of raping underage girls, she divorced him, likely to escape.”
Thank God for Ethan, who thought to check similar homicides, and Greyson for working his magic. Gene knew who the MPVs were.
Dannie was curious.
“Why the whole peel off their skin thing?” he asked. “Is that to punish them?”
Greyson paused, hearing a new voice he didn’t recognize.
And Gene explained.
“We have the other detective with us. You’re good,” he said. “Just tell us what you have. If we can get to Summer Crito, we can close this.”
Greyson did.
“In jail, he was killed by inmates. I did some calls regarding the prison in Nevada, and Franklin worked in the kitchen. He was jumped by some inmates that didn’t like his propensity to touch kids.”
Well, that made sense.
Inmates didn’t like men who preyed on children. They tended to get punchy or shank-y when they knew you were a pedo.
Greyson continued.
“They abused his body, if you know what I mean, and then they put him in a giant soup kettle that was used to make massive quantities of soup and burned him so bad, that his skin came off of his body except for his face. That was the ONLY part that was above the water. If that wasn’t punishment enough, he died of a shank to the heart. ”
And there it was.
Now, it all made sense.
They had the why.
The who.
And the how.
Now, they just needed to know who was avenging his death, because someone was punishing the once-girl victims who testified what he’d done to them.
“It makes sense,” Ethan stated. “Mitch Kline said that Megan didn’t like men, and it took him a while to get her to be okay around him.
She’d likely want that protection of a father figure.
Ivey Slee also had some questionable relationship skills.
I bet she couldn’t get comfortable in any relationship where she wasn’t in control. ”
Everything was coming together.
What they did know was it wouldn’t be the female detective. Her father died working a case and wasn’t a pedo.
“What else did you find about him?” Gene asked. “Where is his wife? Any kids?”
Greyson shared.
“At the time, he did have a kid with his wife. I found the legal papers where she changed her son’s name, likely to protect him. At one point, they too, lived in this town with the sicko,” he stated. “Does the name Tolbent, the wife’s maiden name, sound familiar?”
DING.
DING.
DING.
Did it ever?
They had a Rodney Tolbent.
The gym teacher at the school.
“He’s working at the same school. How did the background check not ding him?” Gene asked.
Greyson shared.
“She changed both of his names. He was James Franklin Elston, and he’s now Rodney Lewis Tolbent. The judge who granted the name change sealed that too so that he could be protected. A legal name change isn’t going to pop any weird things if the person changing their name was a kid at the time.”
Gene did the math.
“He would have been ten at the time this was happening. He would have been in the middle school, not the high school,” he stated.
It made sense to Ethan.
“He was likely caught in the media fray,” Blackhawk stated. “That would have embarrassed him to have his father arrested for raping children. There’s the fracture in his psyche.”
Yeah, now, they had to find him.
ASAP.
“We have to go, Grey. Thank you for finding this. You just solved this case. We owe you one. See you when we get back,” he said, hanging up the phone.
Gene stood up.
“We need to find Summer,” he stated.
Ethan’s fingers were flying over the keyboard, and so were Dannie’s. Being a pro at research, Blackhawk found her social media first.
“She’s a nurse at the hospital,” he said. “She works night shift,” he added.
When there was a knock to the conference room door, Gene told the person to come in. As it opened, they saw the homicide captain standing there.
“We have an issue,” he said, holding a piece of paper.
“What?” Gene asked.
The man handed him the paper.
“The hospital called in a well check on one of its employees. One of their nurses never showed up to her shift. She was supposed to be there two hours ago, and with what has been going on here, they called us immediately.”
Well, shit.
The gods were smiling on them.
What sucked was that they were already too late to beat Rodney to the woman.
“Summer Crito?” Gene asked, taking the paper and reading over it. “Fuck me.”
That said it all.
“Yeah, how did you know?” he asked.
They didn’t have time to explain. Now, it was a race to get to the woman. She was the last person on the killer’s list, and then, he’d be done.
Would he run? They didn’t know.
But they had to get to him.
All they could hope was that he didn’t kill her yet. There was still a chance.
Grabbing their things, they raced past the homicide captain, not sharing anything with him. Outside, they jumped into their rental, with the detective in the back.
“Find us his home,” Gene said as he started up the motor. Only, he was stopped.
“No,” Ethan stated. “He won’t use his personal place. He’s got a split personality due to the trauma of all of this. He likely keeps the killing separate. Find the family home. See if it’s still in his name, or his mother’s. She would have gotten it when he went to jail after the divorce.”
The man began typing, and as he did, Gene got them onto the highway.
It didn’t take Dannie long.
“I found an apartment one block from where you were shot at,” he told Gene. “He lives right there.”
It appeared that Ethan had been right to feel off about that area. They’d been in his neck of the woods.
“It makes sense,” he said. “What else?”
He was searching.
“Nothing in the mother’s name, but I found a small cabin not far from the edge of the Native American reservation in his name,” he said. “It’s not far from where the bodies were dumped.”
Well, that explained that.
Familiarity.
They would have had the address if they had the man’s prison papers, but Greyson saw those, not them.
He gave him the address, and Ethan pointed.
“Other way,” he said. “I can get you there quicker if you access the reservation, and we head in the back way. We can sneak up on him.”
Holy shit.
They had a small window.
Hopefully, this works.
Gene whipped that car around using the median and headed back the other way. He was driving fast, and as he did, he hoped they made it to the man’s location.
Better yet, they made it there before she was dead.
“Does this fit for you?” he asked his profiler. “I don’t want to show up there and be wrong. We need to make sure. He’s had her for hours now.”
Blackhawk was going through his profile and marking off everything on his mental checklist.
“Yes. The liar on the tongue is because he believes, or this personality believes that they lied, and it cost the boy everything. The main personality will be Franklin Elston’s son, but the more powerful identity will be his protector, the male figure that he didn’t have because of what his father did.
He’s getting justice because he doesn’t believe his father, likely a man he idolized, did this. ”
This was fucked up.
Blackhawk continued.
“He works the same job as his father did, and I’d bet he will eventually get to the point he will commit the same crimes in honor of his father—after he kills those who caused his death.
This won’t end with these five. He’ll move to sexual deviation to become the father.
I’m going to guess they were very close, and he loved him.
The mother could have been cold before or after this, and he likely got very little love growing up. The women took his father from him.”
Gene headed toward the address, taking the back roads of the reservation like Ethan suggested.
“That’s sick.”
Ethan took a shot at it.
“There is also a good chance that his mother took him away because his father was also molesting him—or she suspected it. That’s also going to play into his split. He might have a third identity floating around in there—possibly a female who hasn’t quite developed yet.”
Oh, boy.
They couldn’t let that happen.
Ethan wasn’t done, and he explained as he pointed out roads that he should take to get to the back access.
“Rodney might still be in control at work, but the fact that he’s doing the same job his father did…
that tells me the other personality is DOMINANT.
He’s the collector. Rodney is able to pop out of the control, and that’s why he’s dumping the bodies.
He’s horrified, but getting weaker. At some point, he’ll cease to be, and the other personality will become him. ”
Well, shit.
Gene hauled it.
They had to get to him.
Before one more woman died.