“Josh coming in?”
“He’s with Grace now, on the way over to the property to have a look around, lay out a search plan. I didn’t tell him much. He’ll come by here afterwards, and we’ll tell him.”
“How’s he sound?”
“Determined.”
“He’s a good man when it comes to doing what has to be done,” Caleb said. “Did she choose Josh, Ann, or did you?”
“When it became apparent I couldn’t change Grace’s mind about coming back, I suggested Josh and his dogs as the next step. I figured Josh being a friend would help matters.”
“Good thinking. Whatever we can do for Grace now, we’re going to do,” Caleb said firmly, nodding at each of them around the circle.
Gabriel sat down by his dad. He’s in pain, Evie thought, coping, dealing, but in emotional pain.
“Who else in the county was a victim?” Gabriel asked. “It’s unlikely Grace was his first.”
Caleb looked ill at the remark. “We’re going to have to figure that out now, Son, however painful it is to ask the questions,” Caleb replied.
Ann shook her head. “Grace, then Ashley, may have been his first near home. Kevin Arnett was a careful man. He hid what he was, and did it well if it turns out no one in the community ever suspected him. He spent four years grooming Grace before this started so he could ensure she wouldn’t talk. I’m thinking there may be signs early in his life, before he was eighteen, but after he became a man… I think he was carefully hiding who he was. You’re going to find his other crimes away from the area, not in this county.”
“I hope you’re right, if only so I have one less weight to grieve over tonight,” Caleb said. “It’s bad enough it was Grace.” He looked over at Gabriel. “Depending on how things go, you’ll need to alert the adjacent counties in case they have their own unsolved cases…”
His voice drifted to a stop, and Gabriel said, sounding thoughtful, “There was a felon in our county, a registered sex offender who disappeared abruptly. His body turned up about eighteen months later, behind the truck stop off Highway 19. Wasn’t that roughly about the time Grace’s uncle was killed in the hunting accident?”
Caleb thought back and nodded. “Guy named Frank Ash. He worked with scrap metal at the junkyard. His focus was on young boys, liked to pull them in via their curiosity about sex.
“He didn’t show up at work for a week, on the run before we got a call, toward the end of May. His cabin had the feel of someone gone a while-belongings still there, trash gone bad, milk spoiled. We worked it as a probable murder, but couldn’t find his body, couldn’t nail down where he’d been. We did turn up two boys who admitted he’d molested them after his prison release. We looked hard at their families and figured that was where our answer was, but couldn’t prove it with what we had.”
“Frank Ash disappeared in May. The next year, July, the Dayton girl was abducted,” Caleb said. “Grace’s uncle got killed that fall. Frank’s remains turned up behind the truck stop the following year. I remember we had guys still working that scene when the Florist family disappeared, so it would have been the same week in August. It was a busy few years. The entire department practically lived on overtime.”
Evie carefully listened to the overlap of crimes, got up and went to the timeline on the wall, picked up a marker. Frank Ash gets out of jail, she wrote, molests two boys, disappears and is presumed murdered. Ashley Dayton is abducted, Grace’s uncle killed in hunting accident. Frank Ash’s body is found, Florist family disappears.
Evie turned to face Caleb. “Frank’s body… when it was found, he’d been dead a couple of years?”
Caleb thought over her question, and she saw his eyes widen. “Dead a couple years, likely back to the May when he disappeared. Shot in the chest three times. Are you thinking-?”
“No way did Deputy Florist kill Frank Ash and Kevin Arnett.” Gabriel’s hand moved to rest on his father’s shoulder.
Evie heard the certainty in Gabriel’s statement, faced him and said, “You’ve got two dead child molesters in Carin County and a deputy who abruptly disappears the week a murdered body turns up-”
“Evie,” Ann interrupted. Evie looked her way and saw Ann shake her head slightly. Not, Evie saw, that she didn’t agree with her, but there was a time for everything and this wasn’t the right time. Evie set down the marker and stepped away from the crime wall. The sequence on the board was what it was, and to her it looked like one long crime.
“I’m not saying we don’t look,” Gabriel said, his hand on the table fisted with stress. “But we know Scott Florist. This isn’t him. Not shooting a man and dumping his body behind a truck stop. Not shooting a man from a deer blind. Scott’s the guy most likely to have been trusted by the boys, to have heard about Ash, the one most likely to go arrest the man and toss him back in jail. If anything, I could see it going the other way. If Frank Ash wasn’t dead, I’d have him at the top of the list to have killed Deputy Florist and his family.”
“No, Gabe, Evie’s right to wonder,” Caleb said to his son. “She’s just off on the core question. We’ve got two sex offenders in Carin County during those years. Did we have a third?” He looked back at the timeline, then again at Gabriel.
“Think about it,” he went on, walking over to the crime wall. “Someone in the county is afraid Frank Ash is going to get arrested and say to the cops, ‘I’ll give you someone else who likes kids.’ Someone in the county knows Arnett is molesting his niece, he’s worried when it’s going to become known, and neighbors are going to start looking sideways at each other. Every child is going to get asked by their parents if anyone’s touching them. A third guy is out there and wishing the other two weren’t stirring up questions.
“Deputy Florist worked in the schools, he coached Little League, he was good with kids. Somebody got worried Deputy Florist was the one most likely to figure this out. So kill Frank Ash, Kevin Arnett, then kill Florist and his family to make sure he’s covered his tracks.”
Ann got to her feet and began pacing the room.
Evie wanted to accept Caleb’s summary. One killer simplified everything. “A sex offender hides his behavior, but kills if he must,” she said slowly, thinking it through. “This is too many murders. He would have tried to leave the area before it reached this point.” She studied the sequence again. “Another idea. If it wasn’t Deputy Florist being a vigilante, killing the two people abusing kids and then leaving town abruptly with his family, what if that idea of a vigilante is correct? Someone in the community, maybe a victim of Frank Ash who’s grown up? Kill Frank Ash out of vengeance, realize Grace is being abused, and kill the uncle to help her. He thinks Deputy Florist is getting too close to seeing the truth. One person in the community who took out two bad people in vigilante killings and then had to kill the deputy and his family to stay under the radar.”
Evie looked between Caleb and Gabriel as they considered that possibility. Gabriel slowly nodded. “A victim carries a lot of anger around. Murder isn’t a stretch. But a panic murder of a deputy and his family? I don’t see it, Evie.”
Ann walked back to rejoin them. “I’m not saying don’t explore down that road, Evie, but step back for a moment and look at something.” Ann picked up a marker and moved to an open sheet of paper. “We’ve got a dead offender who likes older boys, a hunting accident that kills one who likes younger girls, a deputy and his family who disappear. Each crime a year apart. We want them linked because it simplifies matters, but look at the facts. They are different victim sets, different MOs. We’ve most likely got three years of random crimes, not one linked event.