Deaf Row by Ron Franscell

Author:Ron Franscell [Franscell, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Cherish Nelson’s case was no longer an old man’s pet project.

Six other extraordinarily similar girls missing under extraordinarily similar circumstances to one murdered girl weren’t accidental. That those six girls were still missing made Bell uneasy. That it was looking more and more like a serial killer at work made him sweat.

Inside, Bell arranged his reports on the breakfast table by date. The fastidious Roxy Snipes had paper-clipped his six special NCIC hits together, and that’s where Bell focused.

The six girls had vanished from tiny mountain towns scattered across the Colorado Rockies: Ouray, Idaho Springs, Crested Butte, Pagosa, Creede, and Leadville ... plus Midnight.

In some ways, the towns were odd choices, Bell reasoned. Outsiders would be recognized quickly and attract a lot of curious eyes. The pool of potential victims was smaller, especially if the stranger hunted a specific type of girl. And his escape route was typically one road in and out, and it was likely narrow, long, and often icy, anything but quick.

In other, depressing ways, these dinky towns were prime hunting grounds for a smart predator. They wouldn’t be expecting deviance that, to them, only happened in big cities. Kids were more trusting, less street smart. And local law enforcement was commonly undermanned and undertrained. Bell knew that by the time small-town cops got their act together, they’d have squandered those crucial first forty-eight hours. Their UnSub and his girl could be a thousand miles and two very dark nights away.

Bell had never trusted criminal profilers and their voodoo, but he could draw certain conclusions. The predator blended in, maybe driving a muddy truck, Colorado plates, or a casual wave to passing cars as if he knew them. He didn’t look or act like a sideshow geek who’d attract attention. A cop might drive past and think nothing. The bad guy didn’t snatch random girls but stalked a very explicit kind of girl, so he had to wait somewhere and watch ... patient and observant, like a hunter. His blind rage erupted later.

And he was probably a Colorado guy who understood mountain driving. The seven presumed victims were all from Colorado, with no evidence—yet—that he worked elsewhere. Four went missing in the dead of a high-country winter, when roads were treacherous on more days than not. And somehow he kept his panic-stricken victims under control while he drove on dicey two-lanes back to whatever god-forsaken torture chamber he used.

If these seven girls were snatched by Erskine Midwinter—a dot that still wasn’t connected—then he was fifteen when he butchered Cherish Nelson in 1969 and fifty-two when the last girl vanished in 2006. Today, he’d be in his late sixties. Chances were good that there were unknown others, maybe still piling up. The killer, Midwinter or whoever he was, would only have improved at snatching, slaughtering, and dumping his victims.

All the cop logic in the world didn’t matter now. It was out of Bell’s big hands. This was a Colorado Bureau of Investigation case, maybe even FBI. He

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