The Summer Job - 61. Darkest Night

Detective Butler was joined in the cage by Detective Murphy and Sergeant Daniels. They were both very interested in what the four boxes contained. More coffee was brought in as Murphy asked, “What have you found Chris?”

Butler said, “After Hunter Young vanished in 2007, Farmer took it on himself to find the Freeway killer. No bodies were ever found and, we had absolutely nothing to go on. That’s what is in box number four. You guys are welcome to check the index and have a look at one, two and three.”

He began reading again as the two other cops took the index and began examining the contents of the other boxes.

April 2008- After considering my victimology index I’ve decided to add a few more factors. Mental illness is definitely a big one- two full points based on type and severity. Another big factor is addiction. It causes people to go into risky situations. Again, I give it two points based on severity. Finally, there is a factor I call trust which grades from zero to one. This grades the potential victim’s willingness to ask for help. If they have people they can ask for help, the lower the score. So far, my Potential Victim Grade can run from 0 to ten. Zero is an extremely unlikely victim and ten is a victim waiting to happen.

Chris muttered, “Jesus.”

Murphy asked, “What did you find?”

Butler said, “Farmer is a smart guy. He’s hunting a serial killer, and he thinks the answer might be in the victimology. He’s got a ten point scale he calls a Victim Potential Index. Farmer started thinking about this in January 2008, and he refined it in April.”

Daniels asked, “Isn’t that just theoretical?”

Butler said, “Sure, but it definitely in line with current thinking in Victimology. This is what Farmer came up with. For an adolescent, add one point each for: a dysfunctional home, parental neglect, drug or alcohol use, sexually acting out and prostitution. Then add a number between zero and two based on any mental illness and its severity. Then add a number between zero and two for addiction and its severity. Finally, add a number from zero to one based on whether the potential victim will seek help or hide. I’m tempted to steal this and write a master’s thesis in criminology and call it a Victim Potential Scale.”

Daniels asked, “What did he call it?”

Butler said, “Farmer called it the Victimology Index.”

Daniels said, “I’m looking at the first file in box one. It’s a file on one of the kids we’ve got in holding called Jeremy Aubrey. There is a sheet in the file called the Victimology Index. It’s photocopied, and he’s got it completed in pencil. It looks like he refined the formula since what you just read.”

Butler asked, “Let me have a look at that.”

He looked at the sheet and saw that Farmer had indeed refined the formula since 2008. Two other factors were included and the addiction and potential mental illness factors were scaled back to one. The two new one point factors were parental abuse and parental drug/alcohol problems.

Butler said, “Jeremy here has an eight point five score: Farmer graded him high as a potential victim. One for dysfunctional home, one for neglect, one for drug/alcohol abuse, one for sexually acting out, one for prostitution, point two-five for ADHA, Point two-five for addiction, one for parental abuse, one for parental drug/alcohol problems and one for trust.”

Daniels said, “Cade Brock was next. He scored eight.”

Murphy said, “What do you want to bet all of them score high as potential victims?”

Butler said, “No bet Jack. Besides for his relationship with Tyrone, and I’m beginning to wonder if he didn’t shade the story when he was trying to save his ass, I’m not seeing him abusing anybody.”

Murphy said, “I’m looking at his logs. It looks like Farmer wrote everything down. I’m as skeptical as the next guy, but to fake all this handwritten stuff, he would have taken years. I think that sooner or later we’re going to get the straight story out of these boxes.”

Butler continued reading Farmer’s narrative of his hunt for the Freeway Killer. Each year was written up in one of the moleskin notebooks. Two thousand eight, nine, ten, eleven and twelve came and went. As Farmer continued his hunt, his sophistication increased with experience. He soon had a network of informants all up and down the corridor. They included several highway patrolmen and sheriff’s deputies who were kind enough to share what little intelligence they had.

Along the way, Farmer rescued eight boys like Pete who were abandoned, abused or badly neglected. He would locate them, talk to them, establish rapport, provide a means for them to contact him and when they decided they were ready, he walked them through the system.

Detective Butler wrote on his legal pad: For someone who worked inside the system so well, what went wrong?

Butler said to Murphy and Daniels, “I’m down to the end game guys These are the last few entries in his hunt for Allen.”

Murphy said, “Read them aloud. It’ll give us a feel for the guy.”

Butler began to recite Farmer’s journal entries:

March 2013- Another kid went missing over spring break. He fits the victim profile for my perp like a glove: Gerald Kirk, fifteen, last seen at a Love’s Truck Stop. I will look around there and see if I can shake anything loose.

April 2013- I just might have a clue. One of my contacts told me of a strange encounter he had at the same truck stop Kirk went missing at. He described a large fat man who babbled something religious to him. It was too weird for my contact who got away from him. My contact described a delivery truck with the colors and logo of a regional delivery company. It sounds familiar. I know I’ve seen it before.

April 2013- I’m making my used car salesman happy. I traded the Toyota Camry and Nissan Sentra I’ve been driving and got a Toyota Tacoma and a Mustang. Hopefully, it will be awhile before these two cars and the GMC get too familiar.

I saw my suspect vehicle again. He’s a cagy one who doesn’t engage the kids like the other truckers. He seems to want to wait until late. I’ve heard from a few sources that he won’t even get out of his truck if they’re too many people around.

May 2013- I think I saw him tonight. To quote Arnold, he’s one ugly MFer. He’s a big one and easily weighs in at over three hundred pounds. I think he’s probably invisible to most people: fat, but powerful, bald, ugly, with a flat affect. A hulking brute with cold dark eyes and a furtive manner, he rarely gets out of his truck. He’s got a face you would prefer to forget.

This gentleman isn’t picking up hustlers. Those kids wouldn’t let him get near them. He’s abducting them when isolated. That modus operandi is going to make him even harder to catch. I am even more convinced that I am going to need technical assets. I have to be sure.

Paper clipped to the page was a grainy image of a large bald man wearing coveralls. There was another picture of a box truck with the logo of a regional delivery company on the side.

May 2013- I have procured a tracker bug that I can use with a cell phone. I’m going to try to get it on his truck, so I can shadow him from a distance and figure out where he lives.

May 2013- Success! I was in the Toyota tonight when he stopped. While he was inside, I planted the GPS tracker under his back left wheel-well. I tracked him to an isolated farm house in the middle of nowhere. I’m going to check it out when he’s on a route.

June 2013- I got a look at his place while he was out on his routes this afternoon. It’s a run down two-story farm house with an old barn in the back. I did a reverse lookup and his name is Jeffry Wayne Allen. I’m going to use some connections and get a background report on this guy.

Jeffry Wayne Allen is fifty-two and is from Provo, Utah. He did a hitch in the Army in the seventies. He moved around a lot in Utah, then Texas and finally ended up in this area in the late eighties and this address in the early nineties. There’s no criminal record, but there are missing kids in every region he’s been in: Utah, Texas and here that correspond to his time in the areas. I count sixteen here, four in Texas and three to five in Utah.

I’m sorely tempted just to end this prick and be done with it, but I’ve got to be sure. Watching him these last few weeks, I think he’s hunting. Using the tag on his trucks, I’m going to rotate my vehicles and keep a close eye on him. He’s not going to get another one.

June 2013- I think he was close tonight at the truck stop. The kid he was watching must have smelled a rat and went inside. Keep it up prick. I see you.

Butler said, “This is the last entry.”

July 2013- At twelve-thirty tonight in the back lot of the same Love’s Truck Stop, I witnessed Allen grab a kid, use something to knock him out and leave in his truck.

Not wishing to spook him, I followed him home to his farm from a half mile back. I parked just off the property around a bend in the road.

I gathered my kit, readied my silenced Beretta and crossed his property line. Allen had the box van backed up to the barn. The inside of the barn was his murder room. It looked like a torture chamber with all manner of nightmarish devices to inflict pain. I arrived just as the mutt had the boy stripped and standing in some kind of restraint that looked a lot like a crucifix with his hands and feet tightly bound. As I approached, he used smelling salts to bring the kid around. The boy instantly knew he was in the deadliest kind of peril, and I had to get Allen away from him.

Allen was focused on the boy ranting about Sodomites, how the world would be a better place without them and this little Sodomite was about to leave it. His lack of focus doomed him. The predator was now my prey.

I tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned I punched him hard in the temple, and he went down. Then kicked him in the head a few times until I was sure he was a mewling mass of blubber and restrained him with zip ties.

I freed the kid who was obviously in shock and told him to get dressed. As he did, I put the fat slob into the crucifix device and tightly bound his hands and feet.

The kid asked me what I was going to do with him. I told him that Allen was responsible for sixteen murders, and he had barely missed being number seventeen. I told him that I would take him home, come back here and ask him some very pointed questions.

The boy didn’t live far away, but he was a mess. He told me that when he came to in that torture chamber and saw that nut, he was sure he was going to die. He asked me if I was the Punisher. I told him that tonight I was going to be. Sixteen-year-old Chase Anderson got his life back. What he does with it is up to him.

I have had some training in... rigorous interrogation. What our guys didn’t teach me in SEER school(Survival Escape, Evasion and Resistance), I learned from what the Republican Guards did to some of my Kurdish friends. I used every trick I know on Jeffry Wayne Allen.

He was bug fuck nuts. That’s for damned sure. He told me the Prophets told him to kill Sodomites. The piece of shit didn’t know any of their names. He told me everything. He killed five kids in Utah, four in Texas and sixteen here. After some persuasion, Allen was willing to share where he kept his trophies from his kills. They were in a chest in the closet of his bedroom in his house. I bagged them. He didn’t want to give up what he had done with the bodies. I had to be very persuasive about that. He described his dump sites locally, in Texas and Utah. That information is recorded and placed with his trophies.

I killed Jeffry Wayne Allen slow. I was in no hurry. He lasted until one in the afternoon of the next day.

This son of a bitch would never be famous. Ghouls on the internet would never read about his exploits. No one would ever put him on lists of most prolific serial killers. He wasn’t going to be warehoused and studied. He was just a pathetic psychopath. Ending him was my mission, and it was accomplished July 2, 2013, at ten minutes after one pm.

Murphy said, “Jesus Christ.”

Daniels shook his head and said, “We got lucky tonight. If someone like Farmer had known we were coming and wanted to fight, we would have run into a buzz saw.”