Twisted, Chapter 3
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"Find anything?" Elliot asked Munch when he and Olivia got back to the station after talking more to Brad.
"One similar case, I guess. Four-year-old boy and seven-year-old girl, Kyle and Tessa Masters, both disappeared over night about a mile from the Locke home. Turned up dead a weak later," Finn explained.
"Major differences? Similarities?" Cragen asked, marking the two locations on a map.
"Differences: Siblings were very close in age. Shared a room. Though he hasn't been charged, most believe that their father did it…He and mom had separated a month earlier and he was known to be abusive. Kids turned up stabbed to death less than a block from his apartment. Couldn't nab him because he had a pretty air-tight alibi."
"And the similarities?"
"It was a sibling pair. That's about it. But, there was an eight-year-old boy who went missing about a year back. He looks a lot like Ben Locke does, and was about five miles away."
"And what did you two get from the brother?" Cragen asked Elliot and Olivia.
"He said that she does have two on-line webpages. Myspace and facebook. I think he knows more than he's saying. His dad told him this morning that 'Bad things don't happen to kids who are good'. He said he thought it was because he was upset, but it sounds like a threat to me. Maybe about the abuse complaint filed at Ben and Brad's school a few days ago," Elliot reported.
"We need to find a way to get into her accounts," Olivia said. "Maybe she got some sort of message that would give us a lead."
"I'm sure it won't be too hard to hack into a teenage girl's myspace," Finn said, turning back to the computer. "E-mail?"
"No, it's not going to be too hard, and we don't even have to use our detective skills. Brad knew his sister's information. Her e-mail is ''. Her password is 'freebird3'," Olivia told him.
"Ah, annoying little brothers. Helping solve kidnappings, one sneak at a time," Finn mumbled. "And we're in."
They plugged the computer up to the TV so that everyone could read. One thing they noticed quickly was that a majority of the messages were from a guy named Josh.
"Click on the top message. It'll have all the messages before that, too," Munch said.
Everyone looked at him.
"What? My last girlfriend may or may not have been acquired using social networking sites," he mumbled.
"That's almost kind of sad," Finn remarked, clicking on the top message.
"That son of a bitch," Olivia broke the silence as the group read.
"'You stupid bitch. I will kill you. I'll kill your whole fucking family!!! No one else will ever want you so there's no point in leaving me. Your pathetic!'" Elliot read.
"Well, not only does he suffer from not knowing the English language, he may have come up to #1 on an investigation. I'm sure he'll be proud," Munch remarked.
"She was trying to break up with him," Olivia said slowly as she scanned the conversation.
"'I can't deal with this anymore, Josh. I'm tired of lying to my parents, of covering up the marks…You keep saying you'll quit, but you don't…Stay away from me.' That was her last message to him before he threatened to kill her. He had been hitting her."
"Find him," Cragen ordered. "Finn and Munch, go find Josh. Elliot and Olivia, go talk to the mother of the siblings murdered. Find out what she thinks about the dad doing it."
Munch knocked on the home they hoped was Josh. The nineteen-year-old had put it on his page for the world to see. "He probably didn't think that we were who was going to be seeing it," Finn mused.
"Yes?" The teen who answered the door was not who they were expecting.
"Josh? Josh Perkins?" Finn asked. The profile hadn't featured a picture for them to go by.
"Yeah. What's up?"
He was clean-cut, in khakis and a polo. They weren't quite sure why it surprised them—they had dealt with violent people of all ages, sizes and looks. From the way the kid had been talking through his messages, they expected a kid looking…A bit more angry looking.
"We're here about the disappearance of your girlfriend, Brooke."
"I didn't know she was missing," he said. He appeared to be worried.
"Sure you didn't," Munch replied. "I think we need to talk."
"Oh, sure. Um, come in," he moved aside to allow the officers inside.
Finn and Munch exchanged looks. They weren't use to suspects being so easy, and were going to suggest that he come down to the station.
"I was just about to put the baby down, so if you'll wait just a second," he said, picking up a little girl crawling around in a playpen and walking towards a back bedroom.
"Are we in an alternate universe? Did this guy threaten to 'kill your fucking family'?" Munch whispered.
Josh came back out.
"You have a kid?"
"My mom and step-dad died right after she was born. Murdered. I got my little sister, Jana. We don't have any other family, so she was going to be put in foster care," he told them, picking up a few toys on the floor and throwing them into the play pen.
"It gets better," Finn mumbled.
"So, what about Brooke? When'd she go missing?" Josh asked.
"Last night sometime. Her and her little brother," Finn told him, eyeing for a reaction.
"Oh, my gosh. Do you have any leads?" He asked.
"Yeah we do. You're our main one, though, so this is sort of awkward," Munch informed him, handing him the print-outs of the myspace messages.
Josh scanned them.
"What about this?"
"Are those your messages?" Finn asked.
"Sure. We had a fight, big deal."
"You threatened to kill your girlfriend and her family a couple of nights before her and her brother disappear. That's a big deal. And there's that thing about you hitting her."
"I was caught in the moment. Everyone says 'oh, I'm going to kill them!' And I have never, ever hit Brooke!"
"So she just said that, in a message that she thought no one else would read?"
"Brooke has this other world going on in her head. There's something wrong with her. I've tried to break it off before but I worked damn hard to help her with her issues, which is why I got so upset when she tried to break up with me because I talked to another girl at our college. She'll tell anyone who will listen that she has this huge secret relationship with me, but everyone knows about me. And when we fight she tells people that I'm horrible to her. I've opened my home for her when her dad kicked her out for bad grades when we were seniors. He's the nutcase you should be looking at. I've never touched her."
Elliot and Olivia arrived at Shawna Masters' home. She was on her front porch, pushing an infant in a baby swing and reading.
"Ms. Masters?" Elliot asked.
She looked up and gave a small smile. "Do you have any information on my babies' case?" She asked hopefully.
"No. I'm sorry…We do have questions, though, if you don't mind. Another brother and sister disappeared near here and we're trying to see if there's any connection to Kyle and Tessa."
The little amount of hopefulness faltered.
"The only reason I wake up anymore is this little guy," she said, smiling at the baby. "I separated from David as soon as I found out I was pregnant. I refused to carry another child into this world under his wrath. He had hit me for the last time, had yelled at our kids for the last time. I just thank God that he didn't know I was pregnant or he would have found some way to make me miscarry. I had Jeremy three months after the kids were killed."
"So you're still pretty sure that your ex murdered your kids?" Olivia asked softly, noticing that tucked into the swing next to Jeremy was a picture of two little kids, who she assumed was Kyle and Tessa.
"There was one knife missing from his kitchen set that he had just bought. Has never been found. The kids were killed with a serrated knife just like the one missing. A spot of blood was found in that apartment that matched the same type as Kyle's. The kids had never been there. Someone saw a guy matching David's height and his description from behind to a T, near where they found my babies' bodies. All of this, and they didn't have enough evidence, because there's a video tape showing him at his office the morning they disappeared. They went missing some time between 4 and 6 AM, and he shows up at his office at 6:30, the earliest ever, and doesn't leave until 8, and some bimbo can account for his actions that night. He murdered our kids."
She was breathless.
"Well, was there anything that made them think it wasn't him?"
"He gave some heartfelt mumbo-jumbo on the news begging for them to show up. And because the site they were found at had been checked earlier that day and the bodies weren't there and he was at work all day," she admitted.
"But he did it. He stabbed his kids over a dozen times, each. He isn't your guy for those kids missing now."