“He thinks that his cell service in the dorm was shitty, and later, when he took his phone outside, to meet another group of friends, the message came in. I don’t have the victims’ phone records. Warrants are in, but you know how slow phone companies are. I’m looking at a good month to get them.”
That they did.
Gene was still making notes as Corbin talked so he’d know what he needed to do to pick up where Corbin left off. So far, the baby detective was doing the job correctly. He’d done everything right.
“And was the next victim also a student there?” he asked, wanting confirmation and more information.
Corbin explained.
“Yes, but he was more. He was a grad student who taught a class at Temple. So he was also a TA, a teaching assistant, of sorts, along with a student.”
To them, that still put them in the same hunting location. Honestly, taking a drunken college kid, or an oblivious one, would be easy.
Predators liked easy prey.
“What day did they all go missing?” Gene asked, covering all of his bases to get an idea of what they were looking at.
Corbin swallowed the food he’d been trying to chew with his incredibly sore jaw.
“All three went missing on a Friday or a Saturday night. So weekends.”
Well, that worked with what Ethan was thinking. They were out having fun, and…gone. They maybe got a little tipsy, or were roofied at a bar. A person looking to pick up some easy victim would do the minimum in work to get the maximum result.
Gene glanced over at his partner.
“I know it’s early for a profile, but tell me what you’re thinking.”
Ethan did.
“Well, it’s low probability that we have a woman doing the abducting. There might be a woman running the show, but if that’s the case, we have a male helper. Someone who can do the heavy lifting.”
Gene let him talk.
“The second victim, Wesley Thorton, played college ball. He wasn’t one hundred pounds. Whoever took him had to be able to move him once he was‘contained’.”
Oh, well, Gene needed to know how they were taken. So, he went there.
“Give me a probability that they were drugged,” he said, using what Corbin had found out, and what he knew from chasing predator killers.
Ethan considered it.
“Without seeing toxicology, and knowing what I know about how a predator hunts, I’m going to go high on this one. Eighty percent versus twenty percent that the tox will come back with drugs onboard, or so much alcohol that they were incapacitated. Since it’s college kids, I lean more toward stoned or drunk.”
Greyson hated to be the bearer of bad news.
“IFthey were killed shortly after drugging them, then they might have something in their tox reports,” he stated. “If not, they might be clean. That won’t give us anything.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Gene knew what they’d need to do.
“Toxicology isn’t in the file, so we’re going to have to visit the person who submitted it,” he stated.
They knew Reed Peterson was getting a visit from them. He might be able to fill in the blanks.
“We’ll talk to him,” Gene said, meaning him and Greyson.
Only, now, Ethan was curious about something else. They talked about how the students might have been taken, but he needed more to continue profiling this for Gene.
