Pitiless

5. Black on the New Case

5. Black on the New Case

At the beginning of a missing persons case, there were several key steps that Black always took.  It wasn’t just Black, it was a process and sequence honed over the years by the MPU as a whole.  By sharing information, successes, missteps, and failures that had occurred in the MPU over the years, the team had improved upon their approach to finding missing persons.  Keys to the sequence were age and gender.  Since Tiffany was a missing teen girl, then the first thing Black did was check in the parolee system to see if any sexual offenders or pedophiles had been paroled in the past few weeks.  It didn’t take too long for Black to check on that and see that there were no new parolees matching that profile in the area.  Then Black looked to see if there were any sex offenders on the national database in the area where Tiffany was last seen.  Again, that checked out as negative.  This eliminated a major possibility, as any pedophile who was known to be in the area would be a prime suspect. 

The rate of recidivism among sex offenders was horrendous.  Some people claim that it’s a violation of a right to privacy to publicly announce to a neighborhood and post on the Internet that a sex offender lives in the neighborhood.  But Megan’s Law was passed for a reason.  A third of sex offenders repeat their crime within four years and more than half typically repeat their crime within a couple of decades.  Black would have been fine if they had some kind of device attached to their bodies that blared out, “Keep away from me.  I’m a sex offender,” if a convicted sex offender got within 10 feet of someone.  Black had seen enough of the brutality of what grown men did to children.  True, they might have been abused themselves as a child, but their minds were so warped and twisted that time in a jail cell wasn’t going to straighten that out.  Even deep counseling didn’t do the trick for some of them.  Black believed in the redemptive power of grace and forgiveness, but for some people they needed to simply be abandoned to their own depravity in a cell where they couldn’t hurt anyone else.

So if it was a teenage girl that was gone, the first thing you did was make sure there wasn’t a sex offender in the area.  Black knew that not having a recent parolee or sex offender in the neighborhood didn’t eliminate the possibility that she’d been snatched by some monster, but it didn’t make it the primary focus right off the bat.  Black had already done some quick research on the family’s background.  The fact that she’d run away once within the past eighteen months and that her sister rather than her mother was calling it in were two points of concern.  A missing person detective always looks at the family, but does so in a way as not to alienate them.  There was something hinkey going on in the Dixon family.  Black could sense it already.  Black did a quick search in CADS dispatch system to see if there’d been any officers dispatched to the Dixon household for domestic disputes.  All that he got was the same previous missing persons report.  Then he looked in the field interview system to see if there were any miscellaneous incidents associated with Tiffany, Denise, or Juliann Dixon or their address.  Again, nothing came.  Black would be conducting much more serious and in-depth searches as part of his investigation, but these cursory searches gave him a bit better of a picture as he went out to meet with the mother and sister and interview them about Tiffany.

“Hey, Ralph, I need you to return the favor, man,” Black said as he stood up and grabbed his jacket.

“That Tiffany Dixon thing?”  Ralph asked as he stood up.