Of Guilt and Innocence by John Scanlan Read Free Book Online Page B

places for her to wander where she would not have already been found and reported, but they pressed on anyway in hopes that they may get lucky.
    Based on the police dog’s indications of Ashley’s direction of travel, Mike organized a modest group of officers, volunteers, and recruits from a current police academy class to search southbound along State Road 441. The road was a major, six-lane roadway that spanned numerous counties and had high volumes of traffic the majority of the time. Mike split his search party into two groups and had one checking the hedges on one side and the second team searching dumpsters, parking lots, stores, and alleyways on the other.
    While Mike was organizing and leading his search party, Jim and Dan were back at their desks trying to work on leads or possibilities of who may have taken Ashley.  Jim had begun researching the individual who the mall security supervisor had told him was harassing two women the week before Ashley disappeared. His name was Joe Jackson.  
    On that particular day, the officers who responded to assist mall security with Jackson’s departure noted that he smelled and acted as if he had been drinking. The officers spoke with the two women who had reported his harassing behavior, and both said he had followed them for at least a half hour before they reported it. They said he just stared at them without saying anything, but when Jackson was approached by security, merely to ask him if he was all right and if he would stop bothering the two women, he began ranting and unleashed a profanity-laced tirade on the women from afar.
    Jim was unfamiliar with Joe Jackson so he began digging into his background for information. Based on his driver’s license photo, Joe was a white, possibly Hispanic, man who looked to be clean cut. However, as Jim progressed into unearthing Joe’s past, he learned he was anything but.  
    He had an extensive criminal record dating back to when he was fifteen. Most of the crimes Joe committed at a young age were thefts, but when he turned eighteen they became more violent. Joe had been arrested twice in Fort Lauderdale for robbing and beating two college students who were there on spring break. The charges each time were ultimately dropped for one reason or another. His crimes also progressed to public drunkenness, driving drunk, various drug offenses, and harassment. The one glaring omission from Joe’s resume was any type of sex crime or sex offender status, which made him slightly less appealing as a suspect, but wasn’t reason to exclude him either.   
    Unfortunately, the physical evidence that the detectives had to work with at that point was next to nothing. They had no leads other than Jackson, who was iffy at best. They had no vehicle description and only a general direction of travel. There had been no police reports filed in the Wootens’ community that would be of any help. Dan printed out a list of sex offenders within a twenty mile radius of the mall and the Wooten home, but unfortunately that list consisted of some two hundred people. The DVDs they had received from mall security would take hours, if not days, to comb through thoroughly.
    Word had just gotten back to Jim and Dan that Mike’s search party had unearthed nothing of value, which was yet another early blow to their already challenging task. With the odds strongly against them finding Ashley soon, or safe, and with only a limited amount of daylight left, Jim and Dan left their desks and headed out to speak with Joe Jackson.
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    Tom and Lisa were still out conducting their own search, though they knew in their hearts it was going to be a fruitless endeavor. They, of course, had no idea of where or how to go about looking for Ashley and were simply driving around aimlessly and desperately. Less than eight hours ago the Wooten family was, by all accounts, a typical happy family. Tom ran his computer business, which he had