I glanced down at the notes again. There were two memos between the FBI and the city of Shilo, both dated after the women went missing, but before any bodies were found.
Why would the FBI even be on the investigation at that point, especially with the scant amount of information in this file?
“Was Offerman working this case off the clock?” I asked.
Chizek hesitated. “Ed never knew his birth mom.” He shrugged. “About the time of this case, he did one of those genealogical research things.” He stopped and looked around. Hiked up his pants again. Tapped his pockets. “He found out his mom was a pro.”
“A sex worker?” I confirmed, using the correct term.
“Yeah,” Chizek said. “And one of the gals missing in this case was a… sex worker. Ed sorta felt for her. Thought no one was going to look into the case if he didn’t.”
“Sounds like a good partner,” Richie said, going for rapport. “You stay in touch?”
Chizek made a face. “Ed moved to some godforsaken part of Mexico called the East Cape.” He flicked his eyebrows, addressing Richie more than me. “Livesoff the grid. Water shipped in on a truck. Solar power. Not exactly easy to grab a beer.”
“Is there an office we can sit in?” I asked. “Go through these notes?”
Chizek swiveled his head to me, annoyed at my interrupting his reverie about his old partner.
“You’re welcome to use my office, Camden.” He pointed back at the windowless room. “Or if you want to go back to your old floor, you could sit in the break room.” Again, he flicked his eyes at me. “Some agent trashed the place a year or so ago. Punched holes in the walls. But it’s been patched up since then.”
I kept my eyes on Chizek, my reaction flat.
“Good news is,” he kept up, “we sent those people away. Big office like Miami… you can be Special Olympics and go unnoticed, I figure.”
CHAPTER NINE
Chizek’s parting shot about “those people” and “Special Olympics” referred to PAR, and the agent who had trashed the office was me. But this was not the attitude of 90 percent of federal agents I’d worked with. So I ignored the dig and told him we’d be happy to use his office.
Richie and I made ourselves comfortable then. I sat down at Chizek’s desk and removed the notes and sketches from the two-hole punch. I’d start reading at page 1, I told Richie, then pass the pages to him, so he could read them next.
He grabbed a cup of coffee while I began, moving through the details of what Offerman had documented.
On October 14, 2018, a Baptist preacher in Shilo, Florida, reported two women had gone missing. Their names were Maria Elisandro and Rana Delgado, and both were congregants at the Reverend Jerry Webber’s First Church of the Almighty. Elisandro had been a sex worker, although according to Rev. Webber, she had left the profession and was working as a hostess at a family restaurant.Rana Delgado, on the other hand, had worked two jobs, one as a cleaning woman, the other as a waitress at a roadside diner called Scottie’s.
The police put out the appropriate BOLOs on the women, but nothing came of the cases. When a third woman disappeared three months later, the city of Shilo reached out to the FBI for a consultation. The case of the three missing women was assigned to Ed Offerman in the Jacksonville office, who made the seventy-minute drive to Shilo on January 22, 2019.
Offerman connected with Shilo detective Warner Quinones and examined what evidence there was on the missing women, but that was it. The Bureau could offer little more in the way of help at that time.
Seated in Chizek’s office, I flipped to the next page of the file, leaving each sheet for Richie, who picked it up after me and read it.
Four months later, in May 2019, as construction workers dug for the Sandalwood Johnson Public Housing Project in Shilo, three bodies were found, each victim buried three feet from the next, in a perfect line.
The media dubbed the women “the Shilo County Three,” and Offerman returned to town. The first two missing women, Elisandro and Delgado, were among the victims found, but the third body did not match the third missing woman. It was soon identified as Susan Jones, a woman who had managed a small hotel on the edge of Shilo and had no connection to sex work or either of the first two women.
Offerman tried to connect with friends and families of the victims, but Elisandro was known mostly by other sex workers, and Delgado was an immigrant with no family in the States. He also checked in with churchgoers, but the other congregants only knewthe women to say hi or bye. Still, Offerman dug in, finding at least two people who knew each of the three women. And witnesses described a man who’d picked up Delgado and Elisandro for dates in the last week before they went missing.
My eyes moved to a typed Q and A, taken from an interview Offerman had conducted with a friend of Elisandro’s, a woman who was also a sex worker.
Q: Maria was supposed to go on a date with this guy?
A: Yup.
Q: A date like I’m imagining?
A: I don’t know what you’re imagining.
Q: A real date?
