Alien Among Us (TJ Steele Book 1)

by L. Edwin Brown

  As the vision of Lorain and Kala faded and they were no longer visible, I fell into a deeper sleep. I now was standing on a warm sandy beach, watching the ocean waves rush ashore. There were no sounds coming from the ocean or the area around me. I turned around with my back to the ocean and was now, staring at a thick grouping of palm trees.

  A shadowy figure was moving in my direction, coming from inside the palm trees. I couldn’t make out what it was until it got closer. I now saw it was a person. As the person got even closer, I saw she was female. It was Lorain in a long white shinny satin gown. The gown was blowing in the wind, but I felt no breeze.

  I wanted to rush to her, but I couldn’t move. She walked right up and stood close to me. I could smell her favorite perfume, as she slid her arms around my neck. She kissed me softly and then whispered in my ear. Take care of Kala, she loves you and you need to love her, forever. The vision began to fade to black.

  It was still dark, when I was awakened, when Caroline came into the adjoining room and crawled up between Kala and me. She went to sleep quickly snuggling next to Kala. When I went back to sleep, I had no further dreams or visions.

  Friday morning I got up early and joined the Watson’s, for a continental breakfast, on the first floor of the hotel. They had an eleven hour drive, back to Council Bluffs, Iowa. I told Marylou to not let the experience of the last week knock her down. She should know, she is loved and that nothing can stop her from going forward.

  Shirley Watson said her daughter was a very strong independent woman and that she will survive. I knew, with the love her parents had for her, she was going to be alright. I helped them load their luggage in the back of Fred’s Ford Explorer and stood in front of the hotel as they drove off.

  Deputy Harcort was on her cell phone, when I got back to the suite. Kala and Caroline were still in bed, as well as Abagail.

  Sheriff Miller would like you to come down to the department, around 10:00 this morning. Did he say what he wanted, I asked? Just that he wanted to update you on our investigation.

  When the others were finally out of bed, I told them Deputy Brenda Harcort was going to take me downtown for a while today. I gave Kala the keys to the rental SUV, in case she wanted take Abagail and Caroline out. I also handed her a credit card and told her, the girls needed more clothes.

  Deputy Harcort drove me down to the sheriff department, arriving at 10:00 AM. We headed straight to the Sheriff’s office. Around the conference table was FBI Agent Thomas, who I met the other day, and several new faces.

  Sheriff Miller introduced the other three men. One was the county prosecutor, Leo Black and FBI Special Agent Campbell, from Langley, Maryland. The older gentleman, sitting at the far end of the table, was a local historian, Dominic Wilcox. The five men all had a large folder in front of them, with the Mesa County Seal, embossed on the front.

  When the Sheriff sat down, I looked over at him. I was reading his mind as he was saying something, to Deputy Harcort.

  So, bringing me down here, was just a ploy to get me away from Abagail and Caroline, I blurted out. The Sheriff looked at Deputy Harcort and she was shaking her head, no. She hadn’t told me anything, I said to the Sheriff.

  I’m confused, said Michael. It’s too hard to explain, I responded. You could have told me, you wanted the county phycologist, to examine Abagail. I wouldn’t have objected. I plan on having her see a phycologist, when I get her back to Florida. I know she will need professional help, and all the love Kala and I can give her.

  She has no living relatives, I stated. Then I raised my index finger towards the ceilings and said. Wait I take that back. She has a great aunt somewhere. I haven’t been able to find her, I responded. I don’t even know if she is still alive.

  I looked around the table at the other gentlemen in the room and said. Before we get started, you need to change an item in your folder. I was not relieved of my duties, by the Steele Global, Board of Directors. I left the corporation on my own, forcing the board to buy out my interest, in the company. The five men stared at me, all wondered how I knew what was in the folder, since I had not looked at any of the literature.

  I could see some stress on Dominic Wilcox face. He had put together the portfolio on me, for the other men, sitting at this table. He knew I was probably, the most intelligent individual he had ever been around. The documents in the folder, stated my IQ was never determined and I had attended UCLA and MIT before the age of fifteen. The research, Dominic had done on me, is what was making him, uncomfortable. The fact that I was reading their thoughts, also made him nervous.

  Well, I still want to tell you how our investigation is going, said Sheriff Miller. I’m all ears, I replied as Deputy Harcort sat a tray, with bottle water down, in the center of the table. Sheriff Miller dropped two plastic crime scene bags, over my shoulder, on the table, in front of me.

  The bags contained two tranquilizing darts. Did the dogs survive, I asked? They’re at the county animal compound. They will be euthanize in a day or so. They are too vicious to keep alive. They could never be adopted or trained. The male, is probably fifteen years old and the female, is about twelve.

  We’ve discovered forty two bodies, in the side yard, with a ground-penetrating radar device, said FBI Special Agent Campbell. The bodies are in different levels of decomposition.

  They were buried side by side and in rows of twelve. At the head of each grave, is a solid red brick, placed at ground grade level, with only the top exposed. They were lined up in perfectly straight rows evenly spaced apart. There was writing on top of the bricks, but time has worn off most of what was written.

  We found one body in the center of the front yard. We think it maybe Christine Thomason.

  Darla Burrows, the phycologist we sent to meet with Abagail this morning, believes Sonny and maybe even the senior Brighton, suffered from OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, said Sheriff Miller.

  The way the shoes are perfectly arranged on the shelves and the stacks of clothing are impeccably arranged and numbered. This gives us some indication of the two men’s mind set.

  The adult movies, in junior’s bedroom, were stack and lined up alphabetically. His socks, tee shirts, and underwear are placed flat and straight in the dresser drawers. His pants and shirts, in the closet, were arranged by colors and the photos, pinned to the wall, were in a perfect alignment.

  They are spaced exactly one inch apart on the sides, top, and bottoms. We also found two shoe boxes, filled with additional Polaroid photographs, under junior’s bed.

  In one of the boxes were photographs of Douglas Brighton senior engaged in sexual activity with Sonny when he was around five years old. The photograph’s shows both junior and senior having sex over a fifteen year period and only stopping after Douglas Brighton senior’s accident in 1992.

  The Sheriff said, the floor of the barn is covered in dried blood stains. The bars on the cage were also covered in dried blood.

  There are more photos, of young boys and girls, than there are bodies on the property. It’s going to take month’s maybe years, to track them all. The dates on the photos will help, but most go back, thirty to forty years.

  Dominic stood up and walked over to a window in the sheriff’s office. He was staring out the window at the detention center across the street. While he stood with his back to the group, he said.

  The Brighton family came to Mesa County in eighteen sixty nine from Charleston, South Carolina. He never turned around as he continued to speak. The family had lost everything during the Civil War. They were California bound, but settled here.

  The Brighton’s, as well as other settlers arriving to the area, from the eighteen eighties until the nineteen sixties, started the three main economic activities. Farming, fruit growing, and cattle raising.

  Dominic turned around and walked back to the conference table. He said the Brighton family had the largest groves, growing peaches, pears, apricots, plums, and cherries throughout Mesa County.

  Raymon
d and Douglas Brighton were twins, borne June, 1946. Three years later, a sister Melody came along. 1956 brought another sister, Theresa to the family.

  During the summer of 1959, Raymond and Douglas, along with six other Boy Scouts and there troop leader, were rafting on the Colorado River. During a trip through rough rapids the rubber raft flipped and Raymond and the troop leader drowned. Their bodies were found almost a mile down the river, from where the raft flipped. The other boys managed to get to shore, but it took several hours, to get help for Raymond and their troop leader.

  By the late sixties and early seventies there were a lot of hippies in the area. There was a commune, owned by one of the hippies, on the east side of the Colorado River, just east of Palisade, on an orchard plantation. They were never a problem for law enforcement and the rest of the community just ignored them.

  Douglas senior was in the final months, of his junior year, at the University of Colorado Boulder, studying agriculture, and business management. His father was grooming him to take over the family business. His sister Melody was always hanging around the hippie commune and spending all night with them.

  In 1967, two weeks before Douglas’s college year ended, Melody snuck three men and another girl, she met at the commune, into her family’s Palisade, Colorado home. The plan was to rob the place and take off for California. They were all high on LSD and tripping out.

  The three men tied her father to a chair and made him watch while they savagely rape, beat and murdered her mother and eleven year old sister before killing him. They stabbed the Brighton’s hundreds of times with knives they took from the kitchen. Melody and her four friends were covered in blood, when they took several thousand dollars in cash, pockets full of jewelry and the Brighton’s Cadillac, back to the commune.

  The next morning the house keeper found the bodies and called the police. The hippie’s had left enough clues around the house, to point a finger at them. The local police were able to quickly obtain a court order and raided the hippie commune. The police arrested everyone at the commune and after a few days, of sorting out the ones who committed the crime. They let the other’s go, but things were never the same for the hippies in the area.

  Douglas returned to Palisade, but never went back to the large family home, he grew up in. His sister Melody hung herself in the Mesa County lockup, four days after the murders. The three men and one woman that had committed the crime, was sentence to life in prison.

  For the next few years, Douglas ran the family’s business, but no one knew where he was living. He would just show up at one of the Brighton’s business, long enough to check the company’s books and make sure things were running smoothly.

  In 1970, Douglas buys the Palisade Trucking Company. This was firm that hulled his family’s produce around the country. He also moves onto the farm in Fruita. His family had owned the property, since before he was born. No one knows what happened to the elderly couple that lived in the farm house.

  Sheriff Miller said, they found several pictures of a boy and two girls dated September, October, and December of 1970. We think these were Douglas’s first kill.

  Something snapped and started him and Doug junior on a on a forty four year raping and killing spree, said Sheriff Miller. We have pictures of Sonny, when he was less than ten years old, with his father molesting young people. The photographs shows the brutality of these two men.

  We also cannot find a birth certificate for Douglas Brighton Junior, said county prosecutor, Leo Black. We think Sonny maybe the offspring of one of the young women, Douglas senior kidnapped and held within that house. It’s also possible he picked her up hitchhiking and she was already pregnant, he stated. We’ll know more after DNA testing has been completed on junior and senior.

  In 1980 when junior was six and just starting school, Doug senior built the trucking center at the top of the hill from the farm house and moved the trucking business from Palisade to Fruita.

  That same year, during a heavy snow storm, the Brighton’s abandon family home, in Palisade, burnt to the ground. It was determined to be arson, and some thought Douglas had set the fire. It was also reported that Douglas was at the truck service center, when the fire started.

  A year later he started selling off some of the orchards and land around Palisade, keeping the vineyards and wineries. His trucking company grew and he was hauling tanker trucks for Exon Oil, who was extracting shell oil from all around the Mesa County area.

  In 1992, while Doug senior was inflating a large truck tire, at the truck center, the trajectory ring exploded and the ring struck Douglas in the back severing his spinal cord, said Dominic.

  He was paralyzed from the chest down. He has a little mobility in his arms, but the rest of his body, was paralyzed. Junior put him into a twenty four hour health care center, at the recommendation, of the family attorney. Junior was two months away from his twenty first birthday, and would then take over his father’s businesses.

  This is when things started to get strange. Junior began making changes to the farm. He had a local fencing company install the eight foot high, chain link fence, around the house, with the double gates. Another company from Ogden, Utah, made and installed the steel bars, on all the windows. Neighbors found this activity strange and thought he was just paranoid or simply wanted privacy.

  His employees and few friends, thought he was just eccentric and harmless. He kept to himself and would spend time on the road, in one of his semis. He had a foremen to run his vineyards and wineries and a another managing the truck service center. He never dated, or was seen in the accompaniment of a female.

  He always had dogs on the property after the fences were installed. Sometime after the changes to the farm were made, he moved his father from the health care center.

  Most people thought he had put him in a less expensive place. They never imagined, he had taken him home, to the farm.

  He put up “No Trespassing” signs in 1995 an allowed the pit bull’s to run free on the fenced property. We think this was around the same time he kidnapped, Christine Anderson.

  We don’t think Christine or Abagail knew what he was doing, out in the barn, said Deputy Harcort.

  Abagail had told us, Sonny often locked her and her mother, in the attic space, for days at a time. We believe this was when he had a victim in the barn. The attic space, has two small sealed shatter resistant windows, one at each end of the attic. You can see the truck service center, from the front window and the river and town of Fruita, off in the distance, from the back. The barn and gravel lot wasn’t visible from the attic space. We think this is why junior had the ladies go to the attic when he was in the barn.

  Another gentleman walked into the office and whispered something in FBI Special Agent Campbell’s ear. Excuse me Agent Campbell said, as he pushed his chair back and walked out of the room, with the other gentleman.

  Sheriff Miller, took a call at his desk, while I sat and spoke to Agent Thomas and Deputy Harcort. When the Sheriff returned to the conference table, he said Darla Burrows has finished her assessment of Abagail. She also said Miss Kealoha was a big help. She kept Abagail calm and relaxed, as well as took care of Caroline, while Darla talked to Abagail.

  Special Agent Campbell came back into the room and said the forensic teams at the farm, have uncovered the first twelve human remains. He placed an eight by ten glossy color photograph on the table. As you can see from the photo, the graves are perfectly spaced. They are all thirty six inches deep and twenty four inches wide and sixty five inches in length.

  We believe the graves were dug with an old tractor, found in the barn. The shallow graves are probably due to the shell rock, three feet down. Even where the graves could have been dug deeper, they were still only, thirty six inches deep. We believe this was due to junior’s OCD.

  The twelve open gravesites, are the oldest. The forensic geologist at the site, says the corpse appears to be thirty to forty years old. They will take several days cataloging and remo
ving the remains, from these twelve graves, before uncovering the next row.

  The area is now surrounded by news media. We have moved the crime scene boundaries all the way out to the edge of road and down to the river. The forensic team has asked for a huge tent, large enough to cover the entire grave site area.

  Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base in California, is sending a plane, with man power and a tent large enough to cover the complete area. They also have a large generator with lights, so the forensic geologist can work at night.

  They are not going to open any further graves until the tent is erected. There is concern rain or bad weather could contaminate the open graves. The remains are old and brittle and will take days to properly remove and catalog. An anthropology expert from the Jeffersonian Institute in Washington, is expected to arrive on the site, later today.

  Sheriff Miller, said the news media, only knows we have found a mass grave site and nothing more. At this point, the media has only been told, a young woman was rescued from the barn, on the site. This rescue, is what precipitated the search of the home and property, of Douglas Brighton.

  We will keep the information about Christine, Abagail and Caroline private for now, but you never know how the word of their existence, will spread.

  Sheriff Miller, asked that I stay in Grand Junction a few more days, in case he or the FBI had more questions. Deputy Harcort offered to take me back to the hotel. I called Kala to see what she and the other two girls were doing. She said they were at the Mesa Mall off Patterson Road.

  I told Deputy Harcort where the girls were at. She swung her sheriff’s cruiser around and headed south through town, telling me to tell the ladies to stay in the J.C. Penney store until we got there.

  We pulled into the driveway, on the south side of the mall, at the entrance to the Penney store. I called Kala, to find out where she was at, in the store. She said they were in the children’s clothing department.