One

Night fell over the city like a warm blanket. The humidity in the air was heavy, and those without air conditioners were forced to leave their windows open making curtains billow out the side of high sided apartment towers. Sirens could be heard in the distance seemingly from every direction, traveling to unknown places, thousands of people ignorant to the sound, not caring whether it was a matter of life or death.

It had been the time of her life, he was sure. In his mind he imagined her and her friends, drunk off wine from a liquid lunch, giggling at each other and making suggestive comments about the men they desired. He had picked her as soon as he laid eyes on her, knowing she would be an easy target. It hadn’t taken much to get her into the alley and even less before he had her pressed up against the rough brick wall. Her leg was hooked up over his hip and he pressed himself eagerly against her, their mouths exploring one another’s feverishly.

His hand drew up her thigh to her hip, over her ribs, stopping briefly to gently squeeze her breast before settling on her collar bone. She was writhing against him, throaty moans escaping from her mouth each time they broke apart to gasp for air. His fingers followed an all too familiar path; following along the curve of her neck until he was cradling the weight of her head with his hand. His thumb brushed lightly over the taut muscles at the front of her throat and he felt out for a recognizable spot against her larynx and pushed.

He pulled away from her slightly and watched curiously as her expression turned from that of lust to fear. Her mouth open and closed frantically, her arms thrashing at him, pushing and pulling desperately in an attempt to free herself from the vice-like grip. He was all too familiar with the way the human body fought to hang on to life, he felt in it his own body regularly but more often he saw it in the eyes of others. Desperate for air, her fingertips twitching, eyes rolling back in her head she finally succumbed to being deprived of much needed oxygen and her body went limp. He let out a sigh of relief, it had taken longer than usual and he didn’t have a lot of time to spare. She wasn’t dead, only unconscious, but it was only a matter of time.

He slowly lowered her limp body to the dirt covered ground, tearing open the front of the flimsy button up blouse that covered her chest. She was beautiful, he couldn’t deny, and he reached up to push her blonde hair out of her face to take one final look at her. It was sad that someone so young and pretty had to die in such a brutal way, but she simply needed to learn how to share.

It was a bloody task but he was experienced, and had no issue keeping himself away from the gore. A noise in the alley grabbed his attention and his head quickly snapped in each direction, taking in his surroundings. He didn’t see anything but someone was definitely there, he could hear a voice speaking in the distance.

With a curse he cleaned up what he could and threw some empty boxes over what was left of the beautiful blonde on the ground. He only hoped that no one would see the body before he had a chance to get rid of it.

~*~

“Are you sure this is the way?” she asked, grimacing at the stench coming from the alley. Her black hair was pulled into a stylish ponytail, her makeup done to make her look every bit the 40’s pinup girl she was deep down. She was definitely not the type of girl that typically stalked around dirty alleys, nor did she want to become one.

The man next to her; heavily tattooed with a pair of sunglasses pushed up on top of his balding head, had a similar expression. The alley smelled of garbage and something else he couldn’t quite place. To describe it simply he would have said the alley smelled like death.

“Alex,” his companion complained, trying to get his attention, “are you sure this is the way?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he stressed, “They said the back entrance into the venue was down the alley. Last I checked this is an alley, as creepy as it might be.”

As a rule they tried to avoid the front doors because they were usually crawling with fans no matter how soon before the show it was. AJ (or Alex as he was generally called by his friends), being one quarter of the Backstreet Boys, always avoided the front doors. Normally there was a bay door where the buses went in and out that they utilized but at this particular venue the buses had to park off site and they were brought by car. AJ had been running behind the rest of the group and him and his fiancée Rochelle had come separately by cab. They were now trying to find the entrance before he got mobbed. No matter how many years it had been since they were at the height of their popularity, the excitement of seeing their idol always seemed to easily overcome women of most ages.

“I don’t think this is it,” Rochelle said, trying to see a door in the dim light. She had been fairly certain it was the other side of the building that the entrance had been on. She had seen a service door on that side, likely an employee entrance but AJ was convinced that it was the other side between the venue and the run down building next to it.

He felt a sudden wash of nausea and a chill ran from the top of his head straight down his spine. There was something about this that just didn’t feel right. He felt uneasy, the hair on his arms was sticking straight up and he felt like he was being watched, “As much as I don’t want to admit it,” he chuckled nervously, “I’m starting to think you might be right.”

He reached behind him for her hand but didn’t feel her familiar fingers reaching back to him. AJ turned towards his beloved, seeing her frozen in time, wide eyed and stone faced staring down the alley.

“Rochelle?” he asked anxiously, walking up to touch her shoulder. She was shaking, he could feel it under his grip and when he looked up at her face a single tear escaped from her eye, drifting down her cheek, “Sweetheart, what is it?!”

Slowly she raised her quivering hand, her breath coming in short pants. He could see the fear in her eyes and he followed her point, letting out a gasp when he saw what was in the alley with them. Immediately he reached into his pocket for his cell phone and for the first time in his life dialed only three numbers before hitting send.

Two

There were a lot of angry fans outside the arena watching anxiously as police officers walked yellow tape from one side of the building to the other. To them it was as if they were roping off any possibility of them getting to attend the concert they had waited so long for, and for some of them see the group they’d been waiting to see their whole lives.

Those who had paid for VIP passes had been to see sound check, had their pictures taken and their tour around backstage just  before the boys went for dinner so they were genuinely surprised when they came back to discover that the show had been cancelled before it even began. Of course they had all been assured that they would be refunded in full but it did nothing to satisfy the mob that had collected outside of the venue. Some of them were pissed about the concert but there were a few in the group that were genuinely interested in what had happened. Rumours were spreading like wildfire through the group but the general consensus was that a dead body had been found in the alley next to the arena.

“Make a hole!” a man yelled and two people pushed their way through the crowd of women, dressed up for the occasion, holding signs and CDs tightly in their hands.

The crowd parted and the man and woman approached the yellow tape where they were stopped by a uniformed police officer. The taller of the two was the female. She was Amazonian in build, strong and lean, nearly pushing 6 feet. Her Scandinavian heritage was apparent in her appearance. She had her blonde hair pulled into a tight bun and she wore a black trench coat over top a stylish suit, far too warm considering the temperature outside. From her pocket she pulled out a badge and flashed it at the officer. The man followed, pulling his own badge off a belt clip next to his gun holster. He, too, was wearing a trench coat (in dark grey) over a suit and tie making it apparent to all the other police officers that were lingering around the scene that the detectives had arrived.

A heat wave had gripped the entire eastern seaboard and Maryland seemed to be at the epicentre of it all. It was only mid-May so despite a late to rise, early to bed sun it was easily getting over 90 degrees during the day. It had actually led to more crime through the city. The streets and sidewalks were still dark early which made it easy for criminals to move around and the heat was pushing people out of their homes creating easy targets for thieves, rapists, and murderers. So it hadn’t been a surprise to the two homicide detectives to get a call about a body in an alley, it would only add to the final statistic when someone called this the most dangerous spring on record.

The crime scene unit had already been at the site for an hour collecting evidence and when the two detectives made their way into the alley the medical examiner was looking over the body. The alley way was now brightly lit thanks to some well placed tower lighting which only exposed the filth that littered the ground and the walls of the buildings. Grease and mud were smeared across the pavement leading up to a dumpster. Next to it the dark grime turned to a deep shade of red and both detectives were surprised by the sheer volume of blood that was on the ground, marked strategically with yellow flags by the crime scene investigators.

The male approached first, sticking his hands in his pockets as he watched the medical examiner work, “Hey! Baltimore PD, I’m Detective Knox, this is Detective Jensen, and this is our crime scene.”

“Nice to meet you,” the doctor said from beneath a face mask, leaning close to the body.

“What do we have? There’s an awful lot of blood, is it just the one DB?” the woman asked, circling around but careful not to step on anything that might be considered evidence even though the scene had been released by the CSU.

“Just the one,” the medical examiner, Dr. Murphy, confirmed. He stood and stepped away from the body, lifting the mask of the face shield he was wearing. Television M.E’s were one of his biggest pet peeves. He often would run into this rookie cops that would be surprised by his get up considering that the night before on CSI: Miami the coroner had been stylishly dressed in a $400 suit, a pair of stilettos, and a pile of jewellery littering her dainty fingers. In reality that would never happen there was a certain decorum that you had to keep and a uniform you had to wear in order to properly get evidence from a scene and it did not involve being camera ready. Every time Murph watched one of those cop shows he would list off the variety of toxins that each of those Hollywood M.E’s inhaled every time they stuck their face within an inch of a dead person.   It disgusted him.

“When is your guess for time of death?” Jensen questioned, pulling a small notepad and a golf pencil out of her pocket. She flipped to a free page and looked up at the older doctor expectantly.

Dr. Murphy chuckled and motioned to a piece of equipment off to the side of the corpse, laying seemingly unused. Typically the first thing he did was try to establish a time of death. The laws of physics say that a hot body will always come back to the temperature of its surroundings. If you keep a glass of hot milk on the table it will eventually be room temperature and bodies work the same way. At time of death, all life processes stop and the body cools down to the temperature of the environment. Murph’s preferred method of determining time of death was by making a small incision in the abdomen and using a special thermometer to get temperature from the liver. He then used a formula to determine (based on what time of year, and time of day it was) the difference between the normal body temperature and how long it would take to get to the temperature he’d just taken. When he’d arrived at the scene he’d gone about his usual routine, collected his supplies but discovered something quite unusual once he actually started his investigation.

“I went to figure that out when I first got here, do a liver temp... but there was a little bit of a problem,” he said, watching the woman’s dusty blonde eyebrow rise in curiosity.

“What kind of a problem?” she asked; noticing that the thermometer he had motioned to seemed to be completely clean.

“Her liver is gone.”

Jensen cocked her head to the side, "What do you mean gone?" she asked but her partner immediately chimed in with his own question before she could get an answer.

"You think this is some kind of black market thing?" Knox prompted, "Steal someone's liver then go sell it for a transplant?"

Dr. Murphy shook his head immediately, "No, in my opinion it couldn't possibly be a black market surgery. The liver would have been in terrible condition; no way would someone be able to use it as a donor organ. I can't be absolutely certain until I get her back to the morgue but I really don't believe this was a surgical procedure, it was ripped out," he stressed, "Whatever, or whoever, did this...if I didn’t know any better I’d think they did it with their bare hands."

~*~

"What do you think of what the M.E. was saying out there?" Knox asked as he and his partner made their way through the dim corridors of the arena. He found it a little exciting to be backstage, seeing gig boxes lining the walls and roadies still milling around. He was hopeful that he might even get a glimpse of the changing rooms for the local college basketball team, the Terrapins. He had gone to University of Maryland and played on the Lacrosse team, but always idolized the much taller, much better looking basketball jocks.

Jensen shrugged, her eyes scanning her surroundings habitually, "I have a hard time believing that a person could rip out someone's liver without a scalpel or some kind of tool. Most people wouldn't even know where to point if you asked them where their liver is. Besides, he did imply that he knew better than to suggest something so preposterous.”

“It’s an interesting theory anyway,” he shrugged and continued looking for the sign for the dressing room where they would find their witness.

The two of them had been partners for the better part of six years. They knew each other going through the Academy and hit it off as friends immediately. They both had similar goals of getting through the obligatory years as uniformed cops working a beat and getting to real detective work. They hadn’t necessarily expected they would continue to move up the ranks together but when two opportunities opened up in Baltimore’s Integrated Homicide Team they both jumped at the chance.

They both stopped in front of a bright yellow door, a piece of paper taped to it reading “Backstreet Boys”. It was a little surreal for them to be interviewing celebrities as part of their investigation; Baltimore wasn’t exactly a hotspot for the Hollywood elite. After a quick knock on the door Knox went in first, holding it open for his partner to follow.

The room was surprisingly full, but dead silent. The four men that the detectives recognized from the posters outside were sitting on large leather couches, each accompanied by a woman by their side. A couple of kids were playing on the floor while large bodyguard types lingered around the outside of the room. 

Jensen cleared her throat and two dozen eyes were on her in a flash, “Which one of you is AJ McLean?”

Slowly one man stood from a couch in the corner, his hand still tightly holding onto the hand of the woman next to him who looked equally as shaken. Nervously, he shifted from foot to foot and it was clear by his puffy eyes and distressed expression that he had been crying.

“I am.”

Alexander James McLean
May 14, 2010 20:19

Jensen finishing notarising the interview on a cassette tape and dropped it in an old school recorder before hitting the record button.

“Ever heard of digital?” AJ asked with a nervous laugh, rubbing his sweaty palms on the legs of his jeans. He was stressed out and dying for a little rest but every time he closed his eyes he could see that girl lying in the alley covered in blood.

She cracked a small smile, recognizing the sign of someone who was on edge, "Digital is so unreliable. The first time I lost an interview was the last time I used digital. I find tape more consistent."

AJ crossed and uncrossed his legs, running a hand over his barely-there hairline, "Fair enough, that makes sense."

"Can you tell me why you're so nervous?" Jensen asked, taking a seat across from the man.
They had found a different dressing room to do their interviews in, wanting to keep everyone separate. They couldn't rule anything out without talking to them first and the fact that the only people who were anywhere near the scene of the crime was the boys and their crew was slightly incriminating.

Taking a deep breath AJ again wiped his hands on the legs of his jeans, shrugging, "I've... never seen a dead body like that before. I'm freaking out, honestly. Seeing a dead person at a funeral is one thing but that...that was really messed up."

Jensen nodded, writing a few notes down on the pad of paper in her hand. He seemed to be legitimate. The first officer on scene had told her that he was the one who called 911 that he had been coming back from dinner to get ready for the concert when he and his fiancée had stumbled upon the body in the alley but there were still a few unanswered questions she had.

"Why were you in the alley tonight?" she asked, pencil at the ready.

"My fiancée and I were coming back from dinner. A bunch of us had gotten a drive back to the buses after sound check and came back here a couple of hours later. This venue has a weird set up, they don't really have a private entrance and it's just not a good idea for me to go loiter around the front door trying to get in. They told me there was a staff entrance at the back of the building but didn't say which side so I picked one, and..."

"Did you see or hear anything when you went into the alley?"

AJ shook his head, "No, Rochelle and I were talking. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary but... come to think of it, there was this terrible smell. You know when you get really drunk and spend hours throwing up until there's nothing left in your stomach?"

Jensen blinked hard then shook her head, "I can't say I do."

Blushing, AJ continued, "I used to have an alcohol problem - sober now though. Anyway, that's what the smell reminded me of. When there's nothing left but you just keep heaving this bitter goo... just thinking about it makes me little nauseous. What is that stuff called? Is it stomach acid?"

Jensen was a little unnerved by what he was getting at considering that no one knew anything about the details of the case except for the police and the medical examiner. She stopped writing notes only briefly, looking up at him, "It's bile," she answered and he nodded in agreement, "Were your band mates with you when you came back from the buses?"

"No," AJ shook his head, "not all of them, Brian and Nick stayed here. Howie and I, the girls and the kids all went back together. Then we... well, Rochelle and I... got distracted, and missed the first ride back to the venue so I don't know when they got back here."

Before they'd come in to do interviews Jensen and Knox had a chance to talk with the crime scene investigators. They'd found the girl's purse near the body complete with all of her cash, credit cards and tickets to the show. They'd bagged everything including her wallet which they left open in the bag to show her identification.

"The girl we found in the alley," Jensen explained, "she had a sticker on the bottom of her shirt. It was red with your picture on it. Would you be able to tell me what that is?"

"Oh my god," AJ muttered as he realized that the girl in the alley must have been there for the show, "You get stickers with our picture on them when you register for VIP before sound check party. You have to have the sticker on you somewhere so the people organizing it know which level of VIP you have, they're colour coded."

Jensen picked up the evidence bag with the wallet, holding it up so AJ could see the driver's licence on the inside clearly, "Do you recognize this girl?"

He looked long and hard, but she was fairly average looking and wouldn't have stood out in the crowd. She was pretty he noted, sure to use the word was in his mental monologue. He caught a look at her birth date briefly, sighing when he realized it would have been her 21st birthday.
Looking back to the detective he shook his head, "I'm sorry, no. There were a lot of girls there today; she could have been any one of them."

Jensen nodded and put the wallet back down on her lap, "Thank you for your help."

~*~

Nickolas Gene Carter
May 14, 2010 21:32

At the same time AJ was being questioned Knox was using a different room to interview Rochelle. They both had identical stories about missing their ride, not being able to find the door and stumbling upon the body in the alley rather innocently.

Jensen was presently interviewing Brian Littrell and Knox had the joy of sitting in front of golden boy Nick Carter. He didn’t even know the guy but he already disliked him. He just had an air about him that screamed privilege. He was slouched back in his seat, legs spread, drumming his long fingers against his thigh. To Knox it seemed unusual for someone to be so casual when they were being interviewed about a suspicious death. It was usually an indication of one of two things; either this guy had something to hide or he was just a cocky asshole. Knox suspected the latter.

He’d just gotten an email from the medical examiner with a picture of the girl at the morgue so he and Jensen didn’t have to share. Not that Jensen would have had much use for an email, she would have had to go back to the station, kick her archaic computer ten times and perform a rain dance, before she could actually be lucky enough to get connected to the Internet. She was the least technological person he’d ever met but he was happy to hold the title of ‘computer guy’ in their partnership. So while he already had crime scene and morgue photos on his iPhone, Jensen was more than happy with the physical evidence.

“How’s it going?” Knox asked, starting off the conversation on a positive note.

Nick shrugged, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and Knox was pretty sure he caught a whiff of alcohol on the blond, “I’m supposed to be finishing up a show and heading to the next city by now not getting interviewed by the cops, so how do you think I am?”

He was a wily one, Knox noted, “Have you been drinking Mr. Carter?”

Nick scoffed, his brow furrowing with indignation, “Mr. Carter is my Dad you can call me Nick, and yes I had some wine with dinner. Is that illegal now?”

“Not at all, I was just wondering,” Knox said, marking in his notepad that Nick was slightly defensive but that his alcohol consumption could be leading to his attitude. Knox had a hard time believing him when he said he had wine with dinner unless he’d meant an entire bottle. It had been a few hours since they’d supposedly eaten, “Rochelle Karidis said that you and Mr. Littrell didn’t go back to your buses after dinner, and that you both stayed here. Why?”

Nick shrugged for a second time, wondering what the detective was writing down in his little notepad, “I didn’t have a reason to go back. I needed to be here and I was here so I stayed.”

“Your girlfriend went back though?” Knox asked and Nick nodded to the affirmative, “What did you do?”

“Played on my phone, talked to some of the guys on the crew, just wasted time,” the taller man answered, sliding back in the chair with a yawn.

“What about Mr. Littrell? What did he do?”

Nick laughed, putting both hands on the top of his head lazily, “I have no idea. I don’t keep tabs on him. Why don’t you ask him?”

“We will,” Knox said offhandedly before pulling up the morgue photo on his iPhone, “Have you ever seen this girl before?”

Nick leaned forward only slightly, shaking his head after a glance, “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

“What does a red VIP sticker mean?” the detective asked quickly and Nick’s hands dropped back to his lap.

“It means the person is paying for Platinum VIP. They get to come to sound check, get a photo, an autograph, a back stage tour...”

“Back stage tour?” Knox asked curiously, “Who does those?”

Nick cleared his throat, “It’s a rotation.”

“Who did it today?”

“I did.”

Knox mocked surprise, he had already known the answer to the question because Rochelle had told him as much earlier but he wanted to hear Carter say it, “So if I told you that this girl had one of those red VIP stickers and Miss Karidis confirmed that she saw her standing with you just before the backstage tour would you still say you’d never seen her before?”

A smirk spread across Nick’s face, the reaction surprising the detective, “I’d say she looks like half the girls who were there. I have a girlfriend; I’m not really looking, so she might have been there, I may have even looked at her, but that doesn’t mean I saw her.”

Knox was sure now that cocky asshole was definitely the way he would describe Nick Carter, but he wasn’t confident that he had anything to do with what had happened to the girl. His sneaking suspicion though, was that someone around there did.

It was well after one in the morning before statements had been taken for every person who had access to the back door of the arena during the incident. For the Boys it meant another concert written off since they would not have time to make it to the next city in time. As it was, the police were asking them not to go very far for the time being in case they needed more information. Their puppet masters were now frantically trying to open up their schedule and rearrange a pile of concerts. None of the boys really saw why they needed to be around, none of them had killed her and beyond AJ finding the body they didn’t really have any involvement. It was about more than them though, considering how many people worked on their staff that could have been in the alley at any point while they were eating dinner. No one had officially been named a suspect but management was taking what happened very seriously considering the girl had been at sound check party before her murder.

With the change in plans the Boys were without a hotel and had opted to stay in their buses until it had been sorted out how long they were going to stay. If they found out the next day that the police didn’t need them anymore they could just leave, but if they were going to be around for a little while they would make the transition into a hotel.

Nick was standing on his bus, looking through the cupboards for something to snack on. Lauren was like a Nazi when it came to junk food, he practically had to fill out a formal request and email it to her for approval before he could get a Dorito. It drove him nuts how they all kept snack food away from him like he would die instantly if he ate it. They didn’t seem to understand that things had changed. Maybe he had struggled with food in the past but he was a new Nick, he could eat whatever he wanted and not worry about gaining weight. He heard the door to the bus open and leaned back, craning his neck to see what kind of mood Lauren was in. If he couldn’t gorge on junk food then he would have to settle for his second most raging desire: sex.

“Baby?” he called out, “The window on gettin’ nasty is closing so hurry up and get in here.  I’m playing WOW in like an hour which means we can probably do it twice.”

“Twice in an hour? You don’t leave much time for cuddling, do you?”

That was most definitely not the voice of his girlfriend, Nick noted, “Brian?”

“Yeah,” Brian responded and he met up with him in the kitchenette, “Lauren is on my bus with Leighanne and the boy. I wanted to talk to you.”

“Did you bring snacks?” Nick asked curiously, checking around to see if his band mate had brought along anything to bribe him into a conversation.

Brian smiled but the grin didn’t quite reach his eyes, “You know me too well,” he joked. He pulled his hand out from behind his back where he had been holding onto a bag of Cheetos.

Before Brian could even blink Nick had snatched the bag and was pulling cheesy puffs out and stuffing them into his mouth, “Oh you really are my best friend.”

“Is she still hiding the good stuff?” Brian teased, moving back to the front of the bus where he took a seat at one of the dining tables.

“I blame you guys,” Nick said around a mouthful of Cheeto, “You gave her the impression that I’m a fatty trapped in a skinny body. She’s so paranoid I’ll balloon out and she’ll have to look at a beer gut while we’re fucking.”

Brian rolled his eyes, holding back his comments about Nick’s weight and the way he spoke about his girlfriend. Sometimes he wondered what had happened when Nick lost the pounds. It had all happened so suddenly, one day he saw the 200 plus pound Nick and practically overnight he had slimmed down and developed an attitude about it. It often seemed as though he had dropped the burden of the fat and gained a new personality.

“So... what’s up?” Nick asked, the curiosity getting the better of him. He licked the orange cheese powder off his fingers, eyeing his friend carefully.

Brian was nervous and he took a deep breath to calm himself, “I saw you.”

“Saw me what?” the other man asked, dropping the bag down onto the table. He raised an eyebrow in Brian’s direction, his arms stretching across his chest defensively.

“I saw you with that girl... the one that’s dead.”

Nick’s eyes narrowed and he leaned across the table, keeping his voice low, “What exactly do you think you saw?”

Brian sensed the change in Nick’s demeanour and he held his ground, “I saw you with her in the hallway after sound check with your hand up her skirt.”

The younger blond shrugged the comment off, “So you saw me cheat on my girlfriend, so what? Yes, I got her off in the hallway. I told her to stick around until after dinner because I knew everyone was going to leave. I stayed because I wanted to get laid but she was gone when I went looking for her. I didn’t think anything of it. I thought she got tired of waiting or something. It sucks that she’s dead but I don’t think asking her to stay so I could bone her was really what did her in.”

Brian cringed at how crass the other man was, shaking his head at how easily he dismissed being unfaithful to his girlfriend of more than two years, “You told the police all that, right?”

Nick ignored the question, “Did you tell them you saw us together?”

The older man sighed, running a hand over his hair, “No. I didn’t want them to jump to conclusions. I said I saw her in the hallway after sound check but I didn’t say that anyone was with her. It shouldn’t matter though because you told them everything you just told me... right?”

They stared each other down for a full minute before Nick finally looked away, “Of course I did.”

~*~

Knox and Jensen were back at their desks pouring over pages of written notes, listening back to recordings of dozens of interviews, and exchanging stories. The images of police precincts that were portrayed on television were on par with the inside of an actual precinct. They were on the fourth floor of a large brick building. Frosted glass doors led to a large wooden desk separating anyone from the public that might find their way to their floor from the police officers working away. Their desks were behind the administration area in pairs of two. Each set of desks was facing each other, with name plates off to the side. It made it easier to work when they could simply look up at one another. It was all part of the collaboration and team-like feeling to being part of the police department.

Around them, on a few extra chairs and across whatever empty desk space was available, were stacks of crime scene photos that had just been developed, including the pictures of the girl, who they now knew was in fact Melissa Rhynard since her very emotional parents had come in, after being woken up in the middle of the night, to identify her body. Once the medical examiner had the body back at the morgue he was able to get a more conclusive time of death. They were surprised to discover that the time of death appeared to coincide with the time of the 911 call that AJ McLean had made. Time of death of course wasn’t an exact science it was an estimate but it indicated to them that it was likely that the killer was still in the alley way when AJ and his fiancée had found the body. It didn’t look good for the people working with the Backstreet Boys tour since they were really the only people around at that time.

“Four roadies and one of the stylists told me that they saw Melissa lingering around back stage after the VIP tour was finished,” Knox said, making a few notations on the file he was compiling.

Jensen held up her own notes in front of her face, nodding knowingly, “One crew member told me that he saw her after the band and their families had left after dinner, and Brian Littrell told me he saw her too. Speaking of which...”

Knox looked up and watched as his partner sorted through a few different audio tapes before grabbing one labelled with Brian’s name. She popped it into the player and hit the button to roll the audio. They both listened as she introduced the interview, and had a few introductory questions for the man. The more Brian spoke though they could both hear the nervousness in his voice. In particular, he stumbled quite often on the question of whether or not Brian had ever seen the girl before. It was then that he revealed that he had seen her in the hallway once all the other girls had been cleared out of the arena. He had a panicked, anxious tone in his voice and Knox and Jensen shared a knowing look. Brian hadn’t been nervous during any of the previous questions. It was only after he saw a picture of Melissa, and Jensen had started asking questions specifically about the girl that he seemed to get flustered. To them it was an indication than there was more than meets the eye when it came to Brian Littrell. The tape stopped and they both returned to looking over the pages spread across their desks.

Knox made a soft noise as he thought and brought a particular stack of notes up to the top of the pile, “There were only two people that intentionally stayed behind, Nick Carter and Brian Littrell. Everyone was wearing passes around their necks, including the Backstreet Boys. Melissa didn’t have one of those on her, so how did she get back stage after her little tour was over? If she wasn’t supposed to be there someone would have asked her to leave. Maybe she was there because someone asked her to stay?”

Jensen considered the theory and nodded in agreement, “How was your chat with Carter?”

“Strange,” Knox admitted, rubbing his forehead just above his eyebrow as he tried to think of a way to break it down, “He was strangely calm, cocky almost. He said with absolute conviction that he’d never seen her before in his life then said that he was the one who had taken her on the back stage tour.”

“Did you feel like he was hiding something?”

“Not sure,” he admitted honestly, “He was really hard to read. He’s an asshole but I’m not sure he’s a guilty asshole. Unusual though that we both had unusual interviews with the only two people lingering around during the time Melissa was killed. Maybe Nick Carter’s defensive attitude was because he was trying to cover something up for his buddy? Should we talk to Littrell again?”

“If we’re going to, we should do it fast. Once their lawyers get wind that we’re asking them to stick around they’ll be down here in a flash and our only suspects will be out of the state before we know it.”

Jensen had been right about the lawyers. They were barely an hour into their second interview with Brian Littrell when two tan men in designer suits came storming through the door instructing him to stop talking. That was the end of their access to the Backstreet Boys. It had been a week since Melissa’s murder, the band had resumed their tour and was now a few states south and they hadn’t made much progress as far as leads.

The cause of death was officially determined to be a significant loss of blood from the impromptu surgery that Melissa had in the alley way. The medical examiner did note that the girl had been strangled, but it wasn’t what had killed her. The means by which her liver had been removed was still unexplained; there were no tool marks or any indication that something foreign had been used to cut the organ out of her body. Unfortunately for Melissa’s parents it meant the girl still had not been laid to rest, her body was still evidence and technicians were still scouring over every inch of her to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.

Knox and Jensen were finding the whole situation frustrating. They had other cases they were working but Melissa was always in the back of both of their minds. For Jensen it seemed like the Backstreet Boys had been following her everywhere, taunting her. No matter where she went, whether it was the grocery store or the gas station it seemed like they were playing on the radio. It angered her because she was sure that at least one of them knew something and they weren’t letting on. One of them had information that would help them solve Melissa’s murder and they were keeping quiet, for whatever reason.

Her desk phone rang, breaking her from her reverie and she put aside the paperwork she was working on to answer it with a curt hello.

“Hey, it’s Lawrence,” the voice on the other side introduced themselves as one of the crime scene analysts that had been working on Melissa’s case. Hearing from him was rare, it usually only meant really good news or really bad news, he didn’t call otherwise.

“Hi,” she said her voice thick with fatigue, “What’s going on? Tell me you’ve got good news for me,” there was a pause and she felt butterflies as she waited for the answer.

 “I think I’ve got good news.”

Letting out a relieved breath Jensen leaned her head against her knuckle, “Do tell.”

“The FBI very reluctantly loaned us a skin scanner. It’s the latest in fingerprinting. At first we couldn’t find anything on the surface of the girl’s skin but we went a few layers deep and got lucky. There’s a partial thumbprint just below the hyoid bone. Whoever did this to her must have been pressing really hard on the front of her neck, hard enough for the imprint of their thumb to go three layers deep.”

“How soon can you have the print to me?” Jensen asked anxiously, snapping her fingers to get the attention of Knox who was working at the desk across from her.

The man chuckled through the phone, “I can have it to you instantly. It’s already on my phone I’m just waiting to press send.”

“Send it to Knox,” she instructed, not wanting to have to worry about getting onto her computer and figuring out how to get the information from her email to where she needed it to go.

“He’s got it,” Lawrence told her and before she could even turn and check her partner was bringing it up on the screen in front of him, “Good luck.”

After a quick goodbye she dropped the phone back into the cradle and moved around to her partner’s side of the desk, looking over his shoulder anxiously. Finding a digital match for a finger print was more complicated than just pressing enter and waiting for the magic to happen but it was still pretty fast. There were a few different databases (state police files, FBI, and Interpol) that had about six million different finger prints but overall, for the computer to scan through those millions of fingerprints looking for an exact match took very little time. That little bit of time always felt like forever to the investigators but it was far superior to the way things used to be done. Once upon a time police departments employed an entire unit of fingerprint analysts who manually poured over thousands of prints and matched them with just the power of a good eye. It took anywhere from weeks to years to find a match and it eventually became inefficient and obsolete once a computer could do the looking for you.

The print came up on the screen and the software quickly began processing it, marking out all the identifying points it would use during the search.

Knox sighed, “It’s not a great print. We might get a suspect but this print will never be good enough in court.”

“It wouldn’t be anyway,” Jensen shrugged, taking a seat on the one corner of the desk that wasn’t covered in paperwork, “It’s a print from a skin scanner, a lawyer would find a way to tear it apart.”

The program worked by taking a finger print and essentially turning it into a digital code. It would search for codes that were the closest match rather than trying to match an actual picture which would take a lot longer. Once everything had loaded up Knox started the first search of the state databases which very quickly came up with a few very loose matches, people who had similar patterns in their prints but would easily be eliminated. He then went through the motions of switching databases to the FBI’s federal list – AFIS.

“My gut tells me we’re not going to get anything,” Jensen expressed, crossing her arms over her chest. She bit in the inside of her cheek as she watched the computer do its thing, “The people we’re looking for aren’t going to be in any of the registries.”

“How do you know who we’re looking for?” Knox asked with a smirk, leaning back in his chair to stare at his partner. He knew she had it out for the Backstreet Boys and in a way he wanted her to be right.

“I know someone on that crew had something to do with this. The interviews just left a bad taste in my mouth and if I didn’t know any better I’d say that this is probably Brian Littrell’s fingerprint.”

Knox considered her theory, “Or Littrell is trying to cover something up for someone else. You can’t tell me though that not a single person on that tour has ever been convicted of a crime.”

As soon as Knox had finished his statement they heard a satisfied ding from the direction of the computer and both turned anxiously. There, flashing on the computer screen, were the neon green words: 100% Match Found.

~*~

“Full house.”

It was the fourth hand of tour bus poker and Nick’s pile of winnings was growing by the hour. The girls and the kids were riding on the bus normally shared by Howie and Brian while Nick and AJ’s bus was the party bus for the night. They regularly had “guy’s nights” to give them an opportunity to just relax and have fun with each other without the stress of being pulled in a million different directions. For the most part it was an opportunity to decompress, and complain about work like they were average Joe’s working in a regular workplace.

Normally all of the money on poker night went to AJ, the gambling impresario that he was. That particular evening though he wasn’t on his game. He had been quiet and lethargic for weeks, making them all concerned about his mental state. He seemed to have been taking the incident in Baltimore quite seriously and he hadn’t spoken to anyone except Rochelle about what was going through his head. The other three had hoped that getting him alone would be a good chance to try and lift his spirits a bit.

Howie started shuffling the cards, dealing them out again but when he got to AJ his friend’s hand went up, signalling him to stop.

“I’m going to sit out this round,” he said, pushing the one card on the table back in Howie’s direction.

Brian sighed, “C’mon dude, just play.”

“If he doesn’t want to play we can’t make him play,” Nick said with a roll of his eyes, tired of having to coddle the other man. He couldn’t understand why something like seeing a dead body for a total of four and a half seconds had disturbed him so badly. The guy’s grandmother had died in his arms, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a dead person.

“What’s your problem?” Brian asked, and Nick was surprised to see that the shorter man’s eyes were on him instead of AJ.

“My problem?” he asked with a laugh, “I don’t have a problem. Alex has a problem.”

“No, we’re supposed to be cheering him up and you’re being an asshole. Is winning a couple hundred bucks in a poker game so important to you that you’re willing to let AJ feel like shit and not be himself?” Brian questioned, his eyebrows furrowed in concern. He had been concerned about both AJ and Nick but for different reasons. He had let himself get caught up in what he had seen in the hallway that night. In his own twisted mind he had come up with various scenarios that could have happened. Nick could have been telling the truth; maybe the girl was gone when he went looking for her. Maybe she was there though; maybe they had fought about Lauren and things got out of hand, or maybe rough sex had turned into more than it should have. Deep down he knew that Nick could never kill anyone but something had planted a seed in his brain that was making him question his best friend.

“Whoa,” AJ interjected as Brian and Nick sent each other heated stares from across the table, “I don’t need cheering up. I’m fine. I’m just having issues with this girl. I feel so bad that she was at our sound check one minute and the next she’s dead in a dirty alley behind the venue. I feel like the police didn’t believe us and I keep seeing her face in every crowd. There was just so much blood...”

An uncomfortable silence fell over the group and they all looked around awkwardly. Nick tossed the cards in his hand down on the table and ran both hands through his hair, not knowing what would be the right thing to say.

“I’ll be okay,” Brian assured the other man, reaching out to touch AJ’s shoulder quickly, “We need to just put this behind us. It was a great tragedy and I think we need to do something to honour Melissa soon. The Lord knows who did this and He will make sure that she gets justice for what happened to her. In the meantime we need to move on knowing that we had nothing to do with her death, no matter what the police may think.”

The only sound in the room was a snicker and they all looked at Nick in surprise, “Says the man who was interviewed by the cops not once, but twice...”

Brian’s eyes went wide and Nick was sure that if there hadn’t been a table between them he would have been on the floor by now, “How dare you!”

“Really Nick,” Howie said with a levelling gaze, “Considering that you were the last person to be seen with her alive I don’t think you’re in any position to judge Brian.”

In a flash Nick stood up, their drinks shaking as he rocked the table, “YOU TOLD HIM?!” he demanded, glaring at the man he called his best friend.

“I didn’t know it was a secret!” Brian defended while AJ looked between the three of them confused.

He had been out of the loop as far as group gossip for the past week as he struggled with Melissa’s murder and clearly had missed something, “What’s the secret?”

“Nick was fucking that girl, that’s why she was backstage loitering!” Howie stated smugly, not liking the attitude that their young band mate had acquired lately.

“Is that true? Why didn’t you say anything?” AJ asked with a shocked expression. He had been sharing a bus with Nick and their girlfriends the whole time and his friend never thought to mention that it was him that Melissa had been back stage waiting for when before she was killed.

“I wasn’t fucking her!” Nick exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air, “Okay, I admit I had full intentions of doing it but I never got the chance because while I was busy looking for her she was busy getting killed in the alley! I didn’t do it, so stop looking at me like I’ve done something wrong! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

None of them had realized the bus had stopped outside their hotel in the middle of their argument. They also hadn’t noticed Leighanne, Rochelle and Lauren make their way onto the bus to see what was taking them so long to get their stuff together until they heard a very feminine throat clearing. They all turned in the direction of the front door where the three women were all looking on. They all looked concern but Lauren’s expression in particular was sharp as she looked at Nick with deep concern in her eyes.

It was Rochelle though that spoke, her voice low but serious, “Look what you’re doing to yourselves. It’s time to stop accusing each other of things and move on. You need to move on. We want to move on. It’s up to the police to do the accusing, not you.”

The results of the fingerprint search were not what Knox and Jensen had been expecting. They had anticipated a match to one of the people who were working on the Backstreet Boys’ crew, or perhaps to a convicted felon who happened to be in the area. They got quite the opposite though; there was a match to a latent fingerprint from a cold case. To make matters even more complicated the case hadn’t been worked since the mid-50’s.

Jensen had a difficult time believing that they were looking for an old man but it was hard to dispute a perfect fingerprint match, even if their print wasn’t as good as they would have liked. Late into the night, well after Knox had left for home to sleep and shower, she found herself staring at his computer screen at the man who supposedly was in the alley with his hand around Melissa’s throat, the man who she was supposed to believe ripped out a 21 year old woman’s liver.

He had been brought in for questioning on a homicide in 1955, the details of which she didn’t know yet. All she knew because of the age of the case (digital records were only kept on recent cases, older ones were still boxed up and kept in warehouses) was that this man had been a suspect but later cleared. Still his photo and fingerprints were kept in the system until the case was finally closed.

Gabriel O’Dell was his name. He would have been just about thirty at the time his photograph and fingerprints had been taken, which would make him almost 86 years old now. Jensen found it nearly laughable to think that someone who had been around for close to a century could strangle a girl with their bare hands before defiling her body, she just didn’t buy it.

 She let out a tired sigh, leaning her head in her hands as she continued to stare at the photo. He was attractive for the time and his rough-around-the-edges rebel style was definitely influenced by Elvis and James Dean who were popular at the time. It was a black and white photo which didn’t give her a very good idea of what he looked like in person but Jensen knew from the accompanying information that he had light brown hair, blue eyes, and stood a little over six feet. He had a thin face, with a soft rounded jaw and strong brow line, a definite pretty boy. She wondered what he looked like now; probably wrinkled, and weathered.

When people started coming in to work Jensen realized that she had been sitting there all night. At some point she had likely nodded off but she was too anxious to start making phone calls to go home and sleep. They needed to talk to the cold case officers who were more familiar with Mr. O’Dell, and try to find out where he was now.

As she dialled the number for the investigating officer’s she glanced down at Knox’s desk, covered with a collection of random paperwork. One piece of paper stuck out over all the others though; the Backstreet Boy’s schedule. They would be in Georgia that day, attending a fundraiser for some children’s charity. She wasn’t ready to let go of the chance that they were somehow involved with Melissa’ s murder, but had to accept that for now they were in the clear.

~*~

Ever since Baylee had been diagnosed with Kawasaki disease Brian and Leighanne had gotten heavily involved in the world of charities and fundraising. The boys had all dabbled in charities before, a few of them even having their own, but they had stayed at arm’s length from the fundraising portion of it all. When the Littrells asked though, they couldn’t help but agree to appear at a black tie dinner in the hopes that Brian would be able to secure some government funding for his Healthy Heart Club that would pay for heart surgery for underprivileged children.  

Things had been tense between them since the fight the day before with no apologies given for the things they had said. With everything that had been through though the four of them knew that they would be able to get over their spat and move on. The same couldn’t be said for Nick and Lauren. They had all sat trying not to eavesdrop as the two of them fought in the back of the bus. They could have left but AJ and Rochelle were living there too and Brian and Howie were nosey enough that they wanted to see what was going to happen. Brian had never intended to out his friend in front of Lauren. It wasn’t the first time he had hidden infidelity on the part of the youngest, he was notorious for not being able to stay faithful to his girlfriends. Brian knew that he really loved Lauren though and felt bad that it was his fault they were fighting. The whole debacle had ended when Lauren came out and announced that she would be staying on the other bus for the time being and would be getting on a plane as soon as possible. She was supposed to come with them to the dinner but instead was back at the hotel trying to sort out her travel plans.

Dinner was being held at the Atlanta History Centre, a museum that explored not only the history of Georgia but of the south as a whole. The room was full of politicians, socialites, and other privileged people all anxious to give some of their money away for the kids. Shortly after their performance Brian had lost sight of Nick. He finally found him in the museum looking through an exhibit titled ‘Civil War to Civil Rights’. From what he could tell it was a century of American history told through photographs. He’d seen it when they walked in and had wanted to take a look at but he didn’t imagine that would end up being in the middle of the party. Nick was standing underneath a Confederate flag, his fingers lightly touching the frame of a photograph on the wall.

Brian was quiet as he approached; peering over his friend’s shoulder to see what he was looking at. It was a photograph of a soldier with his arm wrapped tightly around a beautiful brunette. He could only assume it was a wedding photo because the girl looked downright regal in a white lacy Victorian wedding dress, a sheer veil falling over her long hair. Once he’d gotten a better look at it he realized that the woman looked an awful lot like Nick’s soon to be ex-girlfriend.

“Wow,” he said, making Nick call out in surprise, “Sorry I didn’t mean to scare you. She’s beautiful.”

“Yeah,” Nick agreed, sticking his hands in the pockets of his tuxedo pants, “she died in childbirth.”

“She did?” Brian asked, raising his eyebrow, “How do you know that?”

The taller man glanced quickly between the photograph and his friend, “It’s written on the panel next to the photo. C’mon, let’s go over here I want to show you something cool they have about Martin Luther King.”

“Yeah sure,” Brian nodded in agreement, glad that his friend seemed to have moved on from the tension of the day before. He started to follow Nick through the exhibit but something was telling him to go back, “I’ll be right there.”

He quickly jogged back to where Nick had been standing under the Southern Cross, the battle flag of the Confederate Army. After a quick look behind him to ensure he was alone he swung back around to the grainy sepia toned photo of the beautiful brunette on her wedding day and looked next to it at the panel describing the photo, a feeling of unease coming over him as he read it.

This picture, of Confederate Captain Joseph Gabriel of Atlanta, Georgia with his new bride, was taken in a Civil War Camp near Baton Rouge, Louisiana in summer 1862. Captain Gabriel was listed as MIA after the Battle of Bayou Bourbeux, a Confederate victory in November 1863.

He read it over three times, but there was no doubt that the picture’s description said absolutely nothing about the Lauren doppelganger that was in it, but he didn’t know why Nick would have lied about it.

“Brian? You coming?” his friend called out from further into the museum and he quickly responded in the affirmative, running to catch up.

~*~

Nick sat down heavily on the King sized bed in his hotel room sinking into the plush softness. His hand came up and tugged anxiously at the knot on his tie, pulling himself free of the tight confines of the fabric. He didn’t like Georgia; it made him uncomfortable being back there, there were too many memories, too many things to remind him how wrong his life had gone. He never could have anticipated what he had seen in the museum and it was making things even harder to process in his head.

He stared down at his hands, taking note of the yellowing of his skin. He’d been trying so hard to rid himself of his curses, the things that held him back, that he sometimes forgot that he was still human in the end.

The door to the hotel opened with a rustle and he looked up in genuine surprise to see Lauren walking through the door. After the fight over his almost infidelity he was sure he wouldn’t see her again, she had been so mad. Her purse was in one hand and he could see a piece of paper in the other that he suspected was a boarding pass. She had come to say goodbye.

They looked so similar it was almost uncanny. It had been what had drawn him to Lauren in the first place the very first time he had laid eyes on her nearly three years ago; he knew where she had come from. Watching her go would be as crushing as it had been the first time he lost the one he loved.

He had tears in his eyes as she crossed through the living area into the bedroom where he was sitting watching her through the door.

“Nick,” she spoke confidently, trying not to be swayed by his emotions, “I’m leaving. I just wanted to let you know.”

Immediately he was up off the bed. He pulled her into a tight hug as soon as he was close enough, biting back his emotions. She resisted at first but soon accepted his embrace, relaxing against him.

“Sarah...” Nick spoke softly, the words flowing out of his mouth as if someone else were controlling his thoughts. He felt his girlfriend’s back tense up at the sound of a name that was not her own. She tried to pull away but he held her tight in the hug, “It was so hard seeing you tonight. I never could have imagined that would happen. I knew coming here would be a bad idea.”

“Nick what are you talking about?!” Lauren questioned urgently, trying to get her hands in front of her to push him away, “Who is Sarah?!”

He walked them back until Lauren was pressed up against the wall and he pulled away slightly to see her better. One hand wound into her hair while the other continued to hold her against his body, “I miss you so much, Sarah. Every day that goes by I think about you. I’m just trying to find a way to get back to you.”

Tears were falling from Lauren’s eyes which were flitting back and forth between him and the door, “You’re really scaring me Nick,” she whispered, a small sob escaping her throat, “please just let me go.”

She watched as in an instant his expression changed. It went from disheartened, and sad to suddenly angry and it made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. The hand that was in her hair slid down to cup her face and his thumb ran over her cheek, through the tear tracks that had stained her skin.

“I can’t let you go,” he spoke strongly, “I’m sorry. I love you, but I can’t just let you slip away again. I can’t go through the pain of having to watch you go.”

“What are you talking about?!” her voice was shaking and full of fear. Her breath was coming in frantic pants and she threw her arms around wildly trying to get herself free. She felt his hand slide down her face until he was gripping her neck and tried to cry out but soon his hold became too much and the most she could get out was a desperate squeak. Soon things began to go black and she let it take over, the last thing she saw being Nick’s empathetic face.

“I’m sorry Sarah,” Nick said as he picked up Lauren’s listless body and brought her into the bathroom where he laid her down gently in the tub. He leaned down and pressed his lips to hers, feeling a shallow breath against his cheek. He had tried to get her back by dating Lauren but when it came down to it they were two very different people and although Lauren was lovely she could never quite step into the shoes of the woman who was truly his soul mate.

He grabbed her shirt at the collar, easily tearing it down the middle. He drew his hand down the centre of her chest to her firm stomach, knowing that at least this time he wouldn’t have to worry about having a hangover in the morning.

Even now, years after the Backstreet Boys first made it big, the breakfast spread they got was impressive. Nick’s favourite meal was breakfast so it was practically euphoric to walk into the private dining room and see three banquet tables filled end to end with delicious food. If there was one thing that he had in common with the man he liked to call ‘the old Nick’ (prior to his change in lifestyle) it was that he loved to eat. He had just exchanged burgers and doughnuts for fresh fruit and egg white omelettes.

He had been up late taking care of the Lauren issue and was absolutely famished as he walked through the French doors of the hotel dining room. The other three, their women and the children, were already up and waiting for him as he came in and they watched him head straight for the food and start filling a plate.

One thing he realized while choosing what he wanted to eat was that there was no one there lurking over his shoulder judging whatever was about to go into his mouth. He felt a bit of relief at the thought and immediately added extra bacon, a cheese croissant, and a tall glass of chocolate milk to the mix.

Brian watched with concern as Nick made his way over to the table they were all sitting at and dropped into a chair with a heaping plateful of food in front of him, “Where’s Lauren?” he couldn’t help but ask, having noticed her absence as soon as the younger blond had walked in through the doors.

Nick shrugged his shoulders, loudly chewing a mouth full of pastry, “She left last night. I guess she’s probably landed in LA by now.”

Rochelle gasped and everyone assumed it was out of shock since she and Lauren were quite close. Her hand was covering her mouth and she was staring at Nick wide eyed, “Why didn’t she say goodbye?”

Another shrug and he continued to eat nonchalantly, “She seemed like she was in a hurry. Maybe she was late for her flight?”

AJ chuckled and raised an eyebrow at the other man, “She couldn’t have been in that much of a hurry considering the noise coming out of your room last night.”

Immediately Nick stopped eating, looking up at AJ curiously, “What do you mean?” he asked innocently.

They was always good natured ribbing any time one of them made their night time activities vocal to the rooms around them so AJ didn’t feel awkward bringing it up in front of the group, “Oh, I dunno,” he joked sarcastically, “it might have something to do with all the thumpin’ and bumpin’ that was coming from your bedroom.”

Nick realized then that the sound was likely the echoes in the bathroom. The plumbing between their rooms was probably connected. Thinking quickly he gave his friend a little smirk, “What can I say? Some people have make-up sex and some people have break-up sex.”

Leighanne rolled her eyes, reaching over to put her hands over Baylee’s ears even though it was too late to keep him from hearing the words, “Would you mind not using the s-e-x word at the table?”
Nick laughed, holding his hands out in defence, “Sorry, at least I didn’t say fucking.”

Both AJ and Nick snickered while the two fathers in the group looked on disapprovingly.
“You know,” Brian spoke sternly, “one day, when you have kids...”

The smile that had once covered Nick’s face suddenly dropped and was replaced with a forlorn expression, “You’re right, I’m sorry.”

Brian sighed, not wanting to upset anyone. He figured that Nick’s downturn was because he had finally thought he was in a relationship that would last for a long time and he had blown it. He couldn’t blame Lauren for leaving, but felt a little bad that Nick let his impulses get the best of him again. While Nick continued to eat his breakfast he caught Rochelle glaring at the blond, and Brian couldn’t help but wonder what that was all about. Something was starting to smell fishy, and it wasn’t the leftover crab cake on his plate.

~*~

Brian had originally been thankful to be staying in his own home while they were in Atlanta but it was becoming a bit of a pain in the butt. He had to get up earlier than everyone else to make it in time for group breakfast before they did press, and when he realized that he forgot his cell phone on his bedside table he had to make the trip all the way back to get it during lunch.

He would have asked Leighanne to go get it for him but she and Baylee had already left to go to the park, the seven year old needing more entertainment than watching his Dad talk to reporters provided. He pulled his car around the back of the hotel where their buses were parked and made sure he had everything with him before starting the walk back to the conference room where they were set up for the day.

As he crossed the parking lot he saw someone familiar standing by Nick and AJ’s bus. He sighed and turned to walk in the direction of the vehicle, thinking that a diehard fan was trying to stowaway before they left to move on to the next city after the show that evening. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt and would rather get the girl an autograph and a picture than have her spend eight hours in a baggage hold.

“Hey, can I help you?” he called out but as he rounded the corner he realized that the girl was familiar because it was Rochelle, “Oh, sorry I didn’t realize it was you.”

She turned in surprise, her hand over her heart. Anxiously she moved to stand in front of a suitcase, trying to block it out of Brian’s view but from the questioning look on his face he had clearly seen it, “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be inside?” she asked nervously.

“I forgot my phone,” he quietly replied, not able to take his eyes off the blue and pink argyle suitcase that was just behind Rochelle’s legs, “Please don’t tell me you’re leaving AJ...”

“No, it’s not like that!” she exclaimed, shaking her head quickly, her brown eyes wide.

Brian’s chuckle was tinged with sarcasm, “What is it with you girls? That’s what it looks like. You’re being all secretive, taking your suitcase out of the bus in the middle of the day...”

Rochelle sighed, running her hands through her dark brown hair, “It’s not my suitcase and I’m not taking it out, I’m putting it in.”

He had to admit he was confused, “I don’t get it.”

Slowly Rochelle pulled the suitcase from behind her over to Brian, tipping it so he could see the baggage tag on the handle. In perfect block letters the name Lauren Kitt and an address in Los Angeles was written on the tag.
 
Her eyes were filling with tears and she bit her bottom lip to keep them at bay, “I didn’t want AJ to see it. He’s having such a hard time with this whole thing that I didn’t think he could handle any more confusion. My head is so full of doubt, I don’t know what’s going on... but I do know that there is no way Lauren left last night to rush off to the airport.”

“Where did you get this?” Brian wondered, reaching out to put a supportive hand on Rochelle’s slim shoulder.

She inhaled deeply and let it out in a whoosh, “Lauren packed up while we were all at the dinner last night. She called me just after we got back and I met her downstairs in the lobby. I was going to go to the airport with her, just to see her off, but she wanted to go say goodbye to Nick first. She didn’t feel right about just leaving without saying anything to him, especially considering they live together. So I sat in the lobby with her bags, and waited. I chatted with some fans, checked my Twitter, read a magazine... I was down there forever and she never came back. I kind of assumed that she and Nick had fallen into bed together and made up so I took her stuff back up to my room with me and put it in the closet. AJ said he heard noise over there like something really dirty was going on so I didn’t think anything of it. But when he came down without her this morning and said that she left? Brian, she couldn’t have left without her stuff. She wouldn’t have left without telling me. I’ve been trying to call her all day but her cell just keeps going to voicemail.”

Brian didn’t know what to make of all that information. It did seem peculiar but there had to be some kind of logical explanation as to where Lauren had gone. Maybe Nick had been telling the truth and she had made a hasty exit, gotten all the way to the airport without her bag and just assumed Rochelle would bring it home with her, which is what she was ultimately doing. The past few weeks had been incredibly strange and stressful and never before had he had so much doubt in his friends.

“What are you trying to say?” he wondered, wanting to know exactly what Rochelle thought about the whole situation before he jumped to any conclusions.

A tear finally escaped and she was quick to brush it away as though it stung, “What if she went back down to the lobby after she left Nick’s room and someone did something to her? What if that psycho that killed that poor girl, Melissa, what if he got Lauren because I went back upstairs? What if he’s following us? I don’t know how I can tell Nick any of this.”

“Don’t say anything to Nick,” Brian said immediately, squeezing her arm uncomfortably tight for a quick second before letting go. He wasn’t sure how Nick would react if Rochelle went to him with that kind of information but for some reason he didn’t trust the younger man to be alone with any of the girls right then, “Just... don’t tell Nick. Let’s be absolutely sure before we start a panic, okay? If we don’t hear from her within the next day or so then we’ll go through the proper channels. Don’t blame yourself when we don’t even know what happened.”

Rochelle nodded, running both hands under her eyes. Her makeup had smeared slightly making it obvious that she had been crying and Brian reached into his pocket for the small packet of tissues he carried around in case of dirty Baylee.

“We’ll figure it out,” he assured her but deep down he knew that the words were for his own assurance.

As it turned out it wasn’t as easy to get information on a cold case as Jensen had anticipated. She figured she would call up the investigating officer and he would be able to tell her all about the circumstances surrounding the case. It was quite the opposite though. The unsolved murder had happened in Boston, and was one of thousands of investigations that were sitting dormant, waiting for someone to come along and crack the case. Jensen and Knox only had half a dozen cases between them and they knew the ins and outs better than anyone else, but the Boston Cold Case Squad had very few officers, and a lot of cases. They were investigated one by one, so when she made the call no one knew which murder she was referring to.

It took three people, and two full days to finally track down a small deteriorating box, covered in dust in a state evidence lockup, another day for it to be packed up and shipped, and another day for it to finally arrive. It was clear to Jensen that this poor girl’s life was not a great priority to the lovely City of Boston, but if it meant she would be a little bit closer to finding Melissa’s killer then it was now a priority to them.

She watched carefully as Knox, with a rather sour look on his face, took the lid of the dilapidated banker’s box. The dust on the top was so thick it looked like snow and they both had wondered aloud how it had made it all the way from Massachusetts without falling off. Knox had also wondered whether there would be more in the box than just evidence; a rodent home perhaps?

He let out a sigh of relief upon seeing that the box only contained paper and evidence bags. He most certainly would not have been able to handle mice; that would be something Jensen would have to deal with on her own.

“That’s weird...” Knox murmured as he pulled out a stack of black and white photos from the box, holding them close to his face as if it allowed him to see further into the photo.

Jensen raised an eyebrow, trying to see what he was looking at from the other side of the desk, “What is it?” she wondered curiously.

“Is she familiar?” he asked, turning the top photo around to face his partner.

It was odd, she thought as she looked at the sixty year old 8x10 of a dead girl lying on a gurney, how familiar she really did look. Jensen imagined that she was quite good looking when she was living. She had sharp features, high cheek bones and a strong jaw. Her skin was pale but clear and her face framed by dark brown hair in stylish waves that were splayed against the metal slab she was laying on. A chill ran over her and Jensen shuddered; this case was just getting weirder by the day. How could a girl killed when her father was still a child look familiar to either of them? The pieces of this puzzle were misshapen; she felt at this point that they were trying to fit diamonds against circles.

“Let’s just focus on finding our suspect,” Jensen muttered, reaching her hand into the box to pull out the original investigator’s reports. They were old, the paper slightly yellowed from sitting idle for so long. It was mostly hand written with a few areas filled out using a type writer. She had planned on skimming through until she saw the section that pertained to Gabriel O’Dell but a passage of underlined text at the bottom of the first page caught her eye, “Son of a bitch...”

“What is it?” Knox asked, noticing the concern in his partner’s eyes.

“The victim,” she said, turning the page around so he could see the words screaming off the page, “She was missing her liver.”

“It gets worse,” Knox said, letting a heavy breath whistle out between his teeth, “the current contact information for the vic’s family; Henry Kitt. Los Angeles, California. I realized why she’s so fucking familiar. She looks like almost exactly like Nick Carter’s girlfriend, Lauren Kitt. I interviewed her. The family resemblance is uncanny.”

“They’re related?” Jensen’s eyes were wide and she snatched the paper out of Knox’s hand with a snap.

“The victim would be her great aunt.”

“We need to warn her then,” Jensen said, reaching for Melissa’s file where all the phone numbers for the people they’d already spoken to was listed out on the back of the Backstreet Boy’s tour schedule, “Maybe this guy was coming to settle the score and Melissa just happened to get in the way. There’s a chance, although slim, that Lauren Kitt was the real target.”

~*~

Six people in three states were all looking for Lauren.

Brian and Rochelle, currently rolling through Texas, had been checking and double checking their cell phones compulsively waiting for their calls to be returned. They hadn’t mentioned anything to Nick or the other guys about their concern for the woman. They didn’t want to worry anyone, start a panic or assume the worst. They just kept punching in her number religiously, praying that she would pick up the phone.

In California, Lauren’s sister and mother assumed that she was still on the road with the Backstreet Boys. She had told them to expect her at LAX and had given her a time to pick her up but she never got off the plane. They had assumed that she and Nick had worked things out and she had decided to stay but it had been a few days since they’d heard from her. It was unusual for her to go more than a few days without checking in, and none of their calls to Nick had been returned. Needless to say, they were beginning to worry.

Meanwhile in Baltimore Knox and Jensen had been doing the same thing, dialling and redialling the cell phone number they had been given. The voicemail always picked up but a mechanical voice promptly told them that the inbox was full and they were unable to leave a message. They assumed that it was a fluke, perhaps they didn’t get good reception in some areas of the tour, but they kept calling.

After a solid 10 hours of sitting on the bus had left everyone antsy and ready for a break. The drivers had pulled over in a small Podunk town none of them had heard of on their way from Dallas to Phoenix. They weren’t picky about where the stop was, it had an IHOP and that was classy enough for all of them.

Brian’s first stop had been the washrooms, anxious for the opportunity to use a real toilet that flushed. He quickly used the facilities, and had just thrown the wet paper towel from his hands in the garbage when the door swung open and Nick walked in.

“Hey,” Brian said, not having seen the other man since before they boarded the buses, “How’s things on BSB 2?”

Nick shrugged as he made his way over to the urinals that lined the wall, “Not bad. I’m bored out of my mind. I feel like AJ and Rochelle are avoiding me. I think maybe she’s pissed because it’s my fault Lauren left. It’s not like she has to even be here, there’s no requirement for us to provide her with friends to hang out with, ya know?”

“Yeah,” Brian agreed, though he knew it had nothing to do with not having someone to hang out with. He was well aware that Rochelle was worried sick about her friend and her reluctance to hang out with Nick had nothing to do with the blond. As for AJ, he was attached to his fiancée at the hip so wherever she went he went, even if it meant hanging out alone all the time.

Nick quickly zipped his pants and made his way to the sinks, watching Brian in the mirror, “I don’t think she realizes that Lauren wasn’t that big of a fan of her in the first place. She could tolerate her for a while but she always thought she was kind of weird.”

It was the first Brian had ever heard of that, from what he could tell all the girls got along very well, “Oh I didn’t know that. I’m sure Leigh will hang out with her.”

Without acknowledgement, Nick kept speaking, “Lauren is happy to be back with her sister, and back in LA.”

Brian raised his eyebrow curiously, “You’ve talked to her?”

“Yeah,” Nick answered, walking over to Brian by the trash so he could throw out his own paper towel, “She called me just to let me know that she was okay and that she’d be moving her stuff out of the Franklin house as soon as possible. She pretty much made it clear I’d never see her again.”

“I’m sorry.”

The taller blond waved the other off nonchalantly, “No worries, it’s not a big deal. There are more fish in the sea right?”

Brian agreed and they both made their way out of the washrooms and into the restaurant. Nick went to sit down at the table with the rest of the group but Brian chose to hang back, quickly sending Rochelle a signal to meet him by the glass counter where a variety of pies were on display.

“What is it?” she asked in a hushed whisper as she met up with him, watching him stare into the case as if he were selecting dessert.

Brian leaned his hands against the glass which was cool to the touch, “Nick just told me he’s talked to Lauren since she got home.”

Rochelle tried not to react, giving a quick glance back to the table where everyone was going through their menu, “Did you tell him we’d been trying to reach her?”

“Of course not,” he shook his head, “but he knows you’re avoiding him.”

She sighed, peering down at a delicious looking piece of coconut cream pie that she would probably have to indulge in after lunch, “I don’t know if I believe him. Why would she call him but not return any of our calls? Even if just to say ‘I’m here don’t ever call me again’. We didn’t do anything to her, he did.”

“They live together,” he theorized, “He said she was with her sister and they were going to move her stuff out of his place in Tennessee.”

“Why would she go all the way to LA only to go to Tennessee to get her stuff? I’m calling her sister,” Rochelle told him frankly, knowing she needed to get back to the table before people wondered what they were doing so long by the dessert case, “and if she can’t corroborate what Nick said then I’m calling the police. Something just feels really wrong.”

“No, don’t,” Brian stressed, “Nick is a celebrity in case you’ve forgotten. If you accuse him of something and it turns out not to be true it could still be the end of his career – of our careers. Let me handle it.”

While Knox worked the phones Jensen got to work trying to flesh out their case. It was unlikely that someone with a fetish as particular as stealing livers would only commit two murders sixty years apart, even if they were connected. So she started looking for similar cases, hoping that something would stand out.

It was less than an hour before she had her first hit and after that the computer sent them streaming into her partner’s desktop all pinging with matching details. What concerned Jensen the most was that some of the cases that were cropping up weren’t old cold cases, they were active cases, nearly half a dozen within the last eight months. She was terrified to use the words because of how quickly the case could be taken away from them but they were right on the tip of her tongue; serial killer. She was surprised that the FBI hadn’t found her by now since they were likely involved in the mysterious disappearances of the girls on the screen in front of her.

They were all similar in appearance; blond, pretty, slim, and in their twenties, quite the opposite of the Boston case, but she had a hard time believing they weren’t linked in some way. She reached over and grabbed a notepad and a pen off her desk, jotting down the various cities where each of the murders had taken place: Jacksonville, Orlando, Miami, Raleigh and Savannah; all major cities in the southeast.

“Are you planning a trip?” a voice asked and Jensen turned to see Lawrence the lab tech leaning over her shoulder curiously. He was holding a file folder in his hand (Melissa’s file no doubt if he was at her desk) while peering down at her notepad.

“What do you mean?” she asked, doing a double take between the scientist and the desk.

He motioned down to the names, “Well, it’s basically a list of some of the big cities along the I-95. It goes from Miami, straight up to Baltimore and then on to Canada through Maine. Are you going on a road trip?”

Jensen did a quick check of the dates, noting them next to the cities they happened in so they’d be in order (they had been listed on the screen alphabetically). Her hand covered her mouth as she stared at the page, the tech still standing awkwardly next to her, “Uh, what did you need?” she asked, ignoring his question.

He laid the folder in his hand down on the desk, flipping it open to the middle where it had Melissa’s photo and autopsy report listed on either side, “I took some trace elements, what I thought was dirt, from around the victim’s wound and I had been waiting for the lab to get back to me on what it was. The report came in today and it’s... well, it’s weird.”

“This whole case is weird,” she reminded him.

“Fair play,” he nodded while flipping the page to the report from the lab, “It’s a combination of mostly natural elements but a few of them poisonous. Large amounts of Tetrodoxin, which is the neurotoxin in puffer fish. There’s also another toxin commonly found on the skin of marine toads, venom from a Hyla tree frog, a bunch of random plants and this... this is the weird part...”

Jensen cocked an eyebrow, “That wasn’t the weird part?”

“No,” Lawrence chuckled, “There’s also human remains; ashes, to be specific.”

“Yeah, that’s definitely weird,” she agreed, “Any clue why anyone would put all those things together and why you would find them on an incision like that?”

“We have a hunch,” he explained, looking somewhat sheepish, “at first we thought it was too farfetched but really considering the circumstances it’s probably pretty normal. We did some searches for compounds made up of similar ingredients and it all mostly came back to one thing - zombie powder.”

“Sorry?”

“Zombie powder,” he repeated, “People who practice Voodoo supposedly used powders made up of similar ingredients to create the living dead. It was all a scam though, to convince people they could bring someone back from the dead. The powder is an irritant; it’s strong enough to break open a person’s skin if used in large amounts, and at the same time, leaves them completely paralyzed from the huge dose of neurotoxins going straight into the blood stream. The family would think they were dead and bury the body but it would eventually wear off and the person would wake up thinking they were a zombie. In our case I think the catalyst is the missing liver. I think whoever did this used the powder to paralyze Melissa so she wouldn’t wake up or feel anything while they were yanking out her liver, and there was enough on her that the irritants would have broken the skin so the killer didn’t need any tools to make the incision. Speaking of the liver, when we were doing research we found something else that we thought was really interesting...”

“Jensen,” Knox suddenly interrupted, rushing over from the phone he was using to try and track down Lauren, “I just spoke to Brian Littrell. No one has seen or heard from Lauren in days. He’s asking me how to file a missing persons report.”

~*~

Brian didn’t know the first thing about officially reporting a person missing but he knew he had to do something. Rochelle had planted a seed of concern in his mind and it had grown exponentially over the passing days.

Finally he caved and called Lauren’s sister himself, looking for her. The woman was clearly confused as to why Nick’s best friend would have been calling her instead of her sister’s boyfriend, but her concern was clear to Brian as she spoke the words, “I thought she was with you.”

From what Brian could gather Lauren had never made it to Los Angeles, so he found it hard to believe that Nick could have gotten a phone call from her to the contrary. Maybe she had just taken off and wanted to be alone but that wouldn’t explain why no one in her family had heard from her, but Nick supposedly had.

There was a lot holding him back as he thought back to the conversation he’d had with Rochelle just days before. If he called the police they would automatically point a finger at Nick because he was her boyfriend, but he couldn’t help but wonder ‘what if?’ If Lauren was in trouble and his phone call could somehow improve the situation then it would be worth it. He didn’t want to accuse his friend of anything unjustly but there was a smell in the air and it was certainly fishy.

He had gone through the phone book on his cell phone a dozen times trying to think of who he should call before he remembered the business card that he had been given when he was first brought in to give a statement to the police. If anyone knew the proper procedure to follow it would be the police.

Knox had definitely been willing to help him, but there was only so much he could do because Lauren hadn’t gone missing in Baltimore. As far as Brian knew though she could either be in California or Georgia, so the detective volunteered to be a liaison with the other departments.

What he hadn’t counted on was Lauren’s sister making another phone call after she spoke with him. He knew immediately though when he swung open his hotel room door to Nick’s angry face that he was well aware of what was going on.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Nick asked, shoving past the smaller man to get into the room. He turned, his hands firmly on his hips, “Lauren’s family is freaking the fuck out because of you! Why would you call them and tell them she’s missing?”

Brian sighed, closing the door slowly, “We’ve been trying to reach her for days...”

“I told you I talked to her!” Nick snapped, glaring down at his friend, “She said she’s in LA! You’re worrying them for no reason!”

“Her sister and her parents haven’t heard from her at all! They said she didn’t show up at the airport, Nick! You told me not 48 hours ago that Lauren said she was happy to be back with her sister. If that was true then why is her sister thinking Lauren’s with you?”

Nick moved further into the room, putting himself in front of the large picture window overlooking the bright lights of the Las Vegas strip. Brian used to be very good at knowing what Nick was thinking but recently he had become more difficult to read. It made him nervous watching the taller man standing with his back to him at the window and he couldn’t remember a time in the near 20 years he had known Nick that he had ever made him feel that way.

Suddenly Nick turned and the anger that had been in his eyes only moments ago was replaced with concern, “What if someone made her call me? So that we wouldn’t look for her...”

Brian couldn’t help but be slightly suspicious of the sudden change of heart but nevertheless he agreed, “That’s what I’ve been concerned about, that something happened to her. Especially with everything that happened in Baltimore.”

Nick’s voice was low and breathy, “Do you think that whoever killed that girl could have kidnapped Lauren?” he worried.

“I don’t know,” Brian said honestly with a shrug of his shoulders, he sat down on the arm of the couch, watching Nick pace slightly, “but I think we just need to find out for sure.”

The taller man ran his hands through his blonde hair, pulling on the ends, “This is all my fault.”

“Nick,” Brian said sympathetically, quickly crossing the room to rub his friend’s back quickly, “Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have changed what happened.”

“So should we just start calling you Mulder and Scully?” a condescending voice asked, the room filling with light chuckles and Knox rolled his eyes in a wide arch.

As soon as he and Jensen had started asking questions about a possible out of state abduction that could be linked to a series of murders along the eastern seaboard they had gotten a call from the FBI. The feds couldn’t understand why they hadn’t heard of anything of this before but were ready to take over the investigation.

That wasn’t going to fly for the two detectives though. Neither one of them was ready to pack up their files and pass it off to some rookie FBI Agent who would likely let the case drift to the backburner for a couple of years. They had put in a lot of hard hours on the case, so they made a desperate plea to their higher ups to stay on it even if they were just in a support role.

The Bureau was able to do one better. Given the current economy, and the fact that they thought Knox and Jensen’s hunches were a bit of a farce they were temporarily made special field agents. After all, they had an established relationship with the people involved and unless they had concrete evidence of Lauren’s absence being linked to the murders, the FBI was only moderately interested. They were ready to take over, if and when, the detectives were able to find some evidence. Knox knew that really they were just happy to have the free labour and not have to deal with the stigma that came with theories about Voodoo and killer powder made of rainforest animals. He knew that they would be staying a safe distance behind them, looking over their shoulders, waiting for them to screw up so they could swoop in and show how useless the police are.

Jensen couldn’t have been happier about the development. She wanted to be the one to finish the investigation, and being able to follow their leads to Atlanta to find Lauren. It didn’t matter to her that they had a fancy new badge or that they would have the opportunity to travel, she just wanted to be the one who got to say case closed at the end of it all. She was willing to deal with the light hearted ribbing from their coworkers because she knew they would win in the end.

“That’s Agent Scully to you!” she retorted sarcastically, handing her small overnight bag to Knox who was heading out to the car, “Catch you guys later.”

As soon as they had filled out a pile of paperwork they had been booked on the first flight down to Georgia. It was the last place that Lauren Kitt had been seen alive so it would be the first place they’d look. Local PD had already done a preliminary search at their request but they hadn’t turned anything up. In Jensen’s opinion they just didn’t know what they were looking for, but the more they thought about it they more they wondered whether they knew what they were looking for either.

They looked back through Melissa’s case file as they sat next to each other on the plane, going over the pictures and details even though they had seen them a million times before.

“There’s got to be something,” Jensen said, rubbing her temple in thought.

“No incisions, no scope marks, no motive, no evidence beyond a 50 year old dead end and some strange trace elements... this could very well be the perfect crime you know?” Knox suggested, letting out a frustrated sigh as he squirmed in the uncomfortable plane seat.

Jensen ignored his pessimism, leafing through the pages, looking for anything she hadn’t noticed before. She was certain at this point the killer was a male and she couldn’t help herself from trying to picture what he would look like. Was he average in appearance with a certain aura of trust about him or perhaps he was good looking enough that these young women went with him willingly? “There’s got to be something about the victims, why he chooses them, a pattern of some kind.”

Knox was a man who dealt in hard facts. He didn’t sit around imagining the face of the suspect because it just wasn’t one of his skills as an investigator. He was quick to organize, connect, shuffle and reorder the information that laid out in front of him but it was a challenge to accept the things that, some might say, he couldn’t see, “The only pattern I can see right now that would link these crimes together,” he motioned to the map that lay on the tray between them, “is based on location. The suspect must be travelling along the I-95; maybe he’s a trucker or a bus driver?”

“Bus driver...” Jensen repeated softly, her eyes running up and down the image of the coastal United States in blue and greens on the map, “Like someone driving a tour bus by chance?”

“Or someone on one.”

~*~

Brian could vividly remember the last time he had been to Lauren’s parent’s house. It was fourth of July and they were having their huge annual barbecue. He and his family had been in L.A. because of work and Nick had been nice enough to invite them to tag along to the soiree. They were wonderful people, the Kitts, and Brian found he got along particularly well with Lauren’s father Henry. They had a lot in common which they quickly found out after realizing their first connection was through the wonderful state of Georgia and Leighanne’s hometown of Atlanta. The family was originally from the south but had been transplanted to California in the 1980’s.

The Kitts were quite wealthy, sadly her money was one of the main reasons that Lauren had been so quickly embraced by their group of friends. It wasn’t as though they were so elitist as to only allow the rich into their circle but with everything Nick had been through over the years when they first found out that he was dating a girl that was ultimately unemployed they were sceptical. It wasn’t until they found out that she lived off a very abundant trust fund courtesy of her grandparents that they backed the dogs off. Despite the similarities in upbringing they couldn’t see this girl being another Paris Hilton. Brian sometimes felt that judgements like that made them shallow but in truth it was just a harsh reality they had faced time and again.

Their house was fairly typical for a modern California family; Spanish style with white stucco walls, big windows, and a tiny front yard adorned with ornamental trees. Brian recognized it immediately as soon as he pulled his car up next to it. It was if he had driven there blind, not knowing where he was really going until he got there. His first instinct was to just put the car in reverse and drive away but something deep down was telling him he needed to go inside. Soon he found himself leaning through the car window to push the buzzer on a small intercom just outside the gated driveway.

“Hello?” a friendly voice answered and Brian recognized it as Lauren’s sister, Emily.

“Hey,” he replied, not really sure what he should say, “It’s uh Brian... Littrell.”

“Brian?” she asked curiously but none the less he heard the buzzer sound and the wrought iron gate began to slowly open.

He pulled his car around the circular drive and cut the engine just as the large mahogany door swung open to reveal Henry standing just inside the house. Taking a deep breath Brian stepped out of the car, his nerves getting the best of him as he struggled to shove his car keys in his pocket.

“I have to admit this is a surprise,” the older man said to him as he approached. He had a smile on his face but Brian could see that it was weary, “a pleasant surprise but a surprise none the less. What brings you here?”

“Would you believe I was in the neighbourhood?” Brian chuckled and followed Henry into the house.

While both Lauren and her sister bore a family resemblance it was clear that Emily took after their mother while Lauren was the spitting image of her father. He was tall, and broad shouldered, with strong features and a full head of dark hair that was only now beginning to grey with age.

“No,” Henry answered honestly, motioning Brian into a comfortable looking arm chair once they entered a large living room, “if I had to guess I’d say you’re here about Lauren.”

Brian couldn’t help but let a guilty look spread across his face and he nodded, “I just feel so terrible. I didn’t mean to worry you when I called...”

“Don’t stress about it,” Henry cut him off, “the police had already been calling us asking questions about Lauren and about our family’s history.”

“Family history?” the younger man wondered aloud, raising an eyebrow curiously. It was the first he’d heard of it and he wondered what Detective Knox hadn’t told him when they’d chatted about Lauren.

“I figured you would already know,” Henry said, taking a seat on the couch across from Brian, “Admittedly I had forgotten all about it, it happened so long ago. I didn’t even know that my mother’s will forwarded all the contact information to me,” he cleared his throat, “sorry let me start from the beginning. When I was just a baby my mother’s eldest sister was murdered, quite violently. My mother practically went vigilante, trying to hunt down this murderer herself because she was sure this guy, my aunt’s boyfriend at the time, was the one who did it. Eventually the police did pick him up and question him but they had no evidence so they let him go. My mother didn’t let it go though. My whole life I remember her sneaking away to do more research, hiring private detectives to try and track down this guy, this Gabriel O’Dell. She really had it out for him.”

Brian was confused, he wasn’t seeing the connection between this story and the situation they were in now beyond the fact that someone had been killed, “Sorry but I guess I don’t get it. What does that have to do with Lauren?”

Henry let out a short scoff, “I don’t know how but... the police have connected this O’Dell guy to the girl who was murdered outside your concert. They suggested that Lauren may have been the actual target and that he was following you on tour.”

“Wouldn’t this guy be ancient?” Brian asked, feeling particularly sceptical of the other man’s story. It just seemed completely illogical that an old man could be the police’s prime suspect. It also made him feel a little silly that he had been so suspicious of Nick for weeks when all along he had been telling the truth. It seemed at first glance that it was Lauren that had brought the bad luck upon them.

“Look, Brian,” Henry sighed heavily, looking away momentarily as if to calm his emotions, “I don’t know the details. I was hoping that you came here to tell them to me. My daughter is missing and my family is a complete mess right now. Emily is terrified to leave the house thinking that whoever took Lauren might be after her too. I’m not sure why you’re here when we haven’t seen Nick at all. I’ve been checking to see where you guys are so it wasn’t like I didn’t know you were in Los Angeles. We thought we would see him but he’s notably missing. Instead, you show up. Maybe you should just go...”

Brian knew where he wasn’t welcome and quickly stood up, reaching out to shake the older man’s hand quickly, “I’m sorry... I hope they find Lauren soon. I’m praying for you.”

As he left the house he couldn’t help but think about the fact that Henry said they hadn’t seen Nick. Even though the police had evidence that someone else had been involved in the murder of the girl outside the venue, and possibly Lauren’s disappearance Brian couldn’t help but still find it suspect. Nick had told him he had heard from Lauren herself. Surely he would have passed that information along to her family considering the circumstances but when he had talked to Emily she knew nothing about it. Now they were back in Los Angeles, with his girlfriend missing, he hadn’t even visited a family that he supposedly considered to be his own? He couldn’t figure out why his friend would lie. One thing was for certain; as soon as the tour wrapped up that night after the L.A. show he would be taking a page out of the late-Mrs. Kitt’s book and looking a little deeper on his own terms.

Knox practically had a strut as he made his way out of the interrogation room and into the observation area next door where Jensen had been watching through the mirror. He knew it was a bit early to feel satisfied. After all, he’d only established a hunch that Nick Carter was lying about his involvement in his girlfriend’s death. They still needed the tapes from the hotel, which they weren’t giving up too easily due to their high profile clientele, and crime scene investigators were still compiling all of the evidence they’d collected from the boiler room where Lauren’s remains were found. It was a start, though.

Ready to boast about his victory as soon as the door swung open, Knox stopped short when he realized that Jensen was just about to answer her ringing cell phone. He grabbed a seat and pulled the case file across the table, turning it away from his partner so he could read it while listening in on one side of her conversation.

“If you’re calling about your friend, there’s nothing I can tell you,” Jensen said and Knox looked up from his reading. His partner paused, listening to the caller for a moment before she continued. “No, I meant Nick. He’s here...in Atlanta…”

Knox held back his curiosity until Jensen hung up the phone, “Who was that?” he asked impatiently.

“Brian Littrell.”

“He was calling about Nick?”

“No,” Jensen said with a shake of her head. “I thought he was but he wasn’t even aware we’d brought Nick in for questioning. He was calling because he says he may have some information that will be useful to use but that he needs us to keep an open mind.”

“What the hell?” Knox muttered. “Is he coming by?”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to go meet him at some museum. What happened with Carter?”

“He and his lawyer have gone back to their hotel but I told him he needs to stick around. Pretty sure I caught him in a lie,” Knox said before explaining everything that had happened in the interrogation room just moments before. “Prosecutors are on their way and I’m going to tell them we need to hold him for 72-hours. Hopefully, the tapes will have something useful on them or forensics found something that can put him at the scene of the crime.”

“Do you think a judge will go for that? We don’t even know if those cameras picked up his door. His lawyer has to know you might have been bullshitting them.”

Knox shrugged, “I think they can make a pretty good argument, even against his fancy Nashville lawyer. He’s got enough money that he could easily skip town, he was the last person known to be with the victim and he has a record including a citation for resisting which shows he has a lack of respect for authority. I think they’ll let us hold him without charges for a couple days based on that.”

“I’ll let you handle it,” Jensen said as she collected her pen and notebook from the table and shoved them into her coat pockets. “I’ll go talk to Littrell. The forensics report should be here any time now. I guess when I get back Nick Carter will be hanging out in a cell?”

“Here’s hoping,” he said, giving his partner a wave as she headed out the door. Drawing his attention back to the case file, Knox casually flipped through the pages, stopping on the medical examiner’s initial report. The old furnace where they’d found the remains had been days away from an upgrade as part of the hotel’s renovations. A big, round, rusted metal body with enormous pipes pushing air in and out, it had been converted from coal-burning to gas in the 50s.

One thing that was bugging Knox about the possibility that Nick Carter, or someone he knew, being directly involved in the murder, was how he would have known about the old furnace. Not only would he have had to know where the boiler room was and how to get into it but he also would have needed intimate knowledge of how it worked. The killer would have needed to know the size of the door and how to operate the ancient mechanics, as the level of cremation done to the remains showed that the heat had been turned up far beyond what the regulator would typically allow, which is what ultimately caused it to break down.

After a quick rap on the door, it swung open and one of the local officers assisting them while in Georgia walked through with a file in his hand and dropped it casually onto the desk next to the case file. Once Knox opened the folder he recognized it as the updated forensics report which included preliminary details about what had been found in the hotel boiler room.

Inside the folder were numerous still photos and sketches of the crime scene, all related to areas where evidence had been collected. He laid them out on the table in front of him, looking them over with a critical eye. There were multiple fingerprints and shoeprints found that were still being analysed, which would then go through a process to exclude numerous people including some who worked at the hotel or even a police officer that may have inadvertently touched something.

One photo caught Knox’s eye and he took a closer look, quickly scanning the notes on the back to see that it was an organic trace element found on the floor in front of the furnace. He found the corresponding lab report outlining what the substance was. Something about it seemed strangely familiar, strange being the operative word and after a few moments of contemplation he’d made a connection between a hotel basement in Atlanta and a back alley in Baltimore.

“You’re not going to believe this!”

Both Knox and Jensen made the declaration simultaneously, each grasping a valuable piece of evidence in their hand like it were a golden trophy. Knox went to speak again when he noticed Brian and Hilary standing off to the side.

“Um, hi,” he said with a chuckle. “Nice to see you again, Brian. Who’s your friend?”

“That’s part of a somewhat complicated story,” Jensen said. “Why don’t you go first?”

Knox nodded, “First, you need to know the prosecutors came through for us and we got the 72-hold so we need to work quick,” he said then launched into an explanation behind the lab report he held.

Brian was trying to follow along even though he didn’t know the other details but he was soon lost. He turned to Hilary to see if she knew what was happening but the woman was gone. The two detectives were still deep in conversation so Brian quietly backed away until he felt safe to walk down the hallway without anyone noticing.

“Hilary?” he called out in a hushed tone, his eyes scanning back and forth, from one door to the next, looking for his companion.

“Brian!”

He heard his name but couldn’t find where it was coming from until Hilary’s head popped out from a door down the hall and she frantically waved him over. Without hesitation he followed her inside, realizing once the door had closed that the darkened room they’d entered was an observation room, just like he’d seen on television.

“That’s him, right?”

Through a large two-way mirror on the wall, Brian immediately recognized his friend. Nick was sitting behind a large metal desk, the only piece of furniture in the room save for an extra empty chair. His cell phone was balanced with one corner against his finger and the other against the table and he absentmindedly spun it around, clearly waiting for something to happen.

“How did you know he’d be here?”

“A hunch,” Hilary shrugged. “That guy said they got a hold and I’ve seen enough procedural crime dramas on TV to know that means they got approval from a judge to hold him for questioning without charges. I didn’t know if he’d already be in lockup or still in an interrogation room so I figured I’d look. I just wasn’t sure if that was him.”

“That’s him,” Brian confirmed with a nod, still staring at the other man through the glass. He was starting to second guess the path he was on, worried that he was going to accuse the real Nick Carter of incomprehensible crimes that he was innocent of and even more worried that maybe he was just guilty.

“We should talk to him.”

“What?” Brian asked in surprise. “No, we shouldn’t. We’ll get in trouble. We could mess the whole case up.”

“How? We aren’t cops, nothing he says to us is going to be admissible in court. I really doubt they’re going to believe anything we’ve told them, though. We have no idea where the real Nick is and maybe if we talk to him we can find out the information we need to find Nick and prove that they’re two different people.”

Brian sighed heavily and ran his hand anxiously over the fine hair on the crown of his head. He didn’t see Nick being open with confessing anything when he’d done such a stand up job at covering his tracks up to that point. If Hilary was right, and he wasn’t crazy for believing her, then he couldn’t deny that he wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity to find out where Nick was and what kind of shape he was in. His companion was right in that the likelihood of anyone else believing them was slim, and he had no idea what would happen if the Nick lookalike ended up in jail.

“How are we going to get him to tell the truth?”

“Not we,” Hilary said with a chuckle. “You. I’ll stay here and be lookout.”

“I’d better hurry before the detectives start looking for us, then.”

Brian had absolutely no idea what he was going to say when he got to the other side of the steel door that separated him from the interrogation room. He wasn’t a trained negotiator, he didn’t know how to get information out of someone without coming right out and asking them because he was an honest person. He knew that he had to show Nick that he was aware of his secret and somehow get him to confirm the truth while sitting in a room that was likely full of video cameras and where someone was watching their entire conversation. Success seemed completely impossible.

Taking a deep breath, he pushed through the door. Nick’s head snapped up immediately to see who had entered and surprise was clearly written across his face when he realized it was Brian. He leaned back and looked around the other man in an effort to see if anyone else followed while Brian took a seat on the other side of the table.

“What are you doing here? Are you with the lawyer?”

“I’m alone.”

“How did you get in here?”

That probably should have been the first answer Brian thought of in preparation for this discussion. He had no idea how to explain his presence in a restricted area of a police station, let alone why he was in the police station in the first place. Luckily, years of interviews had given him a few skills in the art of bullshitting on the fly.

“I snuck in,” he said, not straying too far from the truth. “I heard you were here and I tried to get the cops to let me see you but they wouldn’t. I was standing out in the lobby and no one was paying any attention so I started looking in case you were here. Guess I got lucky.”

Nick didn’t look completely convinced but he also didn’t look like he was going to press the issue any further. Brian knew there were holes in his story, like who he would have heard from about where Nick was in the first place, but so long as the other man didn’t ask any questions he wasn’t going to offer up any information.

“So what’s going on?” he asked.

Nick was leaning against the cool metal table, still clutching his phone between his hands. Though Brian was speaking to him, he was looking toward the mirror suspiciously as if someone else would be coming through the door at any moment. Slowly, he turned his attention back to Brian.

“They think I had something to do with Lauren turning up dead.”

The Nick that Brian knew would have been destroyed at having to speak those words, but the man in front of him seemed almost casual about it, like it was a simple inconvenience.

“I’m really sorry, man. I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

“I don’t know what they could possibly have that would make them think I killed her, or know who killed her.”

That wasn’t the denial that Brian had been hoping to hear, by any means, “I’m not sure,” he said. “Promise me you didn’t have anything to do with it?”

Nick’s attention had already turned back to the mirror, ignoring the question. “Who is back there?”

“Where?”

“In the other room? Who is on the other side of the mirror?”

Brian laughed nervously, feeling sweat begin to pool at the small of back and at his temples. “Angel of Music?”

Nick turned to him with a perplexed expression, “Sorry?”

“You asked who is on the other side of the mirror...that’s sort of what Raoul asks in Phantom of the Opera when Christine disappears. The Angel of Music.”

“Guess I don’t remember seeing that one,” Nick said dryly.

Brian suddenly felt his heart begin to beat in double time, “You don’t remember being in it? You...you played the Phantom.”

If Nick felt stressed by the line of questioning, he wasn’t showing it at all, but Brian wanted to do nothing more than run out of the room. There was no way Nick would have forgotten being in the Phantom of the Opera as a child. It was his favourite musical for as long as Brian had known him. He could vividly remember years of sharing rooms with Nick, listening to him regularly belt out some of the classic songs in the shower.

“I’m under a lot of stress right now, Brian. I’m hardly thinking about my Broadway trivia knowledge.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry. So, how did you end up in Atlanta? Have you been here since we wrapped up?”

“No, I went home. I had things to take care of,” Nick said.

“There's something that's been bugging me, bro. Did you lie to me about getting the phone call from Lauren? You told me that she moved all of her stuff out of your house, but she never left Atlanta. How is that possible?”

Nick’s eyes turned a steel blue and he leveled at a look at Brian that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Nick leaned his long body forward across the table, putting his weight into his folded arms and didn’t let his eyes leave Brian’s as he spoke.

“I think it’s time for you to go. I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble.”