Brian had made a hasty exit from the museum two days earlier without giving Hilary an answer as to whether or not he was going to accept her cockamamie theory that Nick was bodysnatched by a 150-year-old Confederate soldier. He’d gone home, not mentioning anything to Leighanne about what he’d heard that afternoon because he knew she would be the furthest thing from a believer. Forgetting about it and leaving it all in the hands of the police was the most logical thing to do, but he was up all night listening to a little voice at the back of his head convince him that maybe the illogical route was the only way to get any answers.
Two days later he was sitting in his home office, leaning back in an oversized brown, leather desk chair with his feet up on his oak desk, looking at Nick staring back at him from the gold and platinum records on the walls. He had just considered picking up the phone and telling Hilary he had made his decision when Leighanne rushed into the room. She was crying and clutching the phone to her chest. He jumped up from his chair and was immediately at her side to find out what had happened.
“Rochelle just called,” Leighanne said, her voice rough with emotion. “Lauren never left the hotel in Atlanta.”
“What?” he gasped.
“She’s not missing, she’s dead! Rochelle talked to Lauren’s sister, I guess. The police showed up at their door to let them know that they found human remains in a…” her voice cracked and Brian rubbed her back consolingly, encouraging her to go on. “In an incinerator or something. All they had to make an identification with was dental records and since Lauren was listed as a missing person they checked hers and they were a match.”
“Holy fuck,” Brian said, needing to sit down on the edge of his desk lest he fall over from the shock of it all.
“Has anyone heard from Nick?”
“I haven’t.”
Brian couldn’t help but think that fact was incredibly suspicious. If Leighanne had been found dead somewhere, heaven forbid, he imagined that the other guys or their wives wouldn’t find out about it from anyone other than him.
“I’m gonna see if anyone needs me to do anything,” he told his wife. “Then I need to run an errand.”
Hilary had a satisfied smirk as she watched Brian walk into the back room of the museum. She knew he would be back eventually. The story might have been hard to believe but so were all the circumstances of what he had been experiencing. She had taken the time to do a bit more research about Nick Carter, the murder that had happened outside their concert venue and the disappearance of his girlfriend and she couldn’t be more convinced that there was more at play.
“Yeah, I’m back. Don’t look so smug about it,” Brian said dryly. “Nick’s girlfriend is dead. The police found her, or rather they found what was left of her and no one has heard from him.”
“I’m sorry,” Hilary said genuinely. “I’m not surprised though, you can look back through her family tree and see how many women aren’t around anymore thanks to this guy.”
Brian was genuinely confused by why that was. Perhaps he should have stuck around longer the last time to find out the answer but now it was eating at time. “What was so special about her? She was related to the woman in the picture, wasn’t she?”
“She was,” Hilary nodded. She grabbed the boxes full of her notes about Gabriel that they’d been looking through the other day and pulled out a copy of the photograph that was hanging on the wall of the exhibit before picking up the story where she’d left off. “After the curse, he tried to make his way back to the camp. Imagine what this person would have looked like, though. He’d literally been torn apart yet here he was walking around.”
“Like a zombie,” Brian said, a chill running down his spine, making every hair on his body stand on end. He pulled the lid off one of the other boxes and began to look through the contents.
“Exactly,” she confirmed. “So he stayed in the forest and just roamed around. There were tiny communities in little pockets all over the place, all in hiding, and when they saw him, the witch doctors and other black magic practitioners all thought he was a spirit. That’s when he started picking up some of their skills. He kept learning until he could do everything anyone else could do, including convince other people that he looked and sounded like someone else.”
“What do you mean?” Brian asked, confused. “He only looks and sounds like Nick? Where the fuck is Nick, then?”
“I’ll get to that,” Hilary shushed him. “I don’t have a ton of information about this part but from what I can tell, he came home to Atlanta and his one true love, his beautiful Sarah, had been told he was dead, married someone else and had died during childbirth. Everything the Priestess had cursed him with had come true. The baby that was born the night Sarah died is Lauren’s four-times great grandmother.”
“Why would he kill her?”
“She’s not Sarah,” Hilary shrugged. “Only he really knows the answer to that question. I do know that his desperate need to be reunited with his one true love, isn’t nearly as desperate as his need to put himself back together again, to get his bravery and his power back. That’s why he takes the livers. He’s desperately trying to get back the things that he lost. More than likely, Lauren just didn’t fit the role he wanted her to play so if she wasn’t going to be his true love, then he would use her for other means.”
The information was jarring and Brian wasn’t sure what to do with it all, he wasn’t sure what it all meant in the grand scheme of things. All he knew was that Lauren was dead and he had no idea where the real Nick really was. If he went to the police with Hilary and told them all this they would be surely be laughed out of the station, the same way her father had been in the past.
“What now, then?” he asked. “What is the end game here?”
With one hand on his shoulder, Hilary led him to a seat and pressed him down into it before taking the chair opposite. She kept her voice soft and low and there was enough sincerity in her expression that he knew whatever she was going to say would be very serious.
“He’s going to move on from this, Brian,” she said. “This isn’t the first time he’s been in this exact situation, the only difference now is that you and Nick are celebrities so it’s more than just a couple county sheriffs peeking through the curtains. Lauren is gone, that was what he came for, so now…”
“Isn’t that good though? I want this to be over so I can go on with my life and stop having death around every corner and the freaken FBI following me around all the time. He can leave any time.”
“You don’t understand,” Hilary said in an exasperated tone. “Your friend is in real danger. This is his life that is being toyed with right now. There’s only two options for Nick right now. Either he ends up the prime suspect in a murder investigation or he’s going to be dead.”
“How do we even know he’s still alive?”
Just saying the words made the chill return. He didn’t want to imagine that there was any possibility that Nick might already be dead.
“Trust me. If you believe a single word of my father’s theories then believe that your friend is alive. He’s probably not well, but he’s at least alive...for now.”
Knox leaned back in his seat and stared at the man across the table, wishing he could read his thoughts. He tapped his finger impatiently against the cool metal tabletop while he contemplated his next move. It had taken a while to find Nick Carter but luckily his lawyer had tracked him down somewhere in Tennessee and had encouraged him to show good faith by flying into Atlanta to answer questions about his once missing, now deceased girlfriend. His demeanour wasn’t that different from the first time Knox had interviewed him. Incredibly sure of himself, cocky and arrogant, Knox couldn’t help but wonder what anyone saw in this guy. Some of his forensic science professors from college would surely categorize him as a Grade A sociopath.
“You don’t seem that upset about finding out your girlfriend is dead.”
Nick arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow in the detective’s direction but before he could respond his lawyer interjected, “Everyone grieves differently, surely that’s not indicative of a person’s guilt or innocence.”
“Who said anything about guilty or innocent? This is just exploratory, we’re trying to help your client by finding out who might have wanted to kill Lauren.”
Normally, Knox would have figured out a suspect’s tic by that point in the interview process. Everyone had something that gave them away, even the most seasoned criminals would inadvertently drop a clue or have a physical sign that they were lying. Somehow, as if Nick Carter had been lying for his entire life, this guy was like a safe.
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Nick said with an exasperated sigh. “I wish I could help you but I don’t know anything about what happened to Lauren.”
“You two broke up that night, did you not?”
“Like I told you before, yes, we broke up earlier that day. She packed her bags, said goodbye and headed to the airport. She said she was going home. I don’t know what happened to her after she left my room.”
Knox changed his approach, “What if I told you that the Ritz recently underwent some renovations?”
“You don’t have to answer any more questions,” the man in the three-thousand dollar suit declared but his client waved him off.
“I have nothing to hide,” Nick said with indifference. “I’d say I’m not terribly surprised. It’s a very old hotel. Do you think that has something to do with Lauren?”
“Not necessarily,” the detective said coyly. “Part of the upgrades was a brand new security system. New high definition cameras in the elevators and common areas including on each floor in front of the elevator bays. They say it’s for the increased safety of hotel guests but I would guess they’re trying to catch employees goofing off or stealing from the rooms.”
“This is really quite riveting,” Nick said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Is there a point?”
“We’re in the process of getting a court order to get all the tapes from the night of Lauren’s murder so we can track her as she moved through the hotel. I went to the hotel to check out the cameras and you’ll be happy to know that once we have those tapes it’s going to be pretty easy to take your name off the list of suspects.”
“Why’s that?” Nick asked, a look of concerned confusion crossing his face.
Knox noticed Nick suddenly seemed a bit more interested in the story and sat up taller in his seat, moving his elbows from the arms of the chair to the table.
“It’s pretty easy to see the door of the room you stayed in that night from the elevator bay,” Knox explained. “Hopefully the camera will have caught a clear view of Lauren going into your room. Once she comes out and you don’t, it should be pretty cut and dry.”
The left nostril of Nick’s nose flared ever-so-slightly and Knox smiled. Gotcha, he thought.
