Love and Revenge (Complete)

Chapter 19: The Plot Thickens (EDITED)

Will wouldn't tell me what this new evidence was. He said he wasn't sure himself until he got to the station. He promised he'd tell me when he could, and I'd hold him to it.

Despite the detectives having been on my case for some time now I still knew very little about where their investigation was going. I asked Will why that was on the drive over and he told me it was probably because everything up to now had been circumstantial and they couldn't rule anyone out completely.

We pulled up to the station and went inside. Will sat me down in a waiting room area and disappeared to the back. He left me waiting there for so long I decided to go searching for him. While the receptionist was busy looking at paperwork I snuck past and walked down an unknown hallway like I was confident I belonged there. It seemed to work; nobody stopped me. I kept walking around until I came across a whiteboard with my name written across the top in big block letters.

There were pictures taped up to it and lots of writing. I stopped to read it, too curious to pass it by. The first set of pictures were of my injuries from the first attack. I shuddered and quickly skipped past those: I didn't need a reminder of that day. My eyes moved down to a small bulleted list of information I'd given about my attackers. They knew there were at least two, one had long red hair. The other was a complete unknown. One was suspected to be female; I remembered giving them that tip. To the side of that list were pictures of several different people I assumed were suspects.

Seeing the pictures of suspects suddenly reminded me that all this was really happening to me. My vision swam, and I got lightheaded. I tripped over my own feet and landed on the ground.

"Annie!" I heard Will's familiar voice shout and heard his footsteps move closer. Suddenly his face was swimming across my vision as he pulled me up. "Hey, breathe. You're panting. Take slower breaths. Breathe in and count to three then breathe out. There you go." He guided me to a chair and kneeled in front of me.

His voice drew me out of my daze and I was finally able to focus on his face.

"I'm okay now. Thanks." I shot him a small smile, grateful for his intervention. He smiled back, then looked at me carefully.

"What happened? Also, why are you back here? I told you to wait."

"Oh, about that..." I smiled sheepishly, "I might have gotten bored and tried to find you."

He gave me a deadpan look, though the corner of his mouth was twitching up so I knew I wasn't in serious trouble.

"How did I know you would do something like that?" He asked, fake exasperated. "Well, now that you're here, do you want me to walk you through the case we have?" I agreed, so he wheeled my chair back over to the whiteboard. "Let me know if this overwhelms you again and I'll stop," I nodded in agreement. "So here we have some suspects who don't have alibis for your attacks. We have Ashley Bennet, your old classmate who you caught cheating. There's Jaime Gomez, your current boyfriend. Then there's Lindsay Smith, the sister of the girl who killed herself after you caught her cheating. The last suspect we've been working on is an old gang member your father helped to put away who's been off the grid since he was released from prison several months ago."

I stared at the board wide-eyed. That was a lot of information to take in.

"What new evidence did you guys find?" I asked curiously.

"Do you remember that hair the vandal left on your windowsill when you ran after them? Luckily it had the root still attached, so we ran it for DNA and compared it to those of our suspects we had samples from. It was confirmed to be female DNA, but we didn't get a match on any of them.  We're still working on getting DNA from some of the suspects, but we'll see.  Sometimes it can take a while. Not great news, but if we ever do find someone suspicious, we now have DNA to compare them to. It doesn't mean we can eliminate anyone from this board though, since we know there were at least two people involved.  I'm sorry, are you alright? I shouldn't have dumped all this on you. It's too much to take in isn't it?" Will asked, concern reflecting in his eyes.