Midnight Angel [Jenlisa FF]

~'~'~ Chapter 24 ~'~'~

Lisa, too, came to the same conclusion. "And that Friday Mr. Kim was suddenly held up late at work."

Ryan tapped a finger on his notepad and considered the recent factual additions. "They would have needed somebody to discover the murders. If you'd all been home, who knows when someone would have come in looking for you." he thought some more. "So, they managed to hold up Mr. Kim at work until the job was done, and then he came home to find it all."

Grabbing to ease the tension at the back of her neck, Lisa found herself disgusted at the lengths these people had gone to destroy Jennie and her family. What kind of people were they? Obviously, not good ones. she glanced at Jennie to see how she was doing and saw that she was sitting perfectly still on the couch, a few tears trailing down her cheeks. Damn. she knew this was going to be too hard on her.

Lisa stalked over to the couch and kneeled down in front of her. "We can take a break if you want."

Jennie released the breath she hadn't been aware had been caught in her throat. It wasn't easy to stay clinical about something like this that you'd lived through. Still, she knew she had to do it. She was tired of living the way she was. If she wanted to have a life, a real life, she needed to deal with the past. "No," she said, not as firmly as she'd hoped to. "I'm okay. We need to do this."

There was one question lingering in her mind, one thing she couldn't seem to stop wondering about. "Why didn't they just kill me? Why kill my family and leave me there?" She couldn't help but want to know the answer to that question. Wouldn't it have been the ultimate revenge to them if they just killed her?

"I can't say for sure," Ryan began. "But my guess is they wanted you to pay for accusing the police chief's son of rape and causing trouble. These kinds of people see themselves as all-powerful gods. You tried to take away some of that power and that just wasn't acceptable to them. If they'd killed you, you wouldn't have suffered. So, they set you up for murder. They probably had been planning it for a while. From what you've told me, a lot of things happened to make you seem unstable. They could have been facilitating that to aid in their big plan. When they killed your family, they planned for you to take the fall and spend the rest of your life in jail or some state-run psych ward."

"But Mr. Kim threw a big monkey-wrench in their plan by hiding Jennie," Lisa continued.

"Yeah, and made it seem like she'd killed herself. I can't imagine that Walker and his good buddy the mayor were so happy about that, but then again, they may have found it poetic that it seemed as though Jennie woke up from the drugged sleep, saw what happened, and decided to throw herself off the cliff," Ryan posed. The whole thing was disturbing, but in his years working in law enforcement, he'd seen some pretty ugly stuff.

"How can people do things like this? How can they get away with it?" Jennie wanted to know, her hands shaking. She wanted to ask why her, but she already knew the answer to that. She'd accused Cameron of rape, and for that, they believed she needed to pay. Her entire life, and her family's life, had been ruined because of what had happened with Cameron. If only she hadn't gone to the swim meet that day...

"Power and money can often get people whatever they want," Ryan answered, his voice tired. It was a common finding in his work. "Chief Walker and Mayor Sonner go back a long way, and between them, they've got a lot of money and a lot of power. Push the right buttons, offer the right dollar amount, and people tend to do whatever they want. They got the rape pushed aside and then did everything they could to tear you down. With the murders, well if they've got the right people under their thumb, and I'm guessing they do from what I've seen, it would only take a few well-placed pushes to keep information from being found out, like what's on those autopsy reports."