Life In His Hands [Book I] (Completed)

Life In His Hands [Book I] Chapter XV

        Jake’s POV

        Oh, God, I really need to stop spending so much time alone, I thought to myself. I think way too much. As I shut the car door, all thoughts returned to Jasmine. Why couldn’t I keep my mind off her? I mean, yeah, we were friends and had been for years and I was bound to miss her, but lately it was as though there was something more. There was that need to protect her; something I’d never felt for her before. She usually protected herself. She didn’t need anyone else. And it sure was strange.

        Knowing that she had a boyfriend made the situation worse. And also caused a pang of jealousy to rise in my stomach as I realised that she probably wasn’t thinking about me while she was trapped wherever she was; she was probably thinking about him. Dave.

         I’d never actually thought I’d ever get along with him. We were just complete polar opposites. Everything about him made me want to punch him in the face. But now, we had been drawn together by all of this and had actually pushed aside all our problems in aide of getting Jasmine back.

        “Jake.”

        “Hammond?”

        “What?!” I grumbled and looked up and found Nick and Adam standing over me. “Oh. I must have fallen asleep, sorry.” I rubbed my eyes and stretched out the kinks.

        “Clearly.” Nick retorted, tittering slightly. “Anyway, forensics have found some blood in there. They’re-”

        “Blood? Whose blood?” I asked, jumping out of the car and ran straight into the house. “Whose blood is it?” I shouted at the first person I saw.

        “We don’t know.” Someone else replied. “We’re running it through now. Usually we’d take it back to the lab, but that’ll take hours and we need this sorted now.”

        I nodded and watched as they collected the blood and ran it through the system on the laptop they had brought with them and five minutes later, it came up with a name.

        Emma Hanley.

        So, this is where they brought her. And this is where they killed her. I was standing in the middle of yet another murder scene. “Is there any evidence of Detective O’Reilly being in here?” I asked the same person who had answered my earlier question and she nodded.

        “Yes, we found several of her hairs on the bed, which suggests that she was here for a while. There were also semen stains on the mattress, too.”

        “Oh, God, did they…?” I couldn’t say it. The word just wouldn’t come out. My heart jumped in my throat. The sick bastards.

        “No. They were old and we couldn’t get any DNA from them. They were definitely months old, though.” I breathed out a sigh of relief and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. I needed to calm down.  I was getting too aggravated and it wasn’t going to help.

        “Is there anything in this place to suggest where they’ve gone?” I asked when I opened them.

        “No. They cleaned out the place. There’s not a single scrap of anything to say anything about anything.” She paused. “There is one thing, though.”

        “What?”

        “Come with me.” She motioned for me to follow her and I did. We walked through what was probably the office, which was stacked high of papers – probably useless – and through a door on the other side.

        “This.” She said, pointing to the floor. “This is Detective O’Reilly’s. Blood pool is consistent with a blow to the head. Then there…” she pointed to another blood pool a couple of metres away. “And there’s a knife. No prints.”

        “Is she-?” Yet again, I couldn’t finish my sentence.

        “We don’t know. Don’t get too worked up. We can’t tell anything yet, but it’s unlikely she walked out of here, that’s for sure.”

        My heart stopped. I turned and walked slowly out of the room. Blood. Blow to the head. Knife. What the hell had happened? Had they made Jas watch as they killed Emma and then killed her too? We knew she’d been here, and we had evidence of that now. But we didn’t know much more than that. We still didn’t know whether she was alive and all the evidence was drying out. But, why would they run if she wasn’t alive. It was so confusing. Since finding this place, we’d had no other sightings of Tony Foster or Daniel Taylor, and we still had two missing people. And now, we were stuck. What were we going to do?