Derek
"Who's Brian Thornton?" I asked, looking up a Greene. He stared at me blankly for a moment, so I continued, "there's a statement in here from him, and apparently he was at the house the first time her stalker tried to kidnap her."
"Oh, right," Greene said, recognition dawning in his eyes. "That's Layna's boyfriend. She sent him a picture that night and when he saw that someone was there; he went over to make sure she was okay."
I felt jealousy flare up inside of me, even though I had no right to feel that way. I had told her to move on, to find someone else. I guess I just hadn't expected her to do it so soon.
Clearing my throat, I put the file back down on the desk. "Has he been informed of her kidnapping?"
Greene nodded his head. "He was out of town when I called to let him know, and he said he was on his way back."
"Okay," I replied quietly, looking back down at the file in my hand. I was tempted to just toss it across the room, and scream as loud as I could. This was making me crazy. Seeing what he had done to these girls, and knowing that he was probably doing these things to Layna made me want to find him and kill him.
Judging by the pictures Layna was sent, there were a total of ten girls that had been taken. The ones the police had managed to ID were Sarah Tahir, Jessica Lamee, Tiffany Preacher and Stephanie Sloan.
Four girls, out of ten, which meant there were six families that never got closer on their missing daughters, wives, even mothers.
This wasn't going to happen to Layna. We were going to find her, alive. I had promised her that I would always protect her, and I wasn't about to break that promise now.
I needed to be on my A-game right now, and in order to do that, I had to block out the thoughts about Layna, and treat this like any other case.
Each of the girls had been stalked for a month, before being abducted from their bedroom, on the 10th of that month. He had kept the girls for a week, and then dumped their bodies in public parks.
The tenth must be a special day for the kidnapper, if he always abducted them on that day, and yet, Layna had not been abducted on the tenth. I filled that away in my brain, and continued.
The autopsy reports for the girls were very weird. Two of the girls', Sarah and Tiffany, hearts had just stopped. There were no drugs in their system, and other then a couple of spider bites and some old bruises, they had been perfectly fine.
The other two girls, Jessica and Stephanie, had their throats slashed. They also had spider bites, but their bruises had been fresher, and one of them had broken ribs.
Why had he beat Jessica and Stephanie before he killed them, but hadn't touched Sarah and Tiffany before they died?
I shut the file, and sighed. None of it made sense.
Sometime while I had been reading the file Greene had left his office, but he walked back in in time to see me tossing the file carelessly on his desk.
"Whoever this guy is, he's good," I said to him, and Greene just nodded, taking the seat across from me.
"That's why I was having so much trouble at the beginning; there was no information apart from the pictures, and even most of those turned out useless. When my boss saw how little there was he just assumed that this guy was just getting pictures off of the internet and sending them to her as a joke. He assigned me to other cases."
"How do you have all this information from the picture then, if he took you off of it?" I asked.
Greene smirked at me, "He said I couldn't work on it while I was on duty. I had a lot of free time at home," the smirk fell from his face, hardening into a stoic mask. "I knew that this wasn't a simple harassment case, or a joke gone to far. I just wish I had been more persistent about it, maybe I could have prevented this from happening."
An uncomfortable silence fell over us, and I cleared my throat. "Well, what matters is that we find her, and that she's okay."
Greene nodded his head in agreement, "Let's go over this together see if we missed anything."
I agreed, and we got to work, pouring over the case, as if it was the most important document in the world. And at that moment, to me, it was.
***
After a couple more hours of going over Layna's file, as well as the files of the other girls that had been a victim, we took a break to grab some coffee and something to eat so we could get back to work.
We had established that Layna's kidnapping differed from the other girls. Not only had she been kidnapped on a completely different day, the stalking that she had endured was more extreme.
After our little break, we were making our way back into his office when we were stopped by a uniform officer who informed us that Layna's boyfriend had just arrived, and he wanted a meeting with Greene.
We waited in Greene's office for Brian. When he entered the room, I was surprised to see that he has a great deal older than me, and I was twenty-six. He must have been in his early thirties, which made him much older than Layna, who was nineteen.
He was on the shorter size, but where he lacked in height he made up for in muscle. His blonder hair was longer, and it stuck out in some places making it seem like he had been running his hand through it a lot. But the thing that had struck me as odd was that he had scratch marks down the side of his face.
I narrowed my eyes at him, but said nothing as Allan introduced himself, and offered him the seat beside me.
"Who are you?" Brian asked me, in a hoarse voice.
"I'm a consultant with the FBI, and I'm helping out on this case. My name is Derek Jackson."
His eyes flickered quickly to the empty space beside me, and then back to my eyes as he nodded his head.
"I'm going to ask you some questions, just protocol when this sort of thing happens," Greene said in an apologetic voice. "it doesn't mean you're a suspect or anything, its just procedure."
"That's fine. I want to do everything I can to help get my Layna back," I bristled at Brian calling Layna his, but I knew it was irrational as I had forsaken the right to Layna when I left.
"Where were you last night?" Greene asked opening up a black notebook on his desk and opening his pen.
"I was up in Niagara Falls. I was meeting with an ex-girlfriend of mine. She wanted to get bac together, and wouldn't take no for an answer. I drove up there so that I could talk to her in person, and tell her that I was seeing someone else. I met up with some friends after who I knew from when I lived down there, and we went out for a couple of drinks. I crashed at one of the guy's places since it was late." He spoke in a soft voice, staring down at his hands the whole time.
"Can I get the numbers and names of the people you were with?"
Brian nodded, and quickly wrote down everyone's name when Greene handed him some paper.
"If I would have known that something like this was going to happen, I would have stayed with her," he whispered.
"Do you know anybody that would want to hurt her?" I asked.
"No, everybody loved Layna. The only problem she had was with that stalker, or whatever, but the police assured us that is was probably just a prank. You don't think it was him, do you? I thought Layna had run away." Brian looked up at me with confusion evident in his face.
Which would have been fine, if I hadn't noticed his eyes. They were blank, no emotion showing, even though his features were schooled into a confused façade.
"What would make you say that?" Greene asked.
"Well she was struggling with everything, you know? It was hard with this stalking, and the fights she would have with her parents. They were constantly yelling at her, and getting into fights about the stupidest things. She would call me almost every night crying about something that her parents said. She kept telling me it was because they regretted adopting her, that she was too much of a burden now that this stalking was happening."
"I never had any indication that this was occurring; Tom and Steve showed me that they loved Layna very much," Greene said, staring at Brian intently.
Brian quickly looked towards the door, before leaning in close to Greene. "I know that's how they made it seem, but they were very good at acting. Like I said, Layna would call me every night in tears."
Greene still looked skeptical, but he continued with his questioning. "And so you think that this caused her to run away?"
Brian nodded his head, "That and the stalking, and then having to deal with some ex-boyfriend drama made her really stressed, and I thought she just needed a break from it.
"That's why when you called and told me she was missing, I just assumed that he had run away because of the stress," he continued. "You don't think someone actually took her, do you?"
"We just have to be open to all possibilities," Greene answered easily. "Who's this ex-boyfriend? Could he maybe have an ulterior motive?"
"I'm not sure who he is, Layna only mentioned him a couple times, and never by name. He was her neighbor I think, before he moved away so maybe Tom and Steve know?"
I stared at him, perplexed by the information he was giving me. It made no sense, knowing what I did about Layna and her family, but I pushed that aside and asked the question that I had been dying too ever since I saw him. "What happened to your face?"
He looked at me surprised, touching the scratches gently. "They're from Layna."
I struggled to control my temper as he said that. Why would he have scratches like that on his face, when they were obviously as a result of some type of struggle.
"Yesterday we went to the fair together and when we got back to her house, her parents weren't home so we...uh...we were intimate. I think she got a little bit too caught up in the moment."
I stood up quickly from my chair, sending it toppling to the floor, "You're a fucking liar," I yelled, seeing red as I jumped on Brian, punching him in the face and consequently knocking him out of his chair. Greene flew up from his chair, but I got up, straightening my shirt, and taking a step back from Brian.
"What the hell is your problem?" Allan yelled, rushing towards Brian, who was still lying on the floor, clutching his face.
When Brian had started spewing his shit, I had been skeptical at first, thinking that maybe what he had been saying was true, but now I knew for a fact that he was lying.
For the past sixteen years of my life, Layna had been my best friend; I knew her better then I knew myself.
Layna never fought with her parents. Ever. Even when she got mad at them, which happened, they would all sit down to talk it out. They never resorted to fights, and they most definitely never yelled. Steve and Tom loved Layna more than they could express, and they couldn't bear it when she was mad with them, that's why they never let it get that far.
That wasn't the only thing that was off about Brian's little story. Layna didn't sleep with her boyfriends, at least not after only a month of dating. She had strict rules when it came to that, her main one being that they had to date for at least five months before anything like that could happen. She believed that she had to love the person, and know that those feelings were reciprocated before she was intimate with them. It had been the downfall of many of her relationships, but she was adamant, and never allowed that to change her mind. She knew that if the person loved her, they could wait.
Brian was lying and I intended to find out why.