AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Cracking my neck, I lay back against the cushions, staring at the ceiling like it should have the answers to all of my questions. I just want to be done with all of this. From the moment we found Declan in his car, we have been dodging punches left, right, and center. Don’t get me wrong, it all brought Alayna to us, something I could never regret, but we lost so much more.
A knock sounds at the door, instantly putting me on guard as I sit up. Moving quietly towards the front window, I glance out, my teeth snapping shut when I see Jarrod’s car sitting in front of the house. This fucker is on the top of my list of suspects for who is coming after Lay. His sleazy, backstabbing narcissistic personality not leaving me with any confidence in his innocence.
“LARSEN! I know you’re in there,” he yells through the door, his knocks becoming louder and more frantic. “I need to talk to you and you aren’t returning any of my phone calls. Come on, man! Open up.”
Walking to the door, I rip it open, my glare firmly in place. It takes all of my control to not just punch this piss-poor excuse of a man in the face. He deserves that and so fucking much more.
“What?” I growl, leveling my full anger on him. “What the fuck could you possibly want?”
“Whoa, man. I know I fucked up, believe me. You have no reason to trust me or want to talk to me, but I need you to hear me out. No one else is listening,” he pleads, throwing his hands up in a surrender gesture. In his right hand is a brown manilla envelope which my eyes instantly narrow on.
“You have two minutes so start fucking talking,” I sneer, my rigid stance never faltering for a second.
“It’s about those missing women cases I’ve been working on,” Jarrod speaks quietly, trying to not draw anymore attention to us. “Something has been bothering me about what connects them all, other than the MO of the kidnapping. It wasn’t until I saw Alayna and overheard what went down yesterday that it all clicked. I think it’s all connected to her in some way, but I can’t prove it yet.”
He starts looking back and forth down the street, his eyes darting around like he’s terrified of being watched. “Take this folder and go through it. You’ll see what I mean.”
This motherfucker had me the moment he said it could be connected to Lay and he knows it. This could all be a ruse to get me to look at the folder and solve the case for him, but I won’t chance Lay’s safety on that. Snatching the folder from his hand, I slam the door right in his face, getting only mild satisfaction from it.
If he’s right about this, and that’s a big if, then this is so much worse than we already thought it was. It means that this has been in the works for a long time and a lot of women have been hurt by him in his race to get Alayna. It will kill her to find that out, she’ll never forgive herself for being the catalyst that led to their pain. Lay’s heart is so much bigger than she gives herself credit for.
Sitting back down on the couch, I move all of the stuff we were looking through off to the side, leaving the coffee table open for the contents of the envelope. With a deep breath, I brace myself for what I may or may not find in here. If no one is listening to him, it could be because he’s reaching and none of it actually connects. The other option is he’s the stalker and trying to move my suspicion off of him by fabricating whatever he handed to me.
The envelope opens, revealing an entire folder with victim photographs, police reports, Jarrod’s notes, and a few pictures of key evidence. Laying all the photos of the women out first, I struggle to find the connection between them. At first glance you would assume they were all random, different ages, hair colours, eye colours, and even races. It isn’t until I think of Alayna that the connections start.
Each of these women has a feature similar to Lay, whether it’s similar grey eyes, like the ones in the gift box, or their hair is a similar shade of colour. One of the women even has a similar nose to her, the slight upturn on the end of a short, slender slope. If you cut and pasted the different features together you would get a Bride of Frankenstein situation.
“Motherfucker,” I curse under my breath, my hands shaking as I run over the faces of these eight women again and again.
Grabbing the police reports, I notice that not one of them has been found yet. They were all taken in similar ways, most from the comfort of their own homes. The interviews with their loved ones said that most of them started feeling something was off before the actual kidnapping took place. There was small amounts of blood found at every single crime scene, indicating some force was used to remove them.
Jarrod could have put this together for me, thinking that if I made the connection from information he gave me, I wouldn’t suspect him. It’s a possibility, however it just doesn’t feel right. He’s not skilled enough to pull something this complex off. He has a career and an active social life, someone would notice him missing for all the time he was with these women. Add in the box coming from Lay’s previous hometown and there’s no way it could have been him.
That leaves us with no main suspect and a whole lot of missing and possibly murdered women. Thankfully Alayna is with Riggs right now because if I got this information while she was with her friend last night, I would have pulled the same caveman shit as Riggs did.
Checking through the list of notes he left for me, I see that he hasn’t figured out any possible suspects either. He did highlight one name in one of the police reports, a man named Kevin Jennings. He was noticed hanging around the first woman that went missing.
“Jennings,” I mumble to myself, the name sounding so familiar to me. I know I’ve heard it somewhere before but it seems to be stuck at the front of my brain just barely out of reach for me.
With his name being highlighted and the familiarity of it to me, he just jumped to the top of my list. There’s one thing I’ve learned in my time as a police officer, coincidences are rare. If you come across one, you need to follow that avenue until it’s exhausted, leaving no stone unturned. There’s a reason you usually look at a disgruntled spouse first in a murder, the easiest route is usually the right one.
The name is going to bother me until I get an answer, so I make my way up to Adam’s room. If he doesn’t know either, I’ll drop it for now until I can talk to Jarrod again tomorrow. Riggs is out with Alayna and if this shit is all true and leading to her, she needs a night out before shit hits the fan even more. Knocking on Adam’s door, I wait patiently for him to holler at me to come in.
“What the fuck, Rhys? I was almost asleep. You could have triggered a flashback,” he grumbles, pushing himself into a sitting position on the bed. “This better be important.”
“It is,” I answer, coming to sit on the foot of the bed. “Jarrod stopped by begging me to look at a case he’s working on. He thinks it’s connected to Alayna and the stalker gift she got yesterday. It’s a bunch of missing women cases.”
“Shit.” He runs his hand over his short hair, his pissed off face taking over. “He was mistaken, right?”
“I don’t think so. All the women look randomly picked at first glance, but when you compare them to Alayna, you can pick out at least one feature on each of them that matches her,” I explain, working through it again as I do. “Whether it’s grey eyes, black hair, or even similar nose shapes. Then in one of the police reports a highlighted name stuck out to me. That’s why I’m here, I recognize the name but I can’t for the life of me place it.”
“Hopefully I can help,” he responds, his complete attention on me. If there’s one thing that always gets his full attention, it’s when one of his loved ones is in trouble.
“The name was Kevin Jennings, does that ring a bell to you too?”
Adam snaps his head to look at me, his face going from pale to angry red and back again. His breathing gets erratic as he fights for control over the reaction the name is drawing from him. He definitely knows it, which means it’s not all in my head.
“Jennings,” he grinds out, his hands clenching the duvet over top of his legs. “That was the last name of the foster family that really fucked Declan and Alayna up. Last thing Declan ever said about them was that the father was locked up for a long time. It also starts with fucking J.”
