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Snake gets up and I follow him out to his office. We sit down together in the small space and I think back to that night. All I can think about is her cries for help and how terrified she looked. She wasn’t looking terrified because she was attacked, though. She looked terrified when she saw me beating the guy up to a pulp.
I have to focus on his face. In my mind, I see it bloodied and bruised, but I saw it before I started punching. I tried to commit it to memory for this exact reason.
“His eyebrows were black and kind of bushy,” I tell him. “Rounded at the top and about this far apart,” I indicate with my fingers the distance between them. “He had a flat nose, it looked like it had been broken a few times.”
He nods and types away, somehow turning my words into a digital image. The face is forming in front of me, and I focus on getting it exactly how I remember. Melissa’s life may depend on me getting it right.
But then what? When we get her back, she’ll probably still hate me. Even rescuing her won’t change that for her. She felt suffocated by my presence, there’s no recovering from that. After all this effort, we’re going to just go our separate ways and forget these last few months even happened.
“Bones,” Snake barks, snapping his fingers in my face. “Where exactly were the breaks?”
I realize that I’ve zoned out, too focused on what-ifs. The only important thing is I get her back. It doesn’t matter if she never talks to me again, as long as she’s safe and no one tries to come after again. I’ll kill the guy who did this to her if I have to. She shouldn’t have to live constantly checking over her shoulder.
“He had a wide mouth, but thin lips,” I tell him. “They were flat, they didn’t have that curvy thing on top.”
He nods and types.
“His eyes were narrow, but I couldn’t see what color they were. It was too dark.”
“Do you remember what shape they were?” he asks, not looking up at me as he continues to type away. The image of the man is starting to really come into focus, and it looks like a decent rendering. It calms me a bit, seeing that I’m not totally fucking this up. Just a few more details and he should have enough to do a facial recognition search.
I try my best to describe the shape of his eyes, making amendments as they come to life on the screen. Thankfully, Snake is able to make quick adjustments to the things that don’t exactly look right to me. We’re just about done perfecting his face when Hex comes in with Juliana’s description.
“She made me record it so I wouldn’t mess anything up,” he says, sounding slightly defensive.
He hands his phone over to Snake, who hits a button and Juliana’s voice fills the small room as if she’s there with us. She didn’t get a great look at the guy, but she’s able to give Snake the broad strokes. She’s definitely less precise than I am, but it’s enough to come up with a rough sketch of the man. He looks familiar to me, though I can’t place him. I’ve probably seen him in a bar or in a club. Even as a blurry sketch, he’s giving off major creep vibes.
“All right, gentlemen,” Snake says with a satisfied smirk, stretching out his arms and cracking his knuckles. “Let’s see if this is enough to give us what we need.”
He pushes more buttons and uploads their faces into some kind of software. We watch in amazement as faces blur by, some looking more like the sketches than others. When the program finishes running, there are three matches to my description and seven to Juliana’s. It’s not a bad start at all.
“The one in the middle,” I say, instantly recognizing my guy. “He’s a little older now, but that’s definitely him.”
Snake nods and clicks on his information, printing out his rap sheet. Pages and pages spew out from the printer, and I know we’re dealing with a professional criminal. His list of offenses is nearly as long as mine. Nothing about harassment or physical violence, though. He’s mostly a B&E offender, with the occasional arson. Not a true arsonist by any means, but definitely a guy who doesn’t know how to keep his shit clean.
Hex video chats Juliana to see which one of her results is the right guy. She waffles between two of them, and Snake prints them both out just to be safe. One guy is pretty clean, a car salesman in Jefferson. He has two petty thefts on his sheet from when he was younger, but he’s been clean as a whistle for over a decade. The second guy, on the other hand…
With his face clearly displayed on the monitor, a cold dread settles in my stomach. He was dressed as a pizza delivery man, giving me flak about how he had a job to do and he needed to talk to the person who ordered the pizza. I knew Melissa hadn’t ordered anything that night. She was too shaken up. When I told him to get lost, he took a major attitude with me, and I was ready to punch him in the face just for the hell of it.
I should’ve gone with my gut that night. He was the same creep who followed her around in the club. He may have sucked at his job both times, but it doesn’t change the fact that he took two chances to get at her. Who knows how many other times he’s tried to get to her. He may even be the one who has her now.
“Give me an hour,” Snake says, handing Hex his phone back and turning away from us to his virtual world. “If there’s any connection between the two of them, I’ll find it.”
“Thank you,” I tell him, getting up from my seat numbly and heading back to the meeting room where Pocus and Seer are both on their phones. Seer looks up at me to give me a thumbs up, but I don’t feel an ounce of his cheerfulness.
“We don’t know much yet,” I tell him, feeling defeated. I’d hoped finding either one of those guys would help me feel more assured that we’ll find her, but I somehow feel less confident now.
“It’s hard, I know,” Pocus says seriously, eyeing me with the look of a man who’s nearly lost the love of his life on more than one occasion. Not that Melissa is the love of my life. “We haven’t failed before. We’ll find her.”
“Whatever,” I say with a shrug, putting my feet up on a chair and closing my eyes. I’m trying to show them that I’m nonchalant about this whole thing, that I don’t care if we find her or not. After all, what is she really to me? Just a pretty girl I spent some time with.
“He’s not fooling anyone,” Pocus whispers dramatically to Seer, making sure he’s loud enough to be heard. “Twenty bucks says he’s married within the year.”
“Pocus, have some compassion,” Seer replies a little louder, and I’m about to thank him. But then he says, “They’re going to need some time to heal from this. I’m putting fifty down for a year and a half.”
“Forty on six months,” Hex chimes in, coming back into the room
I genuinely hate them all.
