I almost groaned when the door reopened, but when I turned to pierce Detective Farrow with my death glare, my eyes popped wide. It was a female this time, dressed in a nice pant suit, with long, flowing brown hair not too unlike my own.
“Hello,” she said kindly, taking up Farrow’s seat and setting a laptop on the table, connecting the cord to an outlet on the floor. “My name is Courtney O’Neill and I’m also one of the detectives working your case.”
A puff of air burst between my lips. Loudly. “Where the hell have you been all day?” I muttered.
O’Neill’s lips pressed tightly, giving me a knowing look. “Detective Farrow is…how should I put this?”
“Has a shitty bedside manner?” Nick offered rudely.
“He tries to disassociate himself from the material in his hands and the people in front of him. He says it keeps his mind clear so he can focus on the facts, but it doesn’t always go off well with the people he’s interviewing. And for that, I apologize. But if you could endure me just a little longer… First off, did you bring the sample you used for Claire’s DNA testing and a copy of the lab result?”
I nodded my head and pulled them out of my bag, sliding them over to her side of the table. As she scanned the paper, I asked, “Are you going to run it again?”
“Maybe. It’ll come down to whether or not the lab has the right credentials and the strength of the probability that you’re one in the same. It’ll be up to my superiors to decide. If they approve, we’ll contact the lab for an official report to put in your file. If not, we’ll ask you for a sample to run ourselves.”
“Can you get the sample from her today then?” Nick asked. “We don’t live in Washington anymore.”
“Yes, we can. We’ll just keep it in the evidence lockers with everything else.” She fiddled with her laptop while Nick and I gazed at each other. We were both looking weary.
“Here’s the thing I need to go over with you before you leave,” she continued, looking me directly in the eye. At least she was capable of being personable. “That man’s case in L.A. is still open because it was a suspicious death. Personally, if he was the one that kept you captive, I don’t really care if his case remains unsolved. Honest truth,” she threw in casually. But even so, my heart was cringing with fear. “But that’s not for me to discriminate against. And unfortunately, everything in that house was lost to the fire. If he was involved in trafficking, there’s nothing to connect him. The bank account we found is clean, and if he had a second to fund this type of activity, we have no way to track it. So we’re at a dead end here.
“You say there was a second man that knew about you?” Very carefully, she inquired, “Am I to assume he was no different with you than the owner of the house?”
I nodded my head. Yeah, that jerk had no problem with what his buddy was doing to me.
“I’d like for you to go through some photos in the database and see if any of them resemble that man.”
Oh, God... She saw my hesitancy, and quickly moved to test my guilt. “Megan, it’s impossible for us to put a head count on the number of girls who are stolen by traffickers in a given year right here in the U.S. The number is astounding and very few of you ever escape. We need to put names behind those faces. With your cooperation, we may be able to help a few more of those girls get back home again.”
I sighed and shook my head in defeat. I knew it was only right to help in whatever way I could, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a very bad idea. Reluctantly, I agreed, and O’Neill explained how to maneuver my way through the database and how to mark a picture as a possible suspect or push it into a category for me to review again later.
“Just keep in mind that people can change their hairstyles, hair color and eye color relatively easily. So try to really focus in on the shape of the eyes, nose and mouth.”
It took hours upon hours, and several breaks along the way to keep my mind from collapsing in on me. And poor Nick. He just had to watch the whole time, or else he fiddled with his phone. Together, the two of us couldn’t stop fidgeting in those uncomfortable hard plastic chairs. When I was finally done, Detective O’Neill came to collect her laptop and thank me for my help. In the end, I had only marked five possible suspects. It was mostly the curvature of the eyes that drew me to them, since that was really all I ever noticed in my drug-enhanced state.
“I honestly can’t say that any one of them is the guy, so please don’t put too much confidence in my choices.”
“Don’t worry. We’ve got a checklist of things we do before we consider bringing someone in for questioning. And even if we do, it doesn’t mean we’ll release any information about you being the one that fingered them. Not unless there’s evidence and we can charge them with something.”
Thank God for small favors. Nick stood, stretching his muscles out, readying himself to leave, but I remained seated. “Before I leave, please, tell me,” I told the detective firmly. “Is there anything left in that file of mine that I should know about?”
She gently stroked her chin for a moment, seemingly debating something. If there was anything of the kind, surely she would be the one to share. “Well, there is one thing we never told your family.” She paused to look up at Nick, who had frozen in place, locked hard awaiting her answer. I wondered if the two had ever met before. “We felt it in poor taste to tell because it wouldn’t have changed anything, only made the reality of the situation that much worse for the family.”
“What? Just tell me. After everything I’ve been through, I want to know.” And seriously, what could she possibly say that could make the past two and a half years even worse?
I groaned in pain, my arms still wrapped around the toilet, my forehead too exhausted to lift off my arms. My insides were still pinching and twisting madly, the nausea burning away at my stomach, but there was nothing left to come up.
It was disgusting to be on the floor of a police station’s bathroom, but what Detective O’Neill just told me minutes ago sickened me to the point that my bodily reaction required the assistance of a porcelain bowl. I actually had to run to make it to the bathroom in time. Like it could literally reject the disturbing knowledge, my body heaved so hard I pulled muscles all the way from my belly button up to my throat.
Nick cracked the door three times to call out and check on me. Before he could do it a fourth time, I managed to stand and clean myself up and bury myself into his arms. I wanted to sob right there, but I didn’t think my body had anything left to give. “Nick,” I whimpered, trying to dig even further into his chest, desperately needing to escape my horrible freaking reality.
“I know, baby,” he said soothingly. “And I don’t think we should ever tell anyone. For once I think the detectives were right. No good can come from knowing that piece of information.”
I bobbed my head slowly. “It just makes me sick.” All those poor girls…
Somehow, although I felt incredibly dizzy and tired, Nick got me back to the car. Unfortunately, we passed Farrow on the way and all that anger began to boil and rise to the surface all over again.
Thankfully, I fell asleep for the short ride, and the next thing I knew we were parked in front of my childhood home. “Here,” Nick said, grabbing a box of crackers from the backseat, part of the bag of food he brought for the trip in case we got hungry. “I want you to eat a few of these before we go in because you look like death right now.”
That made me wonder what I looked like in that basement all those months…
I took the handful of Triscuit he offered and began nibbling away. Oddly enough, the combination of wheat and salt eased the anger within my stomach, and I soon felt a little better. Well, I should say my body began feeling better, my mood however, grew angrier with each cracker that made its way into my system.
Fucking police department. Fucking Farrow and his intrusive questions. I had never been so annoyed in my life. “I’m never going back there. I don’t give a flying flip what they want in the future.”
“Sounds good to me,” he answered drearily, rubbing down his face and eyes. This day hadn’t been easy on him either. And I really wished he hadn’t seen the photo of that guy’s remains; it was bad enough he already knew what I had done. “You ready to do this? Because I’d like to get back on the road already.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, opening the passenger door and sweeping my hands together outside to remove the crumbs lingering on my hands.
“So how’d it go?” my mom asked once Nick and I let ourselves into the house and found them in the family room.
“So awesome I hope to go back, right after I shove a railroad spike through my eye socket,” I snarked. “SIX FREAKING HOURS! And I still don’t think I saw the right guy in all those pictures. But nooooo….they requested my assistance in the matter.”
Requested my ass.
I fell aimlessly backwards, praying the couch was within range like I thought. “Insensitive jerks,” I muttered, rolling my head back and crossing my arms tightly over my eyes. Nick sat beside me and dug his hand between me and the sofa, massaging the kinks in my shoulders. I had to admit, it was definitely reducing the output on my bitch-o-meter.
“That good, huh?” my mother confirmed.
“We won’t be going back,” Nick replied firmly.
I suddenly realized I just blew up like a spoiled brat on a tantrum in front of my parents, whom I just re-met not too long ago. Awkward! And I was so wrapped up in my anger I didn’t even hug them when I came in. And then I realized I wanted to hug them, something I shied away from internally the last time I saw them. What a difference two week’s worth of phone calls could make! But I’d save those hugs for later, when I wasn’t blushing from the shame of what I’d done.
Somewhere behind me, I heard clinking, and I knew my dad was making himself a drink. I never felt so envious in my life, and I sighed heavily.
“Nick,” my dad said.
“Oh, no thank you, Tom. I’ll be the one driving back.”
“I know that, son. Now pass it to my daughter already.”
“Oh.” Nick did, and once the icy rock glass exchanged hands, my dad lightly whacked him across the back of the head for his moment of idiocy. “It’s been a long day,” he defended.
Normally, I would’ve laughed at that, but I was too mesmerized by the fact that my dad just purposely gave his twenty-year-old daughter alcohol. I gave him a strange look, and he merely said, “Try it. It’s your mother’s favorite. And it’s not like your mother and I think you’ve never had a drink before.”
“Hmm… Have I?” I asked Nick, and he gave me the funkiest look ever.
“Don’t be asking me that in front of your parents.”
My dad mumbled a knowing uh-huh and my mother cut in with, “It’s fine, honey. If anyone deserves a drink around here, it’s you.”
No shit.
I sipped at the light brown cocktail that contained a floating cherry and was pleasantly surprised by its sweet, yet tart, flavor. I wasn’t used to alcohol, so my head felt heavy in just five minutes. Nick told them about our neverending session with our pain in the ass detective, while I just leaned my head against the crook of his shoulder, his arm wrapped loosely around me. I closed my eyes, and the reverberations of his voice flowed from his body to mine, like osmosis.
Osmosis…that’s a funny word. Ozz…smoooo…siiiiiiis. Yep. Whatever was in it, that cocktail was ga-roooovy.
Their voices became distorted, taking on sound effects that resembled the way Charlie Brown’s teachers always came off. Whap-whup-whap-waaaaa…. The sounds were soothing as the numbness overtook my body, shutting down my brain’s ability to decipher the coded commentary around me.
It wasn’t until later when Nick gave me a hard shake that my eyes burst open and my attention finally snapped to. “Huh,” I immediately blurted without control.
“How are you doing over there?”
I rubbed my eyes and yawned. I was still feeling a little woozy, but clearer than before.
Chuckling, he replied, “Never mind.”
“Huh?” Seriously, I think that drink damaged my ability to speak. Note to self: check for drool.
Amused, he answered, “We were wondering if you were up for grabbing an early dinner before we headed back to Portland, but I think you’d be better off just passing out in the passenger seat and sleeping it off.”
Well, apparently, my stomach had been keeping a generator hidden from the rest of my body, because it didn’t need to coordinate with my brain to answer Nick’s question. I’d be surprised if the neighbors didn’t hear the rumble when Nick said the word dinner. “No, no,” I said quickly. “I can eat. I’m starving.”
That being settled, my parents disappeared into their bedroom to get ready, leaving Nick to stand me up and get me going again. “You’re not going to face-splat in your dinner, are you?”
“I might,” I teased.
He licked his lips and smiled wickedly. The things that boy could do with those lips. So. Freaking. Hot.
“You never could hold your liquor. I always had to limit you to two beers when we hit the parties. Otherwise you’d pass out on me. And apparently, one small cocktail with partial alcohol knocks you on your ass.”
“Then why’d you let me drink it?”
Whipping me up in a gentle squeeze, he kissed me before melding our foreheads together. “Because your parents were right. You of all people deserve a release. Even if it’s just a temporary two hour one.”