Loves Me Not

THREE

AFTER
DETECTIVE BRETT PORTER

In my hands is the photograph that Ben Summers gave me. The woman in the photo stares up at me. Lightly tanned skin, bright green eyes, wide as she stares at the camera. Her hair stops just above her elbows, a chestnut brown that flows over her shoulders in loose waves. Her smile is kind, inviting. I look at the photo and see an enticing young woman who has her whole life ahead of her. She's beautiful.

She's missing.

Catalaina Kittridge: the puzzle that needs to be solved. One moment she was here, the next, she was gone.

I've been a detective for the Bridgeport PD for twelve years now, joined the academy straight out of college. My mother always told me I was never cut out for this type of job, but I never understood what she meant by that. Never cut out for having a job of high importance, or never cut out for having a job period?

My father honestly couldn't care much about what I did with my life, as long as I was making some sort of decent income. If I'm being honest here, I'll admit that I never once pictured myself in this line of work. A businessman, maybe. The idea of entrepreneurship always intrigued me. But sometimes we set goals for ourselves that we never accomplish. And sometimes our life-path takes us in a completely different direction than what we see fit. If I would have told my sixteen-year-old self that this was where I'd be today – thirty-four-years-old, flashing my badge and seeing corpses on a daily bases – well, I probably wouldn't have believed it. But what do you know, here I am.

In most cases, if we don't find this young woman soon and a body turns up, all fingers point to the fiancé. He's playing the victim card, but for all we know, he could have killed her and dumped the body by now. Hell, it could have been an accident even. He's covering his tracks, trying to appear as the good fiancé, calling the police when she didn't come home. But I'm not ruling anything out. She's been missing for almost thirty hours now. Still no word from her, and her cellphone is switched off or dead, so we can't get a trace.

Other than the fiancé angle, there's two other possible scenarios. The first – which would be the most viable option for everyone – is that she's taken off somewhere. Had a sudden change of heart in the middle of the night and disappeared. Perhaps she'll return soon, realize what a mistake she's made, and apologize for having worried everyone.

Then there's option B, which is that someone has taken her.

She's twenty-six years old. Over 260,000 women under the age of twenty-one went missing in the United States last year. 61,000 over the age of twenty-one. So the chances of a woman her age going missing or being abducted are significantly lower, however, not impossible. Someone could have taken her. Someone could have hurt her.

After speaking with the fiancé, it's imperative that I speak with the two people that know her better than anyone else in her life, and that would be her parents.

I show up at their house, which is just North of Bridgeport, around 1:00 p.m. Ben called them last night to ask if Catalaina was with them, as well as this morning. They are well aware of her absence.

A woman in her early to mid-fifties opens the door and recognizes who I must be immediately.
"Mrs. Kittridge?" I ask.
"Have you found her yet?"
"Not yet," I say. "I'm just here to talk to you and your husband, ask you some questions about Catalaina."
"Of course, of course." She ushers me into the house, offering me coffee or tea as she motions for me to have a seat on the couch in the living room.

I decline and wait for her to get her husband and settle in. They enter the room, looking tired and worried. Together, they sit on the couch across from me. In my hand I hold two things: my notepad, and the photograph.