The Test

Chapter Seven

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."