Five teens. Kidnapped. To live out their darkest fears.
***
When five teenagers are abducted outside of the local nightclub, it sends shockwaves through the small town of Redstone.
How were they taken? Where are they...
"How am I going to be an optimist about this?" Bastille
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Jon stared at the board they had set up in their incident room.
String as red as blood, connected a picture of Anna Baker to one of each of the kids, and then trailed along to a large question mark in the centre with the word 'Benefactor' and two names scribbled in black ink underneath it. Notes littered every inch of the white board in between the photos until there was no space left.
The first seventy-two hours in any missing person's case were critical.
But in this one, Jon could literally feel the seconds slipping through his fingers. The clock was ticking in a final countdown that moved far too fast. It had been twenty hours since the kids had gotten into that taxi. Approximately one thousand and two hundred minutes during which anything could have happened.
They had run the plates for the makeshift taxi and come up with nothing. The number didn't exist, clearly a fake. The IT team had managed to confirm that the woman behind the wheel in the surveillance footage was indeed Anna Baker. But that didn't help them at all.
They had looked into all of Anna Baker's credit card transactions. But the last one had been three weeks ago, for something as simple as groceries.
The forensics team had gone over Fever and Anna's apartment with a fine tooth comb and the only thing they had to show for it was two separate sets of fingerprints that were still being run through the system.
Questioning the employees at Hillhurst Pharmaceuticals had left them with two possible suspects for the Benefactor who was funding Anna's experiment. Isaiah had ordered background checks to be done on both Damon Hillhurst and Bartholomew James, but the research team was taking too long to give them the results.
The Facebook page that had been created for the missing kids was filled with thousands of comments, none of them helpful. The Redstone Register was running an article in their Sunday paper; including pictures of the kids as well as Anna Baker, in the hopes that someone would come forward. But that would only be released tomorrow.
In short, they had nothing.
Jon's hangover had long worn off, replaced by an awful twisting feeling in his gut that he wasn't doing enough to save those kids. He would take the hangover any day.
About two hours ago, Captain Renardo had called Isaiah and Jon into his office to advise them that their requests for search warrants on Bartholomew and Damon's homes had been denied due to lack of evidence. Shortly after, Jon had told Isaiah to go home to his wife and child. Jon, himself, had nothing to go home to apart from four empty walls and the remainder of his whiskey which he knew he would be tempted to drink.
