Knox practically had a strut as he made his way out of the interrogation room and into the observation area next door where Jensen had been watching through the mirror. He knew it was a bit early to feel satisfied. After all, he’d only established a hunch that Nick Carter was lying about his involvement in his girlfriend’s death. They still needed the tapes from the hotel, which they weren’t giving up too easily due to their high profile clientele, and crime scene investigators were still compiling all of the evidence they’d collected from the boiler room where Lauren’s remains were found. It was a start, though.
Ready to boast about his victory as soon as the door swung open, Knox stopped short when he realized that Jensen was just about to answer her ringing cell phone. He grabbed a seat and pulled the case file across the table, turning it away from his partner so he could read it while listening in on one side of her conversation.
“If you’re calling about your friend, there’s nothing I can tell you,” Jensen said and Knox looked up from his reading. His partner paused, listening to the caller for a moment before she continued. “No, I meant Nick. He’s here...in Atlanta…”
Knox held back his curiosity until Jensen hung up the phone, “Who was that?” he asked impatiently.
“Brian Littrell.”
“He was calling about Nick?”
“No,” Jensen said with a shake of her head. “I thought he was but he wasn’t even aware we’d brought Nick in for questioning. He was calling because he says he may have some information that will be useful to use but that he needs us to keep an open mind.”
“What the hell?” Knox muttered. “Is he coming by?”
“No,” she said. “I’m going to go meet him at some museum. What happened with Carter?”
“He and his lawyer have gone back to their hotel but I told him he needs to stick around. Pretty sure I caught him in a lie,” Knox said before explaining everything that had happened in the interrogation room just moments before. “Prosecutors are on their way and I’m going to tell them we need to hold him for 72-hours. Hopefully, the tapes will have something useful on them or forensics found something that can put him at the scene of the crime.”
“Do you think a judge will go for that? We don’t even know if those cameras picked up his door. His lawyer has to know you might have been bullshitting them.”
Knox shrugged, “I think they can make a pretty good argument, even against his fancy Nashville lawyer. He’s got enough money that he could easily skip town, he was the last person known to be with the victim and he has a record including a citation for resisting which shows he has a lack of respect for authority. I think they’ll let us hold him without charges for a couple days based on that.”
“I’ll let you handle it,” Jensen said as she collected her pen and notebook from the table and shoved them into her coat pockets. “I’ll go talk to Littrell. The forensics report should be here any time now. I guess when I get back Nick Carter will be hanging out in a cell?”
“Here’s hoping,” he said, giving his partner a wave as she headed out the door. Drawing his attention back to the case file, Knox casually flipped through the pages, stopping on the medical examiner’s initial report. The old furnace where they’d found the remains had been days away from an upgrade as part of the hotel’s renovations. A big, round, rusted metal body with enormous pipes pushing air in and out, it had been converted from coal-burning to gas in the 50s.
One thing that was bugging Knox about the possibility that Nick Carter, or someone he knew, being directly involved in the murder, was how he would have known about the old furnace. Not only would he have had to know where the boiler room was and how to get into it but he also would have needed intimate knowledge of how it worked. The killer would have needed to know the size of the door and how to operate the ancient mechanics, as the level of cremation done to the remains showed that the heat had been turned up far beyond what the regulator would typically allow, which is what ultimately caused it to break down.
After a quick rap on the door, it swung open and one of the local officers assisting them while in Georgia walked through with a file in his hand and dropped it casually onto the desk next to the case file. Once Knox opened the folder he recognized it as the updated forensics report which included preliminary details about what had been found in the hotel boiler room.
Inside the folder were numerous still photos and sketches of the crime scene, all related to areas where evidence had been collected. He laid them out on the table in front of him, looking them over with a critical eye. There were multiple fingerprints and shoeprints found that were still being analysed, which would then go through a process to exclude numerous people including some who worked at the hotel or even a police officer that may have inadvertently touched something.
One photo caught Knox’s eye and he took a closer look, quickly scanning the notes on the back to see that it was an organic trace element found on the floor in front of the furnace. He found the corresponding lab report outlining what the substance was. Something about it seemed strangely familiar, strange being the operative word and after a few moments of contemplation he’d made a connection between a hotel basement in Atlanta and a back alley in Baltimore.
Jensen stared at the pair in front of her, eyes going back and forth between Brian and Hilary, waiting for them to finally clue her in to the joke. When she’d arrived at the museum, they’d taken her into the backroom and Hilary had once again gone through the story she had told Brian earlier that week. This wasn’t the detective’s first trip down Conspiracy Theory Lane, but she genuinely wouldn’t have expected so much crazy from someone like Brian Littrell. He seemed to straight laced the last time she’d met him.
“You two can’t possibly expect me to believe this,” she said in a deadpan tone.
Brian sighed and started rifling through the various sheets of paper and photographs that they felt supported their claims, “I know how it sounds, I felt the same way you did a few days ago. I know my friend, though and that isn’t him.”
“Here’s the problem I’m having Brian,” Jensen began to explain. “Your friend is in serious trouble and the first thing you say to me is that he’s actually being possessed by a ghost and you want me to let him go so that we can follow him to wherever the real Nick is being kept.”
“That’s not it, exactly,” Hilary chimed in, “but sort of, yes.”
“Even if I was open to that idea and didn’t think the pair of you were out of your minds, I don’t have that kind of power,” the detective said. “All I do is collect and examine the evidence then lay it all out for a bunch of lawyers. They are the ones who decide whether to lay charges or not. I’m not open to the idea, though. I don’t actually believe you.”
Brian sighed, not knowing what more they could say to try and convince the woman. He knew how it sounded, but he’d come to accept the ludicrous theory Hilary had presented him over the idea that his once best friend was a psychopath and a murderer.
“I know after the incident in Baltimore you had to have discovered similar crimes,” Brian said. “Lauren’s father told me as much, that you guys found some kind of link to an old case that had to do with her great aunt. You and your partner wouldn’t be here in Atlanta working for the FBI if Baltimore was an isolated murder and you wouldn’t be investigating Lauren’s death at all if you didn’t suspect that there might be a connection.”
He didn’t continue and Jensen realized he was waiting for her confirmation. She didn’t want to engage in the discussion any further but Brian had been helping them in any way he could since the very first day of their investigation and she truly felt he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize their success.
“I shouldn’t even be telling you this,” she muttered. “Yes, there are other cases. I can’t tell you where or when. We aren’t entirely sure that Lauren’s murder has anything to do with Melissa’s but it was too coincidental that there is a direct, familial link between Lauren and one of the other victims not to mention your group is at the centre of everything, connected to multiple victims.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say that anything you might consider my group to be connected to started around eight or nine months ago.”
Both the detective and Hilary gave Brian a quizzical look. He hadn’t told anyone what he was about to divulge to the two women but it was something that had been eating at him for a while and part of why he was quick to accept Hilary’s theory.
“About nine months ago we started our tour rehearsals. We don’t normally see each other during our time off, we spend enough time together as it is. When Nick walked in the door, no one recognized him.”
“What are you talking about?” Jensen questioned. “He looks just like every picture I’ve seen of him.”
“Yes and no,” Brian argued. “If you went and found paparazzi photos of Nick from a year ago you’d see a man who is at least forty pounds heavier than the one you know as Nick Carter. He came into the rehearsal room and everyone was congratulating him for how great he looked but it kind of bugged me because he lost a ton of weight in just a couple of months. I figured he had plastic surgery or something because Lauren is into that kind of thing.
“Then he started acting really different. His vocabulary was suddenly more formal, he didn’t want to play video games anymore and when he did he was just horrible at them, he started cheating on Lauren - a lot, which is something he hadn’t done since the first year they got together. That’s why he stayed behind with Melissa the night she died, to have sex with her and then he tried to cover it up. That’s why he and Lauren broke up. That’s not the Nick I know.”
“People change, Brian. Not always for the better.”
“No,” he said pleadingly. “You don’t know Nick. He doesn’t change. He’s terrified of change. That man is not my friend.”
Jensen shook her head, still not buying it. “You have done an excellent job of convincing me that your friend is probably a murderer,” she said. “Not a great one of convincing me it’s actually someone else pretending to him.”
“Please,” Hilary said, coming to Brian’s defence. She grabbed all the photos she had of the various men she suspected had been used as cover by Joseph Gabriel over the years and laid them all out on the table in front of the detective.
“We’re not crazy. This is the same man.”
Humouring them momentarily, Jensen scanned over the photos and picked one out of the bunch, giving it a glance before putting it back down. She did a sudden double-take and picked the same photo back up and held it for closer inspection.
“Holy shit,” she said, the legs of her chair scraping against the floor as she pushed it away from the table. She motioned for the two to gather up the contents of the boxes, “C’mon, you need to come with me.”
