It was well after one in the morning before statements had been taken for every person who had access to the back door of the arena during the incident. For the Boys it meant another concert written off since they would not have time to make it to the next city in time. As it was, the police were asking them not to go very far for the time being in case they needed more information. Their puppet masters were now frantically trying to open up their schedule and rearrange a pile of concerts. None of the boys really saw why they needed to be around, none of them had killed her and beyond AJ finding the body they didn’t really have any involvement. It was about more than them though, considering how many people worked on their staff that could have been in the alley at any point while they were eating dinner. No one had officially been named a suspect but management was taking what happened very seriously considering the girl had been at sound check party before her murder.
With the change in plans the Boys were without a hotel and had opted to stay in their buses until it had been sorted out how long they were going to stay. If they found out the next day that the police didn’t need them anymore they could just leave, but if they were going to be around for a little while they would make the transition into a hotel.
Nick was standing on his bus, looking through the cupboards for something to snack on. Lauren was like a Nazi when it came to junk food, he practically had to fill out a formal request and email it to her for approval before he could get a Dorito. It drove him nuts how they all kept snack food away from him like he would die instantly if he ate it. They didn’t seem to understand that things had changed. Maybe he had struggled with food in the past but he was a new Nick, he could eat whatever he wanted and not worry about gaining weight. He heard the door to the bus open and leaned back, craning his neck to see what kind of mood Lauren was in. If he couldn’t gorge on junk food then he would have to settle for his second most raging desire: sex.
“Baby?” he called out, “The window on gettin’ nasty is closing so hurry up and get in here. I’m playing WOW in like an hour which means we can probably do it twice.”
“Twice in an hour? You don’t leave much time for cuddling, do you?”
That was most definitely not the voice of his girlfriend, Nick noted, “Brian?”
“Yeah,” Brian responded and he met up with him in the kitchenette, “Lauren is on my bus with Leighanne and the boy. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Did you bring snacks?” Nick asked curiously, checking around to see if his band mate had brought along anything to bribe him into a conversation.
Brian smiled but the grin didn’t quite reach his eyes, “You know me too well,” he joked. He pulled his hand out from behind his back where he had been holding onto a bag of Cheetos.
Before Brian could even blink Nick had snatched the bag and was pulling cheesy puffs out and stuffing them into his mouth, “Oh you really are my best friend.”
“Is she still hiding the good stuff?” Brian teased, moving back to the front of the bus where he took a seat at one of the dining tables.
“I blame you guys,” Nick said around a mouthful of Cheeto, “You gave her the impression that I’m a fatty trapped in a skinny body. She’s so paranoid I’ll balloon out and she’ll have to look at a beer gut while we’re fucking.”
Brian rolled his eyes, holding back his comments about Nick’s weight and the way he spoke about his girlfriend. Sometimes he wondered what had happened when Nick lost the pounds. It had all happened so suddenly, one day he saw the 200 plus pound Nick and practically overnight he had slimmed down and developed an attitude about it. It often seemed as though he had dropped the burden of the fat and gained a new personality.
“So... what’s up?” Nick asked, the curiosity getting the better of him. He licked the orange cheese powder off his fingers, eyeing his friend carefully.
Brian was nervous and he took a deep breath to calm himself, “I saw you.”
“Saw me what?” the other man asked, dropping the bag down onto the table. He raised an eyebrow in Brian’s direction, his arms stretching across his chest defensively.
“I saw you with that girl... the one that’s dead.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed and he leaned across the table, keeping his voice low, “What exactly do you think you saw?”
Brian sensed the change in Nick’s demeanour and he held his ground, “I saw you with her in the hallway after sound check with your hand up her skirt.”
The younger blond shrugged the comment off, “So you saw me cheat on my girlfriend, so what? Yes, I got her off in the hallway. I told her to stick around until after dinner because I knew everyone was going to leave. I stayed because I wanted to get laid but she was gone when I went looking for her. I didn’t think anything of it. I thought she got tired of waiting or something. It sucks that she’s dead but I don’t think asking her to stay so I could bone her was really what did her in.”
Brian cringed at how crass the other man was, shaking his head at how easily he dismissed being unfaithful to his girlfriend of more than two years, “You told the police all that, right?”
Nick ignored the question, “Did you tell them you saw us together?”
The older man sighed, running a hand over his hair, “No. I didn’t want them to jump to conclusions. I said I saw her in the hallway after sound check but I didn’t say that anyone was with her. It shouldn’t matter though because you told them everything you just told me... right?”
They stared each other down for a full minute before Nick finally looked away, “Of course I did.”
~*~
Knox and Jensen were back at their desks pouring over pages of written notes, listening back to recordings of dozens of interviews, and exchanging stories. The images of police precincts that were portrayed on television were on par with the inside of an actual precinct. They were on the fourth floor of a large brick building. Frosted glass doors led to a large wooden desk separating anyone from the public that might find their way to their floor from the police officers working away. Their desks were behind the administration area in pairs of two. Each set of desks was facing each other, with name plates off to the side. It made it easier to work when they could simply look up at one another. It was all part of the collaboration and team-like feeling to being part of the police department.
Around them, on a few extra chairs and across whatever empty desk space was available, were stacks of crime scene photos that had just been developed, including the pictures of the girl, who they now knew was in fact Melissa Rhynard since her very emotional parents had come in, after being woken up in the middle of the night, to identify her body. Once the medical examiner had the body back at the morgue he was able to get a more conclusive time of death. They were surprised to discover that the time of death appeared to coincide with the time of the 911 call that AJ McLean had made. Time of death of course wasn’t an exact science it was an estimate but it indicated to them that it was likely that the killer was still in the alley way when AJ and his fiancée had found the body. It didn’t look good for the people working with the Backstreet Boys tour since they were really the only people around at that time.
“Four roadies and one of the stylists told me that they saw Melissa lingering around back stage after the VIP tour was finished,” Knox said, making a few notations on the file he was compiling.
Jensen held up her own notes in front of her face, nodding knowingly, “One crew member told me that he saw her after the band and their families had left after dinner, and Brian Littrell told me he saw her too. Speaking of which...”
Knox looked up and watched as his partner sorted through a few different audio tapes before grabbing one labelled with Brian’s name. She popped it into the player and hit the button to roll the audio. They both listened as she introduced the interview, and had a few introductory questions for the man. The more Brian spoke though they could both hear the nervousness in his voice. In particular, he stumbled quite often on the question of whether or not Brian had ever seen the girl before. It was then that he revealed that he had seen her in the hallway once all the other girls had been cleared out of the arena. He had a panicked, anxious tone in his voice and Knox and Jensen shared a knowing look. Brian hadn’t been nervous during any of the previous questions. It was only after he saw a picture of Melissa, and Jensen had started asking questions specifically about the girl that he seemed to get flustered. To them it was an indication than there was more than meets the eye when it came to Brian Littrell. The tape stopped and they both returned to looking over the pages spread across their desks.
Knox made a soft noise as he thought and brought a particular stack of notes up to the top of the pile, “There were only two people that intentionally stayed behind, Nick Carter and Brian Littrell. Everyone was wearing passes around their necks, including the Backstreet Boys. Melissa didn’t have one of those on her, so how did she get back stage after her little tour was over? If she wasn’t supposed to be there someone would have asked her to leave. Maybe she was there because someone asked her to stay?”
Jensen considered the theory and nodded in agreement, “How was your chat with Carter?”
“Strange,” Knox admitted, rubbing his forehead just above his eyebrow as he tried to think of a way to break it down, “He was strangely calm, cocky almost. He said with absolute conviction that he’d never seen her before in his life then said that he was the one who had taken her on the back stage tour.”
“Did you feel like he was hiding something?”
“Not sure,” he admitted honestly, “He was really hard to read. He’s an asshole but I’m not sure he’s a guilty asshole. Unusual though that we both had unusual interviews with the only two people lingering around during the time Melissa was killed. Maybe Nick Carter’s defensive attitude was because he was trying to cover something up for his buddy? Should we talk to Littrell again?”
“If we’re going to, we should do it fast. Once their lawyers get wind that we’re asking them to stick around they’ll be down here in a flash and our only suspects will be out of the state before we know it.”
