Jensen had been right about the lawyers. They were barely an hour into their second interview with Brian Littrell when two tan men in designer suits came storming through the door instructing him to stop talking. That was the end of their access to the Backstreet Boys. It had been a week since Melissa’s murder, the band had resumed their tour and was now a few states south and they hadn’t made much progress as far as leads.

The cause of death was officially determined to be a significant loss of blood from the impromptu surgery that Melissa had in the alley way. The medical examiner did note that the girl had been strangled, but it wasn’t what had killed her. The means by which her liver had been removed was still unexplained; there were no tool marks or any indication that something foreign had been used to cut the organ out of her body. Unfortunately for Melissa’s parents it meant the girl still had not been laid to rest, her body was still evidence and technicians were still scouring over every inch of her to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.

Knox and Jensen were finding the whole situation frustrating. They had other cases they were working but Melissa was always in the back of both of their minds. For Jensen it seemed like the Backstreet Boys had been following her everywhere, taunting her. No matter where she went, whether it was the grocery store or the gas station it seemed like they were playing on the radio. It angered her because she was sure that at least one of them knew something and they weren’t letting on. One of them had information that would help them solve Melissa’s murder and they were keeping quiet, for whatever reason.

Her desk phone rang, breaking her from her reverie and she put aside the paperwork she was working on to answer it with a curt hello.

“Hey, it’s Lawrence,” the voice on the other side introduced themselves as one of the crime scene analysts that had been working on Melissa’s case. Hearing from him was rare, it usually only meant really good news or really bad news, he didn’t call otherwise.

“Hi,” she said her voice thick with fatigue, “What’s going on? Tell me you’ve got good news for me,” there was a pause and she felt butterflies as she waited for the answer.

 “I think I’ve got good news.”

Letting out a relieved breath Jensen leaned her head against her knuckle, “Do tell.”

“The FBI very reluctantly loaned us a skin scanner. It’s the latest in fingerprinting. At first we couldn’t find anything on the surface of the girl’s skin but we went a few layers deep and got lucky. There’s a partial thumbprint just below the hyoid bone. Whoever did this to her must have been pressing really hard on the front of her neck, hard enough for the imprint of their thumb to go three layers deep.”

“How soon can you have the print to me?” Jensen asked anxiously, snapping her fingers to get the attention of Knox who was working at the desk across from her.

The man chuckled through the phone, “I can have it to you instantly. It’s already on my phone I’m just waiting to press send.”

“Send it to Knox,” she instructed, not wanting to have to worry about getting onto her computer and figuring out how to get the information from her email to where she needed it to go.

“He’s got it,” Lawrence told her and before she could even turn and check her partner was bringing it up on the screen in front of him, “Good luck.”

After a quick goodbye she dropped the phone back into the cradle and moved around to her partner’s side of the desk, looking over his shoulder anxiously. Finding a digital match for a finger print was more complicated than just pressing enter and waiting for the magic to happen but it was still pretty fast. There were a few different databases (state police files, FBI, and Interpol) that had about six million different finger prints but overall, for the computer to scan through those millions of fingerprints looking for an exact match took very little time. That little bit of time always felt like forever to the investigators but it was far superior to the way things used to be done. Once upon a time police departments employed an entire unit of fingerprint analysts who manually poured over thousands of prints and matched them with just the power of a good eye. It took anywhere from weeks to years to find a match and it eventually became inefficient and obsolete once a computer could do the looking for you.

The print came up on the screen and the software quickly began processing it, marking out all the identifying points it would use during the search.

Knox sighed, “It’s not a great print. We might get a suspect but this print will never be good enough in court.”

“It wouldn’t be anyway,” Jensen shrugged, taking a seat on the one corner of the desk that wasn’t covered in paperwork, “It’s a print from a skin scanner, a lawyer would find a way to tear it apart.”

The program worked by taking a finger print and essentially turning it into a digital code. It would search for codes that were the closest match rather than trying to match an actual picture which would take a lot longer. Once everything had loaded up Knox started the first search of the state databases which very quickly came up with a few very loose matches, people who had similar patterns in their prints but would easily be eliminated. He then went through the motions of switching databases to the FBI’s federal list – AFIS.

“My gut tells me we’re not going to get anything,” Jensen expressed, crossing her arms over her chest. She bit in the inside of her cheek as she watched the computer do its thing, “The people we’re looking for aren’t going to be in any of the registries.”

“How do you know who we’re looking for?” Knox asked with a smirk, leaning back in his chair to stare at his partner. He knew she had it out for the Backstreet Boys and in a way he wanted her to be right.

“I know someone on that crew had something to do with this. The interviews just left a bad taste in my mouth and if I didn’t know any better I’d say that this is probably Brian Littrell’s fingerprint.”

Knox considered her theory, “Or Littrell is trying to cover something up for someone else. You can’t tell me though that not a single person on that tour has ever been convicted of a crime.”

As soon as Knox had finished his statement they heard a satisfied ding from the direction of the computer and both turned anxiously. There, flashing on the computer screen, were the neon green words: 100% Match Found.

~*~

“Full house.”

It was the fourth hand of tour bus poker and Nick’s pile of winnings was growing by the hour. The girls and the kids were riding on the bus normally shared by Howie and Brian while Nick and AJ’s bus was the party bus for the night. They regularly had “guy’s nights” to give them an opportunity to just relax and have fun with each other without the stress of being pulled in a million different directions. For the most part it was an opportunity to decompress, and complain about work like they were average Joe’s working in a regular workplace.

Normally all of the money on poker night went to AJ, the gambling impresario that he was. That particular evening though he wasn’t on his game. He had been quiet and lethargic for weeks, making them all concerned about his mental state. He seemed to have been taking the incident in Baltimore quite seriously and he hadn’t spoken to anyone except Rochelle about what was going through his head. The other three had hoped that getting him alone would be a good chance to try and lift his spirits a bit.

Howie started shuffling the cards, dealing them out again but when he got to AJ his friend’s hand went up, signalling him to stop.

“I’m going to sit out this round,” he said, pushing the one card on the table back in Howie’s direction.

Brian sighed, “C’mon dude, just play.”

“If he doesn’t want to play we can’t make him play,” Nick said with a roll of his eyes, tired of having to coddle the other man. He couldn’t understand why something like seeing a dead body for a total of four and a half seconds had disturbed him so badly. The guy’s grandmother had died in his arms, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a dead person.

“What’s your problem?” Brian asked, and Nick was surprised to see that the shorter man’s eyes were on him instead of AJ.

“My problem?” he asked with a laugh, “I don’t have a problem. Alex has a problem.”

“No, we’re supposed to be cheering him up and you’re being an asshole. Is winning a couple hundred bucks in a poker game so important to you that you’re willing to let AJ feel like shit and not be himself?” Brian questioned, his eyebrows furrowed in concern. He had been concerned about both AJ and Nick but for different reasons. He had let himself get caught up in what he had seen in the hallway that night. In his own twisted mind he had come up with various scenarios that could have happened. Nick could have been telling the truth; maybe the girl was gone when he went looking for her. Maybe she was there though; maybe they had fought about Lauren and things got out of hand, or maybe rough sex had turned into more than it should have. Deep down he knew that Nick could never kill anyone but something had planted a seed in his brain that was making him question his best friend.

“Whoa,” AJ interjected as Brian and Nick sent each other heated stares from across the table, “I don’t need cheering up. I’m fine. I’m just having issues with this girl. I feel so bad that she was at our sound check one minute and the next she’s dead in a dirty alley behind the venue. I feel like the police didn’t believe us and I keep seeing her face in every crowd. There was just so much blood...”

An uncomfortable silence fell over the group and they all looked around awkwardly. Nick tossed the cards in his hand down on the table and ran both hands through his hair, not knowing what would be the right thing to say.

“I’ll be okay,” Brian assured the other man, reaching out to touch AJ’s shoulder quickly, “We need to just put this behind us. It was a great tragedy and I think we need to do something to honour Melissa soon. The Lord knows who did this and He will make sure that she gets justice for what happened to her. In the meantime we need to move on knowing that we had nothing to do with her death, no matter what the police may think.”

The only sound in the room was a snicker and they all looked at Nick in surprise, “Says the man who was interviewed by the cops not once, but twice...”

Brian’s eyes went wide and Nick was sure that if there hadn’t been a table between them he would have been on the floor by now, “How dare you!”

“Really Nick,” Howie said with a levelling gaze, “Considering that you were the last person to be seen with her alive I don’t think you’re in any position to judge Brian.”

In a flash Nick stood up, their drinks shaking as he rocked the table, “YOU TOLD HIM?!” he demanded, glaring at the man he called his best friend.

“I didn’t know it was a secret!” Brian defended while AJ looked between the three of them confused.

He had been out of the loop as far as group gossip for the past week as he struggled with Melissa’s murder and clearly had missed something, “What’s the secret?”

“Nick was fucking that girl, that’s why she was backstage loitering!” Howie stated smugly, not liking the attitude that their young band mate had acquired lately.

“Is that true? Why didn’t you say anything?” AJ asked with a shocked expression. He had been sharing a bus with Nick and their girlfriends the whole time and his friend never thought to mention that it was him that Melissa had been back stage waiting for when before she was killed.

“I wasn’t fucking her!” Nick exclaimed, throwing his arms up in the air, “Okay, I admit I had full intentions of doing it but I never got the chance because while I was busy looking for her she was busy getting killed in the alley! I didn’t do it, so stop looking at me like I’ve done something wrong! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

None of them had realized the bus had stopped outside their hotel in the middle of their argument. They also hadn’t noticed Leighanne, Rochelle and Lauren make their way onto the bus to see what was taking them so long to get their stuff together until they heard a very feminine throat clearing. They all turned in the direction of the front door where the three women were all looking on. They all looked concern but Lauren’s expression in particular was sharp as she looked at Nick with deep concern in her eyes.

It was Rochelle though that spoke, her voice low but serious, “Look what you’re doing to yourselves. It’s time to stop accusing each other of things and move on. You need to move on. We want to move on. It’s up to the police to do the accusing, not you.”