Run by emily_michele
“Trust your instincts,” they always told him, and Kendall Jones took the advice of his senior officers to heart as he quickly worked his way up the ranks in the police force. When the forensics team found that blonde hair at the crime scene the that evening, he immediately thought of the only head of short blonde hair associated with the case, and that belonged to Nick Carter. So, he went with it. The aging pop star’s record had been surprising-- DUIs, bar fights, drug possession-- a very public relationship with Paris Hilton that ended with the release of very public photos suggesting domestic violence. Of course, no charges were filed, but it certainly did look suspicious. Google told him she was most likely full of crap, but still... Nick didn’t at all fit the bill of the squeaky-clean All-American boy he envisioned with Jack and Molly Donohue’s squeaky-clean daughter. No. That was the man in the torn picture they’d retrieved from the crime scene.
A quick search for Andrew Morgan’s death records showed that his death was untimely, tragic, and all over the news. The fact that the Donohue’s assailant apparently felt the need to rip that wedding photo in two didn’t make any damn sense-- unless maybe it was Nick. Perhaps he was jealous of Annie’s dead husband? Maybe the Donohues kept holding him up to an impossible standard set by their daughter’s first husband. Judging by what he’d learned about the older couple over the course of the past day, it didn’t seem too terribly implausible. Jack Donohue was a surgeon. Annie Donohue Morgan had been an emergency room physician married to another physician. Now she was a singer who was planning to marry another singer. Quite a 180. Still, though-- could a guy with a criminal record littered with simple DUIs and bar fights be jealous enough to kill? The 21-year old he’d arrested at a club in Tampa on his first night on patrol eleven years ago was a prick, but he certainly didn’t seem to fit the profile of a murderer. The much more mature 32-year old whose cheek he’d swabbed a few hours ago didn’t really seem like one, either, but something about the way he looked down at the floor when asked about the confrontation he’d had with his girlfriend’s parents last month rubbed the detective the wrong way.
“What do you have for me, Natalie?” Kendall asked as he entered the lab. Natalie looked up from her nearly clutter-free desk, quite the contrast to his own desk, and handed her boss a manila folder. “Does the hair belong to Carter?”
“Maybe. Preliminary analysis of the follicle cells on the hair recovered from the crime scene shows that we can’t exclude him as a suspect.”
The detective sighed as he opened the folder to read the official report. He’d actually been starting to think that maybe his gut was wrong this time. Nick Carter just seemed so smitten with Annie Morgan that Kendall had a hard time believing he could kill her parents in cold blood. However, when it came to this business, nothing surprised him anymore. “Run PCR on it. We need something more definitive.” He shut the folder and handed it back to her.
“If the hair really does belong to Nick Carter, does that give us enough evidence to charge him?”
“No,” Kendall answered quickly. “He’s already admitted to being in the house a few weeks ago. It could have easily been left behind. Anything we have against him right now is purely circumstantial.”
Natalie bit her lip and looked up at the tired man in front of her, nearly twenty years her junior. “What if I told you we found dried blood and skin cells under Mrs. Donohue’s fingernails?”
Detective Jones couldn’t hide his smile. This was exactly the type of breakthrough he was looking for in this case. “Extract the DNA and run it against the sample I collected from Carter last night. If it’s a match, we got him. How long will it take you.?”
“Preliminary non-exclusion analysis will only take a few hours, but if you’re wanting something more definitive, it might take a couple of days.”
“Let me know the preliminary results when you have them, and we’ll go from there. I’m heading back to the house to help them dust for fingerprints again.” Kendall started toward the door with a little bounce in his step, then turned back to face her again. “You need some coffee?”
Natalie laughed. “Honey, you need a nap. I can do this for another 24 hours if you want me to, coffee or not. Just remember that the material we found under the victim’s fingernails might not belong to the suspect at all. It could always be from her husband.” Kendall nodded in understanding and kept walking towards the door. “Cream, no sugar!” she yelled after him.
********************
“How is she?” Brain asked Nick as he met him in the hotel lobby early the next afternoon. He leaned in to give his much larger little brother a hug.
Nick sighed as he wrapped his arms around Brian’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “I wish I really knew,” he muttered into his ear. “She’s barely spoken two words to me since we checked into our room late last night. Seeing Drew this morning helped, I think.”
Brian smiled. “Kids are good for that.”
“Then he asked for his Nana,” Nick said somberly.
“Oh.” Brian’s face dropped. “How’d that go?”
Nick’s face scrunched up like he was going to cry. “Apparently, he saw the water on the way in and assumed he was going to go see his Nana and Papa since they live by the ocean and all.”
“Wow, that sucks. What did she tell him?”
“That Nana and Papa were in heaven.”
“Good. Heaven’s good.” Brian nodded his approval. “He’s just two, but he’s been in church all of his life. He probably knows that’s a good place for them.”
“Well, he was satisfied with that for a while, but while Annie was taking a shower, he asked me when they were coming back.”
Brian winced. “Ouch. What did you say to him?”
“I rolled over his foot with a race car to distract him.”
“Nice.” Brian couldn’t help letting out a little chuckle as he gave Nick a pat on the back.
“Is it bad that I avoided talking to him about it?” Nick asked quietly. His hands were shaking and his blue eyes glistened with unshed tears.
“Nick, no-” Brian led him over to a couch and gently sat him down, then followed suit beside him. “He’s still just a baby. Playing with him to distract him from such a serious situation is good.” The younger man drew in a shaky breath and let it out slowly in a still uncertain sigh of relief. “You’re going to be a great dad someday, you know that?”
Nick’s lips twitched up into a little smirk. “I honestly can’t wait.”
********************
“Talk to me.” Kendall Jones answered his cell phone with one hand while he drove swiftly back to the station with the other, palm trees whizzing by in the early autumn sun.
“Kendall, I’ve got some results for you,” Natalie announced.
“Go ahead.”
“It’s just preliminary, but it looks like the genetic material we collected from underneath Mrs. Donohue’s fingernails matches Nick Carter’s.”
Kendall did a little fist pump in the air with the hand that held his phone as he let his foot off the accelerator to get into the left lane and do a u-turn. “That’s enough for me. Have them type up a warrant and send an officer out to meet me at the Wyndham on Glades Road off I-95.”
“How do you know where to find him?” the forensics specialist asked him, perplexed.
“When we left the house last night, I gave Joshua Donohue my card and told them to call me if they thought of anything else that might help with the investigation. He gave me his number and told me where they were staying in case I needed to contact them. Of course, he didn’t know he was helping me keep an eye on my suspect.”
“Do you really think he didn’t run after you confronted him yesterday?”
“I really think he didn’t run,” Kendall scoffed. “It’s twisted, but I don’t see him leaving his girl willingly, even if he did kill her parents.”
“Innocent until proven guilty, Detective Jones,” the older woman warned him.
“I think we’ve got him, Natalie.”
“But, Kendall--”
He cut her off as he hung up his phone and tossed it onto the seat beside him. It landed on the small file on Nick Carter he’d been working on since last night. “Gotcha.”
********************
“You brought Leighanne,” Nick deadpanned as the petite blonde rushed through the sliding glass doors and into the lobby, loaded down with stuffed Wylee bags and rolling a bright pink suitcase behind her. It’s not that he particularly disliked Leighanne the way he did, say, ten years ago, but he’d kind of been hoping to have Brian to himself now that Howie had gone to Orlando and see his son and pregnant wife for a couple days. He’d been hanging out with Drew while Annie avoided him, but the little guy seemed to be the only ray of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy circumstance, and everyone seemed to want a piece of him.
“Of course I brought Leighanne,” Brian answered matter-of-factly.
“How long is she planning to stay?” Nick asked, eyeing the sheer volume of bags the tiny woman was carrying, not to mention the two large pieces of luggage that were on the luggage cart the bellhop had rolled in after her.
“I brought dresses,” Leighanne announced. “Black one, grey ones, navy blue ones-- anything that might be suitable for a funeral.”
“What?” Nick raised an eyebrow incredulously. Was she really turning the impending funeral into a fashion show?
“Annie said she’d completely forgotten to pack something she could wear to the funeral when she headed down here, and doesn’t feel like shopping, so....”
“Oh.” So apparently, Annie was talking to Leighanne Littrell, but no to her own fiancé. Great.
The sliding glass doors of the hotel lobby slid open again, and in marched Detective Jones and Officer Davis. Kendall never imagined it would be so easy as to just walk into the lobby and find Nick sitting on the couch. “Detective Jones--” Nick said in surprise. Brian stood and started to shake his hand to introduce himself, but the detective had another agenda. He held up a piece of paper that they would soon find out was an arrest warrant.
“Nickolas Carter, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be provided for you...”
Brian and Leighanne watched in fearful astonishment, eyes wide and mouths hanging open, as Detective Jones recited Nick his Miranda rights. The accompanying police officer forced the dazed man up to his feet and pulled his wrists behind his back, then silently pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his back pocket and started putting them on. Brian could feel his blood starting to boil, as he clenched and unclenched his fists in an attempt to calm himself down, but as the officer shoved Nick towards the doors, he couldn’t stop himself. “On what charges?” he demanded furiously. He watched as his friend looked down at his feet, then up at him helplessly.
Detective Jones stopped walking and looked at Nick, who looked absolutely terrified, then at the man he recognized as his Backstreet bandmate, who looked absolutely irate. When he answered, he didn’t look at Brian, but at Nick. “Mr. Carter here is the primary suspect in the double homicide of Jack and Molly Donohue.”
