“Nick just got arrested!”
Kevin winced at the shrillness of his cousin’s outburst on the other end of the line. “Come again?”
“Handcuffs! They led him away in handcuffs!”
“What?” Kevin had certainly received phone calls like this one before, but it had been a while, and he hadn’t expected to get another one in, well…..ever.
“Oh my God, what are we gonna do?”
“Brian, sit down.”
Brian stopped in his tracks, giving the tile floor a sudden reprieve from his frantic pacing. How did he do that? “Okay.” He sank down onto the lobby couch, looked over at his wife, and gulped.
“Tell me what happened,” Kevin said calmly. He gripped the phone tightly and braced himself for whatever (albeit shocking) idiot thing his little brother had done this time. He suddenly felt like it was 2002 instead of 2012.
“Leighanne and I got into the hotel in Boca Raton just a few minutes ago. Nick and I were talking in the lobby, and this detective and a police officer marched in like they owned the place and arrested him! He’s a suspect, Kevin. They think he killed Annie’s parents. How in the world could they think he killed Annie’s parents?”
“I-- I don’t know,” Kevin admitted, flabbergasted. Of all the crazy reasons for why Nick had gotten arrested that he imagined Brian telling him, this wasn’t one of them. This was-- ridiculous. “What does Annie think?”
Brian drew in a sharp breath and his eyes widened to the size of saucers. “Oh, shit.”
********************
“Intimidate them,” they told him. “Let them know you mean business.” Kendall recited the advice in his head as he opened the door of the interrogation room. Nick Carter jerked his head up in the direction of metal-meets-concrete bang of the door handle against the cinder block wall and eyed Kendall Jones. It was a ballsy move-- volunteering to be interrogated without a lawyer present. The suspect had smugly told him that he had nothing to hide, and didn’t expect he’d be needing a lawyer. Of course, the detective had seen that before, even with the guiltiest of criminals. Nick jumped as the detective slammed his hands on the table in front of him and bent down to stare him in the eye. The armed guard standing in the corner didn’t flinch. He’d seen this plenty of times before.
“Where were you on the morning of September 27th?”
“In bed. In Los Angeles,” Nick replied without missing a beat.
“Can you prove that?”
“There was a live streaming fan chat yesterday at noon that we filmed at my house,” Nick explained. How could this guy not realize that he had an alibi?
Kendall Jones didn’t bat an eye. “At noon?”
“Yes.”
The detective smirked. “The coroner determined time of death to be sometime between 5 and 6 AM Eastern time yesterday morning. That would have given you plenty of time to get back to Los Angeles by noon Pacific time.”
Nick gulped, but his jaw remained set in determination. “I flew from Los Angeles to Miami yesterday evening. Surely, you’ve seen flight records that don’t show me doing the opposite yesterday morning.”
It was time for Kendall to open his bag of tricks. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the stack of paper he’d folded once vertically and stuffed into it just minutes before. He tossed it onto the table, unfolded the sheets, and handed Nick the top one. “Ordinarily, that type of information would uncover a rock-solid alibi, but as you know, Mr. Carter, I’m dealing with a celebrity.” The way he emphasized the word celebrity made Nick wince, like obviously, he didn’t have any real regard for the word. It was obvious that the “star treatment” wasn’t what he was going to be getting here. “Have you ever flown under an alias, Mr. Carter?” Nick looked down and skimmed the list of names typed on the stark white piece of paper shaking in his trembling hands. He recognized all of them. He looked back up at Kendall Jones and nodded. “These are just the names I was able to come up with in the past few hours. Considering your long and lucrative career, I’d guess there’s more. Stephen Perry’s my favorite, but I’ve got to admit that Carter Nickelson made me giggle.” Kendall gave Nick a sly smile, but he just glared at the detective, unamused. “There was no passenger with any of these names on either of the two flights leaving Miami for Los Angeles this morning, but we’re still checking Fort Lauderdale, and there were three private charters that flew to southern California this morning as well. Any chance you’ll turn up on one of those?”
“No!”
Detective Jones could see the emotions of his suspect starting to unravel. “Can you prove it? Of course there’s no Nickolas Carter on any of these flights, but how do I know you don’t have some other alias I haven’t found yet?”
Nick crossed his arms over his chest and fell against the back of his chair in defeat. “I guess you don’t.”
********************
“Just knock on it, Brian! Leighanne hissed into her husband’s ear as he stood frozen in front of the closed hotel room door.
“Do you hear what’s going on in there?” he asked incredulously.
“No!” Drew screamed. “No nap, Mommy! I. DON’T. WANT. TO!” Then he started shrieking controllably.
Leighanne rolled her eyes. “You act like you’ve never heard that before.”
“That’s a big set of lungs for such a little kid,” Brian remarked.
“He’s a future singer, of course. Now knock on the dang door!” Leighanne literally grabbed her husband’s clenched fist and banged it against the wood beneath the peep-hole.
“Traitor!”
Annie opened the door looking exhausted. Dark circles hung beneath her red-rimmed eyes, her hair was piled into a messy bun atop her head, and her face was make-up free. Drew’s screams stopped the second he recognized the visitors at the door. “Bri! Weighanne!” she exclaimed happily, running towards Brian with outstretched arms.
Brian immediately bent down and scooped the red-faced toddler up into his arms and swiped a tear off his warm cheek with the pad of his thumb. “Hey, buddy!” He ruffled the mop of curly blonde hair atop Drew’s head with his hand. “What’s goin’ on?”
“I no take a nap today!” Drew announced loudly.
“So, I’ve heard,” Brian chuckled. He turned to Annie, who was staring past his head out into the hallway through the open door, and gave her a sympathetic smile. “Hey.”
“Where’s Nick?”
Brian pursed his lips and handed Drew off to Leighanne. “Where’s Baywee?” he asked her, cocking his head to one side in curiosity.
“He’s not here, sweetie. He’s visiting his aunt Jodi today,” Leighanne told him.
“I have aunt Katie!” Drew chirped happily. “And aunt Allie!” Brian knew Katie, Josh’s wife. He’d found a good friend in Annie’s older brother when the two of them met before one of Annie’s first concerts, and remembered guarding each other at basketball camp as teenagers. He didn’t remember an Allie, though.
“Andrew’s sister,” Annie filled him in, sensing his confusion. “Where’s Nick?” she asked him again, looking back out into the empty hallway.
“Annie, we need to talk.” He placed his hand on her arm and looked over at Leighanne, who gave him a little nod and took Drew out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind her.
“What’s going on, Brian?” she asked as he led her over to the foot of the unmade king bed and pulled her down to sit beside him.
“Annie, Nick--” Brian’s breath hitched in his throat and he paused. How was he supposed to tell her this? He should have practiced.
“What?!” she asked, her voice raising an octave.
“He just got arrested, Annie.”
Annie gasped and clamped her hand over her mouth in surprise. “He just did what?” she exclaimed, her eyes wide. “WHY?”
Brian shook his head and sighed. “I have no idea why, but apparently he’s a suspect.”
“A suspect.” Annie’s exhausted brain couldn’t quite comprehend what her friend and manager was trying to tell her.
“Your parents….”
Annie’s mouth fell open in shock. That was why detective Jones had taken Nick away to talk to him in private last night, wasn’t it? She’d noticed that Nick’s demeanor seemed to change after that, but she’d been a little preoccupied with the fact that her parents were murdered and now she was apparently seeing her dead husband to even notice. Still, given this information, there was one thing she knew for sure. “That’s ridiculous!”
********************
Kendall sat down in the chair across the table from Nick and slid another piece of paper in his
direction. “This is the DNA analysis on the blonde hair we collected at the crime scene. It’s yours.”
“I already told you I was in the Donohues’s house last month.” Nick replied through gritted teeth.
“I know,” Detective Jones answered with a nod. “This alone isn’t enough to put you at the crime scene, or to charge you.”
“So, why am I even here?”
“This.” Kendall slid a third sheet of paper across the table.
“What’s this?”Nick asked him as he looked down at it.
“This is initial DNA analysis of skin cells collected from underneath Molly Donohue’s fingernails. We ran it against the sample I collected from you last night.”
Nick’s eyes skimmed the typed document, unable to make much sense of the technical terminology or diagrams, but when he got down to the bottom, the result was very clear: MATCH. His heart started beating wildly, his hands started to shake, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. “Detective Jones? Can I ask you something?”
“What’s that?”
“That one phone call I’m supposed to get-- Does that include the call to my lawyer?”
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