Run by emily_michele
Annie stormed through the front door of the Boca Raton Police Station, her ponytail flailing wildly behind her, as Brian and Josh struggled to keep up. “Get me Kendall Jones!” she roared, slamming the palms of her hands on the faux wood receptionist’s desk.
“Ladies and gentlemen, she’s come alive,” Josh remarked under his breath. Brian silently nodded his agreement as he watched the woman stare intimidatingly into the bewildered eyes of the kid sitting at the desk. As soon as he broke the news to her, Annie had become like a lioness protecting her cub. She had changed out of her pajamas and pulled her appearance together, retrieved Josh, and gave Drew (now sleeping in Leighanne’s arms) a good-bye kiss on her way out the door in a matter of five minutes. Then, she insisted on driving to the police station, much to Brian and her older brother’s chagrin. However, instead of the dangerous, emotional wreck they imagined operating a moving vehicle, she was focused and methodical. Her hands were steady on the wheel and her eyes were focused on the road, acutely aware of her surroundings as she sped to the station in record time.
The college-aged young man sitting at the desk didn’t even question her. “Yes ma’am,” he said quickly, diving for the telephone, and shaking in his boots. Annie crossed her arms over her chest and tapped her foot impatiently while he spoke to someone in another location in the building. “I apologize. I didn’t get your name,” he said politely, pulling the phone away from his ear.
“Annie Morgan,” she replied curtly.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Morgan, but he’s interrogating a suspect.” He placed the phone back on the hook and looked up at her apologetically.
Annie narrowed her eyes at him and leaned forward. “Would that suspect happen to be Nick Carter?”
“I- I don’t know,” the boy stammered.
“Well, you can tell Detective Jones that the daughter of the alleged suspect’s victims needs to see him immediately,” she hissed at him, emphasizing the word ‘alleged’ harshly.
“I’m not supposed to interrupt him, ma’am.”
“So help me, God, I will come across this desk if I’m not face to face with Detective Jones in the next sixty seconds!” The young male receptionist lunged for the telephone again while Brian attempted to hide his smile.
********************
“Good decision, Nick,” Kendall Jones told his suspect as he stood up from the table. “Can I assume you won’t be talking anymore until your lawyer is present?” Nick nodded quietly.
An officer poked his head in the door. “Sir, we have a situation in the lobby.”
Kendall nodded and headed for the door. “I’m finished here for now, anyway. Take Mr. Carter to use the phone. He needs to call his lawyer.” The officer nodded and held the door open for his colleague. The detective walked the narrow hallway to the lobby and pushed open the side door. There, he found Annie Morgan, Josh Donohue, and the Backstreet Boy who’d been in the hotel lobby when Nick was arrested. His name escaped him at the moment.
“Detective Jones!” Annie hissed. “Can I have a word with you?”
“Of course,” he said cordially. He held the door open for the three of them to file into the hallway and out of the lobby. Once the door was shut, Annie promptly grabbed him by the lapels of his blazer and shoved him against the wall.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she growled.
In a way, Kendall had been expecting this, but considering the cold shoulder this woman had been giving her betrothed last night, he was still surprised by her reaction to Nick’s arrest. He held his hands up in defense. “I’m just doing my job, Ms. Morgan,” he replied as professionally as he possibly could while in the vice-like grip of his victims’ daughter and his suspect’s fiancé.
“Oh, really? Because I thought your job was to find the monster who killed my parents!”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.” Kendall gently pried Annie’s fingers off of his jacket and grasped her wrists as he spoke to her, his gaze softening. “I have DNA evidence that puts him at the crime scene, Annie. I’m sorry, but your fiancé is our primary suspect right now.”
She jerked away from him hastily, but the look in her eyes changed from rage to fear. “That’s impossible!” she retorted. “He was in Los Angeles!”
“Do you have any proof of that?”
Annie pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I called him at 2 AM.”
“Eastern or Pacific time?”
“Central. I was at our house in Nashville. My son woke up in the middle of the night and after I got him back to sleep, I couldn’t get back to sleep myself, so I called Nick. He was awake playing World of Warcraft. It would have been midnight in California, three in the morning here. So, he couldn’t have been in mom and dad’s house at 5 or 6 in the morning, right?”
“Cell phone or landline?” the detective asked without skipping a beat.
“Cell phone. But can’t you trace it?” Annie answered with another question.
Kendall nodded. “Yes. We’ll try to trace it, but Annie, you need to prepare yourself.”
Annie crossed her arms over her chest and glared up at the detective. Prepare herself? Who was he kidding? She’d recited those words so many times to grieving, yet still hopeful family members in hospital waiting rooms. But this wasn’t a hospital waiting room, and her fiancé wasn’t dying. He was a murder suspect-- a falsely accused murder suspect. She didn’t need to prepare herself for anything, aside from going back home with Nick when this nightmare was all over. Detective Jones’ eyes darted around the busy hallway, then he turned on his heel and headed for an open door. “Come with me.” The trio readily followed him, where they all sat around a round conference table in a small room with stark white walls, further brightened by cheap fluorescent lights. Brian found himself staring up at one of the white tubes on the ceiling that was about to burn out, flickering and black on one end. “I don’t just go arresting suspects willy-nilly based on hunches,” Kendall announced, eyeing each of the three people around the table with him individually.
“Oh, really?” Annie raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Then, enlighten us, detective. What could you possibly have on my fiance that makes him a person of interest in the murder of my parents?”
Kendall sighed and pulled the same three pieces of paper he’d shown Nick just minutes earlier out of his back pocket, but this time, he only displayed the bottom one. “This.” He slid the unfolded sheet of paper across the table in front of Annie Morgan.
“What’s this?”
“We performed genetic testing on the skin cells collected from underneath your mother’s fingernails and ran it against the sample I collected from Nick at the house last night. This is the preliminary result.” He didn’t need to make any further comments as the young woman hunched forward and began to read. When she got to the word “Match,” she gasped, clamping her hand over her mouth as hot tears pricked at her eyes. Brian and Josh both leaned across the table from either side of her to see for themselves.
Josh immediately hooked his arm around his baby sister’s neck and pulled her into him protectively, stroking her hair and murmuring into her ear quietly. “It’s going to be okay. Whether he did it or not, you’re going to be okay.”
Brian felt like he was going to be sick. “Detective Jones, can I ask you something? he stammered.
“Sure.”
“How accurate are these things? Like, if you have a preliminary match, what are the odds that it’s not actually a match after further testing?” Brian’s piercing blue eyes silently pleaded with the detective.
Kendall narrowed his eyes at Nick’s Backstreet bandmate and leaned forward, bringing his hands together and tenting his fingers on top of the table “Well, there are a lot of contributing factors there, and every circumstance is different, Mr…..?”
“Littrell,” Brian answered him. “Brian Littrell.”
“Mr. Littrell,” the detective nodded and cast a glance at the mourning siblings. “The numbers are messy, but if I really had to throw out odds, I’d say maybe 1000 to 1. In this particular case, I’d say the odds of those skin cells not being a match to Nick Carter are about 1000 to 1. Then of course, there’s the blonde hair that’s a final match to him.” Brian gulped and brought his own hands together on top of the table, almost as if he were praying. “All I can say is he better have a good lawyer.” Kendall started to stand up, but Brian reached for his forearm, grasping it desperately. The detective stared down into the determined eyes of Nick and Annie’s friend questioningly.
“Detective Jones, I’ve known Nick for a really long time-- almost twenty years. I just don’t think he could have done this. Check out the phone call. I guarantee that Annie will be right.”
Kendall Jones groaned. He’d heard this kind of thing so many times, shrugging it off as naive friends and family family members who just weren’t able to open their eyes to what was right in front of them, but something about the sincerity in Brian’s voice and the devastation in Annie’s face got to him. “It would help if I had a witness,” he told them.
“Howie!” Annie exclaimed.
“Yes, Howie!” Brian cheered in response.
“The guy that was with him last night?”
“Yes!” Annie answered. “He’s been living with Nick while they do some songwriting for new album. He would know know whether or not Nick was in LA with him yesterday morning.”
Kendall’s case had just gotten much more complicated. On one hand, the guy’s DNA was found under one of the victim’s fingernails. On the other, he had an alibi. He couldn’t have possibly been in two places at once. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed it. “Get me a subpoena for Howard Dorough.”
In another wing of the station, Nick stood with the black telephone receiver held to his ear with one hand. He nervously twisted and pulled on the coiled black cord with the other as it rang.
“Jordan Keller.”
“Jordan, I’m in trouble,” Nick panted.
“So, I’ve heard,” the lawyer, who’d been with the Backstreet Boys for years, told his client.
“What?” Nick’s eyes widened in fear. Immediately, he thought of the media. Having been under the paparazzi’s microscope for almost twenty years, he knew all too well how one little tip could have them tearing him apart on Entertainment Tonight within a matter of hours.
“Kevin called,” Jordan answered matter-of-factly. “Then Howie called. Apparently they forgot to call each other.”
“Oh.”
“I’m at the airport now,” Jordan reassured him. “But I’ve gotta say, all I was planning on doing was working on some adoption papers and re-writing your will after you called me up last week. I wasn’t imagining…..this.”
Nick groaned. “I wasn’t really planning on….this.”
“You need to know that as a defense attorney, I’ve never done a-” He paused and lowered the volume of his voice a few notches. “Homicide.”
“Well neither have I!”
“Good. Then, we can definitely deal with this.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Oh, and AJ’s sitting across the aisle from me,” Jordan added before hanging up.
“He is?”
“He says you were framed. He’s planning to tell whoever will listen that you were framed. Do you think you were framed?”
Nick shrugged helplessly. “All I know is that I didn’t do it.”
********************
“Can I see him?” Kendall Jones turned towards the small voice behind him to find Annie Morgan looking up at him intensely.
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. This wasn’t typical protocol in a case like this, but Nick’s lawyer was still a few hours out, and the guy was literally just sitting alone in an empty room until then. He may not have been giving his suspect “the star treatment,” but leaving a pretty boy like that in a holding cell with the rough bunch they had in the jail wasn’t a good idea. Besides, the less they moved him around, the better. The local news was already covering the double homicide, and he was pretty sure that given the male victim’s circumstances, it would soon be picked up by national stations as well. The last thing he needed was a frenzy of paparazzi outside the station because of the suspect. “Sure.” He shrugged. What would it hurt? There was an armed guard at the door, and maybe he could observe them through the double-sided mirror so see if he could pick up any more tension between them-- or fear on Annie’s part-- build the case a little. As he started to lead her down the narrow hallway, Josh and Brian followed, but she turned to stop them.
“I’m sure you want to see him, too,” she said to Brian. “And I know you want to go with me,” she told her other brother. “But this is going to be just the two of us.” The hovering males in the group stopped walking and watched Annie follow the detective through a steel door on the other end of the building.
Nick sat with his head down, literally twiddling his thumbs atop the table, and immediately jerked his head up at the sound of the opening door. He grimaced at the unwelcome sight of Kendall Jones, but his eyes lit up at the sight of his future wife. “Annie,” he breathed, his face contorting in an expression of happiness mixed with fear.
“You’ve got an hour,” Detective Jones said authoritatively. Then he closed the door shut, giving it a little slam to emphasize the fact that he was still in charge.
Annie pursed her lips and walked to the table where Nick was seated. She pulled the chair across from him out, the legs squeaking on the linoleum floor, and eased down into it. “Nick, I need to ask you something, and I don’t want you to get mad--” Nick’s eyes flashed in worry, but he didn’t say anything- just gulped and nodded. “Remember it’s just the two of us.” She smirked. “And an armed guard outside the door and Kendall Jones probably watching on the other side of that mirror.”
Nick smiled weakly. “Ask me anything, Annie.” He stretched his arm across the table, palm turned upward, as an invitation for her to place her hand in his.
She didn’t move. “Did you do it?”
Nick frowned, but kept his eyes trained on hers. “No,” he said simply.
“That’s good.” Annie let out a little sob and put her hand in his, then gave it a little squeeze. “But they found one of your hairs at the crime scene,” she said seriously.
“I was in Boca a few weeks ago,” Nick told her. “I needed to ask for your parents’ permission before I proposed.”
Annie let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. “I bet Daddy wasn’t too happy,” she said with a little glint in her eye.
“No,” Nick shook his head and smiled. “I asked anyway.”
“I’m glad you did, but--” Nick didn’t like the sound of that ‘but.’
“I don’t like the sound of that ‘but’.”
“How in the world did your DNA get underneath my mother’s fingernails?” She took a moment to study him. His forearms were tanned and toned. She turned his hand over to study the underside of it, then did the same with the other. She took in the sight of his handsome face. No scratches that she could see. She doubted there were any under his clothing, either.
“I have no idea,” Nick answered honestly.
