Chapter Three
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Lauren, you should have saved me, too.
Those were the words repeating through Jesse’s mind as they waited in Lauren’s office for information on the crime scene. He had no doubts, none, that those same words were playing the leading role in Lauren’s thoughts as well. And Hallie’s. Heck, through all the deputies’ as well.
Hallie had holed up in her office, making calls to the CSIs and the hospital to check on Abilene Joyce. That left him and Lauren alone in hers.
Lauren’s office was one of the best-equipped in the station, thanks to Owen Striker’s deep pockets.
After the massacre a year and a half ago when most of Outlaw Ridge’s cops had been slaughtered in a calculated ambush, Striker had funded the rebuild, ensuring the department had state-of-the-art equipment.
High-end monitors, specialized software, and top-tier forensics tools.
Didn’t mean the ghosts of the past weren’t still here.
Ghosts of the past could be little shits like that. Never going away. Taking swipes at the living.
That note on the mirror had been such a swipe. Ditto for the blood in the shop and Abilene Joyce. But one of the biggest swipes right now had to be the possibility that a vicious kidnapper was at work again.
And that he was trying to draw Lauren into the nightmare.
If so, the kidnapper had already succeeded.
She was drawn in, and she was frantically working on her laptop, looking for any clues about Mark Smith, the man who had called the Realtor to set up a showing.
Since he had canceled it, this guy could have arranged the appointment simply to bring attention to the crime scene.
Attention that would eat away like acid at Lauren.
It sure as hell was eating away at him while he tapped away on his own laptop, searching for any and everything on Abilene Joyce. He was finding a lot, mostly unhelpful info of meals, parties, and vacation pix posted on social media, but he was hoping more would surface.
More as in why she’d ended up in the Outlaw Ridge Police Station with that knife and blood on her. And with the tattoo.
Lauren groaned, and even though it’d been a soft sound, Jesse heard the frustration. “Nothing,” she muttered. “Mark Smith’s number is no longer in service.”
So, that added more fodder to the theory of this guy being the kidnapper. Or maybe a copycat. Either way, he’d likely done something bad for that blood to have gotten on the floor.
But how had Abilene gotten away from him?
That was yet another question for which they had no answer, and until Abilene became responsive and could talk to them, they might have to find the info elsewhere.
“How are you doing?” Jesse asked when Lauren groaned again and leaned back against her chair. “How are you really doing?” he amended when she quickly opened her mouth to respond with what probably would have been a lie.
She let out a breath and met his gaze. “I don’t know.” A wry smile tugged at her lips, but there was no humor in it. “Not the answer you were looking for, huh?”
He shrugged. “It’s honest. Better than a lie of saying you’re fine.”
Silence stretched, thick with things unsaid. Finally, he gave her a half-smile and went with something that he hoped would shift her thoughts. For a couple of seconds anyway. “You know, we never did go on that date.”
She blinked, caught off guard. “What?”
“That night. I was waiting for you.” His jaw tightened slightly. “Thought you’d changed your mind. Then I got the call that you were missing.”
Lauren’s expression flickered, something raw moving behind her eyes. “Jesse…”
He shook his head. “I’m not bringing it up to make you feel bad. Just… it’s always been there, you know?”
A beat of silence. Then she leaned back, exhaling. “Yes, I know. I became a cold case investigator because of what happened to me.”
That surprised exactly no one. Some people retreated into safety after surviving an ordeal as she had. Others became champions of justice. Like Lauren.
“I needed answers.” She traced an invisible pattern on her desk, and he wondered if she knew it was the shape of a heart. “For years, I kept thinking maybe I had missed something. Maybe if I looked hard enough, I could find the truth.” Her voice dropped slightly. “Find the other girls.”
Jesse felt something tighten in his chest. But there was nothing he could say that was going to make that need go away.
Lauren glanced at him. “I never did find the other girls. Or him.”
The weight of that truth sat heavy between them. But Jesse wasn’t so sure the past was done with her yet.
“How deep do you want to go on this?” he came out and asked.
“Deep,” she assured him. “Why?”
“Because I want to go back through all the notes and files on your abduction. I want to know everything you remembered about the man who took you. It might help to look at it with fresh eyes.”
Though fresh was stretching it. Lauren wasn’t the only one who had become a champion of justice because of what had happened to her. It was the reason Jesse was now wearing a badge instead of making a whole lot more money as a Strike Force operative.
She nodded and took out her phone. “I’ll text you all the files and my personal notes.”
Jesse waited until she had done that before he fired off another question. “Who do you suspect of abducting you?”
Lauren hesitated, her fingers tightening around her phone that she was still holding. “I’ve never had proof,” she admitted. “But if you’re asking who’s at the top of my list…”
Jesse leaned forward, watching her closely. “I am.”
“Dr. Ethan Graves,” she said.
Jesse’s jaw tensed. “The profiler?”
She nodded. “He’s also a psychologist with a background in criminal justice, and after I was reported missing, he volunteered his services to Outlaw Ridge PD to do a profile.
In the days and weeks following my escape, Dr. Graves interviewed me many times.
” She exhaled sharply. “And there was something about him that always felt… wrong. Not in what he said, but in how he said it. It was the way he asked certain questions. The way he looked at me.”
Jesse filed that away. “You ever tell anyone?”
“I mentioned it once to the lead detective.” She let out a bitter laugh. “He told me I was traumatized and seeing shadows where there weren’t any.”
Jesse considered that. Maybe the lead detective had been right, but he would trust Lauren on this.
“What else?” he pushed. “Any reason besides your gut that you put the profiler’s name at the top of the list?”
Lauren swiped through her phone, then turned the screen toward him. “This.”
It was an old case file. A profile for her abductor. But what caught Jesse’s eye was the signature at the bottom of one of the reports.
Dr. Ethan Graves.
“That’s standard, right?” Jesse asked. “I mean, he did volunteer to do that profile.”
“Look at the date,” she insisted.
Jesse did. And his blood ran cold. Dr. Graves had signed off on the profile report less than twenty-four hours after Lauren had been taken. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “What was he basing this profile on? Had he talked to any other abductees that could have been taken by this perp?”
“No.” A muscle flickered in her jaw. “At this point, no one had any info about who had taken me or where I was being held. I asked Dr. Graves about this only a couple of months ago when I finally noticed it. He said it was a mistake, that he’d simply put the wrong date on the form.”
“A couple of months ago,” he repeated, mentally playing that out. Yeah, it could have been a mistake or maybe the doctor had been writing up a profile to throw anyone off his scent.
But even Jesse had to admit that was a stretch.
“What motive could Graves have for kidnapping teenage girls and branding them with tattoos?” he asked.
Lauren didn’t hesitate. She pulled up something else on her phone.
It was a screenshot of an old post on social media.
“Seventeen years ago, one of Dr. Graves’ patients accused him of having an inappropriate relationship with her.
The person who posted this is no longer on social media, and I haven’t been able to find her.
But what if Graves abducted her to silence her and then took several others to cover up his actual target? ”
Jesse stayed quiet for a while. “It’s possible,” he finally said, but he wasn’t completely convinced.
Lauren didn’t seem convinced either. “There are no other complaints,” she had to add.
“And I can’t find a single report about one of his clients going missing.
But he could have covered that up somehow.
Or maybe the client who made that post didn’t have anyone in her life to file a missing person’s report.
” She stopped, sighed again. “I know how this must sound. As if I’m the one twisted up and looking for bogeymen when there aren’t any. ”
Jesse reached across the desk, took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “We’re all twisted up in one way or another. And just because that theory sounds a little out there, it doesn’t mean Graves wasn’t your abductor.”
Lauren stared at him a long time. “Say it. Go ahead and say that I could have triggered him to abduct again when I asked him about that profile a couple of months ago.”
Now, it was Jesse who sighed. “A trigger doesn’t give anyone an excuse to abduct someone and leave the scene we saw in the shop.”
“But I asked him about the social media post, too,” she added in a mutter. “He could have decided it was best to silence me either through traumatizing me with another victim…or doing something else to me.”
He would have tried to soothe her. Would have attempted to say something to lessen the guilt that he could see racing through her like wildfire. But her phone rang, cutting off anything else.
After she muttered something he didn’t catch, she finally tore her gaze from him and looked at her phone screen. “It’s Griff,” she said, taking the call.
A call that didn’t last long. After only a couple of seconds, Lauren was getting to her feet. “I’ll be there in five minutes,” she assured Griff and ended the call.
“The hospital just called the station. Abilene Joyce wants to speak to me, and she says it’s urgent.”
Jesse got up, too. “I’m going with you,” he insisted.
Thankfully, Lauren didn’t argue as they headed out of her office.