We walked back up the stairs into the police station.
Officer Jones immediately looked up from his desk. “Detective O’Neil asked me to let you know when I was ready to give the description of the suspect,” I advised him.
Officer Jones pointed me towards the seats to the side of his desk before picking up his phone and dialling. “Fritzie, I have the girl out here ready to go through the description of the suspect with you.” He nodded a few times at whatever Fritzie was saying, then hung up.
Officer Jones did not say anything to us. He just went back to whatever he was doing before I had come back in the station.
The door opened to reveal a young female officer. She had short black hair that she wore in pigtails at the back of each ear. She had a silver stud in her left nostril and didn’t wear the normal police uniform. She was wearing black pants with a funky red top displaying the name of what I thought to be some local band, as I hadn’t heard of them. She looked like she had just come from a rave. Or maybe that’s where she was heading.
“She had just finished her shift and was about to head out to meet up with her friends when Detective O'Neil asked her to stay back to complete the profile with you,” Aiden explained.
“Jade, I’m Fritzie, could you please come with me?” She gestured to the door she had just come through.
Aiden and I stood up from our chairs.
“And you are?” She directed the question to Aiden.
“I’m her boyfriend, Aiden Scott,” he answered politely.
“I’m sorry, you will have to wait here.”
Aiden stared at her for a moment. I knew what he was doing and hoped it would work.
“Ah, what the hell. Come on through. Maybe you’ll help stop Jade from getting nervous with completing the profile like so many others do.” She waved her hand, beckoning Aiden to follow.
I shot a glance at Aiden. “You did that, didn’t you?”
“Sure did,” he said smugly.
We followed Fritzie through the doors and down a few corridors before entering her office. We sat down and waited for her to rearrange her workstation so we could start.
“Do either of you want a coffee or something else to drink?”
“No, thank you,” we replied. The sooner we got started, the sooner we would be out of there.
She clicked open a computer program. “Now, take your time and try to give me as clear a description as possible. It doesn’t matter if we need to go back and change a few things. We will work on it until the face on the screen resembles the face you remember.”
This was not what I had imagined. I had thought that I’d be sitting there with a sketch artist who would draw his face as I spoke—this would be much easier.
“Let’s get started,” Fritzie said, not taking her eyes off the computer screen. “What shape was his head? Take a look at these and try to remember which one best resembles the suspect.” She was pointing to an array of face shapes on the computer screen.
“Which one is he?” I pretended to concentrate on the faces, as if I were trying to remember which was the closest to the guy I had supposedly seen.
“He had an oval-shaped face. Point to the one on the second row, third from the left,” Aiden instructed me.
“It’s that one,” I said, pointing.
“Good,” Fritzie said, clicking the face with her mouse. “Now, what shape were his eyes?”
Fritzie had brought up rows and rows of different shaped eyes. I had no idea that there could be that many options.
“First row, last on the right.”
I pointed at the eyes that Aiden told me. “These ones.”
We continued through the software application options until we ended up with a complete face staring back at us.
The face chilled me to the core. Not because he looked sinister, but because I recognised the man. My mind went into overload as the memories came flooding back to me.
I had never seen the man in person, but I sure as hell had seen him.
The accident I’d had the other day finally made sense. I realised why I had lost control and plummeted into the light pole. It was because I had a vision—my first vision ever—which I had somehow forgotten when I woke up in the ambulance that day.
“Does this man look like the man you saw?”
I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing would come out. I felt like my throat was closing up on me. All I could do was sit there, staring at the man on the computer screen.
Fritzie misread my blank expression. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep working on it ’til we get it right.”
“I know this is really hard for you. And yeah, holy shit. But you just need to answer her question, and we can get out of here,” Aiden said.
Tears started to well in my eyes as I nodded, confirming that the image matched the man that I had supposedly seen following Chelsea and myself around the last few days before she disappeared.
My tears overflowed and were streaming down my face. How could that man be that cruel? How could he kidnap Chelsea? He was not a man; he was an animal.
I stood up, pushing my chair back. I had to get out of there. I needed fresh air.
“Make sure she comes back to sign off on this before you leave tonight,” Fritzie called out to Aiden, who followed me through her office door as I ran outside.
I pushed open the police station’s doors, gasping for air. The cool night air filling my lungs did nothing to calm me down. I was consumed by mixed emotions. That man I just described was the same man that I had seen in a vision. Only I couldn’t remember the damn thing because I had crashed my friggin’ car.
“Hey, hey… calm down,” Aiden said, pulling me into his arms.
“I should’ve known… I should’ve stopped it,” I wailed, burying my face into his chest. Images of my vision flooded my mind. Chelsea was strapped to a chair, her arms were restrained behind her back, and her mouth was taped shut. Her hair was a mess, and her face was smeared with blood.
Standing in front of her was the man—no, the animal—whose face had been added to the police file. The look in his eyes was that of a monster. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Suddenly I could understand him—he was calling my name.
Just as quickly as the visions appeared in my mind, they stopped.
“What just happened?” I asked, pulling my head back so I could see Aiden’s face. I expected him to have a guilty look on his face, but he seemed just as confused as I was.
“There you are,” Anna said, coming out of nowhere. “You did really good in there. You should be proud of yourself.” She walked over and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“I know you don’t have long,” she continued, not giving me a chance to figure out what had just happened and what it all meant. “I just wanted to pop by to see if you two needed anything before we head back home.” By home, I knew she meant England.
“Nah, we’ll be all right,” Aiden said.
“Okay, well if you need me for anything...” Anna said, putting her hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll call, don’t worry,” Aiden finished the sentence for her.
She smiled. “Okay. Well, you two have a good night. And you especially,” she said, looking at me. “Try to get some sleep.”
Anna started to walk away when I remembered about Chrissy. “Oh, what happened with Chrissy?”
Anna stopped. Taking a second too long to respond, she said, “Oh, you know Chrissy. She’ll do anything for attention. And you know what? I think that girl has told so many lies that she is actually believing them herself these days.”
A few days ago, I would have believed her, but my instincts were telling me that she was hiding something from me. Before I pressed her about it, what she had just said began to make sense to me. Chrissy probably had told one too many lies. Maybe the vision I had of her seeing Chelsea was no more than one of her lies, and her mind could no longer tell the difference between truth and fiction. Something still didn’t sit
quite right, though.
“You’d better go back inside. They’re probably getting ready to send out a search party for you,” Anna said with a laugh.
I turned my head towards the door to the station, half-expecting an officer to walk out and prove her right. But there was no one there.
When I turned back to Anna, she was gone. Aiden, who had stayed silent, finally spoke. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.” He ushered me back towards the station.
I followed without saying anything more about what had just happened—or not happened—with Anna. I knew there was something wrong, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out. My mind felt like it was covered in a blanket of thick fog whenever I tried thinking about it.
We walked back into the station and into Fritzie’s office. She was eating a packet of chips and sipping on a Red Bull energy drink.
Fritzie motioned for us both to sit down in the chairs we had vacated no more than five minutes ago, and she took a sip of her drink. We sat down while she rummaged around her desk. She found the pen she was looking for and placed it in front of me, along with the papers.
“You will need to sign these to confirm this is the man you saw following you and Chelsea around.” She pointed at the signature line on the page in front of me.
I picked up the pen and signed the paper.
Fritzie turned to the next page. It was the picture of the psycho. “Just sign down the bottom, and then we’re all done.”
The sight of him sent chills down my spine. I quickly signed the paper and handed it back to Fritzie. I did not want to look at the picture of him any longer than was necessary.
“Thanks for doing this for us,” Fritzie said, picking up the papers. “Hopefully, he’s already in our system so we can nail this prick.”
I gave her a weak smile before walking out of her office.
“Thanks,” Aiden said to Fritzie. He followed me out of the room, for what I hoped would be the last time.
We walked back out the doors and into the night. It felt like we must have been in the police station for hours. I looked at my watch—it was 8:20.
I sighed. “I just want this all to be over with.”
Aiden opened the passenger side door and waited for me to take my seat before closing the door behind me. “It will be over soon.” He walked around the car and got into the driver’s seat.
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
Aiden started the car. “They were stoked with how detailed your face description was. And even though the licence plate was covered in dirt, you were still able to get a couple of letters, which will help narrow down their search. Now we just gotta hope the car wasn’t stolen.”
He pulled out of the car park and onto the road. “When you left Detective O’Neil, he rushed over to some other officers to give them the details of the suspect and his car.”
“Yeah, a car that looks exactly like the thousands of other delivery vehicles driving around the streets of the Gold Coast every day.”
He placed his hand on my leg and smiled. “This was really the break they were looking for. And who knows, maybe the licence plate details you gave them might narrow down the search from a thousand cars to twenty. Twenty is something they can work with. Before they spoke with you, they were completely clueless. It could have been any one of the hundreds of thousands of people who live on the coast.”
I sat there silently, staring out at the passing houses and wishing that I had as much hope as Aiden did that the police would find Chelsea. Unfortunately, I didn’t. Somehow, I knew it was up to me to find her, yet I hadn’t a clue how I was going to do it.
Before I knew it, Aiden was pulling into his garage. The lights inside flicked on automatically when the garage door opened.
We got out of the car and walked up the stairs into his house, which was lit up by amazing new wall lights that looked like a work of art.
“I’m just going to get myself a drink before I come upstairs. Want one?” Aiden asked.
I headed up the stairs to his room. “No, thanks.” Even though my throat felt a little dry from all the talking I had done in the last few hours, I just wanted to get into bed and fall asleep.
I changed into one of Aiden’s T-shirts before I climbed into bed and pushed his quilt onto the floor with my feet. It was way too hot for anything more than a sheet, even with the constant air conditioning in his place.
I lay there, trying to fall asleep, but the day’s events kept playing and replaying in my head.
Aiden walked into his room. “Can’t sleep, hey?”
I flipped myself around to face the door and saw that he was holding a glass of water, which he offered to me.
I pulled myself to a sitting position and took the glass from him.
“I can’t stop thinking about today.”
Aiden took off his T-shirt and climbed into bed. I put the glass on the bedside table.
He lifted his arm so I could snuggle into him.
We lay in bed and talked about the day’s events, trying to think of how we could find Chelsea. Who was the guy that I had described? And what might I have missed in one of my visions?
I replayed them in my mind, trying to come up with anything that could help us, until eventually I passed out from sheer exhaustion.
Chapter 16
Evolution (Evolution Series Book 1) Page 20
