Disclaimer: I, Nimmireth, am in no way involved with…oh, f k it. Never mind…

Author's Note: I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY THAT I HAVEN'T UPDATED IN FOREVER! School…is a real drag…yeah. I hope this doesn't get a little too repetitious, but I made a lot of this stuff up; you could probably call this "Slightly AU." Just to clear a few things up. If it sounds like there's any JackSam or MartinSam in here, there isn't; so don't freak out and be like "OMG! Jack and Sam should hit the sack in this fic!" Sorry, not gonna happen. Enjoy this new chapter…REVIEW! REVIEW! I only have, like, 4; I WANT MORE REVIEWS! Please:D

Read the above... Always

Jessica

Chapter 2: 3.5 Hours Missing

Danny and Martin glanced at her, brows furrowed. "What?" Danny asked. "You're sister?"

"You've never talked about her before," Martin said.

She shrugged. "You never asked," she replied. "Sorry." She turned away from Danny and Martin, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her black jacket, and rushed over to the house.

She entered through the forest green wooden front door and began to wander around the house, looking for somebody, anybody, that could tell her what exactly had happened. She glanced into the living room and noticed her mother sitting on the white couch, lightly stained with the color of spilled coffee, Jack and Vivian nearby.

Her mother looked up at her, tears still in her eyes. "Sam," she said.

Samantha walked into the room, her black heels making no noise against the beige carpeting. "Hi, mom," she said.

Theresa stood up and looked her daughter up and down. "I didn't think you would come," she said, wiping an eye.

"Nice to see you, too, mom," Sam replied, the tone of her voice filled with sarcasm. She approached her mother, Vivian and Jack turning to their conversation and gaping at them intently. Samantha stood in front of her mother for a moment, looking down at the ground. "What happened, mom?"

"Since when did you care about what happened to your sister?" she snapped quietly back.

"Mom, please don't start that now; I don't need it," Sam pleaded.

"Why? So you can completely ignore the fact that your sister has been missing since last night?" Theresa replied, raising her voice slightly.

"Mom," Sam demanded softly, gently placing her arms on her mother's shoulders. "What happened last night before Jessica left the house?"

Her mother glared at Sam for a millisecond before exhaling deeply. "She got home, went upstairs, pulled out her flute and practiced nonstop until we ate dinner. At 6:30, she left to go to the movies with her friends. I went to bed around 9. I woke up the next morning at 10 to go get her ready for her lesson, her bed was empty. I started freaking out; I called her cell, I called all her friends, her boyfriend, her flute teacher…nobody knows where she is," Theresa said, new, burning tears flowing from her eyes, staining her cheeks.

Sam nodded. "Thank you, mom," she turned to leave, but then decided against it. "I'll do everything I can to find her. I promise."

Theresa scoffed. "Right. Thanks; and if she's dead, you'll definitely be getting a Hallmark card from me," she jabbed, turning away from her older daughter and exiting the room.

Sam stared at her mother as she exited and groaned. She turned around and faced Vivian and Jack, who were still gazing at her. "You have a sister?" Vivian asked.

Sam sighed. "Half-sister," she told them. "We don't have the same father."

"She's 17," Jack pointed out.

"Oh, wow, Jack, how observant of you; I'm pretty sure you were told that when you were first assigned to the case," Sam commented.

"You're 33," he said. "Why such a big gap?"

Sam sighed. "I don't exactly feel like talking about that right now," she said.

"Fair enough," Jack said. Sam began to look down at the floor again, her hands returned to their spot in her pockets. Jack took notice and put a hand on her arm. "Come on," he began. "Let's go find your sister."

4.5 Hours Missing

Back at the headquarters, Sam, Danny, Martin, and Vivian gathered around a rectangular table in front of a white, dry erase board with a red line running along the lower region. They all began to sit down in some chairs when Jack approached the white board and hung a school picture of Jessica into the holders. "Jessica Elise Spade," he began. "Seventeen years old, was last seen at 6:30 last night by her mother, claimed she left to go see a movie with some friends, and was never seen again."

Vivian, Danny, Martin and Sam stared at Jack with rapt attentiveness as he wrote 6:30 underneath the red line in the middle of the board and above the red line wrote "left house to go to movies?" diagonally and drew a line underneath the words. "Martin, Danny, what'd you get from the neighbors?"

"Nothing much," Danny replied, pulling out his little black notebook and flipping through the pages. "She's a nice kid, very bright, always kind to everybody, babysat the neighbor's kids whenever they needed her, yada yada yada."

"Okay," Jack nodded. "Did they notice anything suspicious or unusual lately?"

"Not really," Martin answered. "Apparently she kept to herself, didn't associate with them a lot."

"Although," Danny began. "The neighbor who lived next door, Mrs. Livingston, kept on talking about how she hadn't babysat her daughter, Cassie, in a long time."

"Did she say why Jessica wasn't able to?" Jack wondered.

"Can't say for sure; she mentioned a lot of reasons," Danny replied. "Homework, ACT classes, flute lessons."

"Sounds like she's just making excuses," Martin said.

"Or maybe she's just a busy girl," Jack scolded, glaring at him. He then glanced over at Sam, who seemed to not be offended by Martin's rude comment; she just sat there, staring at her fingers, tapping them against the light brown of the table. "Is that all you got from them?"

"Pretty much," Danny told him.

"Okay," Jack said. "Viv, did you get the names of the girls she was supposed to go to the movies with?"

"Yeah," she affirmed, opening her notebook, as well. "Claire Donovan and Paige Emerson."

"Okay, I want you to go talk to them. Martin, Danny, I want you to look for any paroled or released predators who prefer teenage girls. Sam?"

Sam's head shot up at the sound of Jack calling her name. "Yeah?"

He lifted up his hand and motioned with his index finger and his middle finger to approach him. "Come with me," he said.

She nodded just as everyone else stood up and went to perform the tasks that Jack had asked of them. Sam collected some paperwork that she had and replaced them in a manila folder. She picked them up and walked over to Jack. "So," she began. "Where are we off to?"

"Back to the house," he told her. "Look through her room, find things that we might or might not need to know," he explained.

She nodded. "Oh," she said. "Okay."

5 Hours Missing

Once they were in the car and driving to the Spade household, Jack briefly looked over at Sam on occasion, who was sitting in the passenger seat and staring out the window, her forehead on it. After a while he finally sighed and spoke to her. "All right, Sam, what's going on?"

She glared over in his direction. "You mean other than the fact that my sister has gone missing?"

"I mean why haven't you said a word since we got back to headquarters? Do you even care about this?"

"Of course I care! She's my sister!"

"Then what's going on?" Jack wondered.

She sighed. "It's…just the whole situation, I guess," she said. "I almost hate to say this, but I barely know her."

"Why's that?" he asked.

She quietly cleared her throat. "Look," she began. "When my mother was eighteen, she decided that she and her boyfriend were ready; nine months later, I was born. Fifteen years later she was raped on her way home from work and eight and a half months later came Jessica. I was sixteen when she was born and I didn't really want her around. Two years later, I left the house. Quite frankly, I don't even know if she knows about me."

Jack took a deep breath as he made the attempt to take in Sam's story. "So, that's the big secret?"

"Pretty much," she told him, replacing her forehead against the glass window.

"Oh, I see." He looked over at Sam one last time before continuing to drive and didn't press her any further.

They finally arrived at the house and knocked on the front door. Theresa Spade opened the door. "Agent Malone," she said as she nodded to Jack. She then glanced over at her daughter. "Sam."

"Hi," Sam said, looking at the ground.

"Have you found my daughter?" she asked.

"Not yet," Jack told her. "We just want to go through her room; see if we can find anything useful, if that would be okay with you?"

She stood there for a moment, pondering whether or not she should allow them to search through her missing daughter's room. She shrugged. "Fine," she said reluctantly, opening the door a little more to permit the two FBI agents inside the house. "Not sure what you're going to find, though; she's a good kid."

Sam and Jack entered the house and Theresa directed them up the stairs towards Jessica's room. They arrived at a closed white wooden door with a medium-sized picture of Jessica, wearing a gold medal and holding her flute diagonally across her torso. "I hope this helps," she said as she turned back to the steps and walked downstairs.

They both turned to look at the picture on the door. "I hope so, too," Sam said. Jack opened the door to the view of a queen sized bed with rainbow tie-dyed sheets, pillows, and covers with a sliver music stand at the end of the bed. Her flute case was on the bed along with a large red blanket that said "Interlochen" on it. "Well," Sam said. "Looks like she's really dedicated."

"I see that," Jack said as he walked over to her white desk on the other side of the room.

Sam stared at the edge of the bed where the flute case and music stand were currently placed. She envisioned her little sister, sitting there, flute pressed to her lips, fingers gracefully moving up and down the keys of her shining instrument.

Jack stared at Jessica's desk; the books and binders on it were stacked nicely while pieces of paper were strewn everywhere else. He searched through some of her binders and textbooks. "She's smart, too," he commented. "AP Physics, English 3 Honors, AP Calculus, AP US History, French 5 Honors; Jeez, we didn't have these classes when I was a Junior."

"Maybe they did and you just didn't think you were smart enough to take them," Sam quipped, looking at him with a smirk plastered on her face.

"And did you?" Jack asked, glaring at her with a grin.

"Uh," she began as she struggled to remember what classes she took. "AP US History, I think, but that's it," she told him as she wandered over to her sister's closet.

She opened the doors to discover all of her clothes, neatly folded, stacked on shelves and drawers, and hanging on hangers. Sam looked toward the top of the closet, and on a shelf stood a locked green safe with a bronze key sitting next to it. Sam reached up, grabbed the safe and placed it on Jessica's bed. She then retrieved the key from the shelf and unlocked the safe with it. Sam opened the door to the safe and in it were pictures, a diary and a brown paper bag. She pulled out the diary first and laid it on the bed before pulling out the pictures and looking through them.

The pictures were of Jessica, among many other girls, wearing light blue polo shirts, navy blue shorts and light blue knee socks. "Wow," Sam said. "I have never seen a more interesting uniform in my life," she continued as she passed Jack the pictures of Jessica at Interlochen Arts Camp.

He took the pictures and looked through them. "At least she had a good time," he observed.

Sam pulled out the brown paper bag, opened it, and pulled out the contents; little wax paper bags with a white powdery substance inside. Sam stared at them, eyebrows raised in surprise. "Hey, Jack, take a look at this," Sam called. He looked up and he reacted the same way as she did. "Something tells me that this isn't powdered sugar or parmesan cheese," she joked.

"Well, well, well," Jack said, taking one of the wax packages. "Looks like your sister wasn't so perfect after all."