Missing

Disclaimer: I own nothing

A/N:

Chapter 6 (Examining the Crime Scene)

Tori returned to her old house and was let in by the people living there now. What she needed to do was gain a feel for the crime scene once more, and there were two places that she needed to investigate. She brought Jade along with her, and the couple living in the house stepped out of the way for them.

The first place they checked was the backyard. It was still the same as it had been. The yard was a small square perimeter with a small pond at the right hand corner. The patio had a single crack in it, and four corner pillars that held up a roof.

"There's your old pool and hot tub." Jade pointed to the covered pools and Tori nodded. The plastic tops were covered in leaves and grass. "New residents must not be using it."

"Yeah. It's so weird stepping out here again." She pushed her hands to her hips and walked to the gate. They still had the metal padlock attached to the door, but it was currently unlocked. "I think we can assume the abduction happened out here and not her bedroom. This was the last place Trina was."

She removed her shades and looked to the lounge chair on the patio, it was similar to the one they used to have. Tori visualized Trina sitting there with a book and an angry expression. "The last time I saw her, she was sitting on the patio, reading a book. Trina said she would leave at the end of the day to move in with Holly and Gary."

"Right." Jade extended her arm to the gate and her eyes slanted. "The kidnapper enters through the gate. They have a way to unlock it." Tori sat on the lounge, getting a feel for the victim's final moments.

"She hears them." She lowered her hands as if putting down the book and looked towards the gate. "Now at this point, we know Trina would confront them if they were a stranger trying to break in. We have to assume also that the kidnapper would have a key, unless they were skilled at picking locks."

Jade moved to the gate and walked forward. "So if I'm the abductor, and I know Trina, then I would simply have to coax her into going somewhere with me."

"She's already in a bad mood." Tori crossed her arms and rolled her head back. "Trina's on the defensive, but she also doesn't want to be here." Tori vaguely recalled Trina walking off the patio. "The glass doors are thin, I know it's possible to hear what's going on outside. Trina never screamed, she never called out, she simply left." Tori extended her arms and looked over her shoulder. "Crime scene looked exactly as it does now. When Dad investigated, he checked for fingerprints, foreign material, and any other evidence that would imply that Trina either tried to fight off her abductor or that someone else entered the yard."

"And nothing was found." Jade opened the gate and motioned to the driveway. "The abductor's parked in the drive, all Trina has to do is get in and drive away."

"Something she wouldn't do unless she knew who the person was."

"Who had access to your backyard? Which of them isn't accounted for?"

Tori rubbed her chin and leaned against the fence. "Dad was in the study. Mom was upstairs in her room, getting packed and ready to leave. I know Sinjin had been given a key at this point to the yard, Trina trusted him with that."

"And where was he?"

"At home, helping his sister with homework." Tori looked over to the garage door and whisked her hand away with a sigh. "The possibility that Trina just up and left on her own was considered for a while, but her car was left inside the garage. Her further belongings were in her room. I know Dad had to work to prove it was an abduction, because there were questions that she might have gone out for a jog, but she only does that in the early morning, and she wasn't suited up for a run."

"She worked too, right?"

"Yes, she'd recently got a part time job at the college athletic department. She never returned to work."

"Think back Tori, did anyone else have access to the back yard?" She bowed her head and stared down at the grass with a thoughtful expression. There was only one person she knew of that wasn't accounted for. They found no evidence linking him, and he said he was at home going over case reports for work.

"Gary Malone. Mom's boyfriend at the time." She lifted her head and grimaced at the thought of Gary taking Trina. Her stomach couldn't hold the bile well. As a cop she understood many times the perpetrator might be somebody close to the victim, even family themselves. As the sister of the victim, she didn't want to believe that any of the people who had access to the yard could have taken Trina. "But Trina wouldn't have gone with him."

"You did say she was pissed off and planning to move in with Holly and Gary, so with that said…If Gary showed up and offered to give her a ride? He could have persuaded her to leave with him." Still something was off. Unless Trina were going for a jog, she never went anywhere without her purse.

"Would she have gone without collecting her things. That's what bugs me about this entire theory." She looked to the fence and narrowed her eyes. "Even pissed off, she would have told this person to let her grab her purse."

"If Gary came by to pick her up, he could have said Holly would grab the purse for her. Is that believable?"

"Trina was the one dad trained to be a cop first, she would have been skeptical of Gary bringing that up." There was something more to it, there had to be. Even when Gary was questioned, there was no evidence Trina would have ever been at his house. "Something's missing."

"Maybe we're looking at the wrong angle?" Jade walked up to the fence and peered up at the second floor window. Tori followed her gaze and felt her heart beginning to sink.

"Mom had been staying in the guest bedroom upstairs for months, unable to stand being in the same room as dad." As they studied the window, the could see the woman of the house cleaning the room. The woman stood at the window and waved at them. "Holly has a perfect view of the entire scene."

Jade turned her head and lowered her voice. "You said she was in her room, packing? Her room was the guest room?"

"She failed to mention if she saw anything, but the investigator at the time didn't question her about the window and Dad didn't think about it." As she wrapped her mind around the possibility of her mother being involved, she found herself overcome with the stress. "If she saw something, then why would she not bring it up? That makes her suspicious."

"Is there any reason that she would be involved in her daughter's disappearance?"

"Dad mentioned something the other day, but I've already known this." Her finger brushed along her chin and she paced to the right. "Trina had a different mother, Holly was her stepmother."

"You're calling her by name now?"

"I need to focus on the crime scene, Jade. I have to put personal connections to the wayside, you know that." She lowered her hand and studied the driveway carefully. "Holly didn't like Trina for this reason, she thought her husband favored Trina over everyone in the house-including her. When Trina vanished, Holly was nonchalant."

"I remember that. We all talked about it too, Holly didn't act at all like a mother who just lost her child. She seemed almost happy."

"Yes, but without evidence to go off of, you can't investigate solely off odd behavior." Tori looked back to the window and folded her arms over her chest. "But we need to know if Holly saw something, and if she did and she withheld that information from the original investigators or Dad, then that makes her suspicious."

"If anything, it makes her an accessory." Police stop investigating a kidnapping charge after a certain number of years, unless there was new information or a body was found. In this case, it was a kid that was involved, and if Trina was pregnant at the time, then the charge was for two people instead of one. "Then Holly's responsible for letting both her daughter and granddaughter get taken. If she saw anything at all."

"We need to question her, but all we have is a phone number. I would like to get her in person."

"Maybe she'll agree to come in? Play the part of the ailing mother again, tell us why she failed to come forward if she truly saw anything." Jade walked towards the patrol car and leaned up against it. "We'll also have to question all the old witnesses, see if the story changed any."

"Right, we need a firm grasp on Trina's activities that day. There was a reason she was in a bad mood, and it wasn't the fight between us that caused it. Something else caused her to be irritable, and the argument we had was the breaking point."

"So her anger boiled over with that. I was thinking, she had to be pretty bad off that day to decide she was going to move in with Holly and Gary." Tori leaned to the right and furrowed her brow at the girl. "Beck, Andre, Robbie, Cat, and I all saw how much she didn't want anything to do with either of them. Just because we ignored her didn't mean we didn't notice."

"She and Holly had a lot of conflicts, so you're right, she would never have made that decision in the heat of the moment. Something's definitely off." They might have to look at Holly now as a potential suspect, and not just a witness.

"How many conflicts, and what kind of conflicts? Can you think back to that?"

"Yeah." She made her way to the patrol car, thinking on all the arguments Holly and Trina had. "It got violent sometimes. Holly would even go so far as to call her a whore, primarily because she associated Trina with the birth mother. I don't remember it ever getting physical, I just remember sometimes Holly would sit there. She'd be pissed off and you'd know it, but she'd be extremely calm."

"Calm pissed, is the worst kind of pissed a person can be." Jade opened the door and entered the car. "Did she ever display any other irrational, erratic behavior?"

"Mood swings. She could go from happy to angry, to sad in a split second. Literally violent mood swings, she was so unpredictable there was no way of knowing exactly what she'd do."

"Then I think you know what's next."

"Yeah, we need to question her, get her side of things. If she says she saw someone with Trina, we need to know why she didn't bring it up." There was only so much they could do, and without a body and the best witness still not comfortable talking about the trauma, any evidence they found would be circumstantial at best.

She waved at the couple as they stepped outside to say their farewells, then entered the vehicle. Her lips fell into a frown and she made eye contact with Jade. "If Trina is in fact, still alive…we need to investigate fast. If the kidnapper becomes aware that we're opening up the investigation, it could throw Trina's life into jeopardy."

"Then we'll be dealing with a homicide."

"Pray it doesn't get that for. We could still be dealing with one, but for Dad's sake and Victoria's, pray it doesn't get that far." She shifted the car into drive and took a deep breath. "We're in for a hell of a ride."

I'll say. So Holly might've seen something, or she could very well be a suspect herself. If she is, she would have had someone else do the dirty work since she was upstairs packing. What are your thoughts seeing the crime scene? You think Trina willingly went with anyone, especially if it was someone they didn't trust? She left the yard willingly, do you suppose the area around the yard could be where she was taken or was she taken from another location?